This kid is hilarious. I don't know how she does it, but every now and then she pulls out one of these new tricks and has us laughing and laughing. I'm pretty sure neither of us taught her this one since neither of us can repeat it. Thing is with these noises that she does, she seems to only do them for a couple of days, and then moves on to something new. If she starts doing something new, we have to catch it early.

For a few days, this is what she was doing after she had a bottle. I wish the video was clearer, but it was bedtime so the room was only dimly lit and her white noise was already turned on.



I have no idea how she made the connection that this action was even possible let alone as funny as we found it. When she drinks a bottle, she cups her tongue like a U around the bottle nipple while she's sucking. This is something that breastfed babies do, so it seems that she still has that skill even though we haven't really nursed since July.

This kid just amazes me. I've been struggling to get some decent pictures of her lately so I didn't really have high expectations that her 5 month pictures would turn out very well. I figured we'd have to try at least two different "sessions" with her to get anything workable. Nah! She nailed it on the first attempt. And she was in such a good mood. I am very pleased with how these turned out.

Here are a few of my favorites.

This is pretty funny. Over and over and over. The tongue just cracks me up!

For a while now we've been trying to figure out what to do as far as a baptism goes. We don't belong to a church, but we really felt it was important to have Megan baptized. When we got married, we hired a minister who came to our site to perform the ceremony. It felt like the right thing to do to contact him and see if he'd perform the baptism. When we called him, he said he often gets requests from couples he's married to baptize their children. With that, the decision was made to travel to his home church to have the ceremony performed. It would be a private service, on a Saturday morning.

Here are some photos from the service:


And more photos of Megan in her beautiful baptismal gown:


The dress was just beautiful. It's too bad there isn't reason to dress her up in it a few more times before she outgrows the dress.

At the very beginning you can hear me asking her "What'cha Doing?" She goes on the tell me all about her day.

Look closely. What do you see?


That's right. Megan got her ears pierced today. I have to say she did really well. Definitely better than when she got her shots. She cried, but it wasn't nearly as bad and didn't last nearly as long.

Here she was just before getting them pierced.  Oh yeah, did I mention she's teething and actually taking a pacifier now?  Only took four months to get her to keep one in her mouth for any length of time.  Must feel good on her sore gums.


On the count of 3.  1....2....3!


All done!


It's only been a few hours, but so far they don't seem to be bothering her.  She hasn't been tugging at them or anything.  Now mom & dad are responsible for cleaning and twisting the earrings three times a day for 8 weeks.

We were an hour late, but still lit our candles to remember and honor our babies that were too beautiful for this earth. As crazy as our lives are with an infant, we still often think about our first babies.

Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day is a day of remembrance for all pregnancies and infant death which includes but not limited to miscarriage, stillbirth, SIDS, or the death of a newborn. It is recognized in the United States and throughout Canada on October 15th of each year.

Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day is observed with Remembrance Ceremonies and candle lighting Vigils which coincides with an International Wave of Light with participants lighting candles on October 15 at 7:00 p.m. around the world to honor and remember our children.

For more information: Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day or Remembering Our Babies

Finally all of her hard work has paid off. She's been trying so hard to rollover for the last few weeks and tonight she did it! Yeah Megan!

These were taken right after she rolled over. The first is a little blurry, but she looks so proud of herself. Not optimum shooting conditions, and trying to capture the moment!

Where has the time gone? I've been horrible about updating the blog, but for so long it felt like there really wasn't anything worth posting about. Now that Megan is starting to do more, I'll try to be better about posting more often.

She has her 4 month appointment (with shots) on her actual 4 month birthday. I've been waiting quite a while for an official update to her stats! For the record, she is still an itty bitty peanut!

• Height - 24 1/4" 50%
• Weight - 11lbs 5oz 10%
• Head size - 42 cm 75%

I decided to do her 4 month photos a day early because she would be having her shots and I figured I'd have a better chance at getting some decent pictures. Here are some recent photos.

Not only is September 18th our wedding anniversary, it is also the anniversary of our egg retrieval. The day our little Megan was conceived. What a perfect addition to an already special day in our lives. Oh how our lives have changed in the past year. We feel so blessed.

What a difference a year makes:
Then - Our little Day 5 embryos (actually Sept 23rd). Hard to believe one of these is our Megan.


And Now - Our little almost 15 week old.

Another month has passed. It's just unreal how quickly the time seems to be going now that Megan is here.

We have this month off as far as appointments go, so we tried to weigh Megan to at least get some idea of where she's at now that she's 3 months. The bathroom scale said 10lbs. So, she's gained about a pound in the last month..give or take the accuracy of that scale and method.

This month we've discovered so many things. Megan loves making faces at the baby in the mirror. Even better is when you hold her and look at her in the mirror and she looks at you in the mirror too and flashes one of her giant smiles your way.

Stroller rides have been taken to the next level by getting to ride like a big girl without the car seat bucket. She loves to look around and take it all in. You barely hear a peep out of her unless it's some sort of coo or other sound of contentment.

This kid loves music. Lucky for her, daddy likes to sing silly songs to her. He makes her laugh and it's so adorable!

This morning I noticed that she's started doing a fake cough. It's funny, she'll do it and then smile real big. She also makes a sort of kiss sound when you smother her with kisses.

Megan is definitely a social butterfly. I honestly think she likes people watching and taking in her environment. She's generally a really good baby and tolerates being passed around to whoever might want to hold her. I hope she stays this way. I don't want a clingy baby that won't go to other people.

I honestly don't think we could have asked for a better sleeper. We've been working at getting her down between 8:30-9:00 and she's starting to sleep ten hours (more consistently) before she wakes to eat. Then she'll take a bottle and go back down for another 3-4 hours. They say babies at her age should be sleeping an average of 15 hours per day and we're almost getting that in her night sleep. For now, naps are still mostly happening in the swing. We've tried the PnP and crib a few times but she'll only sleep for 45 minutes whereas if we put her in the swing, she might sleep almost two hours.

Photos are definitely a challenge. She has such an amazing smile, yet doesn't like to show it when the camera comes out.

We're here and all is well. Sorry it's been so long between posts. Days pass and weeks just sort of blend together. After having so much to look forward to for so many months, we're really just taking it day by day and trying to enjoy every moment right now.

Today was a big day for Miss Megan. She had her 2 month appointment and that included 3 shots. Poor kiddo. She did fairly well with the shots and I had timed a bottle pretty well to fall during her appointment time, but it was taking them so long to prepare the shots that we ran out of time and patience. Luckily they came in before she had finished so she had a bit left to help comfort her after it was all said and done.

I was anxious to get her on the scale to see how she's doing. I had an idea of where she'd be because I saw a LC a few weeks ago and she put her on the scale with clothes and a diaper on and she was about 8lbs 9ozs.

Here are her updated stats:
Height: 21 3/4" 25%
Weight: 8lbs, 14oz 10%
Head size: 39.2cm 50-75%

These are the numbers from her Day 3 appt:
Height: 18.5" 5-10% (not sure about this as the hospital recorded her as 19" at birth. I doubt that she shrunk.)
Weight: 5lbs 9oz 5-10%
Head size: 34cm 10-25%

Of course one of my questions was are we feeding her enough? We're doing expressed breast milk in bottles for the majority of her feedings so there's a little guess work in figuring out how much she should be taking. As long as she's gaining, they're happy, even if she is only in the 10th percentile for weight. I guess she's just gonna be a peanut. That's okay. Keep her smaller for a little while longer that way.

Our nights just keep getting better and better. Since she had surpassed her birth weight at her 2 week appointment, we were given the okay to let her sleep without waking her for feedings during the night. That meant we were getting 4 hour stretches almost right away. Now a normal night is anywhere from 5.5 to 7 hours. She's pulled one 8 hour night and that was so nice.

She's been smiling for a few weeks now. I love going in to get her in the morning and telling her "Good Morning" because she always flashes one of her big smiles. Sometimes she'll coo and make noises back at me, but that's really just starting. It seems like everyday is something new even if it's something that seems so small like actually holding a rattle that we place in her hands.

We usually take a couple of walks around the neighborhood each week. At first the stroller rides lulled her to sleep, now she's getting to the point where they'll settle her, but she doesn't usually fall asleep anymore. She's still riding in the bucket to the travel system so she really isn't taking things in, but it's still nice to get out for a nice walk.

Here are some recent pictures. I have flickr linked in at the top, but posting pictures will keep something here in the timeline.

This has to have been the quickest passing month I've endured in the last 3 years.  After month after month dragging on, this was a pleasant passing of time.  Actually, I wanted to slow it down a little.   How is it possible that our baby girl is already a month old?
We were lucky to have daddy home for the first 2 weeks.   Just long enough to get settled into some sort of schedule.  Megan has been a pretty good night time sleeper almost from the start.  It wasn't long before she was sleeping 3-4 hours at a time and just the other night slept for a 6.5 hour stretch.  At least daddy isn't going into work like a zombie.  
When we brought Megan home she had dropped from 6lbs 1oz down to 5lbs 8oz.  Our first mission was to plump up that girl!  When we took her in the day after she came home, she was already up an ounce to 5lbs 9oz.  Because they were concerned about her weight, we had a home healthcare nurse come and see us on our 3rd day at home and according to her scale, Megan was up to 5lbs 13oz.   She really seemed to be gaining well after dropping almost 10% from her birthweight.  We didn't go back to the doctor until she was 2 weeks old.   At that time she was up to 6lbs 6.5oz.  I wish we had a way to accurately weigh her here at home.  She still feels like a little peanut, so I'm curious what her weight is now.  We don't go back to the doctor until she's 2 months old.     
As for me, I had a great recovery.  I took Ibuprofen for the first few days, but it was more for the sore muscles that I was getting from using my holding, carrying, lifting muscles.  My poor arms and back!  It's funny how 6 pounds really adds up when you are constantly tending to a new baby.  My follow-up appointment is 2 weeks away.  Oh, and I've lost all but about 12lbs of my pregnancy weight.  The scale hasn't really moved since the first week.  Oh well, that will come.
We're starting to work on tummy time.  She usually does pretty well for about 5 minutes at a time.  So far she only has a few really bright toys that we take out to show her to try to get her attention.  We'll keep working on this in the coming weeks building up the time she spends on her tummy.  
Besides being a stinker about day time naps, and cluster feeding at night, we really have been blessed with an "easy" baby.  She is pretty easy going.  I guess my OB was right when she predicted that a quiet baby inutero would turn out to be an easy baby.  I hope this characteristic stays with her for many years to come.
And now, in honor of her 1 month birthday, some photos.  I have to throw in this 3D u/s picture because it seems to have captured one of her "looks".  When I saw the photo with her mouth open, I felt like I had seen that picture before.  Her hair is getting crazier the longer it gets!  
 

I feel like I'm at a crossroads.  I've been blogging as PsychedForBaby for a little over 2 years now.
When I started the blog, I really didn't know if I'd get into it, but blogging has been very therapeutic and definitely helped me through some very physically and emotionally rough times.
Honestly, I don't know how I could have gotten through everything I did if it wasn't for the love and support that I got from friends and strangers that I know only through the online world.  There have been so many wonderful comments left over the last 2 years.  Somehow the strangers always had the power to pull me out of my darkest moments.  I guess that's mostly because it was the strangers that could most closely relate to what I was posting about.  
I feel like I'm at a crossroads because I don't know what to do.  I love the idea of keeping a blog to continue to document our new life with Megan, but I don't know if this is the place for it.  Even to this day, not all of our friends and family know the extent of the struggle that we went through to get our precious Megan.  It doesn't seem right to share this blog with them now that we're through all the "bad" stuff and they had no idea it was happening.  Also, I don't really feel like I can leave it all behind either.  This has been my safe place for so long, it just feels natural to come here and leave updates.    
Over to the right there is a link to another blog that I created thinking that would be where I would turn after baby arrived.  What I might do is share that blog with family and friends and keep this blog for the select friends and family that already know about it and all my "other friends" who only know me through the online world.  I just can't see deleting this blog.   I cry just thinking about it.  So much so that it's taken me days to get this far in writing this post.  This blog has too much important information and such a thorough documentation of our journey and ultimately my pregnancy.  Hopefully someday I can share this with Megan so she will know what we went through to have her.  So she will know just how much mommy and daddy wanted her and how much we love her.  
I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been a part of my story for the past 2 years.  Anyone who has ever left a comment has left an impact on my heart.  For that, I am eternally thankful. 
If you have an opinion on the future of The PsychedForBaby Blog, I'd be happy to hear it.