Week 21 - Firsts and Seconds

Happy Thanksgiving! We obviously have so much to be thankful for this year and Week 21 was a week of firsts (and seconds) for our Little Turkey.

Ellie’s first Thanksgiving went incredibly well. She did great on the car trip to my Aunt and Uncles house in Maryland, slept during the meal so her Mommy and Daddy got to eat without distraction, and did as well as could be expected around all of the new people and strange atmosphere. She also did well at her second Thanksgiving on Saturday with Marty’s side of the family. Again, she did well in the car, slept during the meal and was a champ around all the new faces. She even got to enjoy some quality time with her cousins.

With the weekend focused on food, we thought we’d get Ellie into the action by introducing her first solid food! We have been preparing her for this moment for several weeks now. We set up her high chair about a month ago and have been “practicing” having her sit there while we’re eating dinner so she can watch us and get used to the chair. We have been going back and forth about whether to start her with solids now or hold off until she is six months since she has a tendency to have allergy problems. All of the hemming and hawing was starting to get annoying, so on Friday, we sat Elise in the high chair, mixed up 3 teaspoons breast milk and rice cereal and just went for it. Perhaps all of that practicing paid off! Our little baby acted like she has been eating off of a spoon for her entire life! She opened her mouth every time the spoon came toward her, moved her mouth like she was chewing the cereal (even though it was so runny it wasn’t really chewable) and she even leaned in with her mouth open, asking for more! She barely spilled a drop. (we have an eater on our hands!) You would’ve thought she’d just gotten into Harvard with the way Marty and I were beaming with pride. Who knew that a child eating off of a spoon could be so exciting?!

Unfortunately the week was not full of strictly positive firsts and seconds. This week also brought a negative first – her first illness. She started with a little runny nose on Thursday and it progressed into a full-fledged cold by the end of the weekend, complete with cough, runny nose and horrible congestion. She is having trouble nursing because she can't breathe through her nose well, so it's been pretty frustrating for her, especially considering her love of eating . So for the past few nights, we have been doing a lot of nose wiping and nasal aspiration – as well as a lot of hoping that this will end quickly. I am not sure if she made me sick or vice versa, but I am suffering from a similar ailment, and it’s no fun. As you may know breastfed babies supposedly never get sick so this is yet another debunking of the myths of breastfeeding!

Another negative second – for the second time in five months, the prospect of having a nanny was once again dangled in front of us by our neighbors and then rudely yanked away. As we discussed last week, our neighbors broached the subject of sharing a nanny and after weighing all of the options and assessing our current situation, we decided to go for it. Unfortunately, they had a friend who volunteered to watch their baby and they chose to go with that option instead. We are mostly disappointed because the assessment made us realize we weren’t crazy about daycare and we probably wouldn’t have even realized that we weren’t crazy about it had we not over analyzed it in trying to decide if we wanted to get a nanny. So basically nothing has changed, we're just slightly less happy with the situation.

At the time of this writing, at 8:30 on a Monday evening, Meredith and I are struggling, as we always do, to get Ellie to sleep. Meredith has been upstairs on the computer writing this post after feeding Ellie and making the first attempt to get her to sleep. Through much of this writing, Ellie has been crying since we are sticking with the pick-up/put-down/10 minute cry method. (this is a hybrid of several methods that we've had the most success with.) Anyway, my point is, with as tough as it can be sometimes raising a child - struggling with the worry and the frustration- there is nothing in this world as wonderful as your little girl falling asleep in your arms, listening to her breathe through a stuffy nose and realizing there is no place on this Earth that you would rather be - with her little hand on your arm... falling gently, deeply asleep. So, this Thanksgiving, we are most thankful for the little moments, appreciated, but lost as she grows bigger each day.