This little piggy went to market...

Last weekend was exceptionally great, but I think we managed to match it, if not outdo it, this weekend. Saturday morning, my mom and I took Nannies to our local farmers market and we had a great time. This kid loves crowds and strangers, so the farmer's market was right up her alley. About 10 minutes after we got there, I realized that I had forgotten to bring any bottles for her, and she would need to eat soon. Luckily, we only live about 3 minutes away from the market so I was able to leave her and Grandma there and run back for the food. There's a little cafe right next to the market, so we stopped for coffee and scones (and a bottle). Elliot is such a hit everywhere we go. People love to stop and talk to her, and she loves to show off for them. After making some new friends as we waited in line for our coffee, she proceeded to quietly squeal throughout breakfast in the hopes that someone else would come to see her.

While we were wandering through the downtown Overland Park shops, I found a new favorite. There is an incredible antique store full of amazing refinished pieces. They had an adorable child's roll-top desk that I would have loved to have for Elliot, but we've got quite a while before she'd even be able to use it, so I resisted. The store owner's 18 year old daughter absolutely fell in love with Elliot while we were there. She even got Elliot to try to wave. I can't imagine a situation where we'd actually have to pay a babysitter since we have so much family near us, but if we ever do, I know who I'm calling!

After we got home, Elliot took a quick nap (a VERY quick nap, as she's becoming an insomniac during the daytime. She sleeps great at night though, so I'm not complaining.) and we headed to Antioch Park for a walk around the lake. We're really starting to get into a good routine on the weekends, and we keep figuring out more and more places to go with our little bear. I've taken Elliot to the park before, but it was her dad's first trip there with us. I'm so excited for her to get older and be able to really play there. I spent so much time there as a kid, and I know she will have even more fun than I did, since they've added a lot of great improvements since I was a child.





This morning we took her to yet another farmer's market. I've been wanting to go to the downtown KC farmer's market for a long time now, but for some reason we haven't made it out there until today. Matt and I hadn't been there since we were kids, so it was a new experience for all three of us. After checking it out, I can guarantee you that I will never be buying produce at the grocery store again. The prices are sooooo much better at the market, and the quality of the produce is amazing! The spices are especially well priced. Most are $1 for a 1/2 cup scoop. Matt picked out some jerk seasoning to use on the grill, and I'm going to take inventory of my spice cabinet and make a list of spices to pick up next week (yes, we definitely plan to go weekly now). Besides the seasoning, we got nectarines, asparagus, garlic, strawberries, and cherries. I think Elliot enjoyed being there since she sang what I call her "baby song" (a slow series of delighted squeals) the entire time we were out. She was fascinated by the gelato at the Italian grocery and she also enjoyed the Meditteranian market (as did her dad). In just a little over a month, I'll be able to pick out fruits and veggies to make into baby food for her, and I'm really excited to be able to use all local produce.




Next weekend promises to be great as well. We are headed to Lawrence so Matt can get measured for his tux for a wedding we're going to in a few weeks. This will be Elliot's 2nd trip to Lawrence, but I think she'll enjoy it much more this time. She was a newborn the first time we took her and slept almost the entire time we were there. She's so much more fun now, and I can't wait to take pictures of her on campus! I hope all of you had as great a weekend as we did!

Say cheese!!!

I love having pictures of my baby taken. We had her newborn photos taken when she was 6 days old, and and we did her 3 month photo shoot a little over a month ago. We have an amazing photographer who comes to our house to photograph Elliot, and she does such a great job. You can click here, go to the "Clients" tab, and enter the password "Elliot" to view her newborn photos. I'll post the link to her 3 month photos as soon as the gallery is up. We're having her pictures done every three months until she's at least a year old. That's a lot, but sometimes it still doesn't seem like enough. She's already so different now than she was for her 3 month pictures, and I can't imagine how much she'll have changed by the time she's 6 months old.

So you can imagine my excitement when I found a coupon for a free portrait package at The Picture People. The only catch was that I didn't find out about the offer until Thursday, and it expired on Saturday. I called immediately to try to get an appointment. No luck. I accepted their offer to put me on the waiting list for a cancellation, but was sure nothing would come of it. The next day I got a call at 10 am that they had a cancellation and there was an appointment available for 12:30 that afternoon. Elliot did so great! I was nervous that she'd be fussy. Usually I know well in advance when she's having her picture taken, so I can plan our day around it to make sure she'll be happy, fed, and well rested when it's picture time, but we had almost no notice for this appointment so we just had to wing it. I think it turned out pretty well.





(You'll have to excuse the picture quality. I'm not used to having to scan pictures, and I'm sure there's a way to get it to scan in better quality, but I'm too lazy to try to figure it out.)

Nannies ♥'s the Hoff

Tonight I was standing in the living room, holding the kiddo as her dad was getting her bath ready. Out of nowhere she started squealing with delight, which was strange because she was actually pretty grumpy and tired at the time. I turned around to see that she was staring at the TV, where "America's Got Talent" was playing. That's right everybody. She was squealing at David Hasselhoff.

In related news, as she was partaking in her after bath flirt-fest with the blender, "Take My Breath Away" started playing on a commercial. Appropriate background noise for the moment, don't you think? My kid is so weird. I shall leave you with this image, to be burned into your brain forevermore.

Such a great weekend!

We had such a great time this weekend. For once, it wasn't blazingly hot and humid outside, so we took Elliot to Shawnee Mission park to go hunting...for LARPers. For those of you who have not yet discovered the hilarity of LARPing (live action role playing), it's basically a bunch of adults playing medival dress up. Like a spontaneous rennaisance fair in the middle of suburbia. We heard them while we were hiking through the woods. I don't remember the exact words I heard, but it was something like "Hark! Verily the enemy doth approach!" This alone would have been enough to make my entire weekend, but then we heard music. Recorder music. We saw people LARPing through the woods with recorders. Awesome.

After fulfilling my desire to actually see real people participating in the nerdiest activity known to mankind, we headed to the marina where Elliot ate her bottle and looked at the boats. We had an awesome time, and promised ourselves that we would go there more often.

That night, my parents came over to watch Elliot while we went to Starlight for our second show of the season. We saw "Anything Goes", which is pretty much everything I look for in a musical, but seemed to bore everyone else. I suppose they don't have the same appreciation for jazz hands that I do. Oh well. Next up is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, then Chicago (yay!) and Mamma Mia (triple yay!).

On Sunday we took Elliot to her Grandpa's to go to the beach. Fun, but also slightly disgusting since Matt had to scoop up not one, but two dead bait fish that floated a little too close to the baby. After swimming we went back to Grandpa's for a bottle and nap (for Elliot) and beer and steaks (for mommy).

Notice how she's trying to feel up Grandma Jenny

AAAHHHHH! She's mobile!!!

Watch out! She's on the move! That's right, Elliot has not only learned to roll over, she's learned to do it continuously until she reaches her desired destination. If she starts out next to the couch, she will go all the way until she runs into the tv stand. Then I turn her around and she goes back the other day. The days of me being able to lay her on the floor and leave the room for a few minutes are over. I went to get a glass of water yesterday, and when I got back she was about 6 inches from being in the laundry room!

Although her newfound mobility makes life harder in some respects, a recent acquisition also makes it easier. Elliot's friend Eli (Remember him? The one who made a move in the turtle pool?) is not a fan of his baby swing, so he generously loaned it to Elliot, who is a huge fan! For those of you who don't know me in real life, our house is entirely hardwood on the main level. Our only carpeted room is the living area in the basement. This means that it's difficult for me to put her down when we're upstairs since the floor is hard, and usually covered in dog hair no matter how often I dustmop. Usually she has to sit in her bouncy seat, which she now hates, if I'm not holding her. Enter the swing, the solution to our problem. She will sit happily in it for well over 30 minutes, even longer if you let her watch tv in it (Yes, I know. I'm a bad mommy. But it's only Saved by the Bell.). I put her in it right away after Eli and his mommy dropped it off. She seemed happy, so I sat on the couch to check my e-mail. After about 10 minutes, she was unusually quiet. I looked up to find this:

Thank you, Eli!

C is for cookies!!!!

In my never-ending quest to make more milk for my child, I've started making lactation cookies. A friend asked for the recipe, so I thought I'd post it here in case anyone else could use it.

Ingredients:

1 cup butter 2 cups flour
1 cup sugar 1 t baking soda
1 cup brown sugar 1 t salt
4 T water 3 cups thick cut oats (I use steel cut)
2 T flaxseed meal 1 cup chocolate chips
2 eggs 2 T brewers yeast
1 t vanilla

Mix flaxseed meal and water. Let sit for 3-5 minutes.
Cream butter and sugars. Add eggs, flaxseed mixture, and vanilla.
Mix flour, baking soda, salt, and brewers yeast, and add to the butter/sugar mixture.
Stir in oats and chocolate chips.
Drop onto greased baking sheet and bake at 375 for 8-12 minutes.
Eat at least 4 per day for best results.

Notes: I found everything I needed at Whole Foods. Do yourself a favor and just ask someone to help you find everything so you're not wandering around for 30 minutes like I was. The more brewers yeast you use, the better the cookies will work. I've heard some people complain about the taste if they added extra, but I used 3 T instead of 2 for my last batch, and they still tasted fine. I'm going to use 4 T in the next batch. You can substitute anything you want for the chocolate chips (nuts, raisins) or just leave them out entirely.

Poor Mr. CoffeePot

It is always sad when someone you love leaves you for someone else. Mr. CoffeePot is feeling this pain. Nannies has a new favorite friend. It's the blender. To add insult to injury (or in this case, injury to insult) she repeatedly kicked the coffee maker while making flirt eyes and whispering (okay, squealing) sweet nothings to the blender. Perhaps I should move him across the kitchen so he doesn't have to see her flaunting her new relationship under his nose. It seems like the kindest thing to do.

So much to talk about!

It's been a while since I've blogged, so this is going to be a very long post with a lot of pictures. Where do I start? How about...boating safety.

Matt and I came across this sign while we were out Sunday morning celebrating our anniversary. So where were we? A lake, perhaps? The river? Nope. This is the body of water we encountered, at which boating is prohibited.


So please, next time you're at the Plaza, no boating in the JC Nichols Memorial Fountain. But definitely go to Tomfooleries for brunch. Yum!

Sunday was also Elliot's 4 month birthday. She is growing up way too fast and it is so sad. She does get cuter by the minute though, so that eases the transition somewhat. She weighed 11 lbs 11 oz at her doctor's appointment yesterday, and is 24 1/2 inches long. That's 12th percentile for weight, and 54th for height. Here is my tall and skinny girl rocking her babylegs and giving her teddy bear some love.


She got her shots yesterday, which actually went very well. Her dad went with us, so he got the honor of holding her hands down during the shots. She cried, of course, but calmed down within seconds of me picking her up, slept on the way home, took a nap, and woke up as good as new. She's doing well so far today too. She slept through the night last night (yay!) and went down easily for her morning nap,which we are now 2 hours and 15 minutes into. I don't know if she's sleepy from the shots or if she's going back to her usual sleep routine finally, but whatever the reason, I'm enjoying it. I suspect what happened is that she figured out that I bought the Ferber book yesterday and decided to start sleeping better on her own before I read it, thus continuing her never-ending quest to watch me waste money.

Thursday night I finally made up my mind on the great feeding debate. Not knowing how much she was eating was way too hard for me. After all of her weight issues for the first few months, I need to know that she's eating well, for my own sanity. I decided I would pump, and supplement with formula as necessary. I thought I would feel sad giving her formula, but I am loving it! She's actually getting a lot less formula than I thought she would. Once I could stop worrying about her getting enough food, my supply shot up through the roof. For the first few days she got formula mixed with breastmilk for every feeding, to get her used to the taste of it. Now that she will drink the formula by itself, I'm giving her bottles of milk for most feedings, with formula before bed and anytime I need a bottle ready quickly since I can just use warm water and mix it when she needs it rather than waiting for a bottle to heat up. I am still nursing her to sleep at night and whenever else she needs comforting, and it's going great. Since she wasn't eating enough before, she's actually getting more breastmilk now than she was when I was exclusively breastfeeding. When I add the formula on top of that, she's getting WAY more food. I think that's the main reason that I don't feel guilty about the formula, because she's not getting any less milk than before so she's still getting all the same benefits of breastmilk as before. Another plus for formula is that it allows me to kick Matt out of bed at night to go feed her while I keep sleeping! He was always willing to do this, of course, but I always woke up anyway because she would cry while he was heating up her bottle. Formula takes about 30 seconds to mix up, so I can go right back to sleep without hearing my poor baby scream. I feel like this was a great decision, and everyone in our house is much happier now. I'm getting to enjoy being with my baby rather than worrying about her all the time.

Here she is demonstrating how she has her dad literally wrapped around her fingers.

"I've got my washcloth! I'm ready for bathtime now!"

"No! This is MY rooster! Back off!"

5 years ago today

I cannot believe we've been married for 5 years! It really feels like less time than that, but at the same time, it feels like we've been married forever (I mean that in a good way!). You can really tell how long it's been if you look at how tiny Rupert was at our wedding.


When we first got married, we decided to wait 5 years before having kids. At the time, that seemed like forever, but here we are, 5 years later, with a baby. I am so glad that we waited to have her. I feel like our relationship was really ready to handle having a child. We've had 5 years (actually 7 1/2 if you count the whole time we've been together) to do basically whatever we wanted and go out whenever we wanted. I feel like it's really out of our systems now. There's not really much that we enjoy doing that you can't bring a baby along to do, and when we do want to leave her at home we are lucky to have 3 sets of grandparents plus my sister who all love to babysit. Even Uncle Mark and Aunt Lauren said they would watch her if it was an emergency (they are nervous due to their total lack of experience with babies)!


Before the kiddo came along, we had planned to do a big vacation for our 5th anniversary, but now that Little Miss Muffin is here, plans have changed. We'll do our big trip next year or maybe the year after that, but this year we are spending our anniversary hanging out with our sweet little baby, and there's nothing I'd rather do. On Sunday my parents are coming over to watch Elliot so Matt and I can go to brunch on the Plaza and spend some time together. Later that afternoon, Beth and Ty are coming over to meet her for the first time. I'm anticipating that she will be in a great mood for that, since there's nothing my kid loves more than a stranger (she's a weirdo).

I will leave you with more pictures of our big day. If I get really ambitious, I may post honeymoon pics tomorrow. This requires me to scan them into the computer though, since digital cameras were far less common when we got married than they are now (wow, it has been a long time).

Our new friend has arrived

Elliot is now the proud owner of her very own baby scale. While I thought that this purchase would help ease my mind about her weight gain and food intake, it has done the opposite. It informs me that my daughter is only eating 2 ounces when she nurses, as opposed to the 4 ounces that she readily takes from a bottle. My solution to this (for now) is to give her a 2 ounce bottle after every feeding to ensure that she gets enough food in her. Now I am beginning the whole breastfeeding/formula debate all over again. Obviously breastmilk is better than formula, but on the other hand, a full serving of formula is better than a 1/2 serving of breastmilk, no? I'm not sure right now what we're going to do. I can keep nursing and supplementing with breastmilk, but it's a lot of work to nurse her, give her a bottle, and then pump to make sure I have enough to give her in her next bottle. I could supplement with formula instead, but that will make my supply go down and probably eliminate the possibility of working our way back to exclusive breastfeeding. Or I could just switch her to formula. Honestly, I feel like formula is probably the way to go at this point, but I just can't do it yet. Maybe over time the idea will easier for me, but I'm just not ready now. Ugh.

I have yet to come up with a name for this little guy. Any suggestions?

>

We also had a successful unswaddled night last night. We took a chance and tried it out, and it worked! Because she's not all wrapped up anymore, she has to wear pajamas to bed instead of her usual white onesie/swaddle combo. This is both adorable and sad. As Matt said, "Babies don't wear jammies. Babies wear onesies!" Here is my adorable little jammie girl waking up this morning.

4th of July fun

We had a great first Fourth of July with Elliot! We took her to her Grandpa's house at the lake to celebrate. If it had been a little warmer it would have also been her first trip to the beach, but we'll have to save that for another day. She did so great being away from home all day. She took a 2 hour nap when we got there, played with her grandparents and her aunt and uncle for a while, and then went to bed in her pack'n'play. It did take a while to actually get her to fall asleep, but once she was out she was OUT. I was sure that the fireworks would wake her up, but she slept right through them so Mommy and Daddy got to sit out on the deck and watch. She constantly surprises me with how well she adapts to different situations. I think spending holidays with my kid is one of the absolute greatest thing about being a parent. She makes everything so much more fun (and we had a lot of fun before she came along, so that's saying a lot)!

Her adorable 4th of July outfit

OMG, Uncle Mark actually likes a baby!

Today was a gorgeous day, so we took kiddo down the street to the park to try out the swings for the first time. She looks so tiny in it!

More fun to come next weekend, as Matt and I celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary and Elliot turns 4 months old!

The de-swaddling has commenced

Thursday morning I awoke to screaming. This is unusual in our house. She cries when she wakes up and needs to eat, but has a pretty quiet cry. She rarely full-on screams. So I went into her room to find that she had managed to flip herself over onto her tummy. This is problematic because we are still swaddling her at night and for all of her naps, which makes it difficult for her to lift her head while on her tummy, since her arms are stuck inside the blanket. I had actually been really dreading her learning to roll because of this, but it's clearly time, so we are beginning the process of weaning her from the swaddle.

Starting with her first nap of the day on Thursday, we began swaddling her with one arm out. It's a look reminiscent of Michelle Obama at the inauguration. The first nap was about an hour, which is normal for her. The second nap, which is usually 2-3 hours, was around 45 minutes. Not good. She took another 45 minute nap a little later in the afternoon, and by 7 pm, she was not a happy camper. Matt and I had tickets to Starlight that night, so the task of putting her to bed for the first time with her new modified swaddle fell to Aunt Joan. She showed up around 7:15 and began trying to put her to bed when we left at 7:30. When we got home at 11:30, guess who was still awake? I nursed her to sleep and was able to lay her down without any problems. She then proceeded to sleep through the night, woke up for a quick 6am feeding, and went back down until 8:30! She's been doing great ever since. In a few days, if she keeps up the good sleeping, we'll start swaddling with both arms out.

Here are some pictures of her one-arm swaddle. Being the fantastic mother that I am, I allowed her to tip over on the couch while photographing her.

"Hmm, this is an interesting look, Mom"

"I'm falling! Wheeeee!"

"That was fun! Do it again!"

A success story....sort of

I decided to set up the high chair yesterday. I'm not planning on starting her on solids for another 2 months, but I wanted her to get used to her chair. Turns out she didn't need to get used to it. She loves the high chair! So then I decided we should see how she did with a spoon. Problem is, I needed something to feed her with the spoon, but I don't want her to have anything but breastmilk until she's closer to 6 months. Solution: breastmilk slushie!!! Delicious! But cold. Very cold. Too cold. I'm calling it a success because she took the spoon in her mouth, and there was no crying at all. However, she was not a big fan of the coldness in her mouth. See for yourselves:



She does enjoy sitting in the highchair to play with her barnyard friends though.

OMG, that one is HUGE!!!