If there’s one thing that I learned in 2010, it’s what a huge difference just one year can make. Just 365 days ago, my life was so incredibly different.
When we bid farewell to 2009, I was somewhat happy to see it go. A good portion of that year had been spent trying to get pregnant, and learning that my body was not going to get that accomplished as easily as we had hoped.
So when the year ended and I was not yet pregnant (or rather, didn’t yet know that I was), it felt a bit like 2009 had failed us. There had been a lot of trying times emotionally, and all I could think was that 2010 just had to be better. And so, understandably, I was really looking forward to 2010.
Of course, when we rang in the new year, we didn’t know how much longer we would be waiting to become parents. Amazingly, gratefully, fortunately… it was just twelve days later that we learned that our baby was on its way.
From then on, 2010 became a year of incredible joy. We were blessed with a healthy pregnancy, and reveled in the excitement that comes with expecting a baby.
It was in 2010 that we transformed from Michael and Heather into Daddy and Mommy.
It was in 2010 that we received the greatest gift of all time–a beautiful, healthy, happy baby. A girl whom we can no longer imagine living without, because she is now the center of our lives.
So it’s weird to think that 365 days ago, we didn’t know she existed. Now, we will celebrate 2010 for the rest of our lives, each year when we mark Nora’s birthdays. 2010 was an amazing year–the best ever.
I mean, really… what a difference a year makes.
And while we still don’t know exactly what the new year will bring us, we know we will cherish every day that we have with our blessing of a daughter, and that our lives will certainly be full in 2011–full of laughter, full of love, full of joy.
I wish the same for all of you.
Happy New Year.
When I’m in the mood for pizza, I’m usually in the mood for traditional pizza. You know, red sauce, mozzarella cheese, maybe some pepperoni and onions. Occasionally I’ll want to go a little different with the toppings–add some broccoli, peppers–but even that is rare.
So to ask me to step completely out of the box and make an “alternative” style pizza? Well, I have to be in a special kind of mood.
Since we are celebrating this New Year’s Eve with a quiet night at home, we decided to make some good “party-like” food, which included two mini specialty pizzas–taco pizza, which we’ve made a handful of times in the past, and then we decided to give this new one a try.
I was afraid that the ranch dressing would be really overwhelming, but to my surprise, it really wasn’t. All of these ingredients come together to make a nice slice of pizza. Will I ever make this as a full-size pizza? Probably not, but it’s perfect to cut up into small pieces for a party.
Since it’s the dead of winter, we didn’t grill chicken for this–we boiled it and shredded it instead. But you could do it either way, or even cook it up quickly in a pan on the stove.
Chicken Ranch Pizza
(Source: Annie’s Eats)
Ingredients:
– 1 recipe your favorite pizza crust (we use 1/2 of this recipe and freeze the other half for another time!)
– 1/4 cup Ranch dressing
– 3/4 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
– 1/2 to 1 grilled chicken breast, chopped into bite-sized pieces
– 1 tomato, seeded and diced
– 2-3 green onions, chopped
– 3/4 cup shredded cheddar cheese
Directions:
1. Preheat the oven according to the directions associated with your pizza crust. Prepare the pizza crust by rolling it out.
2. Spread the ranch dressing in a thin layer evenly over the unbaked crust. Sprinkle with shredded mozzarella. Top with grilled chicken, tomato and green onions. Sprinkle with shredded cheddar.
3. Once assembled, put pizza into preheated oven. Bake according to the directions for your crust, or until the cheese is melted and browned.
We’re at the beginning of a 10-day, twice-a-day amoxicillin regimen in this house. As such, one of my goals today was to figure out an easier way to “make the medicine go down.”
When we gave Nora her first dose last night, it didn’t go too badly. Her little tongue kept thrusting out of her mouth, causing some of the medicine to come with it, but we pretty successfully administered the majority of the dose. It didn’t happen without a bit of a mess, though.
Then, this morning, I worked from home for a bit to let Nora sleep in (after the crappy sleep she’s had these last several days, we didn’t have the heart to wake her!). When she did wake and it was time to get her ready for the day, Michael was already at work and I was on my own. Needless to say, her morning dose did not go as smoothly. When all was said and done, I felt like half of the dose was smeared on her face, down her neck, and on the changing table.
Does she not like the taste? It’s possible, but unlikely, given that she used to take gas drops without too many issues, and she’s been sucking down the Tylenol like it’s going out of style. Maybe it’s too cold? Amoxicillin needs to be refrigerated, and the little one is not accustomed to drinking anything that isn’t close to room temperature or warmer. Regardless of the reasons, I went to work on a mission to figure out a solution on my lunch break.
I remembered hearing about a pacifier medicine dispenser, which–let’s face it–is a pretty awesome invention. One of my “tricks” to getting Nora to take gas drops when she wasn’t in the mood was to squirt them in her mouth and quickly put her pacifier in to get her to swallow it. So the pacifier dispenser seemed like the perfect solution. The only problem? I ran out on my lunch break and couldn’t seem to find one at Target, except as part of a larger baby care kit that we don’t need.
My lunch break was over, so I had to return to work without one. I figured I’d check a drug store or two on the way home. Late in the day, however, I was talking to one of my coworkers about how Nora has an ear infection and is on amoxicillin, and she semi-jokingly said, “Do you have a ReliaDose?”
The name sounded vaguely familiar to me, but still I said, “No, what’s that?” She explained that it’s a bottle with a syringe inside that allows you to administer medication while your baby drinks his/her milk, formula, juice, etc. I asked her where I could get one. As it turns out, my company used to work with the makers of ReliaDose. So, wouldn’t you know–one of my other coworkers happened to have a box full of them under her desk. For free. That I could immediately take home with me. Score!
And let me tell you: It.is.BRILLIANT.
Image from ReliaDose.com. Still confused as to how it works? Check out this diagram.
Image from ReliaDose.com. Still confused as to how it works? Check out this diagram.
Without ever having used the pacifier dispenser, I think that the ReliaDose is better for a couple of reasons: 1) It’s easier to ensure that your baby gets ALL of the medicine, since the syringe is still technically the “dispenser.” 2) Not all medications taste as good as amoxicillin. If you happen to have a nasty tasting liquid, this little gadget can help mask the flavor since you can administer the medication slowly, mixing it little by little with a better-tasting beverage, right in your baby’s mouth.
Some might wonder why you wouldn’t just mix the medicine in with the baby’s milk or juice. Well, you usually can, but the advantage to using this is that the medication and the drink are kept separate until just before they are in the baby’s mouth. That way, even if baby doesn’t finish all of his/her drink, you know that he/she still got all of the medication. Pretty cool, huh?
Maybe I’m easily impressed, but I love this thing.
When I first prepared it to give Nora her nighttime dose tonight, I turned it upside down to make sure it wouldn’t leak and milk came shooting out of the nipple. It concerned me that maybe the milk flow would be too fast for her to handle, but to my surprise, she took it like a champ and didn’t mind it at all. In fact, the medicine itself was gone in less than 30 seconds and I had to wait several more minutes for her to finish the amount of milk I had put in the bottle part–tomorrow, we’ll be using less milk!
Anyway, I’ve been meaning to write a post about my recommendations for “must-have” baby items–you know, the things we personally cannot live without–but it keeps falling to the wayside because I just don’t feel like I have enough time! I’m still planning to get to it eventually, but I couldn’t wait to tell you all about this gem. I think this might be on the list of little-known baby gadgets that I’ll be giving as baby shower gifts from now on!
We had the night from hell last night. Seriously. It was worse than any other night we’ve ever had with Nora, including the early newborn days.
We were essentially awake from 1 a.m. until 7 a.m. straight. We would get settled back into bed and maybe start drifting off to sleep and then she’d be screaming again. She was up every hour or less. And she was clearly tired–she wanted to sleep, we could tell–but she wouldn’t last long before she’d be up again. I thought I was going to lose my mind. At 7:00, out of complete desperation, I gave up on trying to comfort her in her crib and brought her into bed with us, hoping that we’d all get at least a little bit of sleep. It was still hard to settle her, but eventually Nora did drift off and we all got a couple hours of sleep.
At 10:00, I woke up feeling like a zombie. I told Michael that I wanted to call the pediatrician, mostly because I just needed to hear “There’s nothing you can do differently. It’s just a stage” from a medical professional. When I called, I never expected to hear anything else besides that.
The nurse listened to me explain what Nora had been doing, and asked questions about her eating habits, congestion, etc. To my surprise, when I told her that Nora has had nasal congestion for about 9 or 10 days, she said that she wanted us to bring her in to check her ears. I suspected that her ears were probably fine, but we went into the doctor’s office anyway.
And, well, I guess it was a day for surprises, because as it turns out, Nora does have an ear infection. And maybe it makes me a horrible mother, but I have never been so happy to hear a diagnosis. I was practically giddy, in fact. Of course, I do not want my baby to be sick, but OH MY GOSH, it’s quite possible that an ear infection–a TREATABLE ear infection–is the cause of our sleep hell.
Because of Nora’s young age and the fact that her sleep is so interrupted (seemingly by the ear infection), the doctor wanted to start her on antibiotics right away instead of waiting a day or two to see if the ear improved on its own. So now we have Amoxicillin for the next 10 days, with the expectation that we should see an improvement in Nora within 2-3 days or so.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let this be our answer.
I asked the doctor if there is a chance that the sleep issues are a result of the four-month sleep regression, instead of the ear infection. She said that there’s always a chance, but it would be pretty coincidental to have the sleep regression start at the same time as a cold + ear infection.
I am cautiously optimistic, but only time will tell.
In the meantime, we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to put Nora to bed tonight. Do we stick with the crib now that we moved her into it last night? Do we move her back into our room?
It’s a good idea to let her sleep with her head higher than her feet, the doc said. For at least a couple of days, since her ear is likely painful. That’s all well and good, of course, but now we’re trying to figure this out, too.
Do we let her sleep in the bouncy seat IN the crib? If so, how are we going to strap her in while keeping her swaddled? To help her congestion, we tried propping up the mattress in the pack n play earlier this week, but Nora kept shimmying down to the bottom since she moves so much, so that wasn’t very successful. We could try to put her to sleep flat, but we just did that for her nap and she woke up crying about 40 minutes into it, even though she was still clearly tired. After a couple of unsuccessful tries at getting her settled again, I decided to prop her up in her boppy and thanks to that, she’s been sleeping soundly for more than another hour now. And while that’s an OK daytime solution while I’m checking on her often, we don’t feel comfortable doing that at night.
Oy. My head is going to explode. :)
Here’s to hoping that Nora feels better very soon… and that we all sleep better soon, too!
Nora has been sleeping through the night–in some way, shape, or form–since she was less than two weeks old. She started off by surprising us with six or seven hour stretches, and gradually worked her way up to twelve or thirteen hours. At her “worst,” she woke up twice a night to eat, but it was usually only one time, and then it was none. It appeared that we had hit the jackpot in terms of baby sleep behavior.
I have been so aware of and so thankful for this rare blessing that I have lived the last three months just waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was always afraid to talk to people about what a good sleeper Nora was because I was scared of possibly jinxing ourselves. Whenever I would mention it, I would feel like “Oh, I probably shouldn’t have said anything!” or I’d get the overwhelming urge to knock on wood.
But then, the last few weeks, I started to relax. I returned to work, and after a week of dealing with an overtired baby and not-so-great sleep during our transition, Nora fell back into her normal sleeping routine and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. And I figured, hey, if she can go through that and still come out a great sleeper, surely that’s just her nature. So I felt a little better talking about her sleep habits with people. I felt a little surer that things would not really change–of course, we’d have a bad night or two here or there, but nothing too drastic.
Oh, I was so naive.
Hellooooo, four-month wakeful period. It’s so NOT nice to meet you.
About 10 days ago, Nora started a pattern of restless sleep. On that first night, she woke up several times and I had to pop her binky back in repeatedly. We had experienced a handful of not-so-great nights before. I didn’t think much of it, though, because those nights were the exception, not the rule. But then the next night was the same. The only difference was that Nora had developed some nasal congestion and was having trouble breathing through her nose. As a result, we chalked up the less-than-stellar sleep to her being sick (even though her first cold didn’t interrupt her sleep at all).
But then on Wednesday night, something changed. Nora woke up in the middle of the night and refused to go back to sleep. All told, we were up for more than two hours with a WIDE.AWAKE.BABY trying to get her back down, and when we finally did, I was still up every hour putting her binky back in her mouth and shushing her back to sleep. After a few hours of that, I was desperate for some sleep, so I finally brought her into bed with us–and even THAT wouldn’t settle her. I started to worry, but remained optimistic.
Unfortunately, it has now been several nights of the same type of thing. I’ve come to the conclusion that Nora’s cold led right into the dreaded “four-month wakeful period.” She has all of the “symptoms”–she’s become highly alert and more aware of her surroundings, has shorter/more distracted daytime feedings, and, well, she’s just a few weeks shy of four months. She wakes up in the middle of the night and cries, but she’s cool as soon as we pick her up and hold her. But that doesn’t mean she wants to SLEEP, though; no way. She wants us to talk to her and play. And as much as I love her and her wide open little eyes and her smiles… holy moly, this SUCKS.
I hear every move she makes in her pack ‘n’ play, since it’s right next to the bed and I have developed the mommy hearing. So I’m awake before she even cries–I know it’s coming when I hear her start to grunt and writhe around in her swaddle. I lie there in the dark and I find myself wrestling with what I will do when she finally breaks into a cry.
I can put her pacifier back in. But that’ll MAYBE buy me 10 minutes (and it’s not like I fall back to sleep anyway).
I can try to shush-pat her back to sleep, but that hasn’t been very successful these days.
I can pick her up and try to rock/jiggle/pat/shush her back to sleep, and sometimes that’ll work… until I attempt to put her down, that is. Those eyes fly open faster than you can even imagine.
I can nurse her. But then I find myself debating whether she’s REALLY hungry, or whether I’ll be feeding her just to feed her and perhaps creating a bad habit. And well, unfortunately, nursing her has not proven to put her back to sleep, either.
I can let her cry for a few minutes to see what happens. I can do a little bit of “modified” cry-it-out, and well, we actually did that after being awake for a couple of hours last night. To our surprise, it did work. She wasn’t all-out wailing, but did cry, and we let her do so for about five minutes. At that point, I put her binky back in, shushed her, then got back into bed. She was quiet for a few minutes, then started crying again. We again waited a few minutes, repeated the binky and the shushing, then back into bed again. And she fell asleep, and stayed that way for over an hour. A small success, but a success nonetheless.
To his credit, Michael has been a real team player with these middle-of-the-night “episodes,” so we have been alternating. But even when we’re not handling the baby, we’re all in the same room, so no one gets any sleep. It’s a fun time, I assure you.
To top it all off, this is happening right as we have prepared to move Nora into her own room. And, we may be crazy, but tonight, we went ahead and did it anyway. We put her to bed in her crib. We figure that we’re already getting crappy sleep anyway, we may as well transition her to the nursery while we’re at it. Plus, I read that the four-month wakeful period is a good time to start sleep training (if you’re going to do it), so we almost felt like we HAD to move her now–after all, we don’t want to “train” her to sleep in our room.
I’m scared of how tonight will go, but at least we don’t have to work tomorrow (we don’t go back until Tuesday).
I’ve done some Googling and some accounts of the four-month wakeful period are encouraging. Some parents say their babies went back to normal after only a few weeks. And hey, we’re already more than a week into it, so… fingers crossed! But other accounts are so terrifying that it makes me want to cry. Some parents say that after MONTHS of this, their babies STILL have not gone back to sleeping through the night. *shudder*
Heaven help us.
The worst thing is that I have gone from looking forward to bedtime to absolutely dreading it. I find that with each passing night of terrible sleep, the pit in my stomach grows larger and larger and I feel more and more discouraged. The nights are SO LONG now. Instead of waking up in the morning feeling refreshed and looking forward to the day, I wake up feeling like “well, at least we survived” and I automatically dread the next night.
It’s a good thing she’s cute. :)
Any parents out there have any experience with this four-month wakeful beast?? What did you do to get you through?
About
I'm Heather. I'm 33 and have been married to Michael for seven years. Together, we have two beautiful little girls we love more than anything, and a miniature dachshund who drives us crazy. I'm a full-time working mom who has very little time for my own "stuff" these days, like home improvement, cooking/baking, cake decorating, and photography. Despite the team not making the playoffs since 1999, I'm STILL a Buffalo Bills fan, which I think speaks to my loyalty AND sense of humor. I can't wait to pick up the pace with travel again some day... you know, when we're done being ruled by tiny fists. Welcome to my blog.
