10 Weeks

We made it to double digits! This is a happy/sad time. I'm so excited that she is starting to smile and interact, but my baby is growing up. AH! Pretty soon she'll be 13 and i'll be re-reading these blogs wondering what in the world happened to our time. We DO have a little while before that happens though... :)
OK so what did we do this week? We were in Memphis for Chelsie and Brian's wedding showers last weekend. That was a BLAST! Once again we only held Ava during feedings and at night time but it is VERY nice to know she is around such a loving family. And honestly, it's nice to have a little break! We arrived Friday (a little late because Chad had an INTERVIEW! and got a job at Best Buy!) and got to meet Brian's mom who came in from Iowa for the shower. Spectacular lady! Saturday went very different than I had planned. In the original plan I was going to wake up and in the morning time head out and look for dresses (for the wedding) and then I had a couple things I had to buy for Chelsie's lingerie shower that night. I'd buy those, be home in time for lunch and then have the afternoon to get the punch and stuff ready for the night. What really happened? Well to answer that we have to go back to Thursday... I had what I thought was a pimple on my chin but it was huge and under the skin. Not one you could just ... 'get'... if you know what I mean. Friday on the way to Memphis it became bigger and started swelling all over my chin. Now we are to Saturday. I woke up and my entire chin was swollen out to my jaw. I looked like Jay Leno (Chad's quote, not my own). Not only was it swollen, but I had a hole instead of a zit and it was bleeding. Even better. Not only was it swollen and bleeding, but it was hurting. Not just the kind of hurt that you kind of forget about and then remember when you aren't doing anything else either. The constant throbbing pain that you CAN'T forget about. This only got worse and worse. Anyways because of this I was on the phone all morning with my Dad trying to figure out what to do. Duh duh duh DUUUUH : diagnosis staph. Who gets that? Apparently I do. He called in some meds for me thank goodness. These were just antibiotics though and wouldn't help with the pain. That's ok, I just needed something. Anyways long story short, after lunch I finally went out around 2 to do my errands. I went to pick up the meds, called my pediatrician to ask about the antibiotics, went to the mall to look for the dress,got lost, got a blister, went to walmart and then went back home. I got there right before dinner was finished and still hadn't mixed up my punch for that night which was suppose to chill for a couple hours. FAIL. I wasn't changed for the party either. Chad and Mema noticed I was stressed and they jumped in and made the punch for me as we sat down for dinner. Amazing. We ate quick, I ran downstairs to change and then we were off! Chad came outside to see us off and asked me "are you sure you have everything??" (my mommybrain has been awful lately. yes, its a real thing.) I of course said "yes! bye!". 7 minutes down the road we get a phone call. I left the veggie tray. Of course I did. Turn around. Met Brian at a gas station. Ok, NOW we're off! Traffic. Showed up about 3 minutes early haha.
The shower was great! We played some games, opened some gifts, ate a lot of some food. Chelsie got some great stuff too!
We got home about 11 and headed for bed. My mouth was throbbing. BLEH. Throughout the night it just got worse and by the morning time when the alarm went off to go to church i just couldn't do it. I hadn't slept at all and knew I needed to before the shower so we slept in.
We ate lunch with the fam and then headed out to the church for the final shower of the weekend! Ava came along and was a hit of course. She's just too cute.
The shower was wonderful - the food was so pretty and really good too! The punch was some sort of pink lemonade and sprite? or ginger ale? or something. fizzy pink lemonade. Great.
C&B started opening gifts and got so many great things! It's amazing how generous people are. I went around and took pictures of the shower and would check on Ava now and then. Got to talk to several people I haven't seen in a while. Good times!
After the shower we came home, packed up, and headed back home. Chad and I talked the entire way home. I don't think we ever turned the radio or music on. I absolutely love when we do that. We did that on our first 'date' to MO and I still love when we do it now. I'm just so glad I have a guy who will talk to me for 4 hours on a road trip haha


OK that was last weekend. UPDATE on staph? here we go. Got home Sunday. I ended up taking some hydrocodone from my c-section which lessened the pain but it was definitely still there. I thought that stuff took out anything. Whew. Monday I called a dermatologist and set up an appt for Tuesday morning. We went out and got some pants for Chad's new job (hooray!!) and did some errands but I was hurting so bad that I was grumpy and so we ended up coming home. Tuesday we went to the dermatologist. She basically looked at it and gave me lots of "oh you poor thing" and " oh sweetie" with looks of pity. They then stuck a needle in  my throbbing chin and tried to put some numbing medicine in which hurt like nothing else but it would just come out through the hole in my chin so that didn't really work. (Skip on down a little if you get queasy reading gross stuff haha) They then pushed very hard and squeezed all the nasty puss out of my chin. Yes. I thought there would be some fancy vacuum or something they hooked me up to but no. They squeezed and pushed and it hurt so bad. BUT after we left and got home the pressure part was doing a little better. The next day, it was LOTS better. Today (Friday) I didn't even wear an awesome band-aid on my face because it is basically gone. No more pain, a little bit of swelling still left, and a little redness. The redness, however, is due to an allergic reaction I had to the band-aid the put on the thing. Really? Ugh. I also asked about this redness stuff I've gotten under my wedding rings for a while -- yep. Allergic to the white gold. How does this stuff happen to me? haha its quite humorous really. Oh boy.


Basically this week has been taken up with Dr. visits but other than that we've been spending time with Ava of course. I went over to GiGi and Poopaws house (hehe) Thursday night when Chad played soccer and ate with them. Today (Friday) we went out to the outlet mall and looked for a dress for Ava to wear to Chelsie's wedding...and ended up buying her 2 other dresses and not finding a wedding dress. Hm. It is just so easy to do. Then we went to eat with GiGi and Poopaw at Cozumel!


This next week a lot is happening. Tuesday Chad starts work, Thursday I start work. I cannot believe it is time for that already. I cry every time I think about it. Thursday I'm already planning on not wearing any make up because it'll be gone by 9 AM anyways. Still several days left though! Staying positive!

PS here you can see how the staph chin affected my smile. Wonderful. And no, you can't see the actual bump because I love photoshop :)

9 Weeks Old!

9 weeks old already. To answer your question, No. I cannot believe it! Almost out of single digit weeks. But she grows cuter every day!
We went to the office this week to pick up her birth announcements (thanks Brittany!) and we weighed her. . . 12.5 lbs! She's a chunk! :) 23 inches long too. Some of her 0-3 month things are already looking like they won't last much longer. How can that be?? I just put away her newborn clothes! (waterworks with that by the way - so sad) You can see in her picture above that her onesie is gaping a little haha
So what else is new? She has always held her head up great but she is now actually holding herself up! Not sitting up, but when you hold her all you do is balance and she holds her back straight and her head up and looks around. I can't believe it. GENIUS! haha
She's also started this cute/interesting thing...she's started blowing bubbles (sometimes they are bubbles and sometimes just drool that leaks out). But its hilarious because you'll watch her just spit spit spit and all these little bubbles come out. Its like she entertains herself with it.
Today Chad was holding Ava and she was very awake and I came up to her and started making funny faces to try and get her to laugh (I've become an expert in funny face making). This included opening and closing my mouth along with it. Guess - what - happened. Ava, who wasn't right in front of me, projectile spit up and it went straight on my mouth. I mean PERFECT aim. Luckily I was going from open to closed mouth and the spit up came about as close as you could get to being IN my mouth without actually being IN my mouth. Chad laughed for about 10 minutes. Hilarious.

happy girl!

These are some of my favorite pants. Notice her bracelet too!

Bumbo for the first time! Such a big girl :)

The crazy things we do

Alright before you read any further, this is your warning. There will be an image below containing a poopy diaper like you've never seen. Continue reading at your own risk...   :)

So today we were all 3 sitting on the couch when we heard 'the noise' cuing us that Ava just had a dirty diaper. Hooray! we thought because Ava's normal routine is to wait until she is nice and FULL and then go. So about every 2-3 days. So we heard the noise, and I took her in to get her changed. When I went to unsnap her outfit  IT WAS EVERYWHERE! Here is a picture AFTER we got her clothes off...

Poor thing. It is amazing though, after swimming around in poo we were still kissing her little head all over the place. It would have been a completely different story if Winston had done something like this... haha

8 weeks?!

Ava is 8 weeks today. 8 WEEKS! I cannot believe how incredibly fast time has gone. Obviously I've been busy since this is the first real update blog post I've done haha. It's funny what constitutes as 'busy' now-a-days though. A 'busy' day is feeding Ava, changing Ava, watching Ava, playing with Ava, saying hi to Chad, feeding Ava, changing Ava...you get the picture haha
So what all has happened the past 8 weeks? LOTS!
Ava left the hospital at 7lbs 12oz...she is now 11lbs 6oz! She is also 22.75inches long. She is in the 95% for height and the 90% for weight! Oink Oink! She is a great eater obviously. She has gone through a couple growth spurts and talk about time consuming. At around 2-3 weeks she started eating every hour and a half. She had another spurt last week and was eating every 2 hours. The average is about every 3 hours and night time feedings are stretching out more and more yay!! Just in the past couple weeks she has started sleeping more and more at night. They go back and forth but last night she slept 5 HOURS STRAIGHT! I never thought I would be so excited for so little sleep - which now isn't little, its HUGE. If we can keep that up my overall morale/mood/behavior/etc will increase drastically! She's had several 4 hour nights too so even that is OK. So when I say this here is our 'routine' right now (we are working on getting an actual routine down, just haven't had anything in stone yet). Usually put her down around 10 or 11 because she is so awake later on in the night. Sometimes 12 is honestly when she actually ends up falling asleep because of eating or other stuff. SO then she sleeps for her 3/4/5 hour stretch right off the bat and wakes up to eat. After that feeding then she usually wakes up every 2-3 hours. Not another big stretch. SO here's what I'm hoping...either the 'long' stretch keeps getting longer from 5 to 6 to maybe 7 hours? and there's our night OR she keeps the 5 hour stretch but then sleeps another long stretch afterward. We will see what she decides to do :)
The first several weeks we had BIG trouble with sleeping but then we figured out a couple tricks and now she does much better. She also received a giraffe (shocking) that plays 4 different sounds for whatever 'mood' you are looking for - Play, Calm, Relax, and Sleep. The sleep mood is basically white noise so I turn that on most of the time for her to fall asleep to - she seems to love it. Also, she's in her pack and play right now (unless its a rough night then she is with Chad or me haha) and it has a vibrate mode that I turn on sometimes too that just lulls (is that how you spell that word? I don't think I've ever had to spell it out before...weird...) her right to sleep.
During the day she still sleeps a TON but is having more and more awake time which I am loving. She has just recently started smiling too. Well, REAL smiling that is. She smiled since day 1 with gas and whatever else but the REAL smiles have started now. It's hilarious because when you start trying to actually MAKE her smile she gets this grumpy face, then she will smile and coo and 'laugh', then back to grumpy face haha. I cannot express how much joy that little smile gives me though. Sweet girl.
She LOVES her mobile in her crib. She is now smiling at that too haha Whats hilarious about it is this: there are 5 animals on the mobile. An elephant, lion, giraffe, tiger, and monkey. I was watching her the other day and she was looking around at all of them but then as soon as a certain one came into view she would watch it go alllll the way around until it left her sight then look around randomly again. Guess which animal it was....yep, the GIRAFFE! Thank goodness, huh? She'd be pretty disappointed if she just LOVED lions and had to put up with giraffe everywhere. Whew.
Ava also is in love with .... ceiling fans. No that's not a typo, ceiling fans. She will stare forever at our living room fan. Talk about cheap entertainment!
Lets see, she has moved up into the 0-3 month outfits and let me tell you, the day we had to retire our first newborn outfit I teared up. She's in the size 1 diapers too - no more newborn. Sad. But I'm glad she's growing good. But sad for those little outfits. I have to go through them and store them in the attic for whoever else might come along one day :)
She is AWESOME at lifting her head up. She has never had a problem with it. Day 1 she lifted it up. Genius :) She is pushing up with her arms now though and just looks like such a big girl when she does! She's also tracking rattles and fingers and such with her eyes, but has been doing that since 2 weeks old. 6 weeks is when they are suppose to perfect it - looks like we are ahead of the curve already YESS!
Pacifiers - yes. I don't know what we would do without them honestly. She's a little sucker! ha. As soon as those hit her mouth she is content again.
Boppy - awesome. If you know anyone who is pregnant, this is a great gift. I use it every single day, multiple times a day.
haha
Carseat - mostly good. When she was younger she would fall asleep almost as soon as we strapped her in, but lately its been more up and down. Overall the car experience is a good one though.
Tappy Tunes - amazing. What is this, you ask? An app on the iPhone. There are about 80 songs and you can either 'tap' them out with your finger to the tune or whatever song you are on OR (what we do) you can push play and then click the repeat button and the song plays while pictures pop up with every note. Ava loves it and it is GREAT on trips to Memphis!
Chad - indescribable. Having Chad home has been such a huge blessing. He is the best Dad and has been since day 1! He changes most diapers with no complaining, gives baths, changes clothes, cleans up spit up, helps in the middle of the night, he does it all ladies and gentlemen! I cannot begin to thank him enough for everything he's done. (If you are reading this, you are THE BEST!)

I believe that pretty much sums up all the big points so far. WHEW I'M CAUGHT UP!! Now it can be day to day things and funny stories and exactly what I PLANNED on this blog being HOORAY!

Strike a pose!

{Check below to make sure you are caught up on posts! I'm posting several!}

Our wonderful friend Kim came over and took BEAUTIFUL pictures of our beautiful little girl. Kim is the one who did all my maternity pictures - isn't she just the best?