Not a great blogger...

We have had a very busy time in the last couple of weeks.  I should really try harder at blogging because we could have had quite a few posts recently.

My awesome sister and niece came to visit us at American Thanksgiving.  They were meeting Aoife for the first time and she loved them!

Here we are together.  It was great to see them and we had  great weekend.  The Thanksgiving meal was extravagant, as usual, way too much food.

 They arrived on Aoife's 4 month birthday.  I can't believe 4 months have passed already.  It seems so fast.

And so much has changed, as you can see from the pictures!

We've been struggling a bit with a decreased milk supply, due to the return of my period (yes, that was my 4 month birthday gift...)  Aoife has been having trouble sleeping for a couple of weeks and has slowed down her weight gain a little bit.  She has dropped from the 75th percentile for weight, to around the 40th. I finally figured out why and we've been working on supply with a couple of supplements: Fenugreek and Blessed Thistle.  Things seem to be going back to normal, but I will be keeping a close eye on this.  It is also possible that part of the slowed weight gain is just part of the normal process for breastfed babies.  Apparently they pack on the pounds for the first 3 months and then slow down a bit. Also, her parents aren't exactly giants, either. :)

Aoife met Santa for the first time last week. She really liked grabbing his beard.  Had to stop her from pulling it off!

Milestones: Aoife rolled from her tummy to her back on the weekend. She's also enjoying being on her tummy a lot more and being a lot more active in general (think Jolly Jumper...) She has started using a pacifier when she is tired, and that's helping me to get her into her bed for naps.

That's all for now! I will try to do this a lot more often.

Snow!

Aoife's first snowstorm!

First snow of the season today, and it was a pretty good accumulation.  5-10 centimeters.  We took a photo to remember it.

Aoife's been doing really well with the bottle.  She's had a bottle every day since Sunday.  Next step is to see if she'll take one from me...

Stand-Off

So today was the bottle stand-off with Aoife.  Except that it wasn't a stand-off...

We woke this morning at around 9:15.  Well, Aoife had been up since about 7:45, randomly screaming in her sleep.  So she and Alex were in the rocking chair when I came out at 9:15.  She woke up, super happy, apparently unaware of the sleep-screaming that she had been doing.  I fed her and then left the house, feeling extremely guilty for leaving her for a day of screaming at the bottle. My mom was going to come over to help.
I went to meet Julie for some breakfast and shopping, and then Val joined us a bit later on.
At 12:25, I received this text message: "She took the bottle like it was normal.  Screamed when we took it away.  Go figure."

Seriously?
We've been working on this for weeks. She would scream and scream and scream until no sound was coming out. My mom just lays her down on the couch and she drinks a bottle like she had been doing it forever?

So, I continued shopping and had a massage.  It was great.  By the end of the day, she had drank every last milliliter that I had left in the fridge.

When I got home, she looked at me like "Oh, you came back! I'm so happy!"  It was such a relief to walk in to a quite house, no screeching.  She was ready to eat and latched back on like a champ.  She was ok.  It went so much better than I had expected.  Hopefully she might do this again!

Memories

Birth day!

Feels like it was forever ago...

Squeezy Spoon = Fail

The squeezy spoon did not work.  I don't know why I thought it would...

It was 18 degrees outside today which is crazy for this time of year.  We went out and sat on the steps and watched the activity on the street.  It was really nice.  Aoife gummed her new MAM bottle while we sat there.  I guess that's something, she didn't scream at it.  There was no actual drinking though.  Tomorrow's a new day...

In other news, she found her feet this evening.  I can tell that soon she's going to be trying to get them in her mouth, especially since she has mastered fingers in mouth in the past week:

Bottle shock...

We went out today to buy more bottles...found a couple that look promising.  Aoife is not interested in drinking from a bottle at all, so I have jumped on the bandwagon of "more different bottles will do the trick, especially if you spend many, many dollars on them".  Today we bought a MAM bottle, and a Platex one with the old-school brown rubber nipple.  We also got a squeeze bottle with a spoon on the end of the nipple 'cause I read somewhere that you can feed "difficult babies" with a spoon.  Seems to me that spoon-feeding a 3.5 month old is the definition of difficult...I guess we shall see.

Breastfeeding was really difficult for us at the start.  I think it was a combination of well-endowed mama, pretty small babe and the fact that I was quite ill from about 5 days postpartum and ended up hospitalized.  We finally got it going at about 2.5 weeks, but I was too worried about nipple confusion to introduce a bottle.  So we waited and waited...besides, once the "breastaurant" was finally open for business, it was so easy. No washing, warming, refrigerating, pumping, etc.  She had a bottle while I had another problem with my left boob and that went ok.  I went back to feeding her and forgot about bottles for a couple weeks.  That was the clincher.  When we tried again at around 8-9 weeks, it was verboten, according to Aoife...she has been resisting us ever since.

Here is our line-up of bottles that have jumped into the fray just be rejected at every turn:
Avent
Tommee Tippee
Mimijumi
In all fairness, I don't think it really has to do with the specific bottle, just that Aoife is a very discerning baby and prefers her milk from the soft, warm tap.

Here's the rub though: Daycare starts in January.  And I'd like to go out solo once in a while....so stay tuned for an update on the squeezy spoon thing....

16 weeks...

Time flies...16 weeks today!

I should have started this before.  I want to remember these early days with all the details that make them so special.  The beginning was rough, but we seem to getting into a groove and I'm gonna try to tell the story of our life together.