Happy Halloween! - Four Months!

Another busy week in the Naylor house! On Thursday, Olivia went in for her four month doctor's appointment, we celebrated our fourth anniversary with little fanfare - though we did have some AWESOME thai takeout, which may be the start of a new tradition - and Friday was Halloween! 

Four years ago! Look how well rested we look! Obviously pre-baby :)

We didn't go trick or treating, but we did carve some pumpkins and dress up for the occasion.  Even after having shots on Thursday and a fever for most of the day on Friday, Olivia was enjoying her first Halloween.  She gets it from her dad! 

She was a crab.  Fitting.

Don't worry, I only took about 432,267 pictures of her in her costume.

...and here's the series of pictures that will win us the parents of the year award:

Chef Andy with his catch of the day!

In the pot she goes!

Yum!  She was loving the spoon.

Awesome.

As I said before, this week also marked her four month "birthday."  Time flies!

Operation fatten up the baby continues and is succeeding! She gained another pound since her last appointment and is up to 11 lb, 10 oz.  She's still 6th percentile for weight, but holding steady and the doctor is very pleased!  She also grew another two inches and is now 26 inches tall, putting her in the 97th percentile for height.  Her head also grew and is in the 98th percentile.  Full of brains!

That bunny seems to be shrinking...

Here's all four months now...She's definitely filling out.  And losing all of her hair!!  I didn't think it was possible, but she is definitely getting cuter, too! 

I was convinced she'd be a redhead, but now it looks like she's definitely going to be blonde.  I can't get over how big she's getting! 

She's very active and very verbal.  This weekend she learned a new horrible squealing noise that she uses to let us know she's unhappy about something.  It's at a pitch somewhere between nails on a chalkboard and dog whistle, and let me tell you, it's really awesome at about three in the morning when she wakes up hungry.  When she isn't squealing she's babbling at everything or laughing.  This kid makes some funny sounds! 

Fall Happenings

Hello! I swear the technology gods are doing their best to try to keep me from writing this post today. I've had some serious problems downloading AND uploading pictures today.  It's almost like the computer knows that I only have a finite time when I can get this done.  ANYHOW...

Fall's still upon us up in Anchorage.  We've had a number of days where it threatened to snow, but nothing happened yet, which I'm totally okay with because I know this will be the next six months of our lives and I still haven't really figured out how we're going to handle the winter with a baby.  I'm constantly worried about her being too cold as it is!  Mostly it's been pretty clear and actually warm (okay, well, warm for October anyway...I think last week the temperature was generally in the low 40s).  Still cold enough that we have to bundle this one up when we go for walks! (again, I was bundling her months ago...) 

She just loves her hat...can't you tell?

Another sign of fall...our friends are back! 

Super nice of them to trim the raspberries for me...god knows I wasn't going to do it.

At first when the moose popped by I thought it was just the mama, but she still has her baby with her. Andy was watching them while I was feeding Olive and he noted that the baby was getting a little amorous with his mother (hello Oedipus!).  Sadly(?) I missed it and don't have any pictures to share with you. I have a feeling that she'll be kicking him to the curb fairly soon.  

After tooling in the garden they got brave and headed right for the back window.  I also thought it was funny that, after we made fun of the neighbors all summer for wrapping their lilacs in steel cages to protect them from moose (because moose OBVIOUSLY don't like lilacs), the mama went right for the lilac by the back window.  Punk.  

look at his little antler nubs! Cute!

Hello!

This weekend we took Olive to go pick out pumpkins.  I am sure there is a patch somewhere (maybe in Palmer??) and I know they also do a little indoor patch at one of the local nurseries here, but our options yesterday were limited to either Fred Meyer (where pumpkins are currently FIFTY FIVE CENTS A POUND!) or the local feed store where we buy dog food and plants.  We opted for the feed store and only drew a few odd looks while we took pictures in their pumpkin "patch."  The lack of cheap, available pumpkins is a serious downside to living in Alaska.  As with every year, you can look forward to me going on a similar rant about Christmas trees in a couple of months.  

Ripley wanted to get in on the pictures...

That's pretty much the face I make when I get dog kisses, too.

If you can't tell from the pictures, our skinny mini is looking a little less skinny these days!

We took her for a follow up appointment in our continuing pursuit of chunking her up and found that she gained 19 oz in 16 days! Woo!! As of her last weigh in, she was a whopping 10 lb, 10 oz! She's still BARELY on the chart for weight, but I think she's noticeably chubbier.  Of course all of this bottle feeding at daycare has triggered an epic nursing strike, in which she will only breastfeed in the middle of the night when she's too tired to remember the bottle exists.  As you might guess, I'm thrilled about having to pump all week long AND during the weekend!  Some things I have read suggest that this all may have something to do with a major growth/developmental spurt that happens around four months.  I don't know if this is what's happening, but we sure are noticing some big changes with her!

She is an expert grasper.  She grabs pretty much anything that isn't tied down and puts it immediately into her mouth.  This along with the constant presence of her fists in her mouth have me a little concerned about teeth in the near future...

She's also doing a great job of holding her head up when we pick her up by her arms...

Just look at these two.

 She barely needs any support!

Sometimes, though, the need to put things in her mouth outweighs her desire to keep her head up...

The changes aren't all developmental...can you tell all her hair is falling out? Also, it's starting to look mighty blonde these days.  What's up with that? Bring back the red!

She's also actually starting to enjoy spending time on her stomach, and just in the last week or so she began rolling over! She does it both to her left and her right.  After rolling about three or four times, she figured out that she could do it really quickly if she flings her entire body weight in one direction, which is scary to watch because it seems like she's going to hurt herself by throwing that giant head around.  Needless to say she is done spending time by herself on the couch and the bathroom counter (not that she ever did...).  She is ALMOST rolling from her back to her front, but not quite.  I think pretty much any day now though!

It's so funny to watch her learn new things and then quickly master them.  I feel like every day she has a new skill! We just love watching this baby grow!

Life as a working mom

Just a quick post to say we're all still alive and kicking! The amount of free time I have to blog has been significantly reduced since going back to work, but I'm going to keep writing! Today I thought I'd give you all a glimpse into my daily routine as a working mom with an infant. 

As I write today, this is my view. 

Yes this is me hooked up to my pump! So glamorous! I'm in a tiny room in my office building that I think was thrown together as a total afterthought once my boss started asking about where I was going to pump. This used to be a shower room but all the plumbing has been removed (except for a sink) and I think this whole room was slated for demolition (they are slowly remodeling all 19 floors of my building) until I got pregnant. My own private suite!

There is even some nice artwork:

Seeing a robin fighting a magpie makes me produce more milk for sure. 

This is how I generally feel when I am in this room 3-4 times a day:

Sometimes I do close my eyes for a few minutes. It's the only alone time I get these days!! Most days though I'm just farting around on the Internet. Sometimes I do work, but I don't generally do a lot that isn't computer-dependent, so I just sit in here and pray I am not using up all my data watching cat videos on YouTube. 

Little Olive is settling into her routine too. Right now she is sick which means nobody in the house is getting any sleep (except when I'm in the pumping room!). This was especially evident when we popped over to daycare at lunch today to visit her and saw this:

It looks like she is just practicing some tummy time, but upon closer inspection...

Totally asleep!! Poor baby. Hopefully she kicks this cold quickly and things can get back to normal. I don't think I've slept for more than three hours at a time since last Wednesday (usually it's about 60-90 min at a time) and I'm scared that one of these days my little cat naps in the "pumping room" will turn into me disappearing for an entire day...not that I would complain! 

Three Months and Back to Work

Time flies! Today is my last day of maternity leave and tomorrow I head back to work.  I can't believe that little Olive is three months old already! I still feel like I'm pregnant most days (and some days I still feel like I look like I'm still pregnant, which is a whole other issue).  I can honestly say that for as hard as it was (and, oh my god, was it hard), the last few months have been absolutely awesome and I wouldn't trade them for anything.  I have really loved hanging with my little honeybee and getting to know her!

In this photo, she is doing what we affectionately refer to as "Mr. Burns hands"

This month has been, I feel, more about mental development than physical.  It's amazing the differences we've noticed in the way she interacts with her surroundings.  Her eyesight has improved so much and she loves just checking out the world around her.  She's even stopped screaming in the car for long enough periods to watch the scenery...sometimes.  

She still loves her hands.  She will pretty much put anything she can in her mouth, but her hands are still her favorite.

She loves to smile, laugh, and coo at just about everything.  She mostly loves people and her little play mat with the toys that dangle by her face.  She hits them and just LAUGHS.  It's adorable.

She's a very verbal baby, too...always "talking" at something.  Or screaming.  She has always been really good at screaming.

This isn't to mean that she isn't developing at all physically.  She is SO very close to rolling over, and she uses her newfound ability to rock herself as a means to move even.  She keeps her head still, but rocks herself around and around to face a new direction.  She's like the arm of a clock going around in a circle.  This is how she sneakily tries to watch TV when we turn her away.  Tricky! She is also very close to holding her head up by herself (poor baby, her head is SO big that it's extra work for her) and she really enjoys sitting up in our laps, so I think sitting in her little bumbo chair might be on the agenda fairly soon.

Time for the obligatory bunny photo! 

Three Months!

Compared to Two Months:

I love that she's doing the Fonz in this picture.  Heeeyyyy

And One Month:

Operation Fatten Up the Baby is ongoing.  We have spent a ridiculous amount of time with the lactation consultant over the past three months working on how to get her weight up (you would think the solution would just be to feed her more, but no.).  The general consensus is that we have some weight to gain, obviously, but that she's pretty much always going to be a banana baby (with a giant head) and the doctors are okay with that now, as long as we always go in an upward direction.  The problem with her seems to be that she is just so stinking active that she burns everything she takes in really quickly, so I'm sneaking powdered formula into her breast milk bottles to add calories and hopefully add some bulk!

As of a week or so ago, she was 24 inches tall and weighed 9 lb 8 oz. - about 90th percentile for height and 2nd percentile for weight.  She's basically a supermodel!

In other news, the end of my maternity leave means I'm headed back to work.  I'm sad about leaving her, obviously, but we found an incredible daycare right across the street from my office, which means I can go visit her anytime I want (and Andy, too! Because it's walking distance from his office as well), and I feel really good about it.  The people are awesome, there are not very many babies in her "class" and it just gives me a great feeling.  This spot opened up literally less than a week ago and we are so fortunate to have a spot there, it still seems like a dream!

In work news, I'm going back to my same office, but in a new capacity as the manager of my section. I was crazy enough to work in that job in an acting role throughout the second half of my pregnancy - crazy because it's a much more stressful job with more responsibility - and then I was permanently promoted during the summer (I'm probably the only person ever who was promoted during maternity leave)!  I'm excited for the new opportunity to grow in my position and I'm happy to be going back to work with some awesome coworkers, who I actually have missed over the past three months (enough that I visited them in the office more than a normal person on leave would), so really, this is a good thing all around.

And now I'll leave you with one of the cutest pictures you will ever see:

My family

Fall!

It may still be hot and sunny throughout most of the country, but up in Alaska, fall has arrived!

We've been pretty socked in with rain here for the last few weeks, but the weather was nice yesterday so we went to Hillside for a walk.

The ergo carrier is Olive's kryptonite.  She cannot stay awake while inside.  Also, she looks amazing in hats.

Ripley was so happy to get out and stretch his legs.  His outings have been fairly short with all this gross weather recently.  

He's always so far ahead of us.

The trees have really changed.  So pretty!

This is the best picture I got of the three of them.  It's like herding cats.

Happy Fall!!