Samantha's first blog

pamelamyers | June 29, 2010

Sam went to the doctor today for her 9 month checkup.  As always, she is doing great!  She weighs 18 lbs 5 oz and is 28″ long.  She is growing right on schedule.  The doctor and I discussed how she is eating, that she is crawling, and her sleeping habits. We both agree that as soon as this latest round of teething is done, she needs to be trained to stop waking up at night.  I am going to work on that soon.  She is definitely old enough to be sleeping through.  I think she is waking up and wanting food purely out of habit now, rather than hunger, and that’s probably a lot my fault. She cries, I go in and give her a bottle because that’s what I’ve always done.  Well, she is in for a rude awakening because I am ending that soon! 

The doctor also asked me if she has made any mama or dada sounds yet (the answer is sadly, no…sigh), but I did mention that she likes the Ga, Wa, and Ba sounds.  The doc told me that Ga is a hard sound for a baby, so it is good that she is doing a pretty difficult one and that mama and dada will come.  I really think after we got home tonight she was doing some R’s, but I am not sure.

One of the last things checked were her teeth.  The left top tooth is definitely in like I thought, but the right top one is still not through her gums.  The doctor said it’s right there ready to break through.  Soon, I hope!

The best news, in Sam’s opinion, is that she got no shots today.  She only had a little toe prick so they could get a drop of blood to make sure she is not anemic, which she is not.   She didn’t cry, which was good.  She was more upset when her head circumference was measured — she hates having that tape measure around her head for some reason.

All in all, she is growing wonderfully, and the doctor said to just keep up what we are doing, give her more table food to help her along, and to keep up the good work!  Her next visit isn’t until she’s a year old, which seems like far away, but I know it will be here before I know it!

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pamelamyers | June 27, 2010

Samantha hasn’t been sleeping well lately.  Well, actually, it’s been more than lately, it’s been a while, but just recently it’s been getting bad.  She was on a really good twice a day nap schedule, about 1.5 hours at a stretch, and she has always gone down at night really easily.  She is still not sleeping through the night (that only lasted about 2 weeks then the teething started and she was up all night) and she hasn’t seemed to be able to get back into it again.  But she was back to waking up only once at night, so it wasn’t too bad.  Lately, she has been waking up a lot, crying for no reason, fussing, and just otherwise not happy.  And she is getting very difficult to put down at night and sometimes refusing her naps. She has been making me crazy!  To make matters worse, she has been giving me a hard time lately with her bottle.  Since she’s been eating more solids, the amount of formula she drinks has gone down, which is normal, but sometimes I feel like she is just not getting near enough.  And I know the less she drinks during the day, the more she will be up at night.  Just to give you an idea, for months she was drinking 25-27 ounces a day, then at her maximum, she was drinking about 37 ounces per day.  Now she is back to about 25-27, but sometimes I can only get her to drink about 20, which I don’t think is enough.  But on a positive note, she has finally started feeding herself some table food!  She will put her Cheerios in her mouth on her own now.  She started doing it on Thursday and she looks so cute.  Half of them wind up not going all the way in her mouth, but she tries.

At any rate, we thought she might be teething again.  My mom said she thought that the other day she saw some white on the top of her gums. We looked today and a tooth had pushed through!  My poor little bunny, it is no wonder she has been a cranky baby.  She is doing so much better this time than the last time she was getting teeth when it was just awful how sad she was.  So tonight when I was putting her to bed I promised her that I would not get upset with her if she wouldn’t go to sleep, and that if she did fall asleep I’d hold her for a long time and not put her in the crib right away.  True to my word, I held her, rocked her, and made her giggle for about 20 minutes before she’d even settle down enough to drink her bottle, then when she finally did and fell asleep in my arms in the glider, I held her for 15-20 minutes while she slept before depositing her safely and snugly in her crib.

I have a feeling the other top tooth will not be far behind, then maybe she will get a break before the next ones come in.  As soon as they come in we’ll take some pics!

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pamelamyers | June 27, 2010

This weekend we took Sam to the pool again.  We decided to buy her a swim ring so that we didn’t have to hold her in a death grip the entire time.  It is hard for us to have fun when we can’t let go of her the entire time, and Sam gets really tired of being held constantly.  She is such a wiggle worm all the time.  Ever since she learned to crawl, she just wants to move and she doesn’t tolerate being held for very long. 

I saw a kind that has a mesh seat in the middle for little ones so I bought her one of those.  I also liked that it has a sunshade since she is so fair.  Well, the verdict is in.  She LOVES the swim ring.  She didn’t know what to make of it at first, but once she realized that she was safe, and could move on her own, she took to it like, well…water (ha ha).  In the shallow end of the baby pool, she can touch the bottom with her feet, and she pushes off and goes sailing down the pool so fast!  It is adorable.  One minute she is right in front of us and the next she is 4 feet away and we are chasing her down.  Sometimes she lays back on one of the pillowy parts and kicks her feet up and just hangs out laying back like she’s in a lounge chair.  When I went to buy this at Target it was a nightmare shopping experience that I won’t bore everyone with but it was totally worth every second of annoyance in the store to see how much fun she was having this weekend.

In a couple of these, you can see her little feet hanging down.  She is having such a blast playing with her pool toys.

Here she is hanging out with me and her Grandmom.

Here we all are having fun. 🙂  I think we look pretty happy in our shades chilling in the water.

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pamelamyers | June 25, 2010

…quickly deteriorated into chaos.  Yesterday was a normal Thursday morning, I took Sam to my mom’s and I headed off to work.  Nothing in the forecast but the threat of gusty thunderstorms, but it is summer in Pennsylvania, so what else is new?  My mom had called me early that morning to tell me the news that Sam was feeding herself Cheerios!  We were all so excited about this.  She has just started eating very limited amounts of table food, but we always have to put the food in her mouth, she will never do it herself. So this was a big step for her.  We are proud of you, Sam. 🙂

At around 3:00, Mark sent me a message that it was incredibly dark and thunder was booming and it looked like we were going to get hit really hard with a storm.  About 20 minutes later, he called me from his cell phone to tell me the power was out and we were in the midst of a big storm.  I left work at 3:45 as usual just wanting to get home without getting too wet, and hoping the power would be back on soon since it was so hot, about 90 degrees, and we really needed the air conditioning.  Well, no such luck.  At 4:00  SEPTA announced that not only was the R3 not running, but the R1, R2, and R5 train lines were also dead in the water.  The train station was chaotic as everyone tried to get home.  I took the Market Frankford El to 69th Street Terminal and then jumped on a bus headed to Springfield Mall where Mark was going to pick me up.  At any rate, after what seemed like hours…no, wait, it WAS hours, I got back home at a little after 6:00.  Still, no power.  We did the best we could with the heat, but it was horrible, and Samantha was a basket case.  As I have mentioned before, she really cannot take the heat, and it was absolutely oppressive in our house.  Mark ran to his parents’ house and picked up their old generator that they are not using any more, and quickly had the AC going in our bedroom and the freezer downstairs plugged in.  He was smart enough to run out and buy a bunch of bags of ice and we packed them into our refrigerator to try to keep the rest of the food cold.  Sam, despite being miserable, finally went to sleep at 9:00 in her Pack and Play in our bedroom.  We wound up going to bed at 10:00 ourselves.  Still no power.  We all had sort of a restless night because it’s hard to sleep when things are so unsettled, but we all did ok.  It’s funny, last night was the very first night Sam ever slept in our room.  Even when she was a baby she always has slept in her own room.  Let’s hope she doesn’t think this is a permanent arrangement!

I called PECO at 3:00 a.m. and the message was finally changed from basically, “we have no idea when it will be fixed because we can’t find the problem” to “we are trying to restore your power by 11:00 a.m.”  When we woke up this morning, still no power, but we had hope!  Well, 11:00 came and went and no power.  So we went out to get something to eat at a local diner that thankfully had power and was up and running.  (Incidentally, what was even more infuriating was that our next door neighbors on one side and the houses after that one, as well as the houses on the street behind us, had power almost the entire time.  Grrrr!!!!!)  We got home from the diner at around noon, and YAY!!! at 12:20 our power came back on!  I am always running around the house turning off lights that have been left on but I was never so happy to see lights on in the house as I was at that moment.  It was funny, I was sitting on the floor with Sam throwing her up in the air and she was giggling.  Have you ever seen Monster’s Inc.?  In that movie, the monsters need to scare children because their screams are what powers the monster world.  By the end of the movie, they figure out that laughter is even more powerful.  It was like Monster’s Inc….Sam was laughing and the lights went on.

Anyway, after 21 hours without power, the Myers family, Mark, Pam, Sam and Zephyr, survived the storm of June 24, 2010 unscathed.  A little battle weary, but pretty much ok.  Mark set up the generator to keep us cool, thought to buy ice to keep our food from spoiling, and had a calm and clear head the entire night.  He was our hero. 🙂

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pamelamyers | June 22, 2010

As I think I have mentioned before, Sam does not like her vegetables.  She is doing pretty well with eating her fruits, and as I posted before, she just started on Cheerios.  But vegetables…no.  She would take one, maybe two mouthfuls then clamp her little mouth shut so the spoon couldn’t go in again.  It was getting really frustrating.  Frankly, I was dreading her 9 month appointment at the pediatrician this Friday because they always ask me about her eating habits and how do I explain my daughter isn’t eating veggies?  I do keep trying all the time though because what else can I do?  Week after week I have been throwing away mostly full jars of veggies because you can only keep them for three days.

Last week I tried a new vegetable — summer vegetable dinner by Earth’s Best.  It’s a crazy combination of a bunch of things — corn, zucchini, green beans, brown rice, carrots and garbanzo beans.  She liked it!  I was so excited.  She ate almost half a jar with her oatmeal and never once made her blech face.  I gave it to her for a few meals after that and every time she ate really well.  Tonight I tried another Earth’s Best (she seems to like their flavor combos the best) — green beans and rice.  I gave her plain old green beans before and it was not a good experience.  Tonight she ate every bit I gave her, plus oatmeal, then she had even more beans — half a jar total!  I was so proud of my girl.  I think her taste buds have finally matured to the extent that she can handle the taste of things that are more complicated than “sweet”.  Tomorrow she will hopefully finish the green beans, then we are on to the next veggie — let’s hope for the best!

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