Operation Pink Herring

Emily at not-quite-six months

Emily's babyhood seems to be flying by. A friend here recently had a new baby and he is SO tiny that Emily suddenly looks like a toddler at 13+ lbs. What happened to my baaaaaybeee, etc. 

At two weeks shy of six months, Emily: 

• Loves to be naked. She grins and coos like a loon when I change her diaper, because without clothes and diapers in the way it means she can get her feet in her mouth. Girlfriend has recently discovered her feet and she thinks they are fantastic. I usually let her hang out on the changing table with no diaper on for a few minutes so she can happily chew her feet or hang out in happy baby pose (who knew how aptly named that was? I find it so endearing and hilarious, as Hannah never did it. Then again, Hannah was not a very happy baby. What's cranky baby pose?). But I can't leave her up there unattended because...

• Rolls over, both front-to-back (she's done this for a few weeks now) and back-to-front. Yesterday was her first time doing a double roll, which resulted in her being in the same position I left her, just a few feet over. Disconcerting.

• Got to meet her grandpa and uncle for the first time this week, as Joel's dad and brother came out for a visit. Joel's aunt and uncle came too and it was great having so many extra hands around to help with kid-wrangling.
• Still sleeps with us at night. She was a stellar co-sleeper for several months, just drifting off to sleep next to me and sleeping quietly all night (well, she woke up to eat one or two times, not THAT kind of "all night"). But then she hit the four month sleep regression and got a bit thrash-y, so now I've had to swaddle her to avoid getting punched all night. However...
• Can escape her velcro swaddlers. Time to break out the Miracle Blanket (aka baby straitjacket), I guess. 
• Refuses to sleep alone. She used to be really great at taking naps in the Rock N Play when she was a sleepy newborn, but again, that four month sleep regression ruined everything and we have not been able to get back on track. She will basically not nap unless someone is holding her, which is less than ideal. Thankfully she is still pretty happy even with shitty naps (if I do put her down, she never sleeps for more than another 15-20 minutes), so it's not life-ruining.  But it's getting there. I am planning to sleep train her SOON, but wanted to wait until our company had visited (since I needed her room to serve as a guest room while we hosted four extra adults). Next weekend we're going on a trip and it would also be extremely convenient to have her sleep with us so we don't have to bring a second Pack N Play (and therefore procure an extra Pack N Play), but after that it is ON. (I'm scared. I know it needs to be done, but please tell me it will be OK.)
• Is still nursing, much to my delight. The last time I sat down to write a post (uh, two months ago) I was just about to say that nursing had been almost unbelievably drama-free this time around. But immediately after that post didn't get written, I got thrush. Again. Yeah, ugh, etc. HOWEVER, this time I recognized it right away and our doctor out here was FAR more accomodating and knowledgeable than the experience we had back in Baltimore. I got on meds right away and it helped, but it came back, as thrush is prone to do. So I've been dealing with it on and off for two months now. That sounds awful, but it has not been that bad, I promise. When I realized that the first round of diflucan had failed I immediately started the weaning process because the thing I most want to avoid is sudden weaning and the accompanying hormone crash that I experienced with Hannah. So I started giving her one bottle a day, and then bumped it up to two bottles a day a week later. And though this was not my intention, that gave my boobs enough of a break to heal up using only OTC topical creams, and when I realized I was feeling pretty much 100% better I slowly cut back to one bottle a day, and then none. And then I starte feeling sore again so we went back to one bottle a day. Then better again, so no bottles. Then REALLY bad again (where really bad is about a 4 on a scale of 1-10, whereas with Hannah really bad was a 10), so I called the doctor but my doctor was out because it was Saturday and the other doc would only give me Nystatin, which is generally regarded to be useless in the thrush community. I tried the Nystatin anyway and it gave Emily horrible diharrhea so now we are back on diflucan, for three weeks this time. I am cautiously optimistic that this might be just the thing to finally kick this stupid yeast for good. If not, I'll start weaning again and see how far we get before I feel better. I'm extremely pleased that we made it this far, and that it has not been a constant struggle. The thrush has been annoying, but almost never painful. If we had to quit next week I'll still count this as a very positive breastfeeding experience that I've been very grateful to have. 
• Has dabbled a few times in solid foods and seems eager to eat them, but not so eager to digest them. So far I've tried yogurt (NO good, digestive-wise) and one of those veggie pouches that Hannah rejected (sweet potatoe, pumpkin, and squash.

• Still turbo-barfs like crazy, but seems to be maybe winding down in the spit up department? A little? PLEASE GOD I AM TIRED OF SMELLING LIKE MILKBARF.
• Adores her big sister. She's a pretty happy baby in general, but no one can make her laugh like Hannah can. She lights up whenever she sees Hannah.

• Still uses the green Soothie pacifiers. I think by this point we'd switched over to the Nuks because they were a little easier for her to hold in her mouth by herself, but keeping Emily on the round Soothies helps avoid confusion/jealously over whose paci is whose. Because Hannah is still 100% addicted to pacifiers at 2.5 years old. 
• Wears six or nine-month clothes already. Since Hannah was so small until I quit breastfeeding this kind of blows my mind. Good work, boobs! And good work, Emily! Despite the Thrush 2.0, so far the only other problem I've had is one (1) single clogged duct when Emily had a super stuffy nose and was having a hard time nursing. It lasted half a day. With Hannah I had at least one clogged duct at all times, often multiple ones. 

• Is, so far, happy to hike with us in the Ergo. She either sleeps or just hangs out on the way up, comes out for a break at the top (and nurses) and then rides down awake, checking out the scenery.

•  Feels like she has been part of our family forever. I can't believe that less than six months ago she was just a blob in my belly. I asked Hannah a few weeks ago if she remembered what life was like before Emily came to live with us and she said "Just Hannah. Oh no, my yittle Emmawee GONE! Den Mommy go someplace, bring Emmawee back home."

Introducing: Emily Jane!

Meet Emily Jane! 6lb 12oz, born today around noon. Second time was waaaaaaay easier than the first! Two pushes rather than two hours of pushing. I'd like to put in an order for that kind of labor for all subsequent children.

Home stretch 2.0

So, here we are. One day shy of 38 weeks. Still here, still pregnant. Just kinda waiting. Things were really trucking along until a week ago. I actually felt... ready. Like, really ready. Ready to have an actual new baby. It seemed real. It was very odd. We are still hoping that New Baby will stay internal until Thanksgiving Day, 1:09pm or later so that my mom will be here to watch Hannah and help out, but I've got Hannah's little suitcase packed just in case. I've talked to her so many times about how one day mommy and daddy will go to the doctor to get the baby out and Hannah will go sleep at Babby's (her little BFF, who she loves beyond all reason) house that she runs and tries to get her bag every time I have a doctor appointment. Which is pretty often nowadays. We've had to clarify between going to Babby's house for an hour so the doctor can LOOK at the baby and going to Babby's house to sleep all night because it's time for the baby to come out. Amazingly enough, she actually seems to understand. (It helps that we had an epic week of doctor appointments last week, with Hannah having her two-year checkup and Joel going to a chiropractor because he screwed up his back. Now we're at the point where one of her friends was crying as we left a playdate and Hannah told me that his mommy should take him to the doctor because he must be sick.)

Anyway, at this point last week I felt ready. Especially after I felt the baby drop -- which felt like she was taking a tiny uterine elevator down a few levels -- and had a bunch of contractions and generally felt very off and thought it might be Go Time. Spoiler alert: it was not. What it was was an awful stomach bug. Last Monday was, I think, the second-worst day of my life. Top honors still goes to last year's Family Stomach Bug, but it is a close call. On the plus side, at least this time Joel didn't get sick until I was pretty much recovered. And Hannah at two is much more capable of entertaining and caring for herself than she was when I was out of commission last year. She asked for a snack at one point in the afternoon and I told her she could go and get out the Halloween candy if she wanted to. She went upstairs, opened the closet, got a single peice of candy, and came back down to show me. She even threw the wrapper in the trash. And now she will sit and watch TV, which yeah yeah screen time, WHATEVER. There is no screen time limit when you're puking your guts out all day. And also you're allowed to wear your swimsuit indoors for no reason at all because mommy has no reserves to argue. 

And best of all -- though I'm still hesitant to say this, so please knock on any wood you have nearby -- Hannah seems to have somehow avoided catching the bug this time, thank you baby Jesus. So. That was all good. 

On the other hand, I cannot recommend coming down with a stomach bug while looking like this. That definitely took things to a new level of unpleasantness. 

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So last week felt like we were just barely clinging on to survival. First I was out, then Joel was out, and even though I was feeling much better I stayed up all night having awful thoughts about what in god's name we were going to do if I went into labor at that very minute, with Joel completely incapacitated, Hannah likely to become violently and contagiously ill at any moment and... yeah. No sleep.

Then the next day our landlord informed me that he was putting our house on the market. So we need to move. Soon. And in the meantime there will be showings and all that jazz and yeah, I had a small breakdown. It was not a good week. 

Thank goodness for good friends, who talked me down off the ledge on Thursday. My mom will be here in eleven days. If the baby does come before that, we have a plan in place for Hannah and everything will. be. FINE. 

But now I'm back to just feeling plain old pregnant, la-dee-da, going about my pregnant business and we're a week closer to New Baby making an appearance. It's back to feeling like some mystical event in the distant unknowable future, rather than something that could be any day now. But hopefully not tomorrow. Or the next day. Or any day before Thanksgiving. 

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I still feel like this pregnancy has overall been easier than my first one. I've gained a ton more weight (yaaaaay) and I have some heartburn and a very uncomfortable 1-2 hours every evening (always about 10pm to midnight, which is super convenient timing), but I think things were far worse at this point with Hannah. So that's nice and I'm enjoying every magical moment and all that, especially the perpetual game of is-it-a-contraction-or-is-the-baby-just-blocking-my-digestive-tract-again.

I'm worried about breastfeeding, but I hope that this time I can at least have the perspective that I totally THOUGHT I had last time but got lost in the rush of postpartum hormones. I will try, and if it works I will be so happy. If it doesn't... it doesn't. I know now firsthand that the world does not end when you give your baby a bottle of formula. And I honestly don't even plan to attempt to "exclusively" breastfeed. Even that term annoys me. I'm not going to kill myself pumping all week just to get enough milk banked up so I can go to yoga on the weekend or go to the grocery store myself. A bottle of formula here and there -- hell, a bottle of formula every DAY -- is not the end of the world. Especially not when weighed against my sanity and my ability to take care of the entire other child I have. This entire paragraph is mostly for myself to come back and read in a few months, if that were not entirely obvious. 

(But to go off on a tangent about the whole "exclusive" thing -- why do people love that word so much? I hear it all the time in reference to cloth diapering at well. "Oh yes, we exclusively cloth diaper! Have since Day 1!" You know what? I do not exclusively cloth diaper. I used to. And I used to feel like a huge, fat failure every time I used one of our precious for-emergencies-only disposables. And then we had to use ONLY disposables for several months while dealing with the thrush diaper rash from hell, and you know what? It was OK. We eventually got back to cloth diapers, but then when Hannah started sleeping through the night -- like, 12+ hours through the night -- none of our cloth diapers could cut it. I ordered some wool covers, I ordered extra hemp and bamboo inserts, I tried quadruple stuffing pockets to the point where we couldn't fit any pajamas over her enormous night diaper. And still, they leaked every night and I got sick of not only changing the crib sheets but also of wondering if she would have slept longer if her diaper, pajamas, and sheets hadn't been soaked in urine. Oh, dear, sweet sleep. I was not ready to trade even a MINUTE of nighttime sleep for a measly cloth diapering medal, so we gave up and started using a disposable diaper overnight and I have never looked back. I also stopped carrying more than one spare cloth diaper with me in the diaper bag around the time that Hannah's diapers became the approximate size and bulk of a throw pillow. If we're out for more than one diaper change, she goes into an emergency disposable. And NO ONE CARES! The cloth diaper police haven't shown up a single time! Exclusive anything can basically bite me, is the moral of this parenthetical story.)

I'm also worried about Hannah, which I know is the oldest sibling worry in the book. I'm sad I won't be able to give her the level of attention that I can now. I'm worried she'll resent her sister or feel confused and generally be thrown off -- which is pretty much guaranteed, as our entire household is about to be turned upside down. I know, I know, it's all worth it and she'll adjust and blah blah blah -- trust me, this is what I thought every time I've heard someone else worry about this and I know it's true. But I'm still worried about it, and also sad that the days of us being a family of three are almost over.

I want to write pages and pages about Hannah now, at two plus two months, but I can hear her waking up from her nap so I'll suffice to say that she is SO much fun (except today, when she has been UNBEARABLY whiny -- but most days, she is truly a delight). I love age two so, so much. It's just the greatest.

The same, and different

This pregnancy has been both very similar and completely different from my last one. For one thing, this one seems to have flown by... but at the same time, I feel like I have been pregnant for at least ten years. I realized the other day that I have been pregnant the entire time we've lived in Utah. The first time I met one of my closest Utah friends we got to talking about when/if we were thinking about second kids, and I admitted that I was already kind of six weeks pregnant. I feel pretty settled here, which is really nice. And I've been pregnant for this entire segment of our lives, which is insane.

People ask me if I've got the baby's room all ready (ha ha ha... yeah, no) and I want to laugh because I have PLENTY of time. Are these people nuts? And then I get a glimpse of myself in the mirror and holy shit. I look like I'm about to deliver any day now. Objectively, I'm three-quarters of the way through this pregnancy. That's... a lot. Whoah. Where did the time go?

Symptoms-wise, I feel like things have been... pretty good? I had the same first trimester nausea and crippling tiredness as I did last time, but that seems like ages ago now and has been pretty easy to forget. (Selective amnesia! It's pretty great!) Every one, including me, seemed to think that being pregnant-sick with a toddler sounded like about the worst thing ever, but honestly? I think it was better than having to go to an office job being pregnant-sick. Yeah, chasing a toddler around was rough. There is one particular instance I remember when I asked another mom at the playground who I had just met five minutes before to watch Hannah while I ran to dry heave in bush. That was not pleasant. BUT! Toddlers don't require you to put on business casual outfits and sit in meetings and pretend to be a professional type person who is paying attention to what other adults are saying. Not having to wear pants and sit upright like an adult all day helped an awful lot. Getting in an afternoon nap almost every day helped quite a bit too. The minute I had Hannah in her crib, I shoved some sort of food product in my mouth, checked off "lunch" on my to-do list, and launched myself into bed. I always planned to just rest and listen to my audiobook because I usually have trouble falling asleep for naps and then want to scream when I waste my only free time all day trying to fall asleep -- and then two hours later I'd wake up in a puddle of drool, feeling almost ready to take on the rest of the day. So overall, I honestly think being pregnant-sick while caring for a toddler was easier than working at an office job.

(Unisom and B6 helped a lot too -- how did I not know about these magical friends last time? It just kind of never occured to me that there were things you could take to help with nausea. Um. Durr.) 

Once I crossed that invisible second trimester line I again felt so, so, so much better -- just like last time. And now I'm officially in the third trimester and... things are pretty OK. I am huge. Very huge. Possibly even huger than last time. I gained 39lbs with Hannah, which I thought was A LOT (the healthy guidlines for my height are supposedly 25-35lbs). I'm already up 36lbs this time. So. That's terrifying. But thanks to not working in an office full of clueless males, I have only been asked if I am having twins/hippos twice so far. Progress! 

I've had some heartburn, and some back pain, and some pregnancy insomnia, blah blah blah. The carpal tunnel I had last time never fully went away after Hannah was born, but it's not bothering me nearly as much as it did last time -- probably because I no longer sit at a computer typing all day. I had a few rough days, uh, intestinally speaking, but I don't think the constipation is as bad as it was last time. And at least this time I don't share a tiny bathroom with my boss and my boss's boss and my boss's boss's boss. (I do have a tiny ladies' maid who enjoys accompanying me to the bathroom, but hey! She rips off my toilet paper and flushes the toilet for me. It's actually quite helpful!) My ankles are still present and accounted for, though I know that might change any day if my body suddenly decides it needs to hang on to a few pounds of water. 

New stuff this time around... I have this wierd mole/dark spot on my face that I was convinced was cancer, but my dermatologist assures me is just "pregnancy weirdness" (his words) that will not kill me. And I have been dizzy a lot. So much so that I actually fainted one time and fell down the stairs. Good story, right? It was not a great time, but I am fine. Baby is fine. Hannah was momentarily traumatized, but moved on to doing dramatic re-enactments of mommy falling down and bonking her head by the next day. I no longer do yoga squats to stretch my back first thing in the morning next to the stairs. 

Best off all, I don't feel the panic I felt last time. I never really felt excited last time, the way other people seemed to, about meeting the baby. I just kind of wanted that baby to stay in for as long as possible because I didn't know how to take care of a baby. I expected that would all resolve the moment I saw Hannah's tiny face, like it does in the movies. It didn't. I didn't feel connected to her. And that made me feel like a pretty terrible failure as a mom, and things were not great.

I'm not deluding myself into thinking that taking care of an infant and a toddler is going to be easy, but I'm hoping that things will be a little less bleak with perspective on my side. I... don't really like infants. They are a lot of work (understatement) and they don't do anything. They're like sacks of potatoes that you have to feed and diaper and they cry all the time and don't let you sleep. People who love tiny newborns? I don't understand them. They're kind of... not that great? Can I say that? But this time around I really know that it WILL end. I didn't really believe, in the darkest weeks of no-sleep and colicky crying, that a day would really come when breastfeeding woes didn't rule my life. That Hannah would actually sleep through the night... in her own crib. In her own ROOM. It truly felt like I would spend the rest of my life trying to get a tiny, angry person to stop crying. 

I'm actually excited to set up New Baby's room. And while I'd like her to stay inside for as long as possible (I'd happily gestate babies until they were a year old if that were physically possible), I'm actually excited to meet her. To see what she looks like. To see Hannah be a big sister. I can't tell you how great it feels to feel... normal.

And huge. Let's not forget the huge. 

Life, elevated

Utah is a weird place.

When we decided to move here, Joel had visited once for his job interview and I'd visited once for work five years ago. (I have seriously neglected this blog since I had a baby, left my office job, and started doing 98% of my internetting on my phone but I am so grateful for the record of things past that it provides. Without this blog entry I would have zero idea what year it was that I went to Salt Lake because REALLY? FIVE YEARS AGO?, as well as zero proof that I actually HAVE worn that green corduroy jacket that I cannot seem to part with, even after lecturing Joel many times on his hoarding.) And even from that one visit -- during which I saw much more than I normally did on quick work trips because of the awesome tour Heidi gave me in her fabulous red beetle (RIP) -- I got the sense that Utah was an odd place. Weird and wonderful would have been my description, to rip off West Virginia's state motto. The mountains. The impossibly clean city. The... statue of a sphinx with Joseph Smith's face. Beautiful. Amazing. Weird.

Living here for six months has pretty much changed nothing about that initial impression except to deepen it, both in the wierd and wonderful categories. It's odd living in a red state when I've spent my whole life on the East Coast. Maryland had its fair share of rednecks to be sure, but Baltimore is about as liberal as a city comes. I stay as far away from politics as I possibly can (not just on this blog, but in real life too), but I didn't realize how used to living in a largely liberal bubble I was until I started seeing the billboards on the highway about how Obama is out to steal our retirement savings.  I don't think we're in Baltimore any more, Toto. I have not seen a single billboard for HIV or paternity testing since we moved, that's for sure.

I also cannot get used to seeing people who are not police officers walking around with guns clipped to their belts like someone else might have a cell phone. Utah is an open carry state. It is perfectly legal to bring your gun to the mall (which is where I first saw a regular-looking dude walking around with a handgun clipped to his belt in Macy's). A good friend of mine, a fellow stay-at-home-mom of a toddler, has a concealed carry permit for her handgun. Why, I asked her when she mentioned it. Why not, she responded with a shrug.

And of course, there's the Utah equivalent to "what exit are you from" New Jersey joke: "so, what number wife are you?" Oh, how hilarious. But it's true: everyone in Utah is Mormon. (Though I have yet to meet a single polygamist. Or see a single Home Plus store. It's like HBO just... makes stuff up or something.) I know MORMON is the first thing people think of when they hear the word Utah, but I kind of figured it was one of those exagerrated stereotypes, like the idea that everyone from New Jersey has big hair and everyone in Baltimore says "hon". Turns out, no. Everyone in Utah is Mormon. That's not a bad thing, because by and large Mormons are exceptionally kind, conscientious, family-oriented folks... but it is a bit odd to be a non-Mormon in the land of Mormons. There are Mormon temples everywhere. Like, probably five within five miles of our house. At the park you're as likely to overhear conversations about temples and missions as you are swim lessons or preschool. As a white middle-class very average lady, it's been strange and probably a good experience for me to see what it's like to be in the minority for the first time in my life.

There are some big perks to living in the land of Mormons as a transplant, though, as opposed to moving to another "regular" place. There is a cohesive non-Mormon community that made it almost too easy to meet new people -- which was one of my biggest fears about moving. I was expecting to spend a few months courting new mom friends and creepily handing out my phone number at the library just to stave off the crushing sense of isolation that can come with stay-at-home parenthood. Instead I found a mom's group specifically for non-LDS moms of infants and toddlers before we even moved. Since then I've found several other groups and made some great friends. It's been a huge, huge relief to find a network of other moms and kids to hang out with (this probably sounds very pathetic to those without kids, but dude. I love staying home with Hannah. I love it. As long as we don't actually stay home. The difference between counting the seconds until bedtime and looking at your watch and realizing oops it's 6pm, I need to get this kid home and in bed is having mom-friends to talk to). I miss our Baltimore friends, but love the people I've met out here. And I spent nearly a year handing out my phone number at story times back in Baltimore; here it was easy. Simply because we all have two things in common: we have small kids and are not Mormon in a land where most people are. So, that has been really great.

Plus, you can go to the grocery store or Sam's Club on Sunday and there is NO ONE THERE. No one. I normally go to the store during the week just because I don't want to waste precious weekend time on chores I can do with Hannah by myself, but dude. Sam's Club on a Sunday in Baltimore was something we did with a game plan and a map and emergency supplies. Just the parking lot was such a shitshow that it gave me panic attacks. Here? The store is empty. EMPTY. You can wander the aisles all leisurely-like, check out quickly, and then walk to your car -- which is parked in a spot not ten miles across the parking lot. Because everyone is at church! It's pretty wonderful. It balances out the fifty times I've tried to go to other stores on Sunday morning and found out that DURR THEY ARE CLOSED beacuse it is Sunday and everyone is at church.

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That's the weird stuff. And then there's the wondeful.

Things here are so cheap. So, so cheap. I have never been a person who has a set grocery budget, but I have been using a meal planning service (The Fresh 20 -- LOVE IT) to help pull me out of a what's-for-dinner-oh-how-about-pasta-again rut, and along with the shopping list for the week, it gives you an estimate of how much the week's groceries should cost. Our total is always $15-20 below the estimate, which is fairly conservative to begin with. Hannah and I are on a two-week visit to my mom's in New Jersey right now and my eyes just about bulged out of my head when I saw the price next to a gallon of milk was $3.99. A non-organic, regular old gallon of milk at a non-fancy grocery store. FOUR DOLLARS. Milk, the thing we buy most often with a cereal-loving husband and sippy-cup chugging todder, is one of the few things I do know the price of off the top of my head. In Utah it's $2.00 or less. Even at Whole Foods.

Everything else is cheap, too. I laughed out loud the first time we parked downtown in a garage right on Temple Square. Parking is FREE for the first two hours. FREE. No money. After that? TWO DOLLARS AN HOUR. I used to pay more than two dollars to street park outside the public library in Baltimore. (Of course, that first time we were there I also lost our parking ticket and we ended up paying the maximum fee to get out of the garage. Luckily the maximum was only $20.) Swim lessons at the local, beautiful rec center are $12. A MONTH. Not $12 a lesson. $12 a month. I knew that things were cheaper out west, but it's one of those things that I just couldn't fully grasp until I saw the bills myself.

And then there's the mountains.

The mountains are everywhere. You cannot escape them. They loom over you when you drive down the highway and they peer in, impossibly close, through the windows in our house.

They're there when you're stopped at a stop light. They lurk behind the neighbors' houses. They tower over the Target parking lot.

I've stopped noticing them all the time, until someone comments on a photo that I post on Facebook about the view. Oh, yeah. That. That's pretty awesome.

Now that the weather has transitioned to full-on summer, we've been trying to get out hiking as much as possible on the weekends, while I still can*. There are tons of trails just a few miles from our house that have views of waterfalls and unbelievable mountain vistas.

It's an easy 30 or 40 minute drive up the canyon to reach the ski resorts, which all have impossibly beautiful, well-maintained trails. We can drive up to Snowbird or Alta or Brighton, get in a hike, and be back in time for Hannah to take her nap. It's amazing. It's everything we wanted.

I'm a little afraid of the winter, but spring and summer in Utah have sold me so, so hard. I love it here.

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*I have been kind of bummed that we're only able to hike on the weekends, since a bunch of my friends do mid-week hikes. But I need Joel to carry Hannah because 1) she weighs upwards of thirty pounds now, and 2) I can no longer buckle the hiking backpack around this.   

Surprise! (Or, uh, not so much if you follow me on Twitter, where I outed myself at about six weeks pregnant because a lady needs a place to complain about the fact that Wendy's does not deliver fried chicken sandwiches.) We're having another baby! It's allegedly another girl, though she had her legs pretty firmly closed during our ultrasound and since we didn't find out Hannah's sex until she was born I am sort of dubious of this whole science. You can see inside my belly? With that magic wand thing? Ask the baby what its name is while you're at it then, and save Joel and I some serious list-making.

The alleged Baby Girl Herring 2.0 will be making her debut on December 2, 2013 and not a moment earlier because I need my mom to fly out and watch Hannah and the weekend before is Thanksgiving and there are going to be no flights. So. That's settled.