November Stream of Consciousness

• A couple of Fridays ago was E's birthday.  He doesn't really like to celebrate his birthday and refuses to allow gifts.  Most years, I say that I didn't buy the gifts -- that they were from the dogs or from Finn  This year, he made me promise to not buy him anything for his birthday in August during my birthday.  I ended up forgetting entirely (pregnancy brain) and buying him something anyways.  And I tried desperately to get Finn to say "Happy birthday" -- she refused (of course, as is the case when you really want her to say something that you KNOW she can say).  But she did say it on Saturday, a day late... 

• Finorah now knows her ABCs (for the most part).  She can get through the entire alphabet all by herself (although some of the letters sound a little questionable, like "LMNOP").  And she can count up to nine -- after that she skips ten and goes straight to eleven.  Last week, we were reading a book and I asked her to count how many birds were flying in the sky -- girlfriend immediately started counting as I pointed to each bird and we got up to five!  Also last week, E was getting ready with her and she has old rings that she likes to play with.  E said she got out her rings and put them down, pointing to each one and counting up to four.  E handed her his wedding ring, asking what number ring that was and she responded with "five"!  She has been counting cars & birds flying during our car rides also.

• Update on Finn's crib-sleeping transition...  I am very, very happy to report that during the last two weeks, she only gets up ONCE in the middle of the night on most nights and we have even had some nights where she has slept all the way through until 6:30am!  And in those instances when she does get up, E is able to go in, calm her (as she isn't really crying, but whining & asking for Mama), E tells her that Mommy is sleeping, she lays right now and falls back asleep until morning.  In fact, on last Sunday, Norman (one of our kitties) was laying in her crib and she has a hissy-fit, saying "Norah!  Norah!" and pointing to her bed.  I asked her if she wanted me to take Norman out of her bed -- and her response was "out!"  AND, although there are minor tears when I have to put her to bed sometimes, she will willingly throw her lambs over the railing into her crib in preparation of going in (without any prompting from me).  It appears that we have turned the corner.  Those first few nights were absolute hell, as I'm sure many parents can relate to.  But I survived, E survived and so did she and I think that she is actually sleeping better by her lonesome.

 

• Speaking of sleeping through the night, we took our photos for our Christmas card on two weekends ago.  How does that relate to sleeping you may ask?  This photo shoot was crazy!  And we had a lot of fun doing it.  I officially ordered the cards this morning.  It's going to be hard to wait until after Thanksgiving to spill the beans on our card...  I thought that it was going to be hard to top the card that we had last year, but I honestly think this one takes the cake.

• I also asked E to put up our Christmas lights two weekends ago.  I thought the process was going to take 20 minutes (honestly).  I had it in my mind that I was going to have everything ready for him and all he had to do was climb the ladder and quickly string the lights along our roof.  We had debacle and debacle...  First, the new clips I bought were shoddy.  Every year the stores only put out one type of outdoor light clips.  Last year's clips were amazing!  This year, not so much...  Then we started running into light issues.  I used all new lights, straight out of the box and three (I repeat, THREE) sets went out upon E stringing 10 feet of them.  We were really, really, really close to NOT having lights on our house this year.  But E persevered and our house looks absolutely gorgeous!  Plus Finn liked seeing Daddy on the roof.  And it's really cute how everytime she sees the Christmas lights outside (even lights wrapped out our light-poles), she says "daddy!  daddy!"

• I officially have 10 weeks before Fish is scheduled to arrive.  I'm not sure how this is going to work.  I feel like a house.  In fact, a couple of mornings ago, when I was bending over to get socks out of the bottom drawer, E commented about how weird my upper stomach looked right under my rib cage.  His comment -- "Your stomach looks weird right there.  It, sort of, just bulges out. There's no gentle slope."  And my response was "Yeah, that's because those are my internal organs being crushed up against my rib cage."  Now I'm wishing that I would have taken more photos with my first pregnancy, just to make sure that I'm not imagining things.  Because despite my initial thoughts of him being a couple of days late, I now can't imagine him going to his due date (just due to size).  Of course, I'll know more on the 6th when I see my doctor.  But as time goes on and I just keep getting bigger and bigger, I'm now having serious doubts that he will allow me to travel over the Christmas holidays.  Crazier things have happened, though.