Do you ever get the feeling that your kids think you're not all that bright?

Amanda likes cereal. She's pretty particular about what kind of cereal, which is understandable. But it's the way she asks for cereal that always gets me. She says very slowly: I want ceh-whoa in a bow with milk in it and a foon. For those of you who don't speak three-year-old, that means: I want cereal in a bowl with milk in it and a spoon.

She asks for it the same way every single time. I'm sure it's just her way of learning and explaining what's going on in her world. Or for all I know, maybe she thinks that's a really unique way to eat cereal. But still, it sometimes makes me feel like a complete moron. I mean we have ceh-whoa in a bow with milk in it and a foon several times a week. I'm not a very good cook but I know how to make ceh-whoa!

I just can't help imagining that Amanda is thinking she better really spell it out for me because if she let me handle it on my own I'd pour the cereal on a plate so that the water I poured all over it would spill on the floor…and then I'd hand her a fork and say, "Have at it!"

Nope, it's not just gas

To think that only days ago I was excited about the fact that Alyssa was finally starting to get the hang of this being awake thing. Yes, we were lucky if she kept her eyes open for more than twenty minutes at a time. And yes, the only difference between her awake time and her sleep time was the fact that her eyes were open. I liked to pretend it was more than that though… I liked to imagine that she was actually choosing to give up her precious sleep time to hang out with us.

So the other morning I was changing her diaper and yammering on and on about who knows what, and she looked up at me with an expression very similar to the one you see above.

Yep, she smiled. And smiled. And then she smiled some more.

It felt like time froze for just a moment while I locked eyes with her and just reveled in that smile. Honestly, I've been enjoying Alyssa's company immensely all along, but she's been such a serious little thing. No matter what kind of goofy thing we'd do to amuse the kid, she'd just stare at us with a stern expression, then eventually yawn and go to sleep. I'm pretty sure we're at least mildly entertaining every now and then but she's been a really tough audience. So I can't even explain how thrilling those first smiles were. It was nice to have some acknowledgment that she's enjoying herself at least a bit.

I'm pretty sure it will be quite a while before Alyssa masters the ability to roll her eyes or she would have done it a second later when I started bouncing up and down and screaming like an idiot, "She's smiling, she's smiling!!! Amanda look… Alyssa's smiling!"

Since then, she has repeated the performance a few times. She just beamed and beamed at her big sister for what seemed like an eternity and she's blessed her dad with a few grins too. But trust me, she's no pushover. She refuses to smile on command.

Clearly she's going to make us work for it, but that's okay. It's definitely worth the effort. Just look at the picture above and I think you'll agree.

Why the blog?

When I was pregnant with Amanda I kept a pregnancy journal. I recorded all the details: how we shared the news, all my cravings, how I felt the first time I felt her move, how we chose her name. I even wrote her sappy letters. Pregnant women are hormonal and highly emotional, okay?

When I was pregnant with Alyssa... NOTHING.

After nine months, the mommy-guilt kicked in. I've been teased quite a bit about the fact that pretty much every minute of Amanda's babyhood was recorded on film or in writing. And I started getting nervous about the day that Alyssa spied Amanda flipping through volume 8 of her first year and asked, "Hey, what about ME?" Trust me, as baby number four in my family, I've been giving my mom grief about this for years.

So that's why I started this blog, figuring that if it was a public thing I would be more likely to keep it up-to-date, keep taking new pictures, and writing down the stories. Except that I'm not really wild about the idea of this actually being "public". You know public like weirdos-looking-at-pictures-of-my-kids public or public like strangers-telling-me-that-stories-about-baby-poop-aren't-nearly-as-fascinating-as-I-think-they-are public. I was thinking public like grandmas-and-aunts-and-people-who-think-my-kids-are-truly-adorable public. So if you know about this blog, hopefully it's because you fall into that category.

Welcome to my blog. Oh and don't worry, I know the poop stories aren't fascinating. I'll try to keep them to a minimum.

She's a month old today.

• one hospital bill for $14,849
• three hundred forty-eight trips to the boob
• one hundred and six loads of laundry
• four Sunday papers
• not nearly enough hours of sleep
• five trips to the doctor (and one trip to the emergency room)
• nine hundred sixty-four photographs
• five million diapers
• thirty-one days with her (the best part)
  
  (Please note that a few of these statistics are rough estimates or wild exaggerations.)

Thought for the day

Don't make it more complicated than it needs to be.

And it applies to just about anything you can think of. I'll be repeating that phrase to myself a lot.

Another doctor appointment

Does it seem like all we do lately is go to the doctor? Today we had yet another appointment for Alyssa. Happy to say this was a well-baby visit. She is now 9 lbs. 11 oz. and 22 inches long which puts her into the 75th percentile for both height and weight. I can't believe she's grown two inches in only four weeks. Seems like so much but the doctor compared her growth to Amanda's and Amanda was a whole lot bigger at this age.

Turns out that the awful rash I've been wondering about for days is just typical run-of-the-mill newborn acne. It's because of the hormones she got from me and definitely nothing to worry about. (And no, Mom, it has nothing to do with me eating too much chocolate... though I probably have been eating too much chocolate... I confirmed with the doctor that my chocolate intake has nothing to do with her bad skin. But thank you for asking!)

My other cute kid

How sweet is this baby???

It just figures

Alyssa is definitely my kid. She woke up on "picture day" covered in zits. Newborn baby acne... Oh the cruelty. Hopefully this won't happen in junior high. Okay, it's not actually picture day in any official sense, but today I was in the mood to take pictures... which happens frequently, but I was actually organized enough (empty memory cards, camera battery charged, back drops ready to go, well-fed, happy baby) to do it before the best light went away. So anyway, I went ahead with the picture taking, zits and all. Sorry Alyssa. You still look adorable to me.

Amanda's doctor appointment

Amanda had her check-up today. As expected, she's doing just fine. She weighs 34 lbs. and is 38 inches tall, putting her in the 75th percentile for both. When asked, she informed the doctor that of course she talks to strangers and why yes, if one asked her to get into their car she would hop right in. Yeah, clearly we need to have a discussion there. Other than that, the doctor was wildly impressed with her verbal skills and she passed all her developmental tests with flying colors. Not that I was concerned. For instance, the doctor put a piece of paper on the ground and asked Amanda if she could jump over it. I knew that would be easy-peasy since I caught her jumping over her sister just the night before. Then she asked Amanda to copy what she was drawing and proceeded to draw a straight line. Umm the kid is drawing anatomically correct humans now ('til recently Mommy had boobies and a baby in her tummy and you can guess what Daddy has), she can probably handle a straight line. She did ask Amanda if she could pee in a cup and Amanda said no way, no how and refused to budge on the subject. Stand on one foot? Sure. Stack a bunch of blocks? No problem. Pee in a cup? Don't be stupid. Maybe next year.

Follow-up doctor visit

Alyssa's follow-up visit went just fine. I don't think they have a clue what the problem was but since the CT results were normal it seems we don't need to worry. The doctor told us to continue watching for the same signs they mentioned at the hospital and we'll go back to the doctor next week.

I went through some old pictures of Amanda when she was about the same age as Alyssa and her eyes had that same "sunsetting" look in many shots, so maybe it's just a weird family trait or something.

Oh and I totally forgot to mention Alyssa's eye infection yesterday. The reason we ended up going to the doctor in the first place turned out to be nothing but a clogged tear-duct. They told us to massage it a bit and wipe it with a warm wash cloth and it looks totally fine now.

The scariest day of my life

Alyssa woke up yesterday morning with what looked like an eye infection in her left eye. It was oozing and a little crusty... eek. I got her into the doctor at 10:00. Yep, that's our second Saturday doctor visit and this kid isn't even three weeks old yet.

We saw a doctor we'd never seen before and one of the first things she mentioned was the big lump on Alyssa's head, the totally obvious one, probably from the vacuum used during delivery. I asked her if we should be concerned about the lump because of its size or because it hasn't gone away yet and she said, "Oh no! They called my brother 'Coconut Head' for the first couple of months because he had one. It's normal. You have no reason to be concerned. It will go away."

So that was a relief.

But then she just kept rubbing Alyssa's head for what seemed like an eternity. Not saying anything, just rubbing her head and looking into her eyes. No biggie, except it just went on and on. I got a little nervous but kept telling myself maybe it was her way of soothing the baby or something, though Alyssa was calm as could be. Or maybe she just loves babies and rubbing their heads? Anyway Scott and I were shooting each other strange looks when the doctor finally started asking questions... about Alyssa's sleeping patterns and eating patterns. Is she irritable? No. Does she spit up? Yes. Has she spit up forcefully? Yeah, funny that you ask, she did yesterday. Have we noticed anything strange about her eyes? Again, funny that you ask, but I thought her sister's eyes had looked strange too so I thought it was just a baby thing.

So then the doctor used the phrase, "I don't want to alarm you, but..."

I think it was at that point that I began feeling truly alarmed. Even horrified, terrified and scared out of my mind. And it only got worse from there. According to the doctor, the soft spot on Alyssa's head was swollen (the big lump in back was no big deal, the small lump in front was a very big deal) and she had "sunsetting" of the eyes. They occasionally look a bit bulgy and you can see a lot of white above the iris. You can't see the bottom of the iris at all (picture a sunset), so that combined with the vomiting and other things we'd mentioned had her very concerned. There might be swelling in her brain... Breathe... She told us we needed to go to Children's Hospital Emergency for tests... Breathe, breathe, breathe... and there was a good chance that she would be admitted for the night. Breathe, breathe...

The doctor was very comforting: holding my hand, rubbing my back, talking in the most soothing way. I wavered between loving her because she had such a wonderful bedside manner and just being truly horrified because she thought we needed so much comfort. Clearly this was BAD. Poor woman knew she'd really upset me and seemed to feel horrible about it. I can't imagine being a doctor and having to give people bad news.

So then we had to start figuring out the logistics of this thing. Directions to the hospital. Should we take Amanda with us or try to find a babysitter? Scott's mom was scheduled to arrive sometime that day but we weren't sure when. My sister and my two nieces were planning to come to my house that afternoon so I could take pictures of them all dressed up for Katie's homecoming banquet. We were supposed to have a surprise birthday dinner at our house the following day for Scott's grandfather's 85th birthday. Trying to figure out the details on all that stuff seemed like a good way to avoid thinking about what we didn't want to think about anyway.

We headed for the hospital and started making phone calls on the way. Despite my best efforts to remain cool, calm and collected, I was a mess. I called my sister Darin to tell her the photo-shoot was off and she immediately offered to meet us at the hospital which hadn't even occurred to me... I kept saying no because I figure she would need to help the girls get ready for Homecoming but I finally said yes, please come. So glad I did too. I wonder how the day would have gone differently if she hadn't been there. She shows up and I calm down immediately.

It was an unbelievably long day. Alyssa was poked and prodded and was not allowed to eat in case she'd have to go into surgery, but she was a total trooper. Thank you Alyssa!!! I know I would have been a whole lot more freaked out if she hadn't been so calm. We waited what seemed like forever for her to get a CT scan – the test that would hopefully tell us what was wrong. She kept getting bumped down the list because trauma patients take precedence. I was nervous about it taking so long because the nurse had explained that you have to lie perfectly still for the CT scan which is no big deal for someone older, but the hope is that an infant will sleep through it. Since Alyssa slept most of the day and had nothing to eat, I was afraid by the time she got her turn she'd be wide-awake and starving. And if they weren't able to keep her still she would be brought back to our room to wait for another turn, when she'd be even hungrier!

The nurse had also explained that parents aren't allowed in the room during the CT scan, but when Alyssa finally got her turn, the nurse let me stay with her because she said I was the calmest mother of an 18-day-old she'd seen in her entire career. I said, "Yeah? You should have seen me on the drive over. I was a disaster!" I just kept telling myself, "Calm mommy, calm baby," Alyssa only cried for a minute or two and then, though she was wide awake, she laid perfectly still for the entire scan. Thank you again, Alyssa!

It took an hour to get the results back from the scan. And the results were normal. NORMAL. Normal, normal, normal. Can you feel my relief? She's fine. Alyssa is fine.

Of course they want to follow-up on this. We need to watch her carefully and take her back to the hospital if we see anything out of the ordinary: sleeping too much, unusual irritability, vomiting, fever. And we need to go back to the doctor tomorrow. But the fact that the CT scan was normal means everything.

My baby girl is fine. And I have never been so grateful for anything in my entire life.