Operation No More Babies

Ryan and I recently made the decision to have no more children.  We have 3 beautiful children here on this earth and 3 children waiting for us in heaven.  Our years of fertility have brought great joy and great sadness.  Putting those years behind us is bitter sweet.

When I was pregnat with Genevieve I was sure that I would not think twice about getting my tubes tied.  Pregnancy was hard. Harder than it had been before.  Each day that passed toward the end came with stronger thoughts of being "done".

I made the appointment within 10 days of her birth.  I was sure that these 3 beautiful children were all that I could care for well.  And so it was time to put that stage of our lives behind us. (Side note for anyone wondering why I did the surgery and not Ryan.  It was a financial decision.  We are on separate insurance and mine was 100% covered and he would have had to meet his deductible.  Can't beat free surgery.)
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And yet, when walked into the hospital yesterday for my surgery, I got sad.  Ryan kept asking me if I was ok.  I just kept saying yes.  But inside I was quite sad.  I know in my head that it's the right decision.  But my heart aches just knowing those years are over.

No more pregnant bellies.  Each first that Genevieve goes through is the last time I will see that first.  Each outfit she outgrows will be donated.  Each stage she leaves behind will be another stage we leave behind as well.

Part of that is freeing. Part of that is really sad.  But you have to stop sometime.  It doesn't matter if this is my last baby or if we had one more after this.  I will have to go through those "lasts" at some point.

It is officially over now.  The surgery is done.  There is no turning back.  I will hold on to these lasts as much as I possibly can.  And I will soak in as much joy as I can from the lasts that are coming down the road.

But if you see me getting overly emotional at the little things Genevieve does, just know that I am savoring those moments.  She is officially the baby and will be forever.

Don't Say Things Like That

This past Friday David had an incident with a hanger.  I won't go into the details, but it was gross.  I thought for sure we were going to the ER.  But he was ok.  And then he took a face plant on our train table.  But he was fine.  I was on the phone with my mom later that day and said something along the lines of "I can't believe we have never been to the ER with my kids.  I'm sure David is going to make us go there quite a bit"

David has had a fever and a cough since Sunday afternoon.  The fever has gotten high.  But it is responding well to medicine.  I still took him to the doctor on Tuesday morning.  He said that he was wheezing some but not enough to do anything.  The doctor wanted us to let him know if things changed.

By the afternoon, David was wheezing more and just generally miserable.  You could see his stomach heaving as he was trying to get air.  And his fever was just persistent.  So I put him in the tub to see if it would make him get any better. 

 

It just made him shake and get cold but didn't take his fever down.  I put him to bed and he fell right to sleep.  I told Ryan I was a bit concerned about his breathing and I was just going to call the doctor to see what he said. 

 

One piece of back information is that my pediatrician is very low intervention.  He rarely prescribes anything.  He is a proponent of letting the body do what the body knows how to do.  This is actually one of the reasons we love him.

 

So when I called him last night and he said that we needed to take him to the ER, I was shocked.  But I also knew that we needed to go.  When he jumps, so do we.  We dropped Ainsley off at Grandma's house for the night and off we went. 

 

It was a fairly easy experience. They gave him a breathing treatment and did a chest X-ray. He lungs were clear.  It was viral and we just needed to wait it out.  We were home by midnight with an inhaler and instructions to keep up the Ibuprofen. 

 

Serves me right to say things like that. 

Sacrifices

When you get pregnant or even dream about getting pregnant, your dreams include things like baby smiles, cooing, sweet little sleeping babies.  Your visions of what life with the baby will be like are all roses and sleeping babies. 

Even though I have had a baby before, my mind blocked out all the hard stuff.  My brain went right to 6 months where Ainsley was smiling and sleeping well.  She was easy to put to bed.  She only woke up once a night and was up for 20 minutes at most. She was just generally a happy baby.

And now reality has hit. David wasn't home a week when he was diagnosed with thrush, which is a yeast infection.  The main symptoms are a white tongue, horrible diaper rash, and gas.  The white tongue we can deal with.  The diaper rash got better with some special diaper cream.  The gas on the other hand was miserable.  When he was awake, he was screaming.  It was down right miserable.  We had a couple nights when we slept only an hour or 2. We would just watch him pull his legs to his chest in pain. At his one week checkup the doctor told me that the best way to combat the yeast was to stop eating things that fed yeast.  Gluten and Dairy.  I told him thank you very much but that's impossible.  I explained that I was a vegetarian and cutting out gluten would leave me with nothing to eat.  I went home and listened to David scream for another week.  It was painful.

At his 2 week checkup the thrush had only gotten worse.  I was again faced with the decision of gluten and dairy free.  And this time, I embraced it.  I was going to try it for a week and see if it helped.  If it did, I would do it until the thrush cleared up.  And so this became my life.

And guess what, it worked.  He's happy most of the time.  There is still a good bit of gas (he cleared out a room yesterday but I think that's more genetics he gets from his namesakes), but for the most part, he's good.  And so I continue with the diet and I am figuring out how to keep myself full.

Sacrifices in life are worth it, especially when it comes to your children.

The Spirit of a Child

I have been following the story of an 8 year old girl with stage 4 cancer on Twitter.  Don't ask me why.  I just came across it and started following her about 6 months ago.  I never imagined that I would get so invested in this little girl's fight against cancer.

She lost the battle today.

It's been heart wrenching to watch her mother's updates on caring bridge.  It's made me reflect alot on my life and my role as a mother. 

I often think it's my job as her mother to help her through the big things and help her grow up.  But as I think about Ellie and her mother Amy, I'm thinking that she is not going to remember things like potty training and eating habits.  She's going to remember her spirit.  Her joy and her love.  Her love for Jesus.  She's going to remember that on her death bed, Ellie annoited her mother's head with oil to help her deal with the loss.  That's powerful.

So my challenge today is to really look into my child's spirit, to enjoy the love and joy that oozes out of her.  And to teach her what it is to have a spirit like Christ.  It's my job to lead her on the path of life that follows Him.  So that if something tragic were to happen to her or if she lives to a ripe age of 100, she will be able to enjoy the presence of the King forever. 

Just like Ellie.

She Doesn't Just Look Like Me

Ainsley is starting to get to the stage in life where she's a literal sponge.  She is starting to repeat words and sayings.  It's pretty cute.

I've recently committed to losing a certain amount of weight before we go on a cruise in March.  We have set up our bonus room to be a kind of workout center.  Ryan bought a bunch of free weights and a bench.  We have cleared the middle of the room for exercising. 

Side note...last night Ryan was lifting to the Rocky soundtrack.  I laughed.

Ok...back to my story.  So last night I was in the bonus room doing lunges and squats.  Next thing I know, I look over and there is my sweet Ainsley doing a squat.  I couldn't believe it.  I quickly called Ryan in.  We were so impressed with her.

It gave me some real food for thought though.  She really wants to do what I do.  She wants to be like me.  I need to model a healthy lifestyle to her.  My weight is no longer my issue.  It's hers too.  If I am constantly talking about how fat I am or how much I don't like my body, she will too.  If I eat junk, she will too.  It doesn't stop there.  If I am not modeling a Christ-centered life, she won't think it's important. 

That's quite a bit of pressure.  But it's good.  I guess it's just one more way that having a child makes me a better person.

I Love to Win

I am competitive. I love to win. This rule applies to everything in my life. I like to win at games, at sports, at tests, at all things. It's just one of the million things that makes me like my Dad.

Today I won at something else; the battle of the will. Ainsley is a great sleeper. She may cry for a minute when you put her down but she will stop quickly and go to sleep. Today she decided to try me. She cried for over an hour. Part of the time she would cry softly. Part of the time she would scream. The last 10 minutes of it she screamed.

I was determined to not let her win. I probably shouldn't have let her cry that long. It probably bordered on me being a bad parent. But I had to win. I put my feet in the ground and just let her cry. She finally fell asleep an hour later. I won. I am not sure how I feel about my victory.

What is the longest you have let your child cry?

Enabling

Lately my thoughts have been directed to how much we as parents enable our children.

I was listening to Focus on the Family the other day and Dr. Dobson was interviewing a woman who was talking about enabling her son to the point of him ending up in prison. The story ends happily as he has found Jesus in jail but it was how he got there that has me thinking. The mother in the interview was talking about how she continued to bail him out of his bad decisions so that she could make up for any short comings as a parent and to help her child not feel any hurt.

Last night I was talking to my neighbor Marci who is a 5th grade teacher. She was telling me about a parent teacher conference that she had this past week where the mother was more concerned with her child's beautiful hair than the fact that he can't read past a 2nd grade level. She says that she finds it amazing how many parents enable their children to get away with things that they shouldn't.

Both of these things have me thinking about how I will be as a parent. My child is still very young so I figured it was irrelevant to me at this point and something to think about for the future. Then I really started taking a look at my everyday with my child. There are little things that I do for my daughter that I should be letting her learn and do on her own. I put the small pieces of food in her mouth instead of letting her learn to pick them up because it's faster. I get her the toy that is across the room instead of letting her get there on her own because I don't want her to be without the thing that she wants.

I think it's natural to want to take as much pain and discomfort away from our children. The trick is discerning when it's the right thing to do and when we should just let our children go. Situations like we have in our family right now with Taylor are times when it's obviously ok to want to shield the pain. As we raise our children in His ways, we will have to continue to seek the Lord's guidance and trust that God will use our imperfections to His glory.

Holy Crap!

****WARNING: This story is not for the weak stomached. My co-worker literally gagged this morning****

This morning started out like a normal Wednesday. I got up and got Ainsley's stuff ready to go. I woke her up, fed her, and dressed her. When she was all set, I put her in her Bumbo on the kitchen table to watch Ryan eat breakfast. My choice of the Bumbo (a molded rubber seat) was divine intervention as we don't usually use it in the morning...but I'm getting ahead of myself. I kissed my sweet girl and my loving husband goodbye and headed to the shower. Normal day so far.

As I was in the shower, Ryan comes in and says that he thinks that Ainsley has "crushed" her diaper. If you know Ryan, he often refers to "crushing" the toilet. I calmly say, "Well, I am in the shower so you are going to have to change her". His response was that it would make him late. I told him that I was in the shower and couldn't help him right now and to bring her in her poopie diaper to Grandma Anne's house. She would understand. He walked away. I thought, "My goodness, must I do everything"

Not even a minute later, Ryan walks back into the bathroom and says "You need to finish up in there, I need help NOW! Ainsley is sitting in a puddle of poo". If you know Ryan, you know he has a tendency to over exaggerate. I figured she had pooped a bit out of her diaper. Not a big deal, just change her outfit and head on. I quickly got out of the shower, dried off, threw my hair up in the towel, and draped myself in my bathrobe. I was going to make him feel bad.

I got to the kitchen and there was my sweet girl sitting in her Bumbo laughing at us. She was literally laughing. I took her shoes off (thankfully I had that fore site) and picked her up. Ryan wasn't over exaggerating. She was sitting in a huge puddle of poop. I picked her up, turned her over, and ran for the tub. Ryan followed picking up the drops of poo that we were leaving. She was dripping out of her pant leg.

I set her down in the tub and started to undress her. It was cold today so she had a onsie on under her outfit. Figures today would be 2 things that had to go over her head. As I took her clothes off, I was smearing this poo all over her arms and her belly. She loves putting her hands in her mouth and so I was freaking about not letting the poo get on her hands. As I lay her back down on the tub, she started to pee down the tub. Why not empty everything out? I reached for the wash cloth and turned back and she had poo on her upper lip. There is no doubt that she has eaten some poo. I got her in her tub and rinsed her down. I emptied the tub and started over again. I then got her re-dressed and ready to go.

Meanwhile, Ryan is cleaning up the rest of the house. He is already dressed in his shirt and tie and worried about getting poo on his nice clothes. I ask him to put Ainsley's clothes, diaper and all, in a plastic bag on the front porch. I will deal with that when I get home.

I finally finish all this and send them out the door. I get dressed as fast as I can and throw my hair in a bun (OK, that's normal for me these days anyway). As I am in our bathroom, I smell more poo. I look in our shower and there is the Bumbo with the puddle of poo still in it. I rinse it out and run out the door. I make it to work at 7:58. I was so afraid I was going to have to call my boss (who doesn't have kids) and let him know I was going to be late due to poo, but I made it. Ryan emails that he made it to work at 7:59.

All day, I can think of one thing. There is a bag of crap on my front porch. I worry that I have sent my child to Grandma Anne's with poo still on her, especially in her hair. So when I say my day was crappy, I mean it literally.

What was your worst baby poo story?

Parenting Books...Love Em or Hate Em

It's very interesting to watch your parenting styles unfold in front of you. I am quite different than I imagined I would be. I am a very uptight person in most of my life. Surprisingly, I am not that way as a mother. I am actually very laid back. Ryan is the uptight one. Today he told me that he though Ainsley had Measels when she only had a little scratch on her nose.

In light of that, I have found that I have not been overly interested in parenting books. I have been committed to reading Your Baby's First Year Week By Week. They did a great pregnancy book so I thought it would be a good book as my 1 parenting book. Each week it gives you milestones that your baby should be hitting, the average weight and height, potential illnesses, types of play that baby might enjoy, and general parenting suggestions.

We are now at Week 19 and I have decided I hate it. I'm thinking about not replacing it with any other book. Each week, I find myself wondering if Ainsley is behind or too big or if I'm ignoring some grave illness. This is the 3rd week in a row that it has mentioned that baby should be rolling over with ease. Rolling over isn't even on Ainsley's radar. They are going into great detail about eating solid food. Ainsley is not ready for solid food yet. They say she should weigh 14 1/2 pounds. A week and a half ago she weighed 15lb 3oz. Frankly, I hate the games they come up with for play. They often involve a song I have never heard before or some silly motion. They described playing "So Big" but instead used "So Tall". Whatever!

So I am putting my book aside. I give up. Is there another parenting book that I might like better? Will I forever feel like my child is not normal if I continue to read them? Is she so far behind because she can't roll over at 19 weeks? Am I stressing for no reason?