23 Weeks

Poor Josie - she's had a rough week. She was to finish up her medication for her ear infection on Monday, but she ended up coming down with a virus of some sort over the weekend. So her cough has gotten much worse, she was running a temperature up until yesterday that got up so high (104.3) that we took her to the E.R. on Monday, and now we just found out that her right ear is badly infected again. And yet all we really know is what she doesn't have: pneumonia, strep, RSV, the flu. She has been one sad baby, and has been sleeping more than normal (but will only fall asleep if we're holding her) and sad crying when she's awake :( She did give me a couple smiles this morning, though, so I'm hoping she's feeling a little bit better, and hopefully this new antibiotic will clear up her cough and ear infections as quickly as it's supposed to. It's so hard to see her hurting and as sad as she's been the last week.


We did still take Josie to a community event over the weekend (before we realized just how sick she was), so Josie got to meet Santa for the first time :)

[Walking over]

[Blowing some bubbles]



[Tuckered out and snuggling with Grammy]

Last week was (almost) my first full week of pumping since I moved from an office into a cube ("almost" because I was out sick last Monday). My office building is being renovated to change from all offices to mainly cubes, so after almost 5 years in an office, I am now back in a cube :( Having sunlight again is nice (since I was not in a window office), but it's massively more inconvenient to pump at work now. I'm still pumping every two hours for about 30 minutes, so it's much less convenient now that I can't just pop my door closed and keep working. So now I have to pack everything up, trek over to the Mother's Room in the connecting building, set up, hope my computer hasn't flaked out from being disconnected and then reconnected to the network), pump, work, and usually eat something. Then pack it all back up again, and get set back up at my desk. All in all, it's quite a bit more difficult to work and get really involved in my work, since I know I'm only going to have at most about an hour and a half before I will be disrupted by moving locales. I'm still dedicated to pumping, but this is definitely making me look forward to when Josie will be eating solids for nutrition (which is still months and months away...) so that maybe I can cut down on a pumping session or two during the day.

So I've been back at work for 2.5 months now, and except for the disruptions from pumping and a few rough days from lack of sleep, it's gone pretty well. Josie seems to like daycare (and they seem to really love her there), and while it is still hard to be away from her for so long, it helps that I'm comfortable with the care she's getting during the day, and knowing that she's still getting plenty of attention and interaction. Daycare has also been good about working with us on stuff that's maybe not entirely mainstream - mainly, cloth diapering, exclusively having breastmilk (beyond the age when I think a lot of babies have started on cereals), using glass bottles (with a slight learning curve - turns out glass bottles don't mix very well with bottle warmers). In turn, I think this has helped us stick with doing some things that we had planned on. Although we're not as diligent about using cloth diapers at home (I tend to use disposables at night), she's in them 100% at daycare except for if she has a diaper rash. Really, out of everything that we were really planning on doing (natural childbirth, exclusively breastfeeding, cloth diapering, cosleeping, etc.), the only thing we haven't done is using cloth wipes rather than disposable wipes. Try as I did to remember, I just kept forgetting until I finally just threw my hands up and started buying disposable wipes in bulk.

Miscellaneous cuteness:

[Josie has no problem finding her fingers to suck on no matter which way is up]


[Playing with her gift from Ryan's grandma ;)]

[Blowing raspberries]