One month

I can't believe it - our youngest daughter is exactly one month old. Same date, same day of the week as last month when she entered our lives at 7:38pm. Where does the time go? Katherine is doing well. She is quite content until she gets hungry and then she wants it now. With Emma I remember a little bit of a grace period between starting to get hungry and being all out hungry and possibly mad. With Katherine she just goes from completely content to mad if you do not catch her in time to eat. She has started to cluster feed again today. It seems when she cluster feeds she does not sleep as well during the day - she never slept for a good length of time today until this afternoon during our short walk and at Emma's swim lessons. Unfortunately, the only time Katherine is not that great is in the evening - she seems to be a very gaseous baby at night and does not go down for bed as easily lately at night as she once did 2 weeks ago. A bit frustrating and hopefully something that will be short-lived.

With the weather so nice the past two days I have been sure to go for a walk. Yesterday "the whole family" as Emma puts it went for a walk, and today Katherine and I enjoyed a short adventure by ourselves.

Emma is enjoying the nice weather as well. Although Emma likes any weather outside it seems - my kind of girl - all weather runner. :-) Even though we are not yet running. Emma is keeping busy these days with swim lessons and intro to gymnastics. She loves to go to both classes.

I keep myself busy with endless lists I make for myself and miscellaneous projects around the house. We keep too much stuff so an ongoing project is always cleaning something out - this is the year for us to try and get rid of a lot of unnecessary things and not accumulate more. So far this year I think we are doing good about not accumulating more little stuff but still lots of work to do on getting rid of - although we did a good job when we were preparing for baby #2. A lot of it was moved to a storage shed and the plan for a majority of it is a garage sale this spring/summer. If we go through with the garage sale our idea - it will be our first. Anybody with any pointers on holding one - please let me know.

Emma had a play date last week at home with a friend from preschool - other than Emma having a mini meltdown about sharing it went fairly well. They played dolls and dress up. Below are a couple photos of them in their dress-up clothes.

I have a variety of photos - the couple of Emma sleeping are from the first weekend Katherine was home with us - she did not nap on this particular Sunday but finally let herself relax while Ethan and I were visiting with Aunt Heidi. We thought the photos were pretty funny - especially with her legs crossed. Ethan unfortunately could not get up during this siesta.

Another one of Emma is her doing an art project with her headband on - she put it on - we thought it made her look somewhat like a hippie.

The photos of Katherine are from today at one month old by herself this afternoon and being held by her big sister tonight.












Happy St. Patrick's Day to everyone, especially those who are Irish. Enjoy the beautiful spring day tomorrow - they say its going to be 65 degrees supposedly!

Miscellaneous photos

Here are a couple photos that I just found which I wanted to post. The second is great - it is Emma reenacting me breastfeeding Katherine with her own doll.

Lazy with 2 kids

I have been meaning to post to my blog for the past week but pure laziness and just constantly thinking of something else that needs to be done has been in the way. We are doing well as a family of four. Katherine is sleeping pretty well still. Although last night she had a hard time settling down after her 9:30pm feeding because of some gas we think. I finally went to sleep around 12:30am which was really 1:30am because of daylight savings.

She went to the doctor at 2 weeks and weighed in at 9lb 11oz - great job the Dr. said! He told us he has 2 months old that are not that big. Now that she stays awake for eating better she eats fast and obviously eats enough. Although I think sometimes she likes to trick me to eat so she can fall asleep. :-)

Katherine has been out a little - Target, a few restaurants because we are still bad at eating out, although we are trying to do better. It helped a lot to have some friends make some meals for us - that kept us in and gave us plenty of leftovers. We have 2 more meals coming this week.

Ethan was only home with us for the last part of the week Katherine was born and then it was back to work because it was a training week. He had taken off the week before and the week she was born because we thought she would be more timely and then we would have all been home for about 2 weeks together. We transitioned well into the 3 of us at home - most days I tried to shower before either girl woke up so I would be ready - that only lasted a week though. Last week I was more lazy and would take Emma to preschool and daycare pre-shower.

My Mom came to visit for a couple days when Ethan went on his first night shift after having Katherine - we asked her awhile ago and I was not sure how I would be transitioning but I seemed to have things under control better than I thought. Ethan was not surprised because he pointed out to me - I like to multitask. But it was nice to have my Mom here for the company and for Katherine to get to know her voice. Emma enjoyed Nana having a sleepover with us as well.

Emma has been a great big helper and great big sister. She has a few more meltdowns -and I think most of it is the transition but as some have said it is also just a part of being 3 1/2 too. She does not seem jealous of Katherine or angry at all. She likes to have her dolls use a swing, chair, blanket when Katherine is finished with it. And she makes sure to ask Mom or Dad first. She is actually quite cute with her dolls now.

She said something this morning that melted my heart - she came in Katherine's room while I was feeding her and said I am glad I have a little sister. Then she looked at me and said thanks for having a baby sister Mom and gave me a kiss and then wanted an eskimo kiss - something she and I started awhile ago but have not done in awhile. It was very sweet.

Now that I am home and I do not have graduate work to be doing you would think I am accomplishing projects but I have been a bit lazy - some of it is the settling in and making myself rest - I figure there is time to get to work on all the miscellaneous projects I make for myself. I should get to scrapbooking more though.

The girls and I went to church this morning by ourselves because Ethan is working and it went fairly well. Emma did well although she was very disappointed that they did not have Liturgy of the Word for children this morning (storytime as she puts it). She was really looking forward to it - she went to this for the first time a week or 2 ago out of the blue when we were all at church. Most of the kids are 5 and older but she wanted to go and was okay with going alone. She really enjoyed it.

Katherine will be 3 weeks tomorrow - wow! Here is a photo of her at 2 weeks in a new outfit that Aunt Heidi bought.

First 2 weeks

Here is a slideshow of photos from the first 2 weeks of Katherine's life.