Hairy

I feel as though I have come to terms, once and for all, with my preference for short hair.  When I was a little kid, my mom kept my hair short so she wouldn't have to deal with it, and it wasn't until around 3rd grade (mind you, this is how I remember all this, and not necessarily how it really happened) after much begging that she finally relented and let me grow my hair long.

I never knew how to take care of it, so it was basically a long frizzy mess from then until some point in high school, maybe 10th grade, when I got a pixie, and thus began my addiction to getting drastic haircuts.  Everyone does a double-take when they see you, and you get so many compliments!  It's one of the most fun things you can do, trust me.  And the best thing about drastic haircuts is, even if you don't like it, even if you HATE it, you only have to live with it for a couple of weeks.  I think even the worst haircut ever would resolve itself into something at least OK within a month.

It feels so great to take that huge leap, when the reward is an exciting new look, and the only risk is a few weeks of mediocrity.  The only time this happened to me was when I dyed my hair and it came out Barney purple, and even though I tried two more boxes of dye to fix it, it didn't work and I had to walk around with the worst dye job ever for a few weeks.  But even that faded pretty quickly.  And I'm also resolved, though not as a result of that incident (I've dyed my hair many times since about a year or 18 months ago), to never dye my hair again.  I like its natural color quite a bit; it'll get lighter in the sun anyway; it's much cheaper and less hassle with no dye; and this way I'll know as soon as I get any grey, and I can let it come in gradually so I can ease into natural grey hair and never have to worry about my roots.

My hair was long again, like past my shoulders, my freshman year of college, but has been between super short and chin-length ever since then, until the past year when I started growing it long again during pregnancy.  I don't know why, but something in my brain told me I needed to be able to make a ponytail by the time I had a baby.  I achieved that, and lasted until today with long hair, but I feel fairly certain that was the last time.  It's been coming out in handfuls for a couple of weeks, in the shower, all over our bathroom, all over the house, in Penelope's hands, breeding dust bunnies in every corner...as soon as I made the hair appointment, it couldn't come soon enough.  I've been counting down the days for a week, and this morning when I woke up, I couldn't wait for 11:30.  Now I smile and sigh with relief every time I remember I have short hair again!  I can't wait to wash it and start playing.  I'm still addicted to drastic haircuts, though, so in a month or so I may go back and get it DRASTICALLY short, and then let it get shaggy over the winter because I love every length between super short and chin-length, and then by next spring it will be long enough again for another satisfyingly drastic cut.  But never again will I get to experience as drastic a cut as I got today, from well below my shoulders to above my ears!  There was so much hair on the floor that it filled up an entire dust pan, the big bin-sized kind.

I feel like my experience as a kid with not being allowed to grow long hair should make me want it to be long now that I can, but...Mom was right.  Plus, I have two cousins who have the most amazingly thick, beautiful, dreamy long hair, that mine just seems so BLAH to me in comparison when it's long, all limp and thin and boring.  The true strength of my hair can't shine through unless it's short.  It's just the way of things.

And that, my friends, is more than you ever wanted to know about my hair.

More Milestones

The only new milestone lately is PJ demonstrating her first projectile spit-up.  Not exactly one for the record books.  But I wanted to make sure I got a few general timing things written down somewhere, so here we go...

By around 2 months of age, PJ was on 100% breast milk and 100% cloth diapers, weighed 9 lbs 4 oz, and was almost 22 inches long.

By 3 months of age, she had passed 10 lbs 6 oz; she was baptized on April 29th:

She was really starting to get talented at babbling, shrieking, and making a variety of vowel sounds, and her favorite place to do chat was laying on her changing table, preferably naked.  She occasionally would manage to grab the handle of the musical frog on her bouncy seat & play the song:

On May 5th, she rolled over back-to-belly for the first time, and by 3 1/2 months had pretty reliably found her thumb and started to suck it regularly.

She also started to roll onto her belly at night, so she's been mostly a belly sleeper since then, with the possible exception of nights I put her down when she's already fast asleep.

But my favorite thing to start happening this month are the HUGE smiles and happy kicks and shrieks I get when I come home from work and she sees me for the first time.  She's been smiling for a while, but now she can do it all the time and does it a LOT.

Now she's 4 months old, 12 pounds, sleeps as much as 10 1/2 hours a night, LOVES baths (lots of smiling and kicking and happy noises), still loves to talk while naked on her changing table but also talks a lot anywhere she is, especially if you're engaging her face-to-face but often even if she's just playing by herself in her bouncy seat; she successfully grabs the pull on the frog to play "Five Green and Speckled Frogs" when she's in her bouncy seat, and is very proud of herself for doing it; seems to have stopped rolling belly-to-back, but rolls back-to-belly all the time (even when she doesn't want to do tummy time); has a reliable strategy for finding her thumb: she drags her right hand across her face until the thumb pops into her mouth, but she still doesn't quite grasp that when she waves her arms, that will remove her thumb from her mouth, so she spends some time popping it in and then losing it over and over until she calms down enough to relax and leave it there; just in the last few days, I've found her awake and hanging out on her belly in her crib in the mornings, so apparently now she wakes up and doesn't feel the need to let us know right away!

Along with her first-ever projectile spit-up last night, she had her first low-grade fever today, presumably as a result of the 2nd round of vaccines she got yesterday at her 4 month well-baby visit.  But after an extra-long afternoon nap and a big meal from Mommy, she seemed back to her usual self this evening, and went to bed with her usual no fuss tonight.  She's recently started to try to lean forward when she's propped up, so hopefully the next big milestone will be sitting up!

You guys.  I might have to curb my skepticism.  I bought a bottle of MotherLove More Milk Plus at the recommendation of a lactation consultant at a La Leche League meeting (yes, I went to one in April.  It was OK.  I might go again in June.), and after using it for 3 days, I am pretty sure I'm noticing an increase.  The last 4 times I've pumped, I've gotten at least 20% more than comparable sessions in the previous week.  I need a couple more days worth of data to feel really confident, but it does seem to be helping!

Since I have started getting a more comfortable buffer of milk, and since we've been putting Penelope to bed between 8:00 and 8:30 for almost a week now, I had Paul feed her a bottle while I was at choir rehearsal tonight and put her to bed before I got home!  It's totally weird to come home and not get to see her again, but I'm taking this opportunity to pump at 9:30 instead of 10:30 and go to bed early, so I might actually get 7 hours of sleep AND still have time to get a shower and get into work by 7:00AM tomorrow!  Wouldn't that be amazing.  I'm not quite sure what my boobs are going to do with 7 hours worth of milk, but I guess I'll find out!

Is anyone else totally tired of the election already??  I have been working on a thought process about how the problem with Democrats' and Republicans' policies actually boils down to the same thing, that individuals are inherently selfish and frequently don't act in the long-term best interests of their community, but they have very different beliefs about the best way to mitigate that fact.  That's pretty much the whole theory, I just need to think about some concrete examples. Of course, this doesn't take into account how broken the government is as a whole, regardless of party...but the root of that problem is fundamentally the same thing too, don't you think?  Human self-centeredness, and not the right incentives in place to mitigate it effectively?  Yup.

This is a weird segue, but I think that's one of the strengths of Paul's and my relationship:  we each deeply believe, correctly, that the other is making decisions with each other in mind, and always trying to support each other. So when something does go wrong, and one of us gets a little angry, and maybe we have an argument, it never lasts long because once it's out in the open it just dissolves away into knowing that now we're on the same page and maybe that wasn't the best, but next time it will happen the right way.  We're both kind of lazy and extra procrastinate-y on our own, but we are really good at motivating each other because we don't want to disappoint each other.  Why can't politicians be more like that??  Haha...ah... *weeps for the future of humanity* (um, just kidding.  I'm totally still an optimist.)

Here, have another picture of my baby sucking her thumb, this time with a naked bottom!

Getting comfy

Starting on my second week back at work in the office full time, and things are definitely starting to feel comfortably routine.  Don't get me wrong, every evening we're doing something different--gardening, walking to Hans Frozen Custard, going shopping--but we've implemented a bed time for PJ around 8:00 PM, so we try to be home by 7:00 or so, then I bathe her and nurse her and put her to bed while Paul makes dinner, then we eat and watch some Netflix, and finally right before bed I pump one more time.

As long as I pump 3 times per day at work most days (2 times is OK on occasion in a pinch) and always pump that extra time before bed, I'm breaking even or coming away with a slight surfeit every day, which is totally great.  I am commuting to Baltimore for some training next Tuesday and Wednesday (NOT overnight), which I was nervous about, but now I know it'll be fine.

After about 3 weeks of waking up every night in the 2:00 or 3:00 hour to nurse, PJ is back to sleeping 8 to 9.5 hours per night for the past 4 nights, which is totally awesome.  And she was super fussy for Paul all day yesterday, but today was back to normal.  She is so amazing, I love spending time with her laying naked on the changing table (her most favorite thing to do) and watching her kick and squirm and smile and squeal and make all kinds of cute sounds and faces.  She makes eye contact with me the whole time too.  And then that extends into bath time, which is getting easier and more fun as she gets closer to sitting up!  (That's still a month or two away, but you can tell it's coming!)

Speaking of milestones, we haven't hit any more lately, but she is getting a lot better at finding her thumb when she wants to.  She still doesn't often want to, but when she does...

I bought an album to make a baby book, but that's just one of MANY little DIY and crafty things on my to-do list...first I need to finish addressing and sending the last batch of birth announcements, finish my Mom's Christmas present picture for her bathroom, hem and hang 5 pairs of curtains, get caught up with uploading pictures from the dSLR to Facebook (including organizing the folders for the weekly photo), re-pot and otherwise tend to a few houseplants...and that's not even including big house things, like cleaning up the disaster that is our second bedroom.  Sheesh!

But first, bed time.  Tomorrow we get to introduce Penelope to Johanna et. al., and I can't wait!  What to dress her in...hmm...

On A Roll

See, it's a double meaning, because I'm blogging for the 3rd time this week, and Penelope knows how to roll over!

Baby junk reading on milestones (I generally avoid the crap about parenting on sites like Baby Center, but sometimes I cave in...just, whatever you do, NEVER venture into the comments section.  It will suck you into a vortex of stupidity.  Kind of like Fox News...) says belly-to-back is often the first roll, but Penelope got all her head-holding practice by hanging out with us because she wouldn't tolerate two seconds of tummy time, so her first roll was back-to-front.  Paul said a couple of days ago that he was pretty sure she had rolled belly-to-back, but today he actually witnessed it!  She wouldn't perform for me at all this evening, but it seems we officially have a baby who can roll.  I didn't ask which direction she rolled belly-to-back, so I don't know if she's in danger of being on the other side of the room if we turn our backs quite yet, but the punchline is: there needs to be some baby-proofing or at least baby-fortification happening this weekend, because she could start rolling all over the place any day!  I am in serious disbelief at how fast this has happened.  I guess it all started with the nurses and lactation consultants commenting on her amazing head control as a day-old newborn!

She had also been eating three pretty big bottles during the day when I was at work, way more than I could pump in a day, and now that Paul's done with classes for the summer I was pretty worried it was going to be more than I could keep up with even with extra pumping on evenings and weekends.  But I did some reading and told Paul to try only offering her no more than 4 oz and change to start out, and only give her more if she was still hungry, and now the past two days she's eaten only 2 bottles the entire day I was gone, under 8 oz.  This is partly due to eating more overnight, I think, because she's been waking up to nurse around 3 am for a couple of weeks now, and then she eats a lot in the evenings when I'm home, so I think it's kind of like reverse-cycling light, since I still only have to feed her once overnight.  I also think she just finished up a growth spurt,  So our new strategy + lucky timing with other things, and I'm back to being not too worried about keeping up with pumping.   I did have to go back to 3 times a day, though, because even though I got just as much with 2 session spaced farther apart for a couple of days, it ended up decreasing my supply, so my results gradually diminished.  I have to do 3x a day to keep the girls producing!  But it's also good to know I can "cheat" one day here and there when I need to and cut out a pumping!

Speaking of which, I'm done with the evening session, so it's time for bed!  Until my 2:45 AM wake-up call...