It's truly amazing how fast babies grow and develop. Sometimes instead of doing the household chores that I know are piling up, I find myself just sitting here watching Emma as she plays in her own little world or tries something new like grasping for a toy. A lot of times I'll send Kevin a picture or a video of something that she's doing because I feel like he's just got to see this happening in real time. He, too, will come home from work and just wonder at what she's accomplished that day. I think we understand now why parents are so proud to talk about their kids. Before we became parents, some of the topics or things we'd hear our parent friends say might have sounded silly or no big deal, but now we get it. When you see your child work and work and work for something so hard, you really are proud of her when she's accomplished that goal.
So here are this month's updates. They are brought to you by the letter "T" for three!
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| "Mom, this is not cool... stop taking pictures!" |
- Tummy time: It sounds so cute, right? Time spent on our tummies. Wrong! Oh so very wrong!! Tummy time is not cute or particularly fun in Emma's eyes. In fact, if you were to walk in during the middle of tummy time, you'd think we were engaged in some kind of nefarious torture. If you're new to the parenting game or parented a while ago, then you may ask, why do we do tummy time? Well since the days of putting babies to sleep on their tummies is a thing of the past, babies now spend most of their time on their backs. This means that we as parents have to put them on their tummies so that they learn to do things like lift their heads, build upper body strength, scoot, and eventually crawl. And to be honest, since Emma's been able to hold her head up pretty much since birth, we've kind of neglected doing tummy time regularly. I know, bad momma. So now we've got to play catch up a bit. The problem is, Emma hates being on her tummy during tummy time. Even if we're doing it for just five minutes, we've got about 2 to 2 1/2 minutes of her making a good effort to learn, and then the rest of the time is spent crying. I mean, real crying. Angry crying. So angry, tears and snot come out of Emma crying (on the plus side, it's good for her sinuses). So once the crying starts, you've pretty much got two options: (1) try and distract her with a noisy toy and see if she'll move some more or (2) let the child have her fit because she's got to learn to be on her tummy even if she doesn't like it. The crying part is hard. But we're all learning to deal.
Emma when we started tummy time - 6/18/2013
Emma's progress on her tummy - 07/10/2013
- Tummy troubles: When we went in for our two month check-up, we mentioned to our pediatrician that Emma had been crying a lot during nursing, to the point that it was hard to get her to eat later in the day. Then, she was really fussy in the afternoons, and it just intensified as the night wore on. This bothered us because she's normally pretty relaxed and chill. Lastly, any time we would lay her down, either to change her diaper or to go to sleep, she'd get this look on her face whether awake or asleep like she had just tasted something yucky. So, we asked if these symptoms coupled with her spitting up could be a sign of acid reflux (I had previously googled it). Now Dr. Nelms is a thorough man, so instead of just dismissing our concerns or just writing us a prescription to placate us like so many docs today do, he wanted to get Emma's digestive system checked out. Well, that meant that little Emma was off to have an upper GI done!
Now as an adult, I've had both an upper and lower GI done, and I can tell you, they're not painful, but they're not exactly fun either. The process is simple: you drink a chalk-like solution called barium and they take x-rays of it going through your system. Easy enough, except for the fact that we were going to have to (1) get our child to drink a bottle of barium and (2) get her to be still enough for x-rays. As it turned out, Emma will pretty much drink anything coming out of a bottle. She chugged that barium like there was no tomorrow, and she had the chalky white solution all over her face, neck, ears, and chest to prove it. To get her to be still for the x-rays, Kevin had to go through an acrobatic process of maneuvering himself and her under the machine for the radiologist to watch her drink it and take pictures of it going down and subsequently back up. I got to watch the tummy monitor from behind the lead lined booth. The radiologist was super nice and walked us through the film right then and there to show us what was going on inside of Emma. She did have reflux and quite a bit of it. So now, we take 0.4ml of reflux medicine two times a day, and it's like we have our old Emma back. We are very thankful to have found doctors who were willing to listen and help our baby out!
Kevin suited up for
Emma's upper GI
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| Emma grabbing at the parrot toy |
- Touching things: Emma's current developmental milestone is reaching out and grasping things with her hands. Last month, she discovered she had arms and proudly held them out of us all to see - all the time. This month she's learning that those arms can do things, like reach and touch objects on her play gym. For the longest, she'd just look intently at the toys hanging from the gym and try her hardest to navigate those arms somewhere in the vicinity of it, and every now and then, she'd hit it and get a surprised look on her face. There was no elbow or hand movement involved - it was like she was waving two sticks around - awkwardly, I might add. So, we've been working on grasping things with our hands when she's sitting in her bouncer. Sometimes, I hold up a toy or my own hands, and she's learned to kind of haphazardly go after it. Now, I see her trying to do the same while playing under her gym. She's reaching for the toy because she knows she can touch it, but she's starting to open her hands while doing it and grasp the toy hanging there. It's so cool to see her progress through the different steps of this development. Kevin and I sit and watch her like it's our own sports show with play by play commentary running - which toy will she choose? Will she open her hand? Will she make the connection or utterly miss it? Stay tuned!
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| Watching Lizzy sniff at Emma |
- Tongue tied: Poor Kevin. This whole new person in the house thing has gotten him kind of muddled when it comes to names. Once he picked up Emma, who was crying, and asked her, "What's wrong, puppy?" There was this confused moment where he had this look on his face where he knew something wasn't quite right about what he had just said...and then it clicked. He had gotten the dog and the baby confused. The other night we were bathing Emma, and out of his mouth came, "Whatcha doing, Lizzy?" Again, face palm and riotous laughter from the both of us. I like do give him a hard time about it - I mean, we are working on three months here and he's still having trouble figuring out which one's the real baby and which one's the fur baby. But as long as he doesn't try to diaper the dog or kennel Emma, I guess he's doing okay!
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| I see scalp! |
- Thinning tops: When you're pregnant, your hair becomes luxuriously thick thanks to all the pregnancy hormones and vitamins. However, when you're not pregnant anymore, Mother Nature comes a-knocking ready to reclaim what is rightfully hers. Thus, the Banes ladies are currently going through shedding season. My hair is finally coming out in handfuls, which is both good and bad. Good because it's summer time in Texas, and my hair is so thick, I sweat just trying to dry it (cause if I leave it wet, the A/C will give me a head cold!). But it's also bad because I feel like I need to desperately swiffer the bathroom every time I'm in there. I feel like I've lost enough hair to make someone a pretty decently thick wig. Now, I'm not the only one who is molting around here. Because my hair is starting to shed, that means Emma is starting to slowly lose her hair too. Her once thick and dark brown hair is quickly thinning and becoming lighter. I'm not sure if it's lighter because there's less of it or the if underneath hair growing back in is lighter. It will be interesting to see what her final hair color ends up being though!
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| On our anniversary |
- Time together: Kevin and I have been trying to make sure that we have some time together away from Emma. Some days it's hard to get a word in with one another because we always seem to be doing the baby two-step at night - feed her, burp her, change her, bathe her. This month we celebrated our 8 year wedding anniversary, and my one request this year was for a chance to sleep through the night. Now, Kevin's done way better than just that. On our actual anniversary, my mom babysat while we went out to dinner at Taste of Texas - it was delicious! Kevin even surprised me with a new diamond pendant necklace. He said it was time to update the puny (but precious) one he gave me for our first Christmas when we started dating 13 years ago. But the anniversary celebrations don't end there, folks...in a week, we're going on an overnight date! We have dinner reservations at Brenner's, tickets to see Wicked, and are getting to stay at the Magnolia Hotel downtown. I'm really looking forward to spending time with Kevin and am thankful every day that God blessed me with such an awesome and supportive spouse.
