December Outfits

12.1

12.2

12.3

12.4

12.5

12.7

I decided I don't like tunic + jeans and like tunic + leggings better.

12.9

Leggings look awful when using a flash. The leggings do seem like they are stretched thinner than I'd like when I was wearing them though.

12.10

12.11

12.12

12.13

12.14

12.14

This dress looks better when photographed without a flash. Too bad I forgot to do that earlier in the day.

12.15

12.16

12.17

12.18

12.20 before hospital gown

Too bad this selfie isn't from further away. I don't even look pregnant.

12.23 

12.24

12.25

I think I'm wearing the binder around my belly on the 24th and 25th but can't be sure.

12.27

12.28

12.31

Once Ella was born, I spent a few days in a hospital gown. Then after that I just wear PJs all day so I am lacking in recent pictures. I look a lot more pregnant after I had her than I expected based on seeing many other people after they give birth.

I miss being warm when it's freezing in this house. Now I'm freezing and it's not fun.

I've worn some maternity clothes since giving birth (well I've worn maternity shirts or t-shirts but I just haven't gotten dressed much) and I kind of want to do some side by side comparisons with the same shirt throughout pregnancy and now. I doubt I'll ever get time though.

Since giving birth I've worn athletic pants or my yoga pants. I also wore a skirt. It's tough work to figure out what to wear with a big incision to worry about.

Teeth (1.2.14)

This should really say something like "teeth are overrated because I can just bite with my gums." Ella has done just that a few times while feeding. It hurts. But who can even get mad at someone this cute?!

Week 2 (1.3)

Ella weighed 7 lb 13 oz today after eating. I forgot to weigh her first.  I have some weights documented from home and the doctors. I should start measuring her too. At the doctors for her 2 week checkup a few days ago she was 7 lb 7 oz. She 20.5 inches long. (She was 6 lb 15 oz at birth and 19.5 inches long.)   She is wearing newborn clothes or Gerber 0-3 month onesies. Carters and Gerber clothing is smaller than other brands we have. The one piece outfits are a little tough to work. Her legs don't seem to fit right in them. We bought a few sets and I think a onesie should be worn under some of them but there just isn't enough room.  She's in newborn size diapers. I can't even believe they had her wearing size 1 diapers at the hospital.  We use Pampers Swaddlers. We had a big box of Huggies but they don't go up high enough in the back and she was constantly leaking out of them.

Ella is still sleeping in her crib but she isn't sleeping as much as she was last week. Also sometimes she sleeps in my arms.  There are times this week that after a feeding she stays up until the next feeding. Last week it was always back to bed.  I still set my alarm for every 3 hours to feed her but she's actually been waking up a couple minutes before my alarm goes off or right after it goes off and I hit snooze. I enjoy not forcing her to wake up to eat a lot more than last week. Last week I was so tired and so was she and yet we were there nursing in the middle of the night.  There have been a few nighttime feedings where she didn't fall asleep right away after nursing and so I held her for a bit before returning to bed. The pictures are the day she was born, a week later, and today. I've taken nicer ones of her sleeping than a week ago but I wanted pictures on the specific days to see if you can see a difference in her.   BTW those socks are so cute. I love them. They are cute and stay on her feet so it's a win. Dave was doing laundry and as soon as they were dried, I put them on her feet. I wonder if Target has other cute socks like this.

I feel like just overnight Ella has discovered faces. She likes to stare at my face. If I look away she whines a little. It makes typing this post fun. I'm looking at her while typing.  Later she fell asleep and I got more typed.

Ella seems to love tummy time. She loves holding her head up. She also likes to be held in a standing position. At first it looked like she was doing a jig but now she stands there pushing off.  While doing tummy time she moves her head and lifts it up and gets tired and rests but then she goes back at it again. I got some video of her too.

I filed her nails for the first time this week. I was too afraid to use the clippers.

Her umbilical cord stump fell off.

She had her first bath... and hated it.

We bought saline to use with the bulb syringe and it worked wonders. It was impossible to get everything out before and after what seemed like torture we still only got a tiny bit out.

She hates her arms being swaddled but we do it anyway. If we leave her hands out of the mits at the end of shirts she scratches her face. This is something I would do too. I mean I did as a baby while in line to get my photo professionally taken.

my face scratched when I was a baby

We haven't even been home the 3 of us for 2 weeks since the first few days were at the hospital and Dave goes back to work in less than 2 weeks. He still has more leave to use up but he didn't want to take all 7 of his weeks in a row. I'm not sure when he's taking the rest though.

We left the house besides going to the doctors.  We went to Panera. Ella was a perfect angel but if we didn't go somewhere quick it would have been time for her to eat and I didn't want our first restaurant trip to end in crying.

In the past week, Ella has decided she likes to eat a ton. She eats often. She also makes little piggy noises while eating because she wants more food.

Ella hates to have her diaper changed. We have discovered what makes her cry is when she hears the velcro from the diapers so if we cough over it, she doesn't realize what is going on. She also likes to have a blanket or something on her chest. We joke that it's like at the hospital with a sterile field and she doesn't get to see what's going on below the blanket. In this picture she doesn't know what's going on below the blanket and she's very content.

So I hear you are supposed to put one additional layer on a baby than you wear. But I wear more layers than Dave and I'm cold and he's not.  I think this baby is more like him. At the doctors Ella was crying until we unzipped her outfit and took her legs out. Dave's face was dripping sweat. I was only a tiny bit warm. She fights her swaddle until she gets her legs out. I don't tuck the bottom anymore so that her legs aren't as warm.

Cards

I had a Stampin' Up Party a few months back. I think it was in November but I have no concept of time. I tried to do it in early October but that didn't work  for availability of others so I waited until I was done with traveling.

These are the cards we made. We made 3. Two I made at other parties or classes in the past but with different people.  Usually I do card classes in December with Christmas cards but decided I did not have the time for that kind of prep based on how few people I know around here.

Photo of the Day: Poly (9.17.10)

Poly thinks she owns the place. She wanted the chair that I was sitting in.  She's a cute little cat.

Apparently I did post these pictures back in the day.

Pictures Showing Names

So I've been blocking out the name Ella on everything recently to not give the name away.  I thought you might want to see those pictures.

Here are a few. They were originally posted in the nursery reveal post.

Notice the onesie on the bottom right. I've had that one on this blog a few times and hid the name every single time. Only 2 onesies are name specific (so far). 

40 Weeks (12.28)

The past week has been crazy. I just think about how I could still be pregnant and how awesome it's been to have this cute little baby.

All future updates will go by weeks or months of how old Ella is but I just thought it was fitting to do a 40 week photo here.

If there is something you'd like to know, ask it in the comments and I'll answer. I can't think of what specifically to put here right now.

Size of baby: Based on the scale we have here and putting a diaper, onesie, and socks on it first to zero it out, she weighs 7 lb 4 oz. 

Weight: I lost 18 lbs since Thursday. I don't have a full weight measurement. I gained 40.9 lb overall (well I had 1 extra day there). I've lost 18 lbs of that.  (How far from goal weight: 22.9 lb.  Goal weight is just currently pre-pregnancy weight that was used for all the weight gain amounts the previous 38 weeks)  I took some measurements 2 days ago and today and around my belly button I am 1.5 inches smaller. Perhaps in a few days I'll be even better. I took measurements Dec 17. I wanted to take some the day I went to the hospital but that didn't happen. Today I am only 4 inches smaller around the belly button than I was on the 17th.  I measure at belly button so I had some form of consistency.

Maternity Clothes:  I wore some maternity shirts that were also nursing tanks when I got dressed for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day google hangouts with our families.  I also wore a nursing tank from Target that is not maternity. I've worn T-shirts, athletic pants, and yoga pants that are not maternity clothes. I still have a belly. I have barely gotten dressed for real and didn't want to chance looking silly in non-maternity clothes. Also I have a binder I wear on and off throughout the day but that makes my midsection thicker and would stretch out a normal shirt.  Pants I wore at 30 weeks pregnant were too tight to get over my calf today. 

Sleep:  Intermittent

I messed up making the collage. The sleep while pregnant totals are 7:42 and 7:32. These were all from last week. 

Best moment this week: I almost deleted this category too because I can't possibly pick just one moment. Every single moment I have with Ella is awesome. 

Looking forward to: spending time with Ella

Exercise:  I walked the halls at the hospital. I walked around the house doing this or that. All three of us also went for a walk today.

Ella's First Week (12.27.13)

I couldn't resist making a week 1 post but I won't be doing these weekly.

Here are a few somewhat random thoughts.

• I can't believe how quickly I went from having to pee every few minutes to going back to my old self after giving birth. 
• I'm surprised how little she is. I've probably only held one baby younger than a couple months old before. 
• I expected to look pregnant afterwards but didn't really expect how squishy my belly would be. I think I thought I'd look about 20 weeks pregnant but I never really analyzed what looking like 20 weeks pregnant would be. I feel bigger than I was expecting.
• I'm surprised at how fast I'm dropping weight this first week. I'm not doing anything exercise wise since I'm still recovering. I just walk around the house doing things. 
• I took measurements a few days postpartum and I had a one set of measurements from a few days before birth and going around at my belly button was shockingly similar.
• I can only lift things as heavy as the baby. This means no lifting Poly. But if my baby was a big baby, then my weight limit would be higher. Sigh. 
• People told me about sleep deprivation. I figured I'd be dead tired and sleeping very little. I was sleeping very little. I had 13:30 hours total the first 5 days. But I didn't feel that tired. I was too excited.
• I can't believe I'm actually a mom and actually have a baby.
• Nursing was so much easier for me than I was expecting. Granted I always expect the worst but even at the hospital the nurses talked about how well she latched. I would overhear nurse shift change and they'd be talking about it. I was even expecting nursing to be worse than normal because I read sometimes after a c-section it is a little more difficult.  Right now my difficulty is just so much milk. I have a duct under my right armpit bulging out full of milk.  I have considered pumping since I am so full but that didn't seem to be recommended yet based on what I read and what the nurses said. 
• Poly was mostly unaware we even brought someone else in the house. She was peeping her the day after when she was in her carrier and Ella moved her arm and Poly jumped back. It was interesting to see Ella scare Poly.
• So far I am waking Ella every 3 hours or so throughout the night (and day) mostly. She is supposed to eat every 2-3 hours and we are supposed to wake her up. This makes getting sleep for me more difficult but she has been excellent so far with this so I haven't tried to alter the doctors and videos recommendations. 
• We've only given her a pacifier twice. One time was at the hospital when a nurse was suggesting it and gave us one. I forget why at that point. Then there was another time in the car. 
• Ella screams when getting into the car but then falls asleep. 
• Her hats always seem to come off when she's sleeping.
• Her length at birth was 19.5 but 4 days later at the doctor she was 20. I saw the 20 measurement so know that one is accurate. 
• She was born 6 lb 15 oz. Then weighed 6 lb 11 oz, 6 lb 8.2 oz, and 6 lb 8.3 oz  on the following days at the hospital. She only lost 5% of her body weight and was increasing. The following day at the hospital she was 6 lb 11.9 oz. Granted this was a measurement around noon right before eating which is not consistent with the midnight to 1 am weights the previous 3 days.
• I cannot believe how much Dave has taken to her. He never said babies were cute before and he's talking about how cute she is now. He will kiss her forehead and it just melts my heart. I have a few pictures of him and he's smiling more than I've ever seen him smile. It's crazy. He can't wait until we pump and introduce a bottle so he can feed her. (So he can bond with her not so he gets an additional task.)
• We have a ton of Huggies newborn diapers but hate them. She was always leaking onto the crib with them. We bought a small package of pampers and no leaks. Now we are almost out of those pampers and need to buy more.  We have a ton of size 1 diapers and before we bought the pampers newborn we were using those. At the hospital they supplied us with pampers size 1 so that's why we used those. I'm not sure how long she'll still be wearing newborn size. 

I'm amazed at how much Ella has changed over the past week.

• She is more aware of her hands and now hates them to be swaddled. 
• She's lifting up her head.  
• She likes to sleep on her side.
• She is really good at getting her arms out of a swaddle now. She's even better at it each time Dave swaddles her.

I meant to focus this post on Ella but I talked about me a bit.

I took these pictures specifically for hitting a week old. I just didn't plan ahead so I'm not wearing any makeup.

Photo of the Day: Wedding (8.21.10)

Here's a picture of Dave and me at my cousin's wedding. It was extremely hot so I didn't wear my cardigan.  I never did blog about that wedding. I still want to because there were some crazy stories about the people who were sitting at our table.

I take 300+ pictures at the wedding but there are no full body ones of me enjoying myself.

Photo of the Day: 7.1.10

I bought a Nike+ a few years ago and used it just a couple times. (I hated the thing. It was too inaccurate. I gave it away.) But when I did use it, Poly sure liked to follow the little runner go across the screen. Isn't Poly cute?

You can see my eye-fi card automatically uploading photos in the corner. I sure miss that. With my current setup it only does that when I plug in the card to my computer. This house just doesn't like to work for the wireless upload so much. I'm not sure what the deal is but at least I can just plug in a memory card and it uploads to the proper folders and whatnot.   This was also back in the day when I only had 1 monitor and it was probably 2 sizes ago from what I'm currently using.

Naming Background

12/20 Dave was talking to Ella.

I told Dave I should write a post about how we came up with the name once we actually finalize a middle name. Then he said he should write a guest post.   I thought a better idea is that we should both write the same story and see what aligns.

Dave's version:
Colleen and I were sitting in the office and I was thinking of what to name our daughter. I had previously decided that for a girl I'd name her Ainsley after the character in the West Wing who was a Republican counsel for the Democratic White House and had to stand up to a lot of prejudice and was a very strong woman. Also, it was a good Irish name. Colleen wasn't too excited about the name so I was looking on a baby name web site. There were a lot of name. So I just said pick a number from 1-100, and Colleen picked 18. #18 most popular name in 2012 was Ella so that was the name we picked. We also looked through all the other names on that list and didn't like any of them better.

Next, I was interested in the middle name. I decided that it would be super if the initials were fun because some people have some nice combinations of names and initials at work for their user names. Mine is dlm which is not very interesting. I thought it would be good if the initial spelled a word, so I used this command in Linux to see 3-letter words that start with e and end with m.

$ grep -i ^e.m$ /usr/share/dict/words

The only one was elm so then we knew we wanted to start the middle name with L. Now the problem with having a middle name that starts with L after a name Ella is that Ella has two L-sounding syllables and it's short. So the idea was to pick a long name (in contrast to the short name Ella) so that it would sound good and also one that didn't sound like "la" or "el". There weren't a lot of choices. We also considered a bunch of names that were not starting with L to see if they'd be good. We didn't have a name picked out when Colleen went into labor so while she was in the surgery room getting her spinal, I just decided we'd go with Lindsay and I told her in the recovery room and she was okay with that. She said she narrowed it down to that and another one so she was on the same page as me.

12/20 Holding a swaddled Ella for the first time.

My version:
So many months ago I said our child should have initials that spell a word. I've had CMC and CMM and neither one spell anything cool. So I had that thought but without a name in place. We didn't even know if we were having a boy or a girl.  Dave said he had a name picked out if we were having a boy or a girl. He's actually said both names for many years but now one of them is really popular. I won't repeat them just in case we use them for future kids but maybe he'll repeat them in his story.  I did say that if we had a girl it was less important to spell a word because she'd likely change her name then spelling a word would be pointless.

Then one day I'm sitting at my computer and Dave says pick a number 1 to 100 so I pick 18. He said alright if we have a girl her name will be Ella. Then he went to the boy page and asked me to pick another number. I refused and said this was a stupid way to pick a name. We didn't know if we were having a boy or a girl yet at this point.  Dave then read all the names on the list and said Ella is the best name on the list anyway.

I thought Ella should have more thought but it was nice. I wasn't set on the name but Dave was. Then he started telling his coworkers and such. He said the more people he told the more I couldn't pick a different name. He did this even after we talked about how we don't want to announce a name early because people make so many comments about it when you do that and so many new parents recommended not sharing the name until the baby is born.

So then to jump back to my initials spelling a word idea, the only word that initials can spell in elm. So that began looking for a middle name that starts with L. I went to many sites that list baby names that begin with L. I'd email Dave my favorites from different links even if i didn't fully love them. But he didn't like any of them. Then he'd send me or say to me some names with an L and I didn't like any of them.  After many days of this and many sites we decided to look at all names that begin with any letter. I started a google doc and at the top of the page Dave would type in names that he liked. After a few enters I had my list.  We didn't have any names overlap.  But then this document sat there for weeks and no decision was made at all.

A few days before the c-section, I kept saying we had to pick a name but we still didn't do anything  I looked at the google doc again and realized there weren't even that many names on there. I remembered Dave emailed my mom that we had it narrowed down to 2. Well my mom emailed asking if we decided and his reply was about the 2 names.  I had a few I liked and he didn't so I ruled them out. Dave said he liked Juliette but that didn't fit spelling a word and since I wasn't in love with it, I decided that wouldn't work.

Then Friday morning I went into labor. We still didn't have a name picked out.  Once I got out of recovery Dave said he decided on Lindsay. I said OK.  So it was decided.

12/25 Just before the end of her nap

Well there you have it. Two pretty similar stories on how Ella got her name.

First Onesie in Action

Dec 28, 2013

There have been a lot of onesies made for our baby but I also made some for a friend.  Neil got to wear them first so here's the first onesie in action.  Neil is the son of my friend Jen.  Isn't he just so cute?

I mailed her 3 onesies. Two of which were messed up. This is the one that isn't but also the only one in size 12 month. The other ones were 18 month onesies. By messed up I mean I forgot to sew on the fabric that I ironed on so she has to find the time in her busy schedule to do that. And the other one I lined up to be straight with the sleeves but then overall the image is crooked.  In a few months he'll probably wear them and I'll make her send me a picture so I can share.  I was awful so it'd get there sooner, I made her pre-wash them. After you paint, you need to wait 3 days to pre-wash them. I figured that'd take too long. Now that I think about it, mailing was only a couple days since it wasn't a huge package so it wouldn't have been a big deal to delay going to the post office. Oh well. 

I love how he's dressed in blue. I wanted a blue onesie for the superman but cheaper onesies in colors are hard to find in larger sizes. I also was going to paint yellow on the logo but figured that would add more areas for me to mess up.  You can see this onesie along with the others I sent her at the bottom of my other onesie post.

For Jen's baby shower, I made an afghan. Here's the afghan being used too. This was back in July but I never posted it. 

Welcome, Ella Lindsay

Ella Lindsay was born on December 20 at 6:58 AM via c-section. She was 6 lb 15 oz and 19.5 inches long.  Here are a few pictures.   I will post more and the full story later.  I am still in the hospital.

The picture of the 3 of us was in the recovery room.