Another hike with babes

Ella, Shelly and I met a couple of weeks ago to do a short hike up to Grassi Lake. It was the trial run for the Ergo Carrier and I was quite pleased with it. Since I don't know anyone who is on maternity leave in Calgary, it's been really nice to head out for weekly hikes, coffee talks, general hang-out time with my friends in Canmore.

Why is everyone sleeping but me?

Rocking the toque!

Janet came by to visit a few weeks ago so Lily wanted to model the wicked toque that Janet knitted (and designed!) for her. Apparently these are now all the rage and Janet is knitting up various items in her spare time. Lily is stoked that she has a Janet Li original !

Hikes with babes

I joined in with my friend's prenatal group on their weekly hike last week. We did a 10km hike up to Chester Lake in Kananaskis. Lily was a little trooper and slept the whole way up and most of the way back. It was my second time using the Ergo Carrier and it worked wonderfully! My back was a bit sore by the end and I was pretty knackered but it was a lovely day.

The next big transition

Before Lily was born, I had bought a bunch of cloth diapers to use. When she arrived, she was much too little to wear them and it felt like it would be a ton of work to use cloth. So, we've been using disposables for the past nine weeks. It certainly made life easier in the beginning but now that things are more settled, I feel like I'm ready to switch to cloth (which essentially means adding another load of laundry to my day). We've been using cloth for the past few days and I'm really happy with them! I did the first load of laundry with them today and well it certainly was more work, it wasn't horrible. Using cloth means using much more water but I'm happy to be throwing away less garbage. Another bonus - way less diaper blowouts! Yeah for cloth :)

yeah for bottles!

I have been pumping milk for the past two weeks in anticipation of giving Lily a bottle. I researched bottle feeding, milk storage, etc for days. I sterilized all the bottles then waited a week before giving them to Lily because she was super unsettled for a couple days awhile back. I planned the first bottle feeding for a time when she wasn't super hungry and got Scott to do it so that she wouldn't be confused about the milk source. All that prep work paid off because she took her first bottle like a champ! Lily took a few seconds to figure out what to do with the nipple but quickly figured it out and gulped down 3 ounces in a matter of minutes. We've been giving her daily bottles since then and she continues to happily feed from them. I'm hoping to get out for a couple of hours of riding this week and I'm planning on leaving Lily with Scott for one of her scheduled feeds. Yeah for pumping technology!

Accidents happen

I never that it was inevitable. It was a matter of when, not if. I wasn't sure how it was going to happen but at least we got the 'first time' out of the way. Most importantly, no one got hurt.

Yesterday was the first time that we caused pain to Lily. We stopped in Lake Louise on our way home from mountain biking so that I could feed Lily and Scott could get a coffee. As I was feeding her in the front seat of the truck, I accidentally knocked my coffee over onto the seat. I didn't think anything of it at first, at least not until Lily started screaming. I then realized that the coffee had gotten onto her leg. Scott quickly wiped all the coffee off her leg and threw on a diaper wipe. I dipped a napkin in cold water and put it on the same area. In the meantime, Lily continued to scream so I nursed her as a means of soothing her. Scott was so upset that the spilt coffee had gotten onto her leg but thankfully, his quick thinking prevented the coffee from burning her leg. There was no marks on her leg after we took the wet cloths off and there isn't any evidence of a burn today. Sadly, I know that this isn't likely to be the only time we accidentally hurt Lily but I'm grateful that it wasn't serious.

Hugging her most prized possession...

Bathtime

What are you doing Mom?

Hmm, looks like you're taking more pictures of me...

Help, I'm slipping, put down that damn camera!

Baby Houdini

Lily is one squirmy baby. This kinda makes sense because she moved around all the time when I was pregnant. Outside of the womb, her wiggliness is really impressive. She frequently wiggles out of her swaddle blankets and I had already mentioned that she wiggled out of her pants on three different occasions. Well, she has now outdone herself as she managed to wiggle out of one of her sleepers this week! I went to pick her up in the morning and realized that her sleeper was down by her waist (she had also managed to wiggle out of her diaper which lead to pee getting all over the bed but that's a whole other story!). I wish that I had thought to take a photo because it's really amazing that she managed to get her arms out of the sleeper on her own but maybe she takes after Cara...(back in the day, Cara went through three dog jackets because she would rub up against trees in the forest to get out of them. This was even when the jackets had holes that her legs went through and buckled up at the back!)

The big transition

Lily has been sleeping in our bed since we first brought her home from the hospital. It was never our intention to co-sleep but on that first night, she just seemed so little (not to mention so far away!) in her bassinet and we decided that she should sleep with us. For the past eight weeks, it has worked really well to have her sleeping with us. I firmly believe that it helped with her nighttime sleep routine - I could hear her stirring in the night and quickly could feed her before she started to cry. And for 99% of her nighttime feeds, she would promptly go back to sleep right after I fed her. Plus, it felt like a ton of effort to get out of bed four times in the middle of the night to get her for a feed so keeping her in bed with us was partly laziness (but I prefer to think of it as good self care cause I felt pretty darn well rested most morning!). However, Lily is now mostly sleeping through the night (sleeps for 6-8 hrs straight but usually wakes up for a feed at 5:30am) and it seems less necessary to have her sleep in our bed. I still like the idea of having her really close to me while she's sleeping but I am conscious of the fact that we do not want to establish bad sleeping habits. So, we started working on moving her to her bassinet. I had been trying for weeks to get her to sleep in there for naps with some success. We had also tried to get her to spend the night there last week but it resulted in her waking up every hour (this may or may not have been related to being by herself in the bassinet). Luckily, Scott came up with the idea of putting her "baby bivy" (see previous posts on camping for a refresher on what the baby bivy is) directly into the bassinet and having Lily sleep in the bivy. She always sleeps really well while we are out camping and riding so it seemed like a wonderful idea. Lo and behold, it worked! She's slept in the bivy, in the bassinet, in our room for the past week with no problems. She continues to wake for a feed at 5:30am and has had some nights where she wakes to feed once during the night but all in all, the transition has gone pretty well (especially for Cara who quickly moved back into the space that Lily had previously been occupying!)

Photos from weeks 6 and 7

Summer's here and things are getting busy around the house! We have been doing tons of mountain biking and enjoying lots of visitors. I'm getting a little behind in my blogging so here are some new pics of Lily. Hmmm, what's new with Lily? Not sure how much she weighs but she's getting bigger all the time. She's started to sleep for longer periods (one nine hour stretch in Fernie is the longest to date) but as I mentioned before, these periods are still totally inconsistent. She came down with a bad case of eczema on her face, head, and neck but it has mostly cleared up with the use of hydrocortisol cream (which I was pretty unsure about using but internet research made it sound ok). She smiles all the time and is getting better at holding up her head. She still doesn't seem to realize that her arms and legs are attached to her body but she does love to move them around all the time (she wiggled out of her pants and her swaddle blanket twice while we were camping in Fernie!). She's slowly developing more of a schedule and I feel glad that I haven't tried to impose any type of routine on her as she seems to be figuring one out on her own. All in all, things are just going pretty darn good!

Lily, chilling in the reverse football hold

Happy baby

Really happy baby with a big gummy smile!

The frog pose

Sleeping in the tent in Fernie on Lily's third camping trip

Another cute sleeping baby photo

Meeting Grandpa Barry

Meeting Great-grandma Lenora

Hanging with Daddy and Cara on the bed

Meeting Grandma Pat

Chilling with Dad

Crazy hair and crazy red face (from eczema)

Hanging out at COP while I wait for my turn to ride

(my pretty pink bike is in the background)