An Example

This daffodil is like, "Winter, I could live without you. But if you're gonna insist on sticking around, I'm gonna stand proud and look even more beautiful because of you. Take that!"

I probably wouldn't have even set foot outside today, but I was out of milk* so I had no choice. While I was lugging the groceries into the house I saw this daffodil peeking out from the devastation that is my flower bed. I don't usually take pictures except for of people unless I see something stunning and this obviously qualified. I feel like some kind of professional.

I can't decide which picture is the best. I like them for different reasons. The first one looks more like spring and I like how you can see the snow in the background. But, it's also got a house in the background. The second one is more dramatic.

* If you know me well you already know this, but I can't go on without milk.

Silly Parents

Zoey seems to get more of a kick out of us if we act really foolish. Technically I'm not sure it's an act. Anyway, I think this video of Tim with Zoey is hilarious. She does blow a few raspberries, but he blows a whole lot more. I figure it's only fair to highlight him this time, considering I look foolish in all of the videos with me.



Tim got a giggle storm out of Zoey last night, but I didn't get it on camera. He actually looked very hip, he was beat boxing (is that right? Where you make rapping sounds with your mouth?) and dancing her around and she started laughing like crazy. So cute.

Giggle Storm

Last night I finally found something that got more than just a teeny giggle out of Zoey. I tried peek a boo with her maybe a month ago and didn't get any reaction. Whatever part of her needed to develop between then and now clearly did, because she was thrilled with the game this time. Good thing Tim filmed it, because in the light of a new day, while peek a boo is still gets big grins and wiggles, it apparently no longer warrants giggles.

Rolling Excitement

Zoey just rolled from her front to her back and the excitement in the household is palpable.

Weight Loss

Weight loss is going well. I've held steady at about a pound a week for the last 10 weeks. I'm down to a morning weight of 110. It was about 105 when I got pregnant, so I don't have too much to go. Ideally, I'd like to get it down to 100 since that is my normal weight, I had gained 5 pounds in attempts to become fertile again during the year I was trying to get pregnant.

I did fall off the no dessert wagon a little bit. Meaning I still haven't actually purchased any dessert items, but I do eat them if I'm with someone who offers me one or if I find something hidden in the back of a cabinet. Also, if Tim brings home dessert I eat it. Like the thin mint girl scout cookies last week. My favorite, mmmm. Now though, the house is empty of dessert like items so I will have to rely on my one cup per day of tasty beverage which I allow myself. This is usually Oregon Chai Tea, which Laura introduced me to. I get the caffeine free. After adding milk it's about 150 calories, not exactly a diet product. It does help me with my sugar fix though. What I really need to do is obtain more fireballs. I got a huge container of them when I was pregnant, but they are all gone now. They are a great sugar fix that you can't eat too many of since after awhile your mouth starts to feel like it's falling apart. Sadly, I can't find them at most stores.

I've been running 4.5 miles every other day and on my off days working out for an hour on the elliptical. Weight loss wise this seems to be doing the trick. Shin splint wise it isn't going so well. I am going to buy some quality running shoes in the next couple of days and see if I can't remedy this.

Hopefully next time I report back I'll be a few pounds lighter, I'm getting close to my goal and it feels good.

Munchie Kins

Munchie Kins giggled for the first time a couple of days ago. It was at Tim, but I was right there to hear it too. Yesterday I got her to giggle again, but her giggles are far and few between at the moment. I'm excited for when they're frequent, it is so cute and funny.

She is starting to blow raspberries. They're mini raspberries though, just tiny little spitty noises but she really puckers up to do it and it's hilarious. It seemed like yesterday she was copying me when I did it.

She's doubled her birthweight now, weighing in at about 12 pounds.

She just started noticing her feet. I had her sitting in her boppy pillow and was watching her staring at her feet in awe as she commanded them to move.

She is also getting good at holding toys. She can't pick them up herself, but when I put one in her hand she will move it around and stare intently for up to 20 minutes at a time. I got some video of this amazing happening.



Another thing she does and has been doing for weeks now is thumping her feet. If she is laying on her back she will often lift her feet into the air and them thump them back down on the mattress. She seems pretty happy about this.

It is amazing to watch her develop and she is such a happy girl. I can almost always get a huge smile out of her just by grinning at her or making a coochie coo noise. I love watching her watch the world. She stares at everything and everyone with intense concentration. I can see the gears turning in her head when she does this. I enjoy being her mommy more every day.

Birth Control Pill = No fertility for me

In honor of it being exactly one year since I found out I was pregnant I decided it's time to finally get around to blogging about how I defeated the evil birth control pill. "They" say the pill has no effect at all on the return of fertility. This seems to be based on studies of women who were on the pill and got their periods back quickly after. Who paid for the studies you might wonder? I wondered the same thing and I think we know. Also, I'm betting the women in these studies were on the pill for a year or less, not 5 years + like I was. I have a history of having totally regular monthly cycles up until the age of 21 when I got on the pill. Stayed on it for over 5 years, got off, and boom, my body did not know what the hell was going on. I didn't have a period for 6 months and went to see my doctor. I was told I had PCOS and it had been masked by the pill. I went home and googled it, and it was fairly obvious that I did not in fact have PCOS. Reading about PCOS revealed that it almost always shows up when menstruation begins, which didn't fit because I never had any problems up until I was 21 and got off the pill. There is also a very strong correlation between PCOS and obesity and insulin resistance. Skinny women apparently can get it, but it is uncommon, and the odds that I was one of them as well as had no symptoms until post pill are practically zero. I'm not saying the pill is going to screw every women up, but I am 99.9% sure it was to blame in my case. I also know during the time I was infertile I quizzed many a woman on how long she was on the pill and what happened when she got off if it had been long term. I was very surprised when my quizzing revealed this was actually a common problem. It also happened to a friend of mine who got off the pill shortly after I did. She was also told she has PCOS of course. Couldn't possibly be the pill. Regardless of the cause, I was not ovulating which is the same problem women with PCOS have. This meant treatment would be the same. Get on some sumbitchen drugs to make me ovulate or wait around for years and hope my body figures out how to kick itself back into gear. I waited a year and decided I was sick of waiting around. The two common drugs used to induce ovulation are Clomid and Femara. Clomid is by far the most common, but after reading up on the matter I decided Femara was actually superior. Clomid has been used to induce ovulation longer, but it has a much much longer half life, a much higher chance of twins, more side effects and is less effective. Odds of twins on Clomid are 10% vs odds on Femara are 2.5%. Clomid remains in your system for your whole cycle and when you take it again next cycle it builds on itself eventually causing a thinning uterine lining and problems getting pregnant as a result. It also causes hostile mucus on the cervix, which means that stuff is so thick that sperm have a tough time getting through. The half life issue with Clomid bothered me not only because after a few cycles it starts to cause counterproductivity (is that a word?) but also because I don't think having the drug in your system when you do get pregnant is that awesome of an idea. Cell division is so rapid at first and your baby is so vulnerable to issues in the beginning that I just didn't feel comfortable with Clomid. Femara has a half life of a couple days, so it is all wiped from your system by the time fertilization occurs. Femara is also known to cause less problems with mucus and also less other undesirable side effects like mood swings, hot flashes, and ovarian hyper stimulation syndrome. As far as I could tell the only reason doctors are even still prescribing Clomid as a first line of treatment is habit and fear because Femara and birth defect have been thrown around in the same sentence. However, research informed me that this is because Femara was actually created as a drug for breast cancer and women who got pregnant while taking it were still taking it after fertilization. Obviously you don't want to be on drugs after that egg has been fertilized, but ironically, Clomid would be much more likely to cause birth defects if it was taken the same way, and it is the drug still in your system after fertilization if you take it to induce ovulation as prescribed whereas Femara is not. This is the one area where my reproductive endocrinologist got it right. He prefers Femara and not Clomid, and it's easy to see why. I could only understand clomid it as a second line of treatment if a woman didn't respond to Femara. My doctor told me to take 5 mg of Femara each day cycle days 3-7. Here again, I researched it and discovered that 2.5 mg was often very effective. Why would I start out at 5 mg and risk overstimulating my ovaries if I didn't have to, especially considering I weighed only about 100 pounds? I only took 2.5 mg per day. It worked like a champ, finally after a whole year, my ovaries pumped out an egg. Tim took it from there and almost a week before my period was due, exactly a year ago today, my obsessive pregnancy test taking revealed the faintest of second lines. It was hard to believe because that line was so faint I thought I might have been imagining it, but one digital pregnancy test later, we knew Femara rocked the hizzle in one try. Or the ovary or whatever. By the by, anyone trying to get pregnant unable to resist the sirens call of taking frequent pregnancy tests who would like to NOT spend a million dollars on their habit can purchase cheapie tests here. They worked for me, and even showed a faint line only 9 days post ovulation. An extra trick for you, cut them in half length wise so you get twice as many tests. They work fine that way. I know this blog has been quite boring to anyone not ttc (that's trying to conceive you know), but to someone in the situation I was in, I hope it can be helpful.

Cooing

I started filming her on the DL because she becomes very enchanted by the camera and most of the time quits cooing at all in order to stare at it when I bring it into her sight. This time she even cooed some after she saw the camera, maybe it's getting boring. This is a lot more cooing than normal, but she gets on a roll like this a couple times a day lately.

Pay Off Q and A

Q: How can you tell that your no dessert diet and exercise are paying off?

A: When jogging past a seven eleven a man standing out front holding a beer with his buddy begins to flail his arms wildly to flag you down, only to scream, "Hey! Did you take your dogs over to the dog park?" That was all he had, but he was determined to strike up a conversation somehow and simply didn't have the time to come up with anything else. Don't worry drunk man, your hard work will pay off one day. That particular attempt reminded me of this classic Seinfeld skit:

Men are not subtle, we are obvious. Women know what men want, men know what men want, what do we want? We want women, that's it! It's the only thing we know for sure, it really is: we want women. How do we get them? Oh, we don't know about that, we don't know. The next step after that we have no idea. This is why you see men honking car-horns, yelling from construction sites. These are the best ideas we've had so far...The car-horn-honk, is that a beauty? Have you seen men doing this? What is this? The man is in the car, the woman walks by the front of the car, he honks e-eeehh, eehhh, eehhh, this man is out of ideas. [imitates horn again] e-e-e-eeeehhhh, "I don't think she likes me" The amazing thing is, that we still get women, don't we. Men, I mean, men are with women. You see men with women. How are men getting women, many people wonder. Let me tell you a little bit about our organization. "Where ever women are?", we have a man working on the situation right now. Now, he may not be our best man, OK, we have a lot of areas to cover, but someone from our staff is on the scene. That's why, I think, men get frustrated, when we see women reading articles, like: "Where to meet men?". We're here, we are everywhere. We're honking our horns to serve you better.

3 Months

My little munchkin is 3 months old today. Munchkin is my favorite nickname for her, I'm not sure how she's ever gonna know her real name.

This month she has gotten much better head control. She can hold it up herself just about all of the time. It will kinda fall forward onto her chest after awhile, but she just stares at whatever happens to be in her line of sight when that happens and doesn't seem to care. She seems really stoked about her head control and is moving it around more instead of just holding it up. The other day Tim and I were cracking up because she was whipping it back and forth looking at stuff with her eyes wide open having a blast.



She loves animal noises. She seems especially fond of my seal bark and chicken noises. Sadie does not like the seal bark one bit, but she is getting used to it. She also loves the mechanic game, which is where I make noises like she is on a lift at a repair shop and make them higher pitched and lift when she uses her legs, and a lowering noise and let her drop down when she stops pushing. Vvvveep vvveep vvveep! Like that.

She started sleeping about 9 hours fairly often. Just the past couple of nights she went only 6, but even so, that means only waking up once to feed her some of the time. And after I feed her at night I can usually just put her in her bassinet and she will look at her hands and keep herself entertained for a few minutes until she falls asleep.

She notices her hands all the time now and I'm convinced she is actually batting at things occasionally. Last week I saw her having a brain storm laying in her crib. She was staring intently at her hanging toy, then at her hand. Then she'd bring her hand slowly over to the toy until her hand ran into it. This would be followed by a look of surprise and excitement. Then, she'd slowly open her hand and grab onto the toy. She kept doing it over and over and she looked soooo intent on her work. That night she was doing the same thing with my finger. She definitely isn't consistent about it though, it's hit and miss.

I got a nursing pillow recently (why, why did I wait so long?? After getting one I realized the thing is amazing and so much easier than just using a pillow) and it doubles as a seat for her. She likes to sit in the pillow and hang out or be talked to.



I try to remember to put her on her tummy for at least five minutes a day. The past couple of days she has been figuring out how to do mini pushups and hold her head up. She even pushed up and rolled her head and shoulders over yesterday. If she just had figured out how to flip her leg over she would have rolled over onto her back. She was very close, I wouldn't be surprised if she figures that one out in the next few weeks.

She is such an easy baby. I don't have anything to compare to and wasn't sure if all babies were this easy or what. But, more and more experienced people are telling me I'm lucky. Tim and I left her with Laura and Laura's mom to go to Kristina's wedding and reception. After we got back Laura told me that her mom solemnly confided in her that she could simply not expect her baby to be like Zoey. She had 5 kids, and she said none of them were anywhere near as easy so Laura really needed to be aware that this was not what to expect. My heart swelled with pride. Although I think there is maybe some technique to it, it seems like mostly Zoey just has a really mellow temperament (well, that and no colic since obviously any baby in pain is gonna cry).

She is doing a lot more cooing. Still isn't all the time, sometimes a whole day will pass without much cooing. But, other days I'll get long stretches of talking out of her. I'm looking forward to hearing her laugh, that is going to be exciting.

Here is her 3 month pic with her bunny from mountain mama.



In comparison, here they are together not too long after she was born. She has grown so much already!

Spring and Bob

Yesterday felt like spring. It was almost 50 out and the clouds finally went away. I took Zoey on a walk in the baby bjorn. Sometimes she loves to look out while we're walking and marvel at the world, yesterday she fell asleep though. We will have to try again today. I'm not sure I've mentioned Bob on my blog yet. Bob is our new best friend. Bob is this rad jogging stroller I got a few weeks ago. Technically it was mostly Tim's birthday present from my parents, thanks parents! He's got huge wheels and even shocks so as to provide a quite smooooth ride. He can be easily pushed through the park by my house. He is light as a feather and I can maneuver him over curbs like a dream. He has a cover for the winter that keeps it a good 10 degrees warmer inside and blocks the wind. He harnesses Zoey in for safe keeping. He's even got a storage space underneath for extra layers and water. I've gotten a system down and I'm able to take him along with the dogs jogging. Getting going is hectic but once we're jogging it seems to work just fine. So far Zoey usually gets lulled to sleep, but she definitely enjoys riding in Bob. Once Bob is on the move I've never heard a peep of a complaint out of her. I'm also glad that Bob is helping make my behind smaller. Yay for Bob!