The Fab Foxes

So recently I started keeping a mental list of what I call my Favorite Mommy Moments. These are exactly what the name implies, special moments that I cherish with my precious little girl. I thought that instead of just having a mental list, I'd post them here on the blog to share with you guys. Now I must say that this is not a static list, it is ever growing and changing as she does more and more things that I completely cherish. With that said, this will be an ongoing topic that I add to as the moments occur or as I think of them, but this time I'll start out with a few of them. Here goes:

1. The way that she snuggles next to me and curls up when she is being nursed (in bed) when she first wakes up in the morning.
2. The way she gets so excited when her daddy comes home from work each day.
3. The really wet kisses she gives me on my cheeks after I "chew" on her cheeks.
4. How she will latch onto my lips if I don't nurse her fast enough.
5. How excited she gets when we put her in her high chair because she knows it's time to eat.

OK, so I think five is a good number to start out with, but watch for more that will inevitably be added as time goes by. I could actually name at least a handful more right now but I don't wanna add too many too fast. 143

For the past several weeks I had been struggling with Y waking during the night. It really started when her scalp was first starting to heal. Itching is a sign of healing so it was a good sign, the only bad part was that she wasn't able to scratch it so she would wake up. The easiest way for me to handle it was to put her in bed with us. So she'd initially fall asleep in her crib and then after several hours she would awake, I'd feed her, put her back in her crib, only to have her wake up screaming and moving her head back and forth to kill the itch. Well if you remember, that back and forth movement of her head was what caused the irritation in the first place. So I'd put her in bed with me where she would curl up on her side, snuggle into me and she'd sleep much more soundly. Well as you know her scalp is pretty much healed (her hair is growing back) and the body rash is completely gone and it has been for close to 2 weeks now. So naturally she would start sleeping in her bed all the time now, right? Wrong! Instead she started waking every 1½ hours. I would go in and either give her pacifier to her or if that didn't help I'd calm her down by picking her up and once she'd get back to sleep I'd put her down again. I knew she wasn't waking because she was hungry because she would have no desire to eat. I'd make sure she was changed and had on a nice dry diaper. Nothing helped, she'd always wake up like clockwork after 1½ hours. I had always been reluctant to try to cry it out method but after a week of very little sleep, it looked more and more appealing. So on Friday night, she woke for the first time and I refused to go in. B finally got frustrated and started to get up, I told him to just let her cry. His response was, "I'm going in to put her back to sleep so that I can go back to sleep." All I could think was, "good luck with that." Sure enough my thoughts were right because he got very little sleep the remainder of the night and I when it was time for him to get ready for work I finally took over. The next night (Saturday) it started all over again and when I refused to respond B got up to go in with her. Now I'm not sure if she just finally realized that mommy wasn't coming now but was instead sending daddy, or if she just magically fixed the problem herself but now when she wakes during the night crying she might cry for a minute or so but then she falls back asleep...all on her own. I hear her throughout the night making whimpering noises or small crying sounds but she is still asleep when doing it. We're both sleeping better and waking much happier! Now I just need to get her to take longer naps during the day because lately she has not been waking up from naps happy which signals to me that she's not getting her full amount of sleep during the nap. Oh well...one problem at a time I suppose!

I often think back to the time shortly after Y was born. I had a brand new baby and being a first time mom there were many things I was unsure of. I was in school full-time with a very demanding course load. And on top of that I had a household to run, needless to say the cooking and cleaning part had to take a back burner. Well, when people would ask me, in astonishment, how I managed to resume classes only one week after I had Y - via C-section - I would reply that it was hard and then I'd say, "If I had to do it all over again I would have waited." When I said that I meant that I would have waited to have Y until I was done with school - this is my last and final year. I never had any intention of putting off school for a while because I really, really wanted to be done. So I'd often ask myself, "what if this" or "what if that." Well while putting Y to bed I got an answer to why we did things in the order we did them. Ya see, I tend to plan things out in my head and while I was pregnant and even after Y was born my plan consisted of: graduating, finding a job, buying another car, buying a house, hiring a nanny for Y, etc. Now, since I have decided to stay at home, my plan has changed, it had to change because having only one income changes things - at least it should - in order for it to make financial sense. So now my plan is to graduate, stay at home, eventually buy another car and eventually buy a house. My realization is that I am so glad that we decided to have a baby before I graduated, otherwise I likely would not have been able to make the decision to stay at home so easily. We would have had another car payment and a mortgage which likely would not have given me the luxury of making the decision to stay at home. I guess my lesson is that things happen on the Lord's timeline and it's that way for a reason. I'm extremely content with the answer to my "what if."

We took more pictures (big surprise) in the last 2 days, here they are:

Well today was Y's followup appointment with her dermatologist and he thinks "she looks a million times better." I already knew this but it was really great to hear it from the dermatologist. They looked at the results from the culture came back negative for bacteria and fungus. That kind of confused me because we knew it was infected but if it was neither of those then what could it be? Well he said that just means it was infected with "every germ in the house" - which is good, because it means that it's nothing serious that caused it and nothing to worry about. Now this doesn't mean that it was literally infected with "every germ in the house" but that was just his way of saying that it's nothing serious, nothing to worry about, to just relax. We do know that it was originally eczema though. He wants us to continue to put they hydrocortisone on her body twice a day for another week and on her scalp twice a day for two weeks and he thinks at that time she will be completely better. I'm excited that her hair is finally growing back!!! She will go back at the end of summer just to see how she is doing and how she made it through the summer months. He thinks that it is likely that she will have sensitive skin and may have allergic reactions to foods, fragrances, and other things but we'll cross that road when we get to it, IF we get to it. So all is well on that front.

Every time we go to the pediatrician for Y's well baby visits the nurses measure her height, weight and head circumference. When the doctor comes in he then tells me, among other things, what percentile she falls in. This was always really interesting to me. Well I've found the charts online for any of you mothers (or fathers) out there that are interested. They differ for girls and boys so be sure to look at the correct one. They're even .pdf files so you can save them for reference later. I even found out that at birth Y was off the charts for height, she was 22 inches (the chart only goes to the 97th percentile). Here's the link: Growth Charts. Maybe I'm just a nerd, but I find these very interesting and if your child is older than 36 months they even have the ones that go from 2 to 20 years.

It's really late and I should be in bed but I've been meaning to write this post for a couple days now and have just never gotten around to it, so here I am! On Thursday, in an effort to get Y to sleep through the night again, I started feeding her 3 times a day - cereal twice and vegetables once. Upon her first taste of peas I got this really scary face:
I was not really convinced that she liked them at all but she kept opening her mouth for them and eventually ate about half of what I thought she would eat. The next day I tried again and she gobbled them up really fast! I've started to make my own baby food and I'm excited that I just got my new baby food cookbook in the mail. My other one is okay but extremely basic and didn't give as much info as I wanted so I bought "Super Baby Food" and although it's a lot more organic and natural than we tend to be I like a lot of the other stuff that's in the book so I'll just pick and choose what I want to do. I also just ordered the complete starter kit for Baby Signs and I'm excited to learn some of the sings so that I can begin to incorporate them when talking to Y. I'm certainly not going to use every single sign that they teach but will again pick and choose the ones that I want to use. This way Y and I can communicate before she can talk and will hopefully be a lot less stressful when figuring out what she is trying to tell me. Y is doing much better in her sitting up with and without the help of the boppy. On Sunday I took a few pictures (okay, I took a ton of pictures but I'll only share a few here) of her sitting up with her boppy. She is also doing much better with rolling over but is still struggling at times. She'll get there and I'm not really in a huge rush for it to happen. She goes back to the dermatologist on Thursday when we will find out what infection she had and then maybe can narrow down what caused it. For now though, here are some pictures!

What do you think?

As for Y, she is continually getting better. We've also been doing a lot more tummy time and she's getting much better at it. She is really working on rolling over and she can do it but she just lets her arm get in the way. She hasn't figured out that she needs to lay her arm flat in order for it to work. She sometimes does it and when she does she can roll over, but she has yet to make the connection between the position of her arm and her ability to roll over. As for sitting up, she's pretty good at it and has actually been doing it for a while now - the problem: whenever she sits up on her own she wants to lean forward to eat her toes. When she does this, she tips over. We just have to get her to sit up straight and she could do it. That's all of the updates for now, until next time...

Yep, our baby is 6 months old already, time has really flown by! This has without a doubt been the most stressful event of my life but that should really be no surprise. Given it all I will say that this has also been the greatest experience of our lives (I think it's safe for me to speak for Brandon on that too). I am enjoying every moment and have a lot to look forward to. Anyway, as for Yanna's rash she's doing a lot better now. The rash on her body is leaving now and the place on her scalp is healing and the old dead skin has shed to reveal new healthy skin - so we're making a lot of progress. I could definitely tell it was healing over the past several days because it had been itching her really badly to the point that she would awake in the middle of the night crying while moving her head from side-to-side trying to scratch it. She ended up sleeping in bed with us for a couple of nights which meant that I got very little sleep. I'm am happy to announce that last night she did sleep the full night in her crib again, whew!!!

She is 16 pounds now and around 27 inches long. She's not yet rolling over or sitting up completely on her own but it's something we're working on. It's probably at least partially our fault since we haven't been very persistent with tummy time and letting her sit up on her own. Most times we would either have her in our laps, on the floor on her gym on the her back, in her exersaucer, in her jumperoo or in her swing. So now we've been throwing tummy time into the mix and she doesn't mind it as much as she used to. She has rolled over a few times but not enough to really have figured out how to do it. Either that or she just doesn't want to do it. Anyway here are some tummy time pictures as well as some pictures that I took today on her 6 month-day!

So I wanted to type up a quick update because I know a lot of you check the blog on Sunday. Y has been responding really well to both creams that were prescribed by the dermatologist. The rash that covered her face and body seems to be clearing up slowly and as for the place on her head it seems to be healing nicely as well. We're still not totally there yet and we're keeping our fingers crossed that it doesn't reoccur as it has in the past. We're being optimistic!

As for the whole thing about the Mongolian Spots, I called her pediatrician to ask more questions and he simply laughed and said that he had never heard of such thing and assured me that many of his patients have Mongolian Spots but are all fine. I was satisfied with that answer. Not that I don't think the dermatologist knows his stuff but I was definitely comforted to know that in all his years and in all his patients he's never dealt with such a case.

Well it's late and I'm tired so I'm going to bed but I wanted to post an update for everyone. 143.