To do: blog

Every single day, it's on my list! Because he's just growing and changing so quickly, I feel like every day there is some new accomplishment to share. Yesterday he ate his whole serving of rice cereal (and wanted more!). He fell in love with his super-soft stuffed puppy. He got to finally meet his wonderful friends Jess and Jennie, and fell in love with them too. He hung out with his buddy Ava and got cranky with this little heat wave we're having. And for a few moments, he stood up in his exersaucer all by himself! Of course, then he thunked back down (that's why the back is padded with a blanket...) but I was so proud of our little man. All the cliches are true. They do grow up so fast, you won't believe how quickly it goes, and you can't imagine how much love you have in your heart.

Not so much Mommy and me, as Mommy and Mommy

Warning: this post has very little to do with Graham.

I'm sure every mom-blog on the planet has posted on this topic, but right now I am a snake-charmin', bible-thumpin', revival-tent-puttin-uppin' convert on the concept of me time. Time (and frankly, a little bit of money) to put in to actually feeling relaxed, and perhaps even attractive, again. I am not the best when it comes to this, even before I had Graham. I think the last time I really put a good deal of effort into my everyday appearance was...college? Maybe? I mean, a lot of effort went into looking good for my wedding, but that was an over-the-top, one day only kind of effort. So I am finally getting ready to start running again, and my (actual) friend Kelly told me about ExerciseTV OnDemand, and my (only in my head) friend Kelly Kapoor told me about this:
It's a heated eyelash curler, which I love for all of its ridiculousness and self-involvement. And my real real true friend, Maura, put it in an envelope and sent it to me. And I am going to curl the crap out of my eyelashes.

Updateration

"Oh, Mommy, you trickster you! This isn't my regular breast milk...it's got rice cereal in it!"

Dad and Graham together on cereal day #2

Graham and friend, pre-bath

We've had an eventful past week - a growth spurt to end all growth spurts (requiring formula follow-up after breastfeeds, waking up at 3 am again after weeks of sleeping through the night, and some serious crankitude), which led to calling the pediatrician and getting permission to start rice cereal, a visit from Joe's parents, and now today, sleepiness to end all sleepiness, which is allowing me to finally, finally update the blog.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what I think are probably typical mom concerns. You know, I leave him at his activity gym while I fix lunch for myself, and when I finish eating, he's still happily kicking away. Do I interrupt and start interacting with him so I don't feel guilty about basically leaving him to his own devices, or do I do what I know I should and sit next to him but let him amuse himself, because that's an important skill? Do we need to bring him to more different places more often, even though he shuts down at first and it makes him crankier later on, because he needs to be more socially comfortable? Is that a rash around his mouth (worrying about an allergic reaction to the rice cereal), or just the baby acne? And so on. I don't think I am an over-worrier, per se, but we spent the first two months of his life analyzing every blip, boing, and beep of his monitors...every tiny fraction of an ounce of breastmilk he took...every noise he made every second we were around him. It's just hard to break myself of the habit.

Speaking of worrying, I put our names on waiting lists for daycare starting in January. How am I possibly going to be able to leave him with someone else for 40 hours a week? There's also practical concerns, in that he will still be more susceptible to RSV for the coming winter season as well. Can we responsibly put him in a daycare center, the bastion of cold and flu? And once you start looking at daycare in people's homes, it's terrifying how many have been reported for one infraction or another. I think the solution is for Joe to quit his job (hi honey! just kidding!) or for Dave and Evan (hi guys!) to start a Daddy Day Care. Or, maybe I can tele-commute for the rest of my third year rotations? No? Didn't think so.

p.s. I feel like I should give Joe his due credit for the bear that is hanging out with Graham in the last photo...that is Graham's first ever stuffed animal. Joe bought it the night he arrived back in Boston after driving through the night from Rochester. He wanted me to keep it with me all through my hospital stay so that it would smell like me, and then Graham would have something that smelled like his mom when he was in the NICU. And I did - I slept with the bear (as much as I could have slept that week), used him to prop up my belly in the uncomfortable bed, put him under my head so that I could read while not moving a fraction of an inch (for a few days, every time I moved, Graham would roll over on his cord and his heart would slow down, which alerted a giant team of nurses to come in and maneuver me and all my monitors around). So while we didn't end up putting the bear in his NICU bed, it absolutely is Graham's favorite. And I'd like to think that is all due to his amazing dad.

We've been working hard for the (very limited amounts of) money

Sorry, friends! I know it's been forever since we posted. It's just been a combination, as always, of some sleeplessness, some boringness, lots of hard work around the house and in other areas of our lives. But! The other reason I have been holding off on posting is that Graham rolled over all by himself for the first time this weekend, and I have been trying to get video of it ever since. He is not a command performer, apparently. He did it twice for me when Joe wasn't there, once for Joe when I wasn't there, and has refused to do it at least four times when the video camera was running. Apparently he has not inherited my flair for drama and attention. Perhaps that's not the worst thing in the world...

Anyway, Graham just continues to change and grow every day. He's solidly sucking his thumb now (hooray!) and grabbing and holding onto things and laughing this very bizarre deep-throated "heh huh heh" whenever he grabs my hair. He's sitting up better than ever (propped in my lap, but not all slouchy like he has been until this point), and is even turning his head when he hears my voice. His grandparents (dad's side) are coming this weekend (also hooray!) and I think Grandma Lorraine is going to flip out when she sees how big and smart he is. I was looking at old pictures the other day and I just couldn't believe how much he has grown already. I can't imagine him crawling and walking and running, but I know it's right around the corner.

So, since it's been forever (a whole week!) without new pictures, here you go:

Graham concentrating really hard on his new toy:

Looking very dapper in the new Tybee Island onesie Grandma Big K and Grandpa JSpen sent:

And being a bit of a mess after we tried to do handprints and footprints last night. Maybe we should have done that when he was a little less mobile?

But then...

Guess who slept the whole night through for the first time? Wooo-hoooo! He finally went to sleep at about 8:30 pm. Then we got him up at 11 to feed him, and he went back to sleep pretty quietly. I heard him wake up around 3:30, and he made little noises until 4 am, but he soothed himself back to sleep until about 7:15. What the! So exciting. Now we are currently working on napping, since he was yawning a blue streak, but has been chatting to himself for about 20 minutes and definitely cried when I put him down.

My name is Graham, and I hate to sleep.

Graham is currently on a sleep strike, and it is breaking our hearts and wills. We have been so so lucky up to this point - he has always been so calm and collected, with hardly any crying. And when we put him down to sleep, either he is already zonked out or within a few minutes he has talked himself to sleep. Not so much for the past few days. He is really refusing to nap in the morning (at best, it's 45 minutes) and then it's a major struggle to get him to nap in the afternoon so that by the time he falls asleep, he is sleeping for 3+ hours and it starts getting towards evening. Then it gets later and later until when he will fall asleep for the night. The past few nights, it has just been that he was awake until late. Tonight, he was yawning and yawning and even fell asleep the last time I fed him, but the minute his head hit the mattress, he screamed. With real, big tears and gulping air and honest-to-goodness screaming, which he has never done before. It took about an hour of being up and down, trying to get him to soothe himself but not abandoning him, before he settled to sleep. It was so hard to see him so miserable. So, I don't know if he's still in his little growth spurt and his bones are aching, I don't know if he's transitioning to giving up his morning nap and just having a big long one in the afternoon and is just thrown off by that, I don't know if he's just getting a first little separation anxiety, I don't know if maybe he's even starting to teethe a little bit (he's recently started drooling and bubbling as well). But I do know that no one in our household was happy from 7:30-8:30 pm this evening.

I suppose I shouldn't complain

So this morning I was playing with Graham and I finally cracked. He is a lot less interested in lying on his back anymore - he is much happier when we are holding him to stand or sit on our knees when he can look around at the whole world and practice his grabbing skills. So I called Joe and got financial dispensation to go out and buy the bebepod. Hooray! Except we went out to buy it and this is what happened:So now his little chair is just waiting for him to wake up:He's been asleep in his carseat for three hours. Look at your cool chair, dude! Don't you want to sit in it?? And besides, we were supposed to meet up with Kelly to go to the Lilac Festival! I had me an appointment with some fried dough and a slushie! Instead, I did work. Ugh.