Aunt Flo!

Sylvia is exactly eight weeks old, and today, I got my first period! Wow! Never got it back this early. Usually it comes at exactly 8.5 months, like clock work. The only two exceptions are Erik, where it took me 13 months to get my period back, still not sure why, I suspect that I might have had some hypothyroidism going on. The other exception was between Tara and Jane, when I hoped to be pregnant soon again, and had read that taking evening primrose oil could help to get your period back sooner. It sure did! Got one period at 3.5mo and got pregnant on that subsequent cycle. I was thrilled! Loved having those girls so close together.

This time, I was afraid I would have to wait 13 months again, and I also still have all those miscarriages going through my head, and am afraid for a re-occurence, even although the problem should be solved now that my fibroids are gone. So I was hoping for an earlier return of fertility, so we could start trying sooner. I had been taking essential fatty acids anyway, just because of general health support, and I was hoping that this would get my period back sooner this time, since the evening primrose oil seemed to work for me eight years ago.

It worked! I even did ovulate about a week ago, although my luteal phase sucked, only 6 days. But I am thrilled that my period is returning this shortly post partum, I would love for Sylvia to have a sibling closer in age than Erik is. Maybe even one of her own gender, but I have to admit that I couldn't care less what gender baby it would be, I would just be so happy to have another miracle baby after all those miscarriages.

Today was the last day of daily swimming lessons, phew, so glad that that's over! Those three weeks of gymnastics and three weeks of swimming sounded like a great idea when I was 39 weeks pregnant and full of energy and signing them up. In hindsight I really am like 'What WAS I thinking????' But it's over now, and the kids did have fun.

After the swimming, I followed Kim's example and took them to the beach. The weather had not been cooperating much lately, and I just hadn't been up to it yet this year. But I really wanted to go soon, because I felt bad for Erik, who had to come to the swimming pool with us every day, but never got to swim. Now he finally could swim!!! Sylvia wasn't thrilled with her hat at the beach. So I ended up keeping her mostly in the shade, so I didn't have to bother with the hat. And who else showed up when I went to use the bath room but our trusted af? Typical af behavior :-)

I think another reason that af might be showing up so early, is because Sylvia is sleeping a good chunk of time at night, often 4 to 6 hours. Quite a long time for such a little baby. Not something I will complain about though :-) This picture shows her, down for the night, she always sleeps on this quilt on the floor in the computer room till we go to bed.

I had my helpers again today, the Good Beginnings volunteers. I asked them to cut up veggies, since that is usually the reason that I can't get dinner cooked at night, the veggies haven't been cut yet, and by the time evening rolls around, I am too tired, and Sylvia is too fussy. I often try to cut them up during the day, but that does not always happen. So I emptied the veggies drawers for them, and had them cut it all up. I have cut-up veggies for a few days now, perfect! They also helped me to do a quick kitchen cleanup.

Fussy Day

Sylvia is having a fussy day today. She usually is mostly fussy during the evening, and fine during the day as long as you carry her around. But today, she was not happy during the day either, especially not if I dared to sit down instead of walk around. So I did spend a lot of time walking around with her, or sitting down to nurse, but then she started complaining about MILK coming out of those things she just wanted to suck on for comfort LOL.

She used to poop all the time, like 20 times a day or so. Then she started pooping less and less, until she was on a fairly consistent schedule of once a day, always in the evening, after a few hours of fussiness. But yesterday, she did do her few hours of fussiness, but forgot to finish it with the poop. She didn't poop yet today either, but she sure was fussy. I guess she is changing her schedule again, Tara only pooped once a week or so, so maybe she will be a baby like that.

Tim was sitting next to her in the van today, and played the tongue game with her. He was so thrilled when she copied him by sticking out her tongue. I think it makes her even more fun for her siblings now that she is starting to play games like this.

Yesterday was a full day, first swimming lessons, then LLL evaluation meeting, followed by 6 weeks checkup at midwife, and we also had karate. I used the karate time to return the crates from our CSA, since I did some delivery for her on Tuesday. Phew, what a full day!

But it was nice to see my midwife again, Sylvia weighed in at 12 lbs 2 oz! Wow! She is about 1.5 times as heavy as when she was born. Little piggy :-) We talked about my depression issues, she looked up how long it lasted with Erik, which was about 3 months. I should be able to deal with it for a few months. And Sylvia is worth every minute of ppd anyway, she is the most perfect baby ever ;-)

My weight was down to 138 lbs, so getting pretty close to my pre pregnancy weight. She took some blood to check for hypothyroidism, since my bbt has been low for me, and it has made me wonder whether that could be an issue for me. I'll hear the results early next week.

I visited a good friend today, and came home with dinner, barbequed tempeh with peppers. Yummy!!!! It is nice to have friends who love to cook :-) I had planned on cooking tonight, but I never even got veggies cut up, so this was perfect timing.

Financial Musings

I paid my mortgage, always a good feeling to have that accomplished. I started our debt annihilation program (including getting rid of the mortgage!) a little over 2 years ago, and have been keeping track of every pesky detail in a spreadsheet ever since.

Today, we reached the mile stone of having paid more than $10,000 in interest since starting this program. Quite a lot! Of course, I had to try to figure out how much interest we would have paid if I had not started paying off everything faster. I came to about $13,500. At first I was a bit disappointed, $3,500 did not really seem like a big difference. But then I actually started using my brain, and realized that the big difference is during the 25 years that I am not paying ANY interest, not during those 5 years that we pay less interest. I know that in the end, we will have saved about $80,000 in interest, I guess that's why the $3,500 sounded so low.

But the $10,000 sounds high, that's a lot of money to have paid to the bank in just over 2 years. Can't wait till my mortgage finally will be paid off, only 4 to 5 years left!

Today was a sucky day, things seemed to be ok till it was afternoon and everything just fell apart. It didn't help that it rained and rained and rained. Have to go to bed now, so won't go into the details, but it just was not fun. Hope tomorrow will be better!

The good news is that I played the tongue game with Sylvia. I stuck out my tongue to her, and she would imitate me. It was the first time she did this, such fun to watch and interact. She was watching me intently, either my eyes, or my tongue when I stuck it out. She kept alternating between those two, so cute!

Lots Of Girls

We have been doing sleepovers since Saturday night, keep exchanging some kids with a friend. Saturday, my three girls slept over at their house, so we had only 4 kids, 3 boys, 1 girl. But tonight, we are reversing that and ended up with 5 girls, and only 1 boy. Poor Timmy!! Cees is at camp, Erik is sleeping over, for the very first time ever. He was so happy that he finally got to go :-) Now I am waiting to see whether we'll get a midnight phone call to come pick him up. I don't really expect it, since he was the one initiating the sleep over, but still wondering.

I had a friend over this afternoon, who held Sylvia for me, so I could do things as unloading/ loading the dishwasher, and cut up veggies for dinner. I made one of those 'whatever there is in the fridge' soups. I even found my first pattypan squash in the garden, so added that too. And a bunch of overgrown snap peas, which we used as shelling peas. We shelled them outside, lots of little ones to help us shell and eat some of them. It was nice to be outside and do stuff like that with a few friends. Perfect weather, not too hot, and not as extremely humid as it was last week.

When I came back from swimming lessons, I even managed to get some weeding done in one of my flower beds, with Sylvia in the sling. The vegetable beds are totally overgrown with weeds too, but vegetables are still growing, so ignoring that for now. I usually pull out a few weeds every time I am outside, but the weeds are winning anyway, oh well.

The pond is doing well, we are getting more and more frogs. Not sure how that happens, since we never saw any tad poles. But our frog population has increased from 2 to 7 over the last few months. Hmmmm, we have as many frogs as kids now :-) The mosquito fish are doing well too, we are pretty sure they must have had babies, there are more and smaller ones than there used to be. Now, the mosquito larvae are not doing well, we had a thriving population before we put in the mosquito fish and goldfish, and now we don't have any left. Too bad :-) :-)

Managed to fill up 1.5 garbage bags today, it's is so nice to know that I will never see all that stuff again! But why can't I see any difference in my house, even although I have been filling up garbage bags since last week?????

Nice Day

We slept in till 8am, well, with a few interruptions for nursing, but still :-) Sylvia is a pretty good sleeper at night though, she often has one 4 to 6 hours stretch between feedings, not bad! Of course, I might have jinxed it by posting this. But I just had to share what a 'good baby' she is. Maybe we won't exchange her after all ;-) And I have to say, that when she wakes up at night, she just nurses and goes back to sleep, so that's not hard to deal with. She gets extremely annoyed if I change her diaper in the middle of the night, 'Can't you see I am trying to SLEEP here??? Stop bothering me!!!' LOL

Farmer's market day, always fun. I bought some baguettes and goat's cheese for the birthday party we were invited to in the afternoon. Usually I would have baked my own baguettes to bring, but wasn't up to that right now. So they just had to deal with store bought bread :-) I met a few friends, one of them carried Sylvia around for me :-) Another one gave me a wonderful raspberry pie, yummy, will have it with tea tonight. I know things aren't totally right with me though, since I almost burst into tears twice when people asked me how I was doing. A tad embarrassing to say the least.

After the farmer's market, we went back home to wrap presents (which heavily were focused on Pokemon... ) The older boys wanted to stay at home with dh, so I took only the younger five to Mesa's birthday party. We had a wonderful time, it was cooler weather, great food, nice people. The kids ran around and played, the parents hung out and chatted. The cake was very good, nut flours, carrots, eggs, no sugar, no flour. Some day I want to try to bake a cake like that, but not right now :-)

When we wanted to leave, Mesa first asked Tara to sleep over. Jane asked 'Can I sleep over too???? Please?????' Then Kate asked ''Can I sleep over too???? Please?????'. Followed by Erik 'Can I sleep over too???? Please?????' Erik was so disappointed when he couldn't sleep over, because he is still a bit too little, and I didn't want them to end up with four extra kids anyway. He was very indignant 'Kate is little too, and SHE gets to sleep over!!!' So I went home with only two kids, kind of weird. And we'll have only four kids in the house tonight, even weirder :-) Mostly boys too :-)

Dh took Sylvia out on a walk tonight, when she was fussy, which gave me my hands free to kind of clean up the mudroom. Not perfectly, but it looks a lot better now, and gave me the feeling that at least I did get something accomplished!

Decluttering

Another Friday without volunteers, but I did get some stuff done anyway! I managed to throw away two garbage bags full of thrash/papers/broken toys/whatevers. Two bags full of things that I will NEVER see again! I ran around like crazy when Sylvia was sleeping on her own for a bit. Had to be careful not to show the kids that I got rid of some of the 6,861 drawings that are cluttering the floors. But I did it, nobody even noticed anything missing! Phew! This felt good.

I was totally drenched in sweat afterwards, it was raining today, but still too hot. Some day I want an air conditioner! I really would like a whole house a/c some day, we have forced hot air, so I think it shouldn't be too hard to also have a/c connected to that for the summer. Of course, there is no way I want to spend the money right now, paying off the mortgage just is higher on my priority list, but some day, we will be cool! :-)

Cees is going on camp this weekend (scouting) and still needed stuff for his first aid kit for his first aid merit badge. We went out tonight to get most of it, apart from the 40 inch triangular bandages, which were impossible to buy. I am just going to cut up an old sheet to make those ourselves, there just is no way I am going to spend more time driving around, trying to locate those stupid bandages!

We have a birthday party to go to tomorrow, at least I did pick up a few presents for the birthday girl while we were out. It's a potluck party, I'll just pick up something at the farmer's market tomorrow, maybe a baguette and some goats cheese, because there is no way I am going to manage to prepare anything. It will be fun to go to the party though, and show of my wonderful little baby girl :-)

I was planning on doing more decluttering tomorrow when Sander was home, but with the birthday party, I don't think it will happen. So much to do, so little time! Well, with Sylvia wanting to be held all the time, at least I do get a lot of reading done LOL.

We have one red cherry tomato, our first one!!! And we ate broccoli from our garden for dinner, yummy! I love eating vegetables from our own garden. We have had so much rain lately, that everything is growing really well, especially all the weeds. And we have wonderful bolted spinach, lettuce, and radishes LOL. Tara loves all the flowers on those. For me, they just remind me of all the gardening work I am not getting done, oh well.

Phew!

Jane's birthday and party are over! But boy, what a stress!!! Yesterday I ended up taking all seven kids with me to the grocery store to shop for her party, so came home with way too much candy LOL. Was going to bake the cake, but it never happened till after midnight. I kept thinking of all the stuff that still needed to be done, but did get almost nothing accomplished. I hadn't even checked whether we had all the presents, and we ended up making an emergency run to Coconuts to pick up a Sailor Moon DVD for her. Oh, and we forgot to put up the decorations, which we ALWAYS do the night before. I felt so bad about that, although Jane was fine with me doing it today.

Last night, at 11pm I realized how much I had overscheduled today. Sander had to go into the office early, so couldn't help with the swimming lessons drop off. So it was birthday presents early, boys swimming lessons at 9am, girls swimming lessons at 9:30am, and LLL evaluation meeting at 10am. Baking and assembling a cake, getting ready for birthday party at 3pm. Hadn't baked the cake, hadn't vacuumed the floor (needed for LLL babies), hadn't cleaned the bath room. And it was almost midnight. Finally did get the cake in the oven, Sander vacuumed, and I cleaned the bath room. But my friend in the Tons Of Kids chat convinced me that I should cancel the LLL evaluation meeting, since I was soooooooooooooo overwhelmed, I spent most of that chat crying, which isn't good I guess.

Ended up going to bed at 2am, woke up at 6am, the lack of sleep doesnt' help I guess. I canceled the LLL meeting, which helped a bit, although I felt really bad about canceling so late :-( I know they understand, but I felt bad nonetheless, I am so used to just doing things instead of being overwhelmed. But canceling the meeting gave me time to prepare for the party. I considered skipping the swimming, but I had promised to pick up one of Jane's friends there, so she could be at the party. So I couldn't skip that.

Two friends came over early so they could help me set up, and one of them even cleaned my aquarium!!!! Wow! Had been wanting to do that for the last 2 weeks or so. And I got the cake assembled in time, it actually looked good too, but haven't uploaded any pics yet. It was a 'dinosaur cake with vulcano' as requested.

I spilled green food coloring all over myself and the kitchen floor.
Tara threw up in the hammock after eating too much frosting.
One of the young guests had a pee accident at the top of a slide.
We had at least 2 cups of soda falling over.
Tim fell out of the hammock and scraped his cheek and shoulder.
But the kids had a great time.

And I enjoyed having friends over, so that was a good part of the day, but the getting ready stress was just crazy. Blech!

Down Day

As in feeling down, not a day with not much to do. I really just want to crawl in bed and cry, cry, cry, but that's just not an option today. Blech, blech, blech!

Too many things to do, and not much that I can cancel. Swimming, one of Kate's friends is over now, dentist appointment for Tim, karate, and I need to drop off videos at the rental place. And either today or tomorrow, I need to shop for Jane's birthday, and I need to bake a cake too.

I am waiting for the friend's mom to come pick her up and then I might just ignore the whole house and take Sylvia up to bed to lay down for a bit and relax. I am just soooooooooo stressed right now.

Formula Beginnings

Or... as they named it 'Family Beginnings'. A glossy magazine, sent to me by Enfamil, supposed to be 'A guide to baby's first three months'. Full with feeding problems to be solved (by giving formula of course), and brain building activities (feed them Enfamil with fatty acids). The magazine has 24 pages, 6 of which are formula ads. That's 25 % of the magazine... In the middle, they have $8 worth of coupons for yes, you guessed it, formula. And a list with questions for your doctor, with even more formula ads on the back.

There is a long list of contributing experts, all MDs, PhDs, and one LCSW. I am wondering whether I want to write them all a letter, asking them why they contribute to a magazine which obviously is written to undermine, and hopefully get rid of breastfeeding. Not sure whether I have the energy right now, but someday I might and just do it. If anybody else is up to it, I can provide a list of names for them.

It has articles like 'Is my baby getting enough' (which is really easy to see when you use formula of course), 'Feeding Problems solved' (Even breastmilk [...] can cause upset). It tells us why breast is best, but 'While breast milk is best, Enfamil LIPIL formulas have many of the same vital nutrients...'. It advises to give ORS to a baby with diarrhea if you are breastfeeding, which I think is only rarely needed. Usually just nursing should be enough, but I guess the ORS would have to be given in a bottle, so makes it easier to switch to formula?

The last article 'One new mom tells it like it really is' claims that 'just because your baby is a natural-born nurser doesn't mean your breasts are up for the job'. Amazing how they can claim to be supportive of breastfeeding, while writing things like that. I did wonder about the title of the magazine, it seems close to 'New Beginnings', the LLL magazine, but maybe I am just too paranoid?

Today we went out to get stuff for Jane's goody bags. We got the non edible stuff, some dinosaurs, pencils, and such. We have her birthday party this week, I am soooooooooooo not up to it. Somehow it seems overwhelming to get ready for the party and bake the cake, but I guess I'll just have to do it anyway. She wants a dinosaur cake, including a vulcano. We found plastic dinos in the party store, so those are taken care of. But I am so not up to cake baking! I feel like I can barely function in daily life, the birthday party just seems to add a lot of stress. Oh well, at least Jane is looking forward to it :-)

More rain today, why am I not surprised? LOL I got a hydrangea at the farmer's market today, so it was kind of nice that I didn't have to water it. Trying to see the advantages of all this rain.

My girls went to a birthday party yesterday, and came home with a friend who slept over. But tonight Tara and Kate are sleeping over at their house, so now I suddenly have only five kids. The house just seems so quiet :-)

A Clean Kitchen!

They came today! My volunteers from Good Beginnings, I really really like this initiative! I have a clean kitchen now! I did most of it, since I know where everything goes and such. They helped by holding Sylvia and doing some cleaning too. One of them vacuumed the downstairs floors, they did some tying up of my tomato plants, and they made 'magic mud' with the kids. Erik started out with yellow mud, added green coloring, then blue, then red. I asked him what color it was now. He replied with a very decisive 'It's a POOP color!' LOL

The tomatoes are looking good, I even have some plants that are producing tomatoes already. Now if only they would turn red instead of green :-)

When they were gone, and Sander was home, I was able to clean off the table too, so it looks almost like I am an organized person now! It's such a shame that this usually doesn't last more than a few days.

Will it ever stop raining? I guess it will, but this is yet another day with too much of it. At least it didn't rain while they had the swimming lessons. And I was able to walk for a bit after getting home, with the three little ones. It was raining a bit while we were walking, and it started raining really hard when we were close to home, so we had it timed pretty well. Now it still rains on and off, I am sooooooooooo done with all this rain!