Letters

A few weeks back I noticed this fridge toy at Target and thought it would be fun for Madeleine. We’ve been working on her ABC’s for a little while now, and she can repeat all of the letters after me. She also knows that the end of the song goes “Next time won’t you sing with ME!” and if I pause after the “with” she will say “ME!!!” with vigor! 😀 It’s really quite cute. This toy helps her identify the sounds each letter creates in combination with the shape of the letter. Each letter plugs into the larger fridge “base” and it sings her a little song about what sounds that letter makes. “M says mmm M says mmm, every letter has a sound, M says mmm”

Needless to say, she loves it. 🙂

Swimming update

One of our favorite new family activities is to take Madeleine swimming. As she’s gotten more comfortable with the water, she has really turned into a water baby!

Things she has conquered:

• Doing bobs (dunking under the water)
• Holding onto a floating noodle and kicking
• Floating on her tummy (with us holding her up) and kicking her legs while flapping her arms. We call this her “swimming”. haha
• Climbing out of the pool, sitting on the edge and sliding off the edge into the water without my help.
• Having us place her standing on the edge of the pool and while holding our hands she “jumps” in.

We have tried:

• Blowing bubbles
• Back floating

We tend to go to the pool every Sunday as a little family ritual. I’m glad she’s taking to the water and loving it so much! Her love for the pool even inspired me to suck it up and go buy a swim suit because she is so cute in the water.

Below are photos of one such day at the pool with her daddy. 🙂

Ready to jump!

Mid-jump!!

Swimming!

All smiles 😀

I was trying to get a good picture of her smiling. And then she made this face. HAHA!

Again with trying to get a cute picture of the two of them, and then she did it again. HA!

Back floating. She is not a fan of it.

Coming up from a bob

Isn’t she cute?? I sure think so. 🙂

M-I-C-K-E-Y

M-O-U-S-E!!

Those of you who know Madeleine in person, know how much she adores Mickey. He can cheer her up, no matter what is wrong. Honestly. It’s a little disturbing, actually.

Last week a package arrived from Grandma (my mom). In that package were several Mickey items for Madeleine, but her favorite by far is the little stuffed Mickey Mouse. In fact, it already needs to be washed because she sleeps with it, drags it around the house, chews on it, smears her runny nose on it, etc. Ew! On Friday I had to explain to her that Mickey didn’t go to daycare and that she had to go put him down before we could get in the car. Eventually she did, but boy, she sure didn’t want to.

Holding her brand new Mickey with her Mickey snack container

With Mickey at the doctor

The Pink Eye Battle

I knew that when Madeleine started daycare, she would be exposed to all sorts of germs. I knew she would probably get sick and have to miss a day here and there. I did not know that this first sickness would be pink eye which would keep her out of daycare for four days.

Luckily, it started on a Friday and the daycare didn’t initially think it was pink eye, so they didn’t send her home that day. But by Saturday morning, it was quite obvious she needed to go to the doctor. It also was handy that her regular pediatrician happened to be working that Saturday. The doctors rotate at the Bellevue Saturday clinic, so his presence was not necessarily guaranteed. She was feeling just fine, aside from the eye issue and ran all over the waiting room. See?

Checkin' out the fish tank

See what a mess? 😦

Anyhow, she was diagnosed with pink eye and prescribed drops. After waking up from her nap that afternoon, her eye was a mess. It had gotten swollen and even more goopy and just, ick. Thanks to timing, we had been unable to get her prescription filled before her nap, so we went after she finally got up. Sunday, while still goopy, her eye was definitely not swollen anymore and we thought she was on the mend. Her ped told us that after 24 hours on the drops, she’d no longer be contagious. What great news! This meant no interruption to daycare.

Except that after Alex dropped her off on Monday, they called him and had him pick her up again because of the goopiness. Evidently, she cannot go back to daycare when her eye still looks that way. ***sigh*** So we waited it out through Monday and then on Tuesday it started looking better. Until Wednesday when it started looking worse again. Alex took Wednesday off of work (his days off are Sun/Mon/Tues, so the other two days were fine) and I took Thursday off so I could take her to the doctor. Again.

Her daycare was great, and offered the option that if we took her back to the doctor and got a note saying she was noncontagious and suitable to go back to daycare, that they would allow her back. Oye! So back we went. Again, with the running around the waiting room and acting like absolutely nothing was wrong.

Her doctor determined that she actually had a secondary infection from allergies (which I guess is common?) and that’s why it got better and then worse again. She also had an ear infection developing, so she’s now on an oral antibiotic to clear it all up, and it is working. Her eye is looking much better now, so that is good. She’s also back in daycare, which is also good since both Alex and I are in new work positions and can’t be taking all this time off.

Exhausted after we got home

The end of an era

As you may or may not remember, I am a breast-feeding mama. Or should I say was?

We have had our fair share of issues with breast-feeding.

First, my milk supply disappeared and Madeleine was basically starving. We had to switch to formula, and finally saw her gaining weight again. You can read about that here and here. I struggled for a month pumping like a maniac while supplementing her with formula and my milk just wasn’t coming back.

Finally, I gave in and was prescribed a lactation drug. I called it my miracle drug. My milk came back with a vengeance and I have been able to breast-feed ever since. With some hiccups. As it turns out, even with the drug, my milk supply was very finicky and would disappear if I was under too much stress, didn’t get enough to eat, tried to lose weight, etc etc. And every time this happened, I’d have to eat like crazy to jump start production again, which caused me to gain about 10lbs each time.

Now, to the point of this post. Sorry for rambling. I found it to be very important to continue until she could get her vaccines again. Since she got her vaccines at 18 months, I have only been feeding her once a day. And given my work to lose weight, my supply had taken a pretty huge hit and I couldn’t feed more than that, anyway.  I hadn’t consciously thought about when I would stop, but with my starting work and the mad dash to get out of the house in the morning, I had just not been feeding her before I left. When I got home and started the mad dash to feed her, bathe her and get her into bed, there wasn’t much time to feed her at night either. And then I thought about it and figured it was time to stop. I hadn’t fed her my milk in several days and she wasn’t protesting, so why not?

It’s been several weeks now and she is doing great without it. I am pleased, because I felt comfortable with the timing, too. It’s kind of amazing to me that I managed to breast-feed her for 19+ months considering all of the trouble I had. It was definitely time, though. And there you have it. The end of an era, but my body is finally mine again.