Coach Kirstin

I'm going to start shifting away from our weekly posts and become more ad hoc, as it was before. Also because I won't be home all the time with her. I'm actually only going back part time. This makes it a bit easier on me and hopefully her. We did a trial run at daycare on Monday. I worked from home and she only stayed 5 hours.   She pretty much didn't sleep and only took one bottle. I was hoping for better sleep but it was about what I expected. Her sleep started getting off on Sunday night. She was probably feeding off my anxiety. And there was plenty of that to go around, along with a lot of tears. There were tears with the drop off and for a while. I contemplated going into the office, just to be around people. But the dogs were pretty good company that day. I checked the clock constantly waiting to go pick her up. Because of the lack of sleep and eating, she came home and we napped the rest of the afternoon. Tuesday was food prep because the husband wa...

Strange that it actually falls on the same day.  Three months really just means I'm going back to work. I contemplated more time unpaid but am choosing not to. I don't feel ready but I probably never will. I've been really anticommital these last 2 weeks and this upcoming weekend. Basically I just want to spend every second with her. I also just want to hold her constantly. I know bad habits starting. It will pass. She will go to daycare. I will cry and go to work. Cry some more. And probably cry every time I drop her off next week. Morning cocktail anyone? It was a pretty good week. We had an early morning (before it was miserably hot) walk through the neighborhood and she held her head up the whole time. She was the exhausted and needed a nap. You forget it's actually really hard for a little person to do all that. We are learning our fine line of over stimulation and then sleep is harder.  She definitely has the giggles now, which is adorable. We are w...

So I skipped week 11.  Mostly because I was in tears about having to leave McKenna and go back to work.  Mom guilt is a real thing.  It also makes me very angry about the maternity leave policy in this country.  It wasn’t something I honestly paid attention to before.  Maybe because I wasn’t planning on being a mom for a long time. Or probably because I assumed that is just a benefit you give people.  Now I am learning, we are about as good as a third world country.  We don’t even give government employees a maternity benefit.  No surprise that private companies wouldn’t feel obligated to provide that.   My time home with McKenna has been amazing.  I know so much about her, , her likes, her preferences, her behaviors and her routine.  We have had the benefit of setting our own schedule.  I don’t have to rush out in the morning.  I didn’t have to stress about pumping right away.  I have gotten to experience so much ...

The smile and the dimple make their first appearance  So 4th of July.  I had no idea how awful this holiday was as parent of young child.  As the 4th was Tuesday, there were fireworks Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday and then the best for Tuesday.  Its probably most frustrating as were just getting into a routine of her falling asleep on her own.  Oh well, its passed.  I would say we are back on our routine but as I am writing this, I’ve spent the last 2.5 hours attempting to get her to go to sleep after sleeping for all of about 1.5 hours between 10:30am and 7pm.  She’s exhausted but just won’t stay asleep when I put her down.  We will figure it out. Part of that bedtime routine is books and singing to her.  Except I don’t know what to sing.  I was trying to sing lullaby’s but they don’t have any significance to me.  So I was trying to think of songs that have significance to me, that got me no where so off to Goog...

We officially made it to 9 weeks and celebrated a 2 month birthday. Most importantly, we are sleeping 7.5/8 hours a night with the occasional 10 sprinkled in.  Mostly I think it's because of cute PJs. In reality it's probably a lot of learning to self soothe. The Miracle Blanket also helps. A LOT. She is figuring out how to use her limbs, which means she busts out of the swaddle. Quickly. She and Dad do leg "exercises" after bath time, which encourages this. She is also learning to self soothe with her hand. Basically she attempts to put the whole thing in her mouth. So there is a lot of drool and outfit changes.  She has become super observant of the world around her. She prefers to sit forward and watch, though we are still working on body/ head control. So the boobs make great head rests while sitting in my lap. There are also "words" for every thing we do. Our conversations aren't great but we're working on it.  ...

Practicing our outfit changes I actually had a lot to write about for the first few days of this week. I made it to the gym. Twice.  Never knew that would be so hard. Getting to the gym At the gym Trying to leave the gym We had a meltdown at the store and didn't get to pick out any Father's Day cards. We made it through our first bath and getting dried off with no tears, though that only happened the once.  I was trying to reduce my formilk to reduce her spit ups by pumping before feeding her. Apparently the formilk is really sweet and if they don't get enough hind milk (which has more fat) it can cause digestion issues. So I pumped about an oz ahead of feeding her for about 2 days and then realized it was 44 hours without poop. So went back to feeding normally, a few very stinky farts and a couple hours later we had a very stinky and full diaper. We actually decided not to go out last Friday because we were anticipating it.  I went to s...