When comparison tries to steal our joy...

The nasty cold bug hit our home hard this past week. First, Will had the typical symptoms of sore throat, achy body, obnoxious runny nose. Then Madison caught the cough one night and was drowning in snot the next morning. I was the last victim. We were (or still, its lingering) all pretty pathetic. This would not have been as big of a deal any other time of the year, but this particular week was one we had been anticipating. It was the week my mom had agreed to come in town so that we could have a weekend away from Madison duties. We had booked the hotel two months ago and had been day dreaming about all the activities we could do with out baby (run, hike, rock climb, and on and on...) This also happened to be a weekend where Will had work to do from home. So our weekend consisted of me in the hotel bed shaking with a fever and Will working from his laptop in the hotel lobby so he would not disturb me.

This was the point where we had to fight really hard our tendencies to compare. We have both struggled with this individually and now as a couple. We tend to look at other couples who have children and seem to just go about their normal way of life. This is wonderful for them, but we just do not have the resources to drop Madison off anywhere. If we need relief, we have to plan months in advance and fly a family member into town.

So, of course, our situation seems bleak in comparison to other people's. But, we had to decide to step back and refuse to compare our situation. We have everything we have ever wanted. I am able to stay home with Madison, we live in the mountains, someone is willing to pay Will for his knowledge, we have a beautiful dog, we have family that is willing and able to help us, and the list could go on.

There will always be people who seem to be "winning" in this rat race. But, my prayer for our family is that we decide to run our own race. To make sure we are placing our worth in something other than home ownership or fancy dinners out. It is easy to get caught up in the comparison cycle, especially with the world of Facebook and tweeting and blogging. We have to make sure we are filling our minds with reminders of what we are living for.

Even though our weekend was not what we had envisioned, we feel rested, closer, and thankful for all we have been given. Not too mention, how wonderful it was to have my mom get to know Madison's personality and spend so much quality time with her. And who doesn't want a mom to come in and take care of you when you are sick?

Because this turned into a novel, I will post all the pictures in the next post.

Whiskey, Shakes, Park, oh my!

This past weekend we went on a tour of a local Whiskey Distillery. The majority of the tour was a bit over my head because I am more of a visual learner and needed to see the process versus just hearing about it. I also do not know much about making alcohol so the terminology left me scratching my head. The most interesting part was the way in which the wooden barrels used for storage add so much to the flavor and how subjective the entire process actually is. They designate one person to pick which barrels go into each batch of whiskey, so every bottle is a bit different.

Everyone in the tour got a big kick out of Madison being there. Making jokes about sticking her pacifier in the whiskey, ha. She behaved the majority of the time, she just doesn't understand how to not interrupt people when they are talking yet, so there were a few squawks at inopportune times.

Madison has been spending a lot of time rolling on the floor lately. I started having anxiety about her never learning to crawl or walk because I hold her all the dang time. So now she is spreading her wings and rolling about.

I have been going through a vanilla shake phase. Like, I want a vanilla shake every day, maybe even more than once a day. I don't feel so bad about this because it will help prevent me from losing any more weight. Well, it turns out, Aspen also likes vanilla shakes.

It has been beautiful the last couple of days here, so we have taken advantage of the outdoors. Unfortunately, the geese who poop like every two steps, also take advantage of the outdoors. So even though this looks like a relaxing trip to the park I was constantly gagging because there was geese poop within every inch of my baby. Do not even get me started on the pile I put my hand right into, I am still gagging just thinking about it. But apparently, that did not stop me from feeding my daughter in the poop infested field. Mom of the year!

Does she not look like she is grown? Sitting up all by herself, eating unassisted, so big. (except for the few moments before this when gravity rolled her all the way down the hill)

And here are my attempts of capturing a cute baby photo.

1. "Hey mom, is this the goose poop you were talking about? Are you sure I can't eat it?"
2. "Ha, you thought I would look at the camera, but no, I am just going to stare right past it."
3. "Oh, is that Aspen? Aspen, whatcha doing? How come Aspen gets to eat the goose poop and I don't"
4. "Mom, seriously, just give me the camera."


I did manage to capture one decent picture.



And that is a wrap!
Can you tell I am getting more sleep?

Five Things on Friday

1. We officially "sleep trained" our baby. If you have no idea what the heck this means, it is the process of teaching your child to fall back asleep at night with out any assistance from the parents. The way in which one does this is by putting them in their bed at night and not going back in until the morning. There are gentler ways to do this, but little miss was too stubborn for those ways, so we had not just let her figure it out all by herself. It seems to have worked with out any permanent damage, ha. She still wakes up fairly frequently, but just jingles her toys and goes back to sleep.

2. I thought that once she slept through the night I would feel like a new woman. Unfortunately, I have been more exhausted this week than I was when she was waking up every 2 hours. Will thinks its because my body is finally trying to recover. Today, I actually feel a lot less tired, so lets hope this feeling lasts.

3. Will and I are going on a tour of a Whiskey Distillery tomorrow. We have been so focused on this sleep issue, that we have not had much time to do anything outside our home. I thought we could start fresh this weekend and begin to recapture our adventurous self's. So drinking whiskey sounds like a wonderful start to that!

4. We booked our tickets to Hawaii to see Grant in April. I am unbelievably excited. Even more exciting than that is my brother being scheduled to leave Afghanistan on March 9th. I am also going to go to his Army ball with him, which means I get to wear a fancy dress, which means I have to buy a fancy dress.

5. I made oatmeal cookies on Tuesday and I have had about five every day this week. Thank goodness for the mega calories nursing Madison burns. Its like the more I eat, the more I lose. A little frustrating since now all my clothes are too big, but I am sure I will gain all this weight back once I stop breastfeeding.

Sadly, everyone that reads this blog probably knows everything I listed above. There really has not been much going on in our house besides the sleep issues. Hopefully, now that we found a resolution there will be more photos and outings to blog about.

The only picture I have from these past two weeks, is one I did not even take. My camera needed a new memory card badly, so my picture taking suffered. We have been taking swim lessons so this was before our class on Wednesday. Just ignore my zombie eyes and focus on the adorable baby in the swim suit.

Six Months

[I feel this picture captures her sassy smirk and how big she actually is]

- Madison weighs 15.5 lbs, she has officially doubled her birth weight.

- She is still extremely active. She has mastered rolling from every angle and showed Will how well she can roll across the floor the other day. She has figured out how to maneuver herself backwards towards our bookshelf in her walker and then rip the contents of the shelf off.

- She is an eater. We have been feeding her foods for about two weeks now. She was beyond ready, like take the spoon and put it right in her mouth ready. She has loved everything I have given her, except carrots. Those made her gag and cry.

- She has found new ways to get our attention, like continuous coughing. It started off as a dainty cough, to get us to laugh, and has now turned into non stop coughing. She really likes doing this in her crib so that we come in to get her.

- She plays with my hair while I am nursing her. And just recently started playing with her own hair. It is so adorable to see her chunky little fingers reach up to her head and grasp her hair.

- She can sit all by herself for five to ten minutes at a time. She catches her balance much better when naked, but we only let her sit like that for short periods of time.

- She is really interactive with strangers. I have really enjoyed watching her light up someone's day. I have had several people tell me how much it meant to them to see her smiling. I love that she likes other people as much as us.

- Yet another month of not sleeping. Christmas was disastrous for her sleep and has stayed pretty rough since then. I am talking, not sleeping for longer than 1.5 to 2 hours at a time. We have been letting her cry it out, but that only produces less sleep and more stress. She has gotten really great about going down for naps and going to bed initially, just won't stay asleep.

- You can always tell when she is tired because her eyes get beet red, she hits herself in the head over and over again, and continually chunks all her toys across the room. Such a diva.

My beautiful baby with her golden locks of hair. She is such an adorable mess.

Some outtakes of our photo shoot this morning.

Even though this month I was the most exhausted I have ever been, I can feel I fell in love with her even more. She is developing so rapidly and it is continually an adventure to be around her. I just keep saying she is like a little person, I mean obviously that is exactly what she is, but her movements and abilities are beginning to resemble ours more and more each day.

Photo Dump

1. We are having a snow day today, so I took Madison out in it. She did not seem to mind even when she fell backwards and hit her head on the tree.

2. She is loving eating real food. And by real, I mean vegetables mushed up to an unrecognizable state. She is eating/smearing home made squash.

3 and 4. More snow pictures. She realized she was in the snow and did not know what to do and just laid there.

5. She is officially sleeping with out a swaddle. So this means she has to figure out what exactly she should be doing with her arms and legs while she sleeps. Turns out she just moves them until she is worn out and ends up in a totally different position than the one I laid her in.

6. Us on New Years Day. She was being super cute and giggling about nothing.

The past week has been get Madison to sleep week. As in, put her in her bed and leave the room. This results in a lot of crying and even less sleep than what we were getting before. While her screams have lessened over the past seven days, we seem to have made little to no progress in the sleep department.

new year. new you.

Is that how the saying goes? Well, I think that I became all the "new me's" I could handle last year.

I spent the first part of the year growing in size. My body expanding to fit baby girl's growth. Documenting my pregnancy and the anticipation of Madison, pretty much took over January through July. So there was the new me, that was an expectant mother. Something I am still in awe over.

Then there was July. The month I had been counting down to for ten months. The month I repeated over and over again to strangers. I blinked and it had disappeared. With it, I became a mother, we became parents. So the new me was a squishy all over mom.

As July faded into December, my body became recognizable again and so did my brain. Like I said, everything was squishy, pregnancy and giving birth made my head spin. So then I became a mixture of the "old me" with the "new mother me" thrown in the mix.

But in all reality, July through December, were mostly spent trying to get baby girl to do this.

Our efforts have not produced the results we desire because she would much rather be doing this.



Naked and eating her toes.

So I am attempting to be contemplative about the massive amount of change I have undergone this past year, but it is somewhat difficult when our night looked like this...

7:15 pm: Madison falls asleep really easily. Just lay little one in her crib and she drifts off. She also had been up since 2, so maybe that helped.

7:45 pm: Madison is back up screaming. Give her some gas medicine and some tylenol. We have resorted to drugging our child to get her to sleep.

10:40 pm: About an hour after we have gone to bed. So we are in that place of finally being relaxed enough to fall asleep, but have been asleep just long enough to where being woken up by crying is like torture.

11 pm: Will finally gets her back to sleep. I have no idea of the actual time because I was unable to move.

12 am: Madison is back awake. Oh good gosh, what is wrong with her. Decide to just feed her. Even though I know she is not hungry, but I am sooo tired.

12:15 am: She is back asleep. I decide to keep her in bed with us, maybe this will help. I can not really fall back asleep because I fear I might squish her. She is happily snuggled next to me until...

1:35 am: She starts thrashing. Arms flailing, legs kicking, head spinning side to side. This awakens Will and he begins to wonder what has possessed our daughter.

2:0o am: She is back asleep in her room now.

5:00 am: Back awake. Feed her again. Will rocks her.

7:00 am: Back again for good.

Exhausted, just reading that??

We have started her on rice cereal for real this time. She is downing that nasty substance like its her last meal. We have stopped swaddling her. We try and just pat her back to sleep. We have tried letting her cry (she grunted/whined for two hours straight Saturday morning). We have tried just about everything.

So in moments of clarity I realize I must accept my non sleeping child. That this will all pass with time. And just think how many extra snuggles I get from my kid because she is up all night, ha.

I also must rely more on the Lord to get me through this because exhaustion is real. Its effects are raw and very ugly. I am really starting to believe that Madison refuses to sleep because it keeps my ego in check. My pride over having a baby that sleeps and is happy all the time would be huge. I would think I had this mom thing down and become way too arrogant and only rely on myself, instead of the Lord.

This verse is helping me:

"Praise be to the Lord, to God our Savior who daily bears our burdens. Our God is a God who saves; from the Sovereign Lord comes escape from death."
Psalm 68:19-20

So last year I think I reached my max in things changed. I am sure when I am in a less sleep deprived state (when she is 18?), I will write about the things I am hoping God will help change in me.

But for now, my hope for the new year is to just relish in all the beautiful changes Madison is going through. To enjoy my family of three. To be a devoted wife and mother. To fully soak in all the changes that were at work last year to get me to where I am now.