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Misc. and stuff

• Went to the pediatrician yesterday — Johnny is 28 lbs. and 34.5″ tall and has a 50 or 51cm head. Hah! And he’s doing well, which we knew.
• Went to the midwife today. Dunno my weight, but it’s fine. BP is fine, pee is fine, baby’s heartbeat is fine. Scheduled our ultrasound for Saturday, July 17! I am so excited for this! Jes has hers on June 12 and Karen’s is June 15. Who is next?
• Oh, and something about the midwife’s office (maybe the fact that it’s in a hospital?) freaks Johnny out. He cries hard when they take my blood pressure or use the dopplar. It’s like he’s afraid they’re hurting me or something! Aww. OR he’s afraid he’s about to get a shot. Who knows. But he’s always happy to get outta there.
• My Bible in 90 Days reading is going well! I want to elaborate a little so I’m breaking out of the bullet points.

Big-boy beds are overrated

Ugh! Johnny is a big boy in terms of size, but mentally he just isn’t ready for a big-boy bed. It takes awhile to get him to sleep again. We had a month or so where he’d go to sleep extremely easily and we wouldn’t hear from him again until a reasonable hour in the morning (though sometimes he’d wake once).

He DID sleep in his “new” bed all night once already. So that was a victory.

But the rest of the nights so far, he sleeps for a little and then comes blazing to the door, or flying out of the room looking for me if we didn’t put the gate up. It’s like he’s terrified of the situation.

In an effort to get some more sleep myself, I’ve gone back to sleeping on the guest bed in his room after he wakes up, but it’s still not a smooth night’s sleep.

I think we just need to get through this adjustment phase and it might take some time. I’m going to see about getting a better nightlight in case that helps some.

I miss our crib.

A post for Baby2

With Johnny, I blogged through my pregnancy week by week. I was a first-timer and everything was new to me! I haven’t blogged much about this new baby, and I don’t want him or her to feel bad about that.

So here’s a post for you, Baby2.

I don’t want to compare you with your big brother. You are both my children, but you are not the same child. You will hopefully have things in common — similar interests, perhaps similar physical features. But I also think you will have some different interests and personalities. You aren’t your brother’s clone! You’re an individual.

When I DO bring up Johnny in regards to you, it’s not that I’m trying to compare you. I’m just drawing on my past experiences.

For example, I only had a few days worth of what I could call “morning sickness” when I was pregnant with Johnny. With you, Baby2, I haven’t had even a tiny bit. Thank you! You are sweet!

I have had a tiny bit of food aversions in the early weeks. Didn’t want to look at or handle raw meat. And certain food smells had me running for the door. Nothing I couldn’t handle.

The only real difference I can see so far is my skin breaks out like crazy and my hair looks pretty lousy. Both things looked better when I was pregnant with Johnny. The old wives would say that this symptom means you’re a girl, because you’re stealing my beauty away. Could be!

Or, because Johnny is still nursing some, my hormones are all over the place. It’s hard telling.

You’re too small for me to feel you move yet, for sure. There have been a few tiny bubbly feelings, but I can’t guarantee that it’s you. In a few more weeks, I imagine you’ll poke me to say hello. We’ll also soon be able to find out if you’re a boy or a girl, and after that then we can work on a name for you.

It will be a secret from everyone except your daddy and me. That way, everyone can have a little surprise once you’re born!

I am truly excited to meet you and watch you grow. Being pregnant a second time is WAY more fun, in my opinion! With Johnny, I was learning on the job. Still am. But with you, Baby2, you will come home to a much more experienced mama and daddy. Your big brother had to put up with quite a bit of trial-and-error! Still does.

And it’s not to say what worked for him will work for you. I don’t expect it to. It’s just, this time, I have much more confidence in my ability to be a mom. Even if I have to figure things out on my own, or call the pediatrician or another mom, or do something in the exact opposite way as I have done in the past, I have more confidence about the whole thing in general. I trust myself more. With you, I think I will be much more laid back.

I don’t know what it’s like to parent two kiddos at the same time. That will be interesting. But don’t worry. I’ll keep you close to me in a cozy sling. Your big brother is a sweet guy, and he likes to give hugs and kisses and he’s pretty good at sharing. He will be so excited to be your brother! He’s too young to understand that you’re coming, but once you are born and we bring you home, I think he’ll figure it out pretty fast.

You will have plenty of hand-me-downs, and that’s OK. In our household, we believe in second-hand items. It’s good for the environment and good for our finances. You’ll have a few new things, and you won’t lack for anything, trust me.

I sometimes forget how many weeks along I am, or how many weeks + how many days. I try not to dwell on it, because it is still six months until December. That’s sort of a long time right now. But don’t take that to mean that I don’t think of you every day. I do. I think about all the fun we’ll have together, and how much excitement you’ll bring to our home.

I think about holding you in just one arm, and having you fall asleep in the crook of my elbow. And how you’ll smile at us for the first time. And how you’ll fit into those tiny widdle t-shirts and diapers I have for you. You won’t be tiny long, and I will try to enjoy that time!

And THEN I think about you crawling after Johnny, or running after him, and rolling a ball to him, and playing at the park…oh we’re going to have a blast!

We are so honored to have you join our family. Love you already!

18 months

So the Jonathan is 18 months old. That’s 1.5 years. What.

I think in future years, we’ll play up his half birthday with a small celebration — maybe cake and ice cream and a present or two.

This year, we got him a wooden puzzle for toddlers. You know, you just lay the piece over the cutout. But THIS one makes animal noises when you match it up right. It also makes noises whenever it wants.

He also got a floor rug that has little streets, railways and buildings on it. I’ve been wanting one of those for him for awhile. He loves playing with cars and this will be fun for him in the coming years.

He’s saying a lot more. Lemme see if I can think of all the words: mama, daddy, up, down, car, apple (very clear pronunciation on that one!), nana (banana), peas, cheese, cracker (but sounds an awful lot like daddy!) eat, bubble (he means water. Dunno), ball, cat, dog, Elmo, keys, ears, hair, nurse, aw man, hi, bye, uh-oh…maybe a few others?

He says some things that clearly have meaning to him, but I’m not in on the secret.

He likes to buckle things, like shopping cart buckles, the buckle for his high chair and anything else he can come across.

We did the kiddo shopping cart (the grocery cart with the little car attached to the front) the other day because he saw one in the cart corral and thought it was fun. It was just a quick shopping trip so I didn’t need a lot of cart space.

Oh man, that thing is hard to maneuver! He seemed to enjoy riding in it and beeping his horn, but he got sick of it after awhile. When I went to get him out of there, he had put the second seatbelt around him and clipped it. Lol!

Johnny had his first haircut recently, as I had mentioned. Since then, two people have asked if he was a girl or a boy. To be fair, one only saw him from the back of his head and he was wearing a white shirt…and today the lady couldn’t really see him over the deli counter. Weird!

He’s gotten a little bit picky about food lately. He used to eat whatever we put in front of him (and sometimes other things!) but now if he doesn’t recognize it, he says, “nah.” Don’t want it. Don’t wanna try it. And some of the things he used to like, he won’t touch now if he hasn’t seen it in awhile. Hopefully this phase will pass.

He LOVES apples and asks for them by name all the time. He prefers eating them whole, but with the peel cut off because he can’t really chew that. He’s a big fan of bananas too, and likes to hold it himself. He went uh, bananas one day when he saw a bowl full of them. He was saying NANA! and EAT! and patting his cheek like we used to do for the baby sign. But they weren’t ripe yet. Sorry!

He has 10-12 teeth now, depending on how you count them. The top 2 molars are still coming down, so once they’re in, it’s 12. And then next are the 4 what, bicuspids? And then another 4 molars and then we’ll be DONE with the teething bit.

He’s a climber and has recently started getting out of his crib again. So in an effort to protect him from serious injury, we took the crib rail off and turned it into the big boy bed (it’s supposed to do this). I know some people have success with crib nets, but I think that would just make him really furious and not sleep. So I don’t want to spend money on it.

Tonight is his first night with that setup. When we first showed him the crib, he was really excited and climbed in and out of it repeatedly, with such a cute little grin on his face. But when it came to bedtime, he wasn’t happy about it.

Actually, he hasn’t napped or gone to bed easily since our camping trip on Friday night. It does take awhile for him to get back on track.

We have our baby gate on the door frame at his door. I laid down next to his bed, but he wanted to cuddle. So I sorta laid on the crib mattress. Um. Pretty sure I’m over the weight limit. He was almost asleep, but just needed to be against me and have his hand on me. Just like the old days.

He fell asleep and I was able to slowly move away and I put a pillow against his body to help hopefully keep him from rolling out. We don’t have a rail or anything for the bed yet.

Hope he sleeps well!

We have a pediatrician visit next week so I can find out how much he weighs and how tall he is. He’s big and strong and adorable and we love him so much!

Our first family camping trip

I told Shane I didn’t want to talk about future camping trips until after we got home, I showered and took a nap. Those things have now happened and I’m ready to process it all.

First, I’d like to go camping again this summer.

But let me back up and do a recap of this whole little trip.

I had to spend almost all day Friday preparing. Finding sites that were available and close enough to get to after Shane got off work. Putting all our gear together. Making a list of things we still needed to get, and going to get those things.

Doesn’t sound that complicated, but for some reason it was really time-consuming!

Next time will be better because I will have almost everything except consumable things on hand and we’re trying to store it all together (in our storage locker, mostly! I don’t want to bring bugs into our apartment. We have enough of those as it is).

I can use my old list as a starting point. So that’s good.

We ended up staying at Raccoon Creek State Park because Shane had always wanted to visit there, and it was the closest campable state park as far as I could tell.

For $23/night, it wasn’t a bad deal. We stayed at site D15 in case you’re planning on visiting, too. It’s really close to the bath house (like, as close as you can get) and close to a fresh water spigot. But that means you also have people walking by at all hours.

We only had neighbors to one side and they were quiet. The back of the campsite was just woods and it was pretty.

Being a thick set of woods, it got dark there earlier than it would elsewhere. We were at our campsite at about 7:30-45 p.m. Friday and we were fighting daylight.

The tent was large and intimidating. The directions weren’t especially clear. We didn’t set up our tent in advance of our trip, as so many people had (wisely!) suggested. There’s nowhere to really do it at our apartment complex and we didn’t take the time to go to a park or something. I feel like we should have; Shane feels like it turned out ok.

Personally, I’d say to set up your tent in advance! Especially if you’re racing the clock!

It did turn out ok, but that was because a nice man saw that we were completely clueless and needed help. He sent his sons over and they put the tent together in no time, with Shane and I just sorta watching and trying to remember what they did.

If it wasn’t for them, it would have been very dark by the time we got it all together. I would have been crying and just pleading to go home because I get really stressed out over that sorta thing.

So thank God for those guys!

With the tent up, Shane and Johnny sat down for dinner (Chic-Fil-A…yeah.) I wanted to do something, so I set up the air mattress.

And then it was pretty much dark.

The campground itself didn’t sell firewood like we thought they would. You had to buy it at the boathouse (closed already) or from some guy down the street who has a sign for “Far wood.”

The lady at the check-in told us because we were backed against the woods, we could scavenge for dead branches. Shane wasn’t able to find anything dry enough. Sad. So no fire.

Good thing we weren’t planning on cooking anything major on a camp fire! We didn’t bring our grill because there really wasn’t a ton of space anyway. Not sure how we’ll fit it all in on future trips! We also didn’t bring our cooler, which isn’t THAT big. Instead, we brought Shane’s lunchbox and filled it with ice for drinks, and also packed our picnic basket and another bag of food.

I brought some card games and a book to read, but Johnny was acting pretty crabby and tired so it was time to try to get him to sleep. This was probably 9:30 or 10.

But…people in adjacent campsites didn’t seem to know that quiet hours started at 9. There were people talking until about 1 a.m. Ugggh. They weren’t speaking loudly at all, but sound just travels so well out there. So that stunk.

Oh, and if you’ve ever been around Johnny right before he falls asleep, then you know he sorta sings/chants as he winds down. It’s just a big loud, “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” at around the same pitch. Stress relief? I dunno. He’s done it forever. Didn’t even think about that being an issue until we tried to get him to go to sleep with the rest of the campground was relatively quiet.

I can only wonder what people must have thought! Sorry, peeps. We tried to keep him quiet (lots more nursing than I really wanted, but hey, it does shush him!) but he just needs to make that sound to fall asleep so there’s not a whole lot I could really do.

Raccoon Creek isn’t too far from the Pittsburgh airport, and unfortunately several planes were routed directly overhead. LOUD! Especially when you’re trying to sleep.

And then Rocky Raccoon kept coming by our tent and rubbing against it. GO AWAY! We didn’t have any food inside so there shouldn’t have been any enticing smells.

I asked the lady at the check-in if there had been any bear sightings lately. She sorta chuckled and said, “Well, I haven’t seen any bears.” When pressed, she said that there had been two cubs spotted recently on the other side of the park. Great. Not sure how recent it was.

We were told to keep our food in our car and to call 911 if we saw one. Fantastic!

Didn’t see any, whew!

So between the uncomfortable air mattress (which, Johnny fell of twice. Oops!), the talking people, the dead silence, the buzzing bugs stuck between the tent and the rain tarp, the raccoons, and the noise of the park ranger driving by throughout the night, it was a rough night’s sleep.

Shane woke me up at one point, telling me, “I’m about to fall off the bed! Move Johnny over!”

Since the air mattress was one big bubble instead of having air chambers, it didn’t distribute our weight well. Shane is the heaviest (for now. I will catch him/pass him up in December), Johnny sorta rolled toward him and was pressed against him.

Shane needed help to scoot him over, but we all just woke up anyway.

And then around 5 a.m., the birds were going nuts. They sounded so excited that it was morning! Like, heck yeah! I knew it would be here soon! Twittering like crazy. Facebooking, too.

So noisy. With the daylight growing, there was no way Johnny was going back to sleep. And that meant neither were we.

We tried our darndest to keep him quiet as long as possible, and I think we made it until about 7:30 or so and I saw other people up so I didn’t feel so bad then.

Breakfast was cereal and milk, raisins and bananas. And graham crackers, because Johnny spotted them and once that happens, you have to give him one.

I wanted to start tearing down camp a bit so we wouldn’t have as much work to do later. Did some of that, and then we went on a little walk.

We were pretty close to a trail that led to the beach, so Saturday morning we hiked on over. It was only .4 miles long, but steep in places so it was a good workout. The beach had a few swimmers and it was only 9 a.m.! It was muggy and already getting hot by that point.

The area had a little trickle of a creek, and Shane and Johnny threw some rocks in. Precious!

We stayed out there for a short bit and hiked on back to tear down the rest of our campsite. It went a lot better than the set-up! We even fit the tent in the bag on the first try. Whew.

Got out of there around 10:45 or so, and it was fun to drive back through the campground to see other people’s tents and what they were up to — riding bikes, cooking breakfast, throwing balls around.

Johnny was asleep before we got out of the park. We got home and he slept until I got him up at 5. Gee!

I showered and went to sleep for a few hours. My bed has never felt so good!

Shane thought the trip was a ton of fun and it felt like a mini-vacation.

I had a decent time, but I was too stressed out and busy with it all to really sit down and just breathe and enjoy it.

It would have been better if we got to the campsite much earlier in the day. I also think it would be more fun to camp with friends or family nearby.

We will go again sometime this summer. I want to buy a tent fan for some air circulation and a little bit of white noise. We’re used to sleeping to the sound of Johnny’s loud box fan, so the sounds of nature were hard to get used to!

Raccoon Creek was nice but I think we’ll go somewhere further from an airport next time. We’ve heard lots of good things about Ohiopyle so that might be next.

Oh, and I think a one-night camping stay is a good length for us right now. I honestly don’t know how I could convince Johnny to take a nap for several hours during the heat of the day, with so much commotion going on outside. Maybe if he was smaller he could be convinced in a travel swing or a sling, but not now. Plus, dealing with all that extra food.

It’s a lot of work for just one night, but if we get to the site early enough we could stay for about 24 hours, so that’s decent.

I hope next time feels more relaxing to me. Camping and outdoorsy stuff isn’t really my thing, but I need to suck it up and be a good sport.

Oh, best piece of gear? The headlamps! Shane loved them and I don’t think he even knew I bought them until I handed him one. The ones we have have 4 light settings: red, focused beam, floodlamp, and then super bright.

Pictures, taken Saturday morning:

View of the inside, peeking in the window.

Liked the hinge door and the little porch area. There’s a tent light for the roof but I forgot it .

Along the trail heading toward the beach.