Thursday, June 26, 2014

My 7 Month old

I have a seven month old - what the hell?!

I cannot believe how fast time flies by when you have a little one. Everyone kept telling me this  would happen. Ugh. Some days I sit down and try to think back to when she was a newborn. That amazing newborn smell, her loads of dark hair, how she always curled up on our chest and would crash right out for hours. Now shes sitting up, has two teeth and eating solids (sorta..haha). 

The reason why I take about a thousand pictures of her a day - is because I want to be able to look back at my sweet girl and all the changes she goes through, what seems like everyday.

Harper is honestly the funniest baby ever. She's such a ham - just like her father. Always laughing, smiling or making this weird noise that she thinks is funny (constantly). She thinks Josie, our dog, is hilarious. She will start to bust out laughing at the silliest things Josie does. Take today for instance, she was laughing her guts out watching Josie play with her rubber bone in the basement - as if it was the funniest thing shes ever seen.

Harper is the sweetest baby ever. She is always so happy and laid back. Every time Fraser and I are out somewhere with her, strangers always come up to us and say "she is so well behaved, not fussy at all" or "she is so happy, look at that smile!". Honestly, as long as she's fed and not to tired, she is constantly smiling and giggling. Even when she is hungry or tired and we're out somewhere - shes never had a tired fit or lost her temper.


One thing I do wish came with the fact that Harper is growing like a bean stock - is more sleep. Harper is exclusively breastfed except for when she eats solids. Something that's common for breastfed babies is that they start to associate going to sleep with needing a boob to do so. This is Harper without a doubt. In the past two weeks I have successfully gotten Harper to fall asleep without nursing, by nursing her until she's sleepy and then laying her next to me and letting her whine for a bit until she falls asleep. However, she still is waking up every 2 - 2 1/2 hours at night, looking for a boob. Now, that being said I still do get a decent amount of sleep. She wakes up, looking for a boob -I nurse her until she is sleepy (usually 4 minutes) and then lay her next to me and she crashes out within 2 minutes. So thankfully she is not waking and wanting to party for an hour or something. And because she sleeps with Fraser and I, I nurse her laying down which helps. Every other night she will sleep for an hour stretch - which is ah-mazing!

I'm hoping once she is consistently eating solids during the day and not nursing as often, she will maybe sleep a bit better at night. Also, once I have her sleeping longer stretches at night, I'm going to try the crib again. Right now she isn't having any part of her crib and I'm not totally upset with that, as getting up and walking to her crib in her bedroom 3+ times in the night, would suck.

One positive thing with Harpers sleeping situation, is that 9 times out of 10, we sleep in until 9 or 10 am. I'm going to re-evaluate the whole sleeping situation when she is 9 months - as I want her on a good sleeping schedule for when I go back to work when she is 12 months old.








Overall, I'm totally obsessed with my sweet girl AND I'm totally dreading going back to work at the end of November. If I could, I would stay home with her until she was old enough to go to school. BUT I like to spoil her and buy her everything I want to ..so that mean's I need to work. Ha.


Monday, June 16, 2014

Ikea furniture, sick baby and a funeral: General Post

Last week was a hectic and sad week and I'm glad we're on to a new one.

It started on the Friday, June 6th with Harper having a fever. Initially I thought, "oh no big deal, shes teething"..nope. What started off as a slight fever turned into a pretty high fever by Saturday. I fought and fought with that damn fever, rotating Tylenol and Advil every 4 hours. Sometimes it would get her fever under control, other times it wouldn't. Sunday morning, after the second miserable night we decided to take Harper to the emerge just to have everything checked out. My fear was that she had an hear infection and I would have felt horrible if we had waited until the following day to bring her to our family doctor.

The great thing with children's emerge, is if you have a small baby, they don't make you wait very long. They had Harper in a room pretty quick, checking her ears, throat and temperature. Sure enough when we first got there, she had a fever and apparently a slight red throat. So the verdict was Harper has a virus and it would just need to run its course. OH but they still needed to check her urine in case she had a bladder infection. Here I'm thinking, oh great she could potentially inherit all of her mothers bladder issues. Then I immediately thought, oh shit how are they checking my little babies urine?! At first they attached a small bag to catch any urine - which meant we had to sit around and HOPE that she pees. After about an hour, no luck! Harper was running off of fumes at this point - ready for a boob and ready for bed. I managed to feed her while we there and actually got her to sleep but of course the nurse comes in right at that moment to check her temperature. After over an hour of waiting and no luck with the little pee bag, the nurse found the doctor and was given the go ahead to give Harper a catheter. Holy crap. My poor baby has to go through having a catheter. Luckily the nurses were in a out pretty quickly and the whole time Fraser and I were holding her little hands and smothering her in kisses. She wasn't happy - obviously - but she was a champ. The test came back negative - thank goodness - and we were on our way home! She lasted all of 3 minutes in the car, before completely passing out! Poor monkey.

To make things worse, on the way home Fraser and I were starving so we decided to grab some breakfast at Timmies. I decided to go with their strawberry banana smoothie which has the option of adding yogurt. Of course I didn't get yogurt because of Harper's milk allergy. Once I got my smoothie, I was looking at it thinking, hmm looks sort of creamy. THAT INSTANT I should have thrown that sucker out. Instead I drank it thinking it was all good. Holy freaking crap. For the next three days Harper screamed her head off with an upset tummy. It was horrible. My poor baby. I should have known there was yogurt in that damn drink and should have thrown it away!! We saw our family doctor on the Monday and got him to refer Harper to see an allergist. Ugh. What a nightmare of a weekend that was!

All while this was going on, we had all of our Ikea furniture delivered and our house looked like a bomb was set off. I was excited to get our furniture finally, but holy stressful when you have a sick baby!

Wednesday came long with some very sad news, my mom called early in the morning to inform me that our cousin Kyle had passed away. I was guttered. I hadn't seen Kyle in a few years - we all were just living our lives which of course brought guilt to me immediately after hearing the horrible news.
I was so upset, obviously because I would never see him again, but mostly thinking about my cousin Sabrina, Kyles sister. Kyle was Sabrina's only sibling and I couldn't help but put my self in her shoes. Just the idea of losing one of my brothers brings tears to my eyes. Also thinking of my aunt and uncle losing their only son made the tears flow and the big kicker is he left two beautiful kids behind. Horrible losing a family member, regardless of how often you saw them. With the terrible news, I started to think of some childhood memories of Kyle. I used to spend weekends with my Aunt Brenda and Uncle Paul to play with Sabrina who is two years older than me. Sabrina and I used to fight a lot - being that we were two young girls, having to spend three or four days together. I remember one incident like it was yesterday. I was over for a few nights and Sabrina had her friend Sarah spending the weekend as well. Sarah had a really bad sunburn on her back so when we were figuring out where we were all going to sleep - Sabrina gave Sarah the sofa. Sabrina took the loveseat and I was left with the armchair and footstool. Kyle came out of his room which was in the basement next to the rec room we were in, and saw that I was making my "bed" in the armchair. He immediately started to get angry at Sabrina for not letting me sleep somewhere else and began rummaging through the storage room. He came out with an air mattress and blew it up for me. He turned to Sabrina and told her not to even try sleeping on the air mattress with me. I remember feeling so special that he did that for me. Little ol' me having a whole air mattress to myself. I was so curious about Kyle. He would always be in his room playing his drums and I desperately wanted to go in his room and watch him play but was too shy to knock on his door. He was such an awesome person, so friendly and sweet. It breaks my heart that I hadn't seen him in a few years and now I won't ever see him again. Ugh. Fucking sucks losing anyone in your family. I don't deal well with death because I haven't had to deal with it that often. I just keep telling myself that he is in a better place.

The day I found out about Kyle, Harper's 6 month photo shoot CD came in the mail. It was like a much needed pick me up (very brief).

They turned out amazing! Here's a few of my favourites:





























Okay, so it's hard for me to pick just a few. Look at that chubby beauty!! I'm so obsessed with her and am amazed that I made that little babe!!

I'm going to have some more interesting and fun posts in the next few days. One on my craft area, Harper's room and the house in general. Also some DIY's I'm wanting to do. xx

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Harpers Photoshoot and Update: General Post

This past Saturday, Harper had her 6 month photo shoot and holy crap am I ever excited to get these photos! She was pretty happy during the hour shoot, except for the last 20 minutes or so since it was right around her nap-time. We went with 'Inspired Photography by Christy' (she's located in St.Thomas) who also did Harper's newborn session which turned out amazing! She's super talented and has amazing taste in regards to her style of photography. I love the natural feel you get with her photos, which is exactly what I wanted. I initially made headbands to go with the outfits I had picked out but when I got there I completely changed my mind. My headbands are little more funky and really cute to top off Harper's everyday outfits, but I wasn't feeling it for her photos. Christy has a lot of soft and delicate headbands specifically made for her photo-shoots and they went a lot better with the backdrops we had chosen. Christy also had some seriously cute outfits for Harper that I fell in love with. Here's two sneak peeks of the photo shoot:
This outfit Christy had specially made and it is seriously adorable! I think it suits Harper perfectly - and LOOK at those chubby arms! Nom nom!
This is one of the outfits I chose for Harper (from Baby Gap) and a delicate headband that Christy had. I just love this outfit, it makes me think of a flower child. Ha. I feel like this style suits Harper perfectly - rather than having her in a big pink tutu for her shoot.

Fraser and I got in on some of the photos with Harper - we did a few family shots and each got some photos with Harper alone. I was super excited to have some photos with Harper by myself because when we had her newborn photos - I felt like utter crap and had braces. SO I wasn't exactly photogenic (I never really am..). SO this time around I really wanted a sweet picture of her and I.

As for for Fraser, he tried to re-create one of the photos from her newborn session (shown below). These following photos from her newborn session literally made me cry when I first saw them. They're so beautiful, like something from a magazine. So he tried doing a similar photo with Harper - super excited to see how they turned out!!

The rest of the weekend was pretty fun too. We went out for lunch to one of my favourite restaurants, East Side Mario's (yum), for my birthday. Miss Harper was in a really cute white romper with navy polka dots - but she decided to have a pooh explosion while we were there so I put in her in a boring undershirt since it was pretty warm out. She's such a ham!

Then we went to the dollarstore to grab some small baskets for me to organize my makeup and craft stuff. I want all of my craft stuff nicely organized for when we get our Ikea furniture this weekend, and can finally make a proper office/craft area in our third bedroom. I was so excited when I found these clear organizers (shown below) because they remind me so much of some I've seen in Bed Bath and Beyond (which were certainly more than a dollar each there!)

I have the Alex drawer system from Ikea that just had all of my makeup floating around - not cool. So now I have things a little more organized. I'm thinking I need to go get some more! I've also told Fraser that I am not allowed to buy anymore makeup - honestly, who the hell needs this much? Ridiculous! Especially since I wear very minimal makeup anyways. Sheesh.

Now on to my craft stuff. I collect stamp sets so I needed some small baskets to nicely display them in a matter that was neat. I found these gray/silver bins that were two for $1.50 - they fit my stamp sets nicely. Again, I think I want to go back for more since I'm sure I will need more down the road. I think they'll go nicely on my large white bookcase that I will be using to store all of my craft stuff! I will make sure to take photos once we start organizing the office this coming weekend! SO excited. 
These three containers were perfect for my ink pads! In the red handle one I put all of my red, pink and purple ink pads. In the green one I put all of my green, yellow and orange ink pads. In the blue handle one, I put all of my blue, greys and darker ink pads in it.

A quick update on my little babe. Harper is is still currently sleeping with Fraser and I and is still getting up every 2-3 hours to nurse. This whole suck to sleep association is SOOOOOO hard to break in babies. I'm currently trying a technique from my no cry sleep solution books (talked about in previous posts) - where I break the latch when Harper is nursing once her sucking slows down. Thus, hopefully shortening the length of time she is nursing to a point when she will hopefully not need to wake up anymore. Now another problem with this is that she does not know how to fall asleep on her own. She thinks she needs to nurse to go to sleep. Again, not an easy fix when you don't want to let your baby cry it out! Oh well. I keep telling myself that she's only going to be this small for so long and to enjoy every minute. 
She makes me so happy and if I need to get up every 2-3 hours to sooth her in the night, it is totally worth it!
   (Headband made by me, shirt and shorts from Baby Gap)