Well, Isla is 4 weeks old today. Tomorrow starts my first day "alone" with the kids although Eric will be working from home so I won't really be all by myself. It's intimidating but has to happen eventually. And Isla is finally sleeping a bit more at night so that helps! For the first three and a half weeks she wouldn't go longer than 2.5 hours between feeds even in the night time which got exhausting pretty fast, especially since she's pretty refluxy so we hold her upright for 15-20 minutes after eating. BUT the last two nights she suddenly started sleeping longer! Night before last I feed her at 8 and then she slept until 1 am! And then she slept again till 5! It was awesome. Last night she did another long earlier evening stretch (9-1) but then ate every 3ish hours after that. But the biggest struggle for my sleep honestly isn't even how often she is eating but rather how grunty she is! She makes so much noise at night! She grunts and squirms and coughs sometimes and gags and just is generally noisy even though she is asleep. I think its partially the reflux and partially that she is just generally very gassy despite my diligent attempts to burp her and she holds her poop so she'll go a full day or more with no poop and then squirm and fuss a lot and then have a blow out. I'm hoping she learns how to poop and fart more easily soon! Until then, Eric advocates for putting her in the closet to sleep but I just feel anxious about having her not right by us at night even with the owlet sock on. I do think the owlet sock is helping me sleep better and not feel as anxious but I still feel uncomfortable putting her farther away from us. So, Eric has been taking her out and sleeping on the couch with her about once a night for an hour or two when she's being especially noisy and keeping me up. He sleeps through it much better than I do and he's very patient and good with her when she is actually awake and can usually get her back to sleep well.
Anyway, with the lack of sleep, these past several weeks have passed in that zombie-like blur of the newborn period. Sometimes I am amazed at how little I get done and how much I feel like all I do is feed the baby even with my Mom and Eric to help out. My Mom was here until last Sunday and was a HUGE help, especially with Emery who got so much love and attention from Grandma. Emery has been struggling a little bit with not being in school. She says she doesn't miss school and she likes being home but I can tell she is missing the structure of school and the socialization. She is constantly asking to go to Maren's house or Silva's house and she is always asking "what we going to do after this?" and when I tell her she says "and after that? and after that?" She likes to know the plan! Which is challenging when there really isn't much of a plan! Haha. And I do feel bad because Maren and Silva are both in preschool now, Silva from 9-3:30 every day so they don't have much time for play dates! And I have been very cautious about germs around Isla what with RSV being so high here right now and it being flu season. So I've not wanted to take Emery to indoor play dates or places like the children's museum where I just feel like there's so many germs. So while my mom was here she mostly took Emery to the park to play or to the outdoor story time at the library. This week I did let Emery go over to the Ennis's house for a play date because I know they are super germ conscious and safe too so I feel comfortable with them. She had a blast playing with other kids her age! She's been missing nursery but we've just been watching church at home. Eric and I have talked about it and decided to go back for Sacrament meeting only starting next week. I would be fine with us staying for 2nd hour except for the whole nursery thing. I feel like Emery regularly catches bugs from nursery because there are people in our ward who will send their kids sick to nursery and none of the teacher or anything wear masks and I don't think the toys get cleaned much or anything. Soooo, I feel bad that Emery is missing her favorite part of church but also I just don't feel comfortable. She will age up to Sunbeams in January and I am seriously considering just keeping her out of second hour of church until then. Eric feels like we should maybe let her go to nursery again before that but I'm not sold on it yet. We'll see how we feel in December but that's such a germy month here in TX with people traveling and everything that I doubt I will want her to go. It's a bummer but I just really don't want Isla to end up with RSV.
Anyway, so to try to help Emery out with a little more structure, Eric was an awesome dad this week and came up with a little preschool at home schedule. He planned out 2 hours of each day broken into 15 minute work segments for her to do. She does 1 hour with him and one hour with me and she has been responding really well to it. I feel like she's been happier this week having that bit of focused time and attention. He tried to do things that draw from the Montessori works she's used to but also introduced some new things. So she's been doing work books, pin poking, number puzzles, letter tracing, lacing cards, etc. He tried to make many of things stuff she can do mostly independently once she's set up with it so that's good. I feel better with her doing these things so I don't feel like she's forgetting everything she learned at her Montessori school. She's a very smart girl and already knows many of her letters and the numbers 1-10 (like can match a group of 5 objects to the written number 5). I want to make sure we continue to intellectually stimulate her.
Speaking of intellectual stimulation, we had Levi tested for the gifted and talented program this week. I gave him a heads up that they would be pulling him from class to do puzzles. He told me he had a lot of fun with the puzzles and that they were easy for him. We should hear by the beginning of December whether or not they are putting him in the program. I think it would be good for him because he is definitely gifted with numbers but we'll see. Thankfully, he seems to really like school even though all the math work in his class is way too easy for him. He has become very good friends with Kyler Thompson (from our ward) and talks about him a lot. We went to the ward trunk or treat on Friday night and Levi and Kyler quickly ran off to trick or treat together and were inseparable the whole night. It's incredibly cute. And Matthew, Valerie and Silva came to our trunk or treat too so Emery had fun being with Silva. Matthew, at Eric's invitation, had arranged the Pokemon theme song in a minor key for us to play since we had a Pokemon themed trunk! The trunk was Levi's idea. He had a very distinct vision of how he wanted it to look. He came home from school one day and was like, "I need some cardboard and I need to measure the trunk!" He traced a wooden circle I gave him and with Eric and Emery's help made a whole bunch of Pokeballs to decorate the trunk with. Then Eric got some Pokemon cards and white balloons from Walmart and they taped the cards to the balloons and colored a sensory ball to make a Pokeball and had kids throw the ball and whichever balloon they hit, they got to keep that Pokemon card. According to Eric who manned the trunk while Valerie and I took the girls trunk or treating, the trunk was a HUGE hit and all the kids really loved it.
Anyway, so despite having a newborn, we have been able to do some fun Halloween things with the kids. We did the trunk or treat like I said, and last Saturday we did a trick-or-treat around the lake which was put on by the city of McKinney and included some bounce houses which the kids liked. And then yesterday we took the kids up to Gunter to the Preston Trail Farms pumpkin patch. Honestly, it wasn't the best pumpkin patch I've been to but they did have a hay maze, a hay ride, feed for the farm animals, a little train ride and a small selection of pumpkins to choose from. The kids really liked the train ride and had fun feeding/petting the goats and cows. Emery picked out a little white pumpkin and has been asking ever since when she can paint it and Levi picked out a funky gourd he said looks like a fire. Eric and I decided to skip pumpkin carving this year and I can't say I'm sad about it at all haha.
So yeah, that's how things have been going lately. I spend a lot of time on the couch or in our room feeding Isla but I am excited for when she starts to go longer between feeds during the day too and I am physically healed enough to start exercising again. I feel like this week will be a chance for me and Emery and Isla to start settling into our new routine for the next couple months. Fingers crossed it goes well and I don't go completely crazy haha.
