10 Things I Did This Week

1. The most major thing, is we decided we were going to have boyfriend's daughter, Madi, in our care full-time. We started taking some of the steps towards making that work. 

2. I got super into the idea of meal planning and extreme budgeting. This is all due to #1. 

3. Something's been up with Chloe. I think and hope it's teething. First she was super cranky for days, then she was fine. Then she was fine, but randomly throwing insane tantrums and waking up a million times through the night. I'm tired, she's probably tired and I could some happy child time. 

4. I cooked a spaghetti squash and it was a huge fail. Chloe wouldn't eat it, I tried it and thought it was weird. Garbage it went. We'll try again someday. 

5. I'm still struggling with Chloe's eating lately. I'm trying almost anything to get her to eat, well, almost anything. Her favorite seems to be 'cherry berry carrot' apple sauce that I got her. And vegetable soup. It's hard to get her to eat much else these days. 

6. Got a couple of cavities filled at the dentist. Oh, fun times. 

7. I got most of my papers to get my taxes done. I hope the tax fairies are good to me this year. 

8. I decided I would try get caught up on current episodes of Gossip Girl. I haven't seen the end of season 5 or any of season 6 yet. 

9. I realized I need to work on how I deal with some things in life. Like sleepless nights or mealtime fights with Chloe. 

10. I miss coffee giving me that perky feeling in the morning, but when I drink it now it makes my belly hurt sometimes, the rest of the time the coffee shop just doesn't make it right and it tastes like bitter water. 

* I don't feel like posting photos. Go to my instagram to see a couple from this week. There's not much*

My child got smarter

There are not enough words to describe how happy I am to have my baby home. After spending a week at her grandmother's, and the week before that in the hospital, she's like a whole new kid. 

Well, maybe not new, but new to me because it's been so long since she's been herself. 

I just couldn't stop kissing her and hugging her all weekend. But she didn't seem to mind too much - she likes kissing now, too, complete with the 'mmm' sound. 

I didn't mean for this post to be a Chloe update, but what better time to document all the new things she's been doing lately? This is Chloe at 16.5 months.

While sick, she was starting to get mean. Really mean. A lot of slapping people in the face, pinching, and scratching. As she got less sick, she got less cranky and violent, but my mom also unintentionally taught her to be nicer. Anytime she would be rough with Mom's cat, mother would tell her to 'Be nice to the kitty' and show her how to pet him. Now? When she hits me and I tell her no, she rubs my face and says 'nice', which sounds more like 'niiii', but it's still adorable. 

She started waving 'bye' a little while ago. Now? She says bye. 

She knows where her nose is every time. She's also learning eyes, ears, hair, mouth, tongue, belly and fingers, and she sometimes gets them all right without help. She also says nose, eyes and mouth.

She understands so much of what I ask her now. If I ask if she's hungry, she goes to her highchair. If I ask her for her baby, she brings me her doll. 

She says 'baba', and is she ever addicted to the thing. She gets it at night, and for her nap then it needs to be immediately hidden, or she'll just carry it around in her mouth sucking on air. Now that she's better, the first step is switching her to milk, and soon after that it's bye bye baba. 

After being sick, her appetite was basically non-existent, and she would barely eat a bite of solid food. Mom had her eating mashed food and baby cereal all over again. This weekend I managed to get her hooked on blueberries again, and eating pasta, cheese, bread, broccoli and cauliflower. Her newest addiction is regular old saltine crackers. As soon as grocery day comes, her diet will be expanded a lot, if I have any say in it. 

Moving on...

This weekend we had a storm, and got a TON of snow. I believe it was about 30-35cm. It snowed and blowed all day Saturday, and most of Sunday. 

Boyfriend tried to get out to pick up his daughter Saturday with no luck. He got stuck and gave up. Sunday, he finally managed to get out and get to work, after an hour of shoveling. 

This morning, we let Chloe sleep in while we dug my car out. That took another hour of shoveling, car pushing, and flying snow. We checked that Chloe was still asleep every now and then, and lucky for us I still had to wake her up when we were done.

Luckily, she's back to being a great sleeper.

But back to Sunday. For the first time ever, I bundled up my little bundle of joy, and we went outside to play and shovel a bit. I knew boyfriend's car wouldn't make it back in the driveway with the mountain of snow that the plows made at the end.

Chloe watched me shovel and laughed every time I threw the snow. She wasn't interested in playing at all though. She just stood an watched, until she finally got sick of it and we went inside.

Our shovel broke Sunday morning

The snowbank next to our driveway was almost up to my shoulders. 

So that was our weekend in a nutshell. 

To recap? I love having Chloe home. We got a lot of snow. 

Chloe Smashes a Cake

It's no secret that my child is a little odd. She hates to eat. She hates the beach. 

And now...

She hates cake. 

She had her cake smash photo session the week after her birthday. The cake was a cute little Elmo cake. She wore her colorful circus tutu. The pictures were going to be adorable. 

I half counted on this being her reaction, but still hoped we'd get some good shots. 

Like this one...

This is a good shot. I think it's the only one where she looks happy. And that's because she hasn't touched cake yet. 

It took a lot of coaxing to even get her to touch the cake a little bit. As usual, my daughter feels uneasy around things such as cake, but is super brave when it comes to barking dogs or trying to jump off the back of the couch.

Her next reaction after 'Wtf is this' was 'Okay, I touched it. I'm done now.'

I had to keep picking her up, holding her messy hands far away from me, and putting her back near the cake. She'd barely touch it. I smeared some on her face. Again, she was like 'wtf, Mom.' But at least she half smiled. 

Finally, she was had her fill of this cake and icing business and wanted out. I peeled the dirty tutu off her, hoping she'd be a little happier naked and at least take one or two more good shots. Maybe even show the photographer a real smile. 

Not a chance. She was so done. 

So done that she just wanted to cry. 

And all I can think about every time I look at this photo is that it looks like my daughter was feeling remorse after taking part in a brutal murder. Of Elmo. 

Cake smash was kind of a fail. At least we got a couple of pictures out of it. 

7 Tips for Feeding a Baby Who Hates to Eat

If there's one thing I haven't talked about in much detail, it's Chloe's eating habits. They are horrible. Feeding time is more often than not just a huge pile of stress and tears, sometimes on both parts. 

You see, Chloe is a bit underweight - she was always between 1st-4th percentile. I kid you not, the child is tiny. At 11 months, she's not even 18lbs yet, that tiny. I've had public heath and nutritionists constantly checking with me, wanting me to bring her in monthly to be weighed, so it's important that I make sure she's eating enough. 

She's always hated eating. When she was on only formula, she would push the bottle away after only a few ounces. Once I started her on baby food, she hated it, and that was an even worse struggle. Now, after 5 months of baby food, she still constantly bounces back from eating a nice amount, to eating just about nothing. 

She cries, she hits the spoon, sometimes she's just plain distracted. Foods she gobbles down one day, she fights not to eat the next. I've tried all the tricks, I've tried forcing her, I've considered giving up. 

I am convinced that I have an anorexic baby. If you think you might have an anorexic baby too, here are some tricks I've tried that have worked (even if only for a little while) to get her to eat. 

1. Try everything. I've given her fresh deli meat, grated cheese, yogurt, pieces of bread, rice treats, ice cream, anything just to see if she'll eat it, and to get her used to all kinds of tastes and textures. If I'm at a restaurant with her, I let her try a little of what I'm eating to see if it's something she might eat if I tried it at home. 
2. Mix it up. She hated carrots, so I put about 3 tablespoons of her pureed carrots in a bowl, and about 2 tablespoons of her rice cereal (it was rice cereal with apple and banana) with some of her formula to make it less thick. She gobbled it down three different times before she refused to eat it again. I've tried it with other vegetables, and one time added some pureed apples when she still refused to eat it. 
3. Play 'Hide and Seek'. If they hates a certain vegetable, mix a little bit of it with something she does like. Or put a little bit of both on a spoon and see if they takes it better. 
4. Keep trying. If they don't like something one day, give up for awhile and try again later. 
5. Give them choices. On days Chloe wouldn't seem to eat anything, I just threw a bunch of random things onto her tray: grated cheese, lunch meat, pieces of bread, cooked pasta. Whatever was available. 
6. Distract them. Sometimes if some baby food dropped onto the tray, Chloe would get so distracted by it that she would willingly take a few bites. The same thing happened if I gave her a spoon or something to play with. Singing also worked sometimes. 
7. Make it fattening. By that I mean throw in some extra calories where you can. I always make Chloe's cereal with her formula, no matter what the packaging says. She gets more calories from her formula than she would if I used water. I also sometimes dip pieces of bread into baby food. 

Do you have a little one at home who isn't a huge fan of eating? Or any tips to share?

Ps: Join me Thursday for Pinterest Clean-up where you can link up and show off some of your favorite child-related pins. 

When Being a Parent Becomes Ugly

Warning: Do not read this if you're on the fence about having children. It will make you definitely not want any. Hell, it's making me not want any more, and I actually do want more children.

This is about teething and the havoc it wreaks. It can be pure hell.

When people told me about the fussiness, rashes and red cheeks, loss of appetite, loss of sleep, fevers, and so on, I braced myself. But we didn't get that here for the first six teeth. We certainly got all of it for teeth numbers 7 and 8.

There were a few nights where my little miss simply wouldn't sleep. She was up from 11-2am, and again from 3-5am. Usually she wouldn't even be fussy, she just refused to go back to bed, and was fine staying up and playing. Other times she would wake up and just cry and cry until finally some random act (like giving her my cell phone) would calm her down.

A few nights, I made a bed on the living room floor so I could lay down and watch her play and attempt to let my body rest. Several times I woke up on the floor, realizing I'd put her back to sleep and went to my makeshift bed to wait and see if she'd actually sleep, before finally going back to my actual bed.

Once... I woke up on my floor-bed, and went into panic mode thinking I fell asleep and she escaped the room even though the door had been blocked off. I searched the apartment for her, thinking she was playing in the dark. Finally, I rushed into her room to see if she was playing in there only to find her fast asleep in her crib.

And even then, I spent a moment wondering how she got into her crib before I remembered that I had put her there, and fell asleep waiting to see if she'd fall asleep herself.

I was so tired that it took me that long to remember.

And that, ladies (and gentlemen?) is the truth about teething, and how rough it is on everyone.

The Less-Fun Baby Phases

I used to think my daughter was an 'easy' baby. Some days I still do. Feed her, play with her, get her to nap on time and life is good. It's just not that simple anymore. I'm leaning more towards her being a 'difficult' baby. This is in no way a complaint post, but more simply 'this is my girl'. 

For so many babies, a car ride is the equivalent of a sedative. For Chloe, she may take a short nap here and there, but has proved many times over the past couple of weeks that she can whine and cry for the majority of a 2-hour trip. 

If there was such a thing as an anorexic baby, that's what mine would be. She goes through very brief spurts where she'll eat amazingly, but the majority of the time I absolutely dread meal times. She'll eat a couple of bites of anything, then will go on to look anywhere but at the spoon, slap it, he annoyed if I try to feed her. Most baby food gets washed down the sink. I've been trying my hardest to let her try new things in hopes she'd eat them easier, and that worked for awhile, but then even things she likes (custard, creamed corn, pears) she'll barely eat. She's been like this her entire life. 

I've finally realized that she'll eat a lot more finger foods, but mostly just the baby puff treats. I've tried feeding her cut up meats, bread, toast, scrambled eggs and she'll eat little bits of that stuff, but doesn't seem nearly enough. This is especially rough since she's a small baby and we have public health tracking her weight. 

Annnnd, she's hit the stage where she hates getting her diaper changed and whines, kicks, and tried to rolls away. No fun for anyone. 

Besides those three issues, she's a pretty amazing baby. I always dread taking her places in case of a meltdown, but she's keeps surprising me over and over by being a complete flirt wherever we go, no matter how tired and cranky she should be. 

She won over the hearts of most of my friends recently when we were all together for a wedding just by babbling and smiling away almost the whole weekend. She can mimick the words 'uh oh' sometimes. She won't give kisses, but makes a mean kissy noise. She's just so much fun to play with and be around. Most of the time. 

What was your least favorite baby phase?  

My Highs and Lows, Lately

I couldn't think of a thing to blog about, but then I realized I haven't said a word about anything I've actually been up to lately, since the wedding anyway. Things have been all over the place. One minute I'm deliriously happy, the next minute I want to cry. I guess you might want reasons. 

- Teething. 

Babies teething: making parents everywhere wish they were alcoholics. Kidding, but seriously? It's hell. My girl wasn't too bad with her first two teeth, but now my poor girl has three popping through all at once. She's whiny, she barely wants to eat her baby food, and a couple of nights ago she woke up four times through the night, the first time staying up for 2.5 hours before going back to sleep. It's getting better each day, but is still rough on both of us.

- Babysitting

For the first time (and two more times after that!) I babysat my boyfriend's daughter. Not for him, but for her mother who just started working, and ended up with a flaky babysitter. She's 18 months old, and super busy. The first day was a little stressful, but by the third day, I had it down. Her mom returned the favor and kept Chloe overnight so I could catch up on some sleep and spend some time with boyfriend. 

- Car

Is useless. I'm planning to sell it as junk, and buy a new car. I'm trying to save every cent that I can, but it's super stressful not knowing if I'll ever have enough money to get a decent car. Plus, I hate relying on boyfriend to get around, although he's been amazing with lending me his car (twice) and driving me around a couple of times.

- Boyfriend

We had a bad moment over the weekend, when we both drank and he lost the ability to realize what not to say in front of your girlfriend regarding the past. It was nothing serious, but still something I'd rather not know. Besides that, we've been spending a crazy amount of time together, what with him moving in soon. Some of his shirts are in my closet, and some of his daughter's clothes are in Chloe's room. I look forward to when he's actually moved in, so it feels less like he's 'visiting' all the time, and more like it's our place. I sure love having him around. He did my dishes twice over the weekend (and more!). Without me asking. If I wasn't already in love, that totally may have won me over anyway.

- Travelling
I'm less than two days away from going to visit friends for the weekend. It's been about 7 months since I've gone to visit them (although A. was here to visit me in March). I cannot wait to get out there and see everyone, hopefully get in some beach and campfire time, and hopefully Chloe will enjoy some of it. Boyfriend works Friday and Saturday, but after a lot of thinking, decided to join us when he's done work Saturday. The entire weekend sounds like it's going to be amazing.

So...

What have you been up to?

What the baby's been up to.

I had no intentions of this becoming a boyfriend-filled blog, but I guess that comes with not being able to write about him at all before. Either way, that's not all I'm about.

Oh that girl of mine. I have a crawler on my hands. It's pretty much the cutest, but most annoying thing in the world.

I was reveling in the ability to sit her on the floor with her toys while I tidied up or.. did anything really. Now she's on the run. Kind of.

She pulls the dvds off the shelf, she plays with anything that isn't her toys. She loves trying to pull herself up on the coffee table, which is only going to end in tears sometime soon. She doesn't leave the room or go anywhere yet, she just touched whatever she sees in the room we're in.

I have a major love/hate relationship with this crawling stage.

Still, she's just too darn cute.

Also, she's been driving me absolutely crazy lately when it comes to meal times. She usually eats breakfast like a champ, except for the one day we had to be up and out early to get her to the babysitter's house. Lunch and dinner though? Forget about it. Veggies are either completely boring or disgusting. Even things like sweet potatoes don't do it for her. Since she won't eat her veggies, she hasn't had too much fruit lately, but when she does she eats that okay. Girlfriend loves banana mango baby food. But mostly... she's just a pain to feed. She doesn't open the mouth, she spits stuff out, she looks away, she hits the spoon.

She was like this with her bottle for a long time - always pushing it away. She's never been an easy-to-feed baby. Which is unfortunately because she's such a little baby that the health department always wants to keep an eye on her weight.

Hopefully she soon opens up to veggies a little bit more. She can't stay on formula forever. Stuff's expensive.