Post-Christmas Roundup

I didn't mean to be gone for that long; sorry folks. Between traveling for Christmas, the cleaning fit that came upon me once we got home (I don't look those things in the mouth; I just let them take me) and a visit from my parents, I've hardly been on the computer at all. A nice change, actually. While I was away from you, though, many interesting things happened. Lucky for you, I was able to document most of them with photographs!

Item the First:

The penguins found their Christmas spirit:

Sam was delighted with the tree and loved to spend time in his exersaucer just staring at it. He actually helped me decorate. I'd hold up an ornament and ask "How about here?" He'd scream his excitement at the spot (or cry his disappointment) and I'd place or move the bulb accordingly. It was So. Much. Fun. He also loved it when the tree was lit up at night:

He'd grab at the spots the light would make on the floor, like a cat with a laser pointer. Since he's too young to grab the tree on his own and won't likely remember this next year, I sat him on my lap and let him touch the bottom branches. He was so interested in the texture and the way the lights made his little hands turn colors. Watching him explore and discover the tree made me so happy.

Item the Second:

Yes, Virginia, there IS a Santa Claus! He sent Sam a present using the USPS.



I'm not kidding, the box came with a return address of "Santa Claus, North Pole." I have no idea who did this but thank you. Sam loves the doggie and we are so grateful for the formula. People have been so kind to us this year (well, not just this year). "Thank you" never feels like enough to say. This was just incredibly awesome.

Item the Third:

Sam quit his job as a drummer in a rock and roll band and got a job as a banker.

Item the Fourth:

When I wasn't cleaning, we goofed off. We actually did this a lot. It was awesome.

Item the Fifth:

NEW CAMERA!!!!!! I am SO EXCITED! Expect many, many more pictures in the future. MANY. Thank you, Mom and Dad Szczubelek! We are STOKED! (Canon Digital Rebel, for those who know about these things. I did not expect anything so nice. And they got us another lens for it that I'm excited to try as well.)

I hope everyone had a great Christmas! I don't know about you but I'm looking forward to a great new year full of broken resolutions (who am I kidding, I'm not making any resolutions) and a happily imperfect life. There is so much to be thankful for; cherish each day.

Dear Uncle Josh~

What's up?!

Auntie Beff told me that you think Mommy doesn't post enough pictures of me on the internet.  And I think you are totally right.  She has been completely slacking off on her responsibilities lately.  After all, she didn't even write me a letter when I turned five months old! 



She was all: "Your father is having multiple seizures!  We have to travel for Thanksgiving!  I'm having so many migraines I think I'm going to stroke out any second!"  Lame. 

I figured I'd take things into my own hands. 

I can do all sorts of cool things now.  For starters, I was observing my cousin Deacon when we hung out in August and I've acquired his technique of housing cereal (well, any food really) like there's no tomorrow.  Oh man, that stuff is SO GOOD.  Have you tried it?  Food?  You really should.





In addition, I can now rock out on the drums.  Oh yeah!



The ladies love it, I'm not going to lie.  I've got this one girlfriend, Addie CutePunks...well, I'll save that story for when I see you in person.  All I'll say is she wears this little pink barette...CUTE!

I'll bet Mommy never told you that I am good with animals, either.  Uncle Josh, I am a veritable BeastMaster.  KaKaw!  Look at how I tamed this guy:



Now he just follows me around all day, meowing for treats.  I know.  I am THAT good.  Please notice my awesome pirate bib and skully booties.  I am fierce!  Do not mess with me.  Tigey knows.

Aside from tiger taming, rocking the drums and eating myself into a coma every night, I like to spend time working out in my jumpy seat.  Gotta keep my muscles in shape, you know?  Fitness is important if you want to be a cage fighter.



When the endorphins kick in I just get so happy!  I start laughing and I  jump higher and higher until someone eventually says "Whoa!  Slow down there!"  No one seems to mind that I am damaging the molding in their home.  Being intensely cute has benefits.

At the end of the day, I'm pretty tired.  Being a baby is hard work, what with all the public appearances, trying to grow (cell replication is REALLY HARD) and all the digestion I'm doing.  I normally sack out around 7 PM.



Anyway, that's about all that's going with me.  Sorry Mommy didn't fill you in sooner.  I'll have a chat with her about that. 

Love from your favorite nephew,

Samster the Hamster

What's up New Jersey?!

A big thank you to Megan McCullen for the awesome onesie!

Eets not a toomah.

So saith the doctor, at any rate.  He found the burnt toast smell interesting and asked if I'd ever had an MRI.  I confessed my deep clausterphobia and my inability to even get near so much as an open MRI, even with medication, and he didn't push it.  I might have fallen a little in love with him just for that.  He said we could do a C/T if it came down to it but he'd like to hold off.  Yay for that!  There was discussion of how burnt toast could be indicative of siezures (ack!) but since I am cogent (just miserable) during my headaches and Topamax is an anti-convulsant, he feels that is extremely unlikey.  WHEW!

What he did suggest was this: upping my dosage of Topamax and adding a few other meds.  I'm on kind of a low dose of the T. at only 50 mg. a day.  Turns out the max is significantly more (500 mg./day) and he feels there is plenty of room to work with.  Of course, the more I take, the spacier I will become so we are trying to keep it within reason.  I'll try taking 75 mg. at bedtime and if that really leaves me in orbit, I'll climb back down and we'll see what else we can do.  The good news is I should lose a few more pounds with the increased dosage.  I can't be unhappy about that!

He gave me four or five samples of as-needed medication to try when the headaches come. Whichever works best will be what we go with.  Lucky Penny did warn that there may be some unpleasant side effects to some of the meds he gave me.  He told me that if the side effects lasted only ten minutes or so then I would need to make a decision about what was worse, the headaches or the side effects.  What happened with the Immitrex lasted a full 12 hours; if these side effects will last only ten minutes but work to clear my migraines, I'll take it.  I'd rather be down for ten minutes or an hour than a whole day.

He also gave me an anti-nausea medication to help manage the symptoms of the migraine.  I tend to become freezing cold when I have a headache, no matter what the temperature outside, and the doctor told me today that this is because my blood pressure becomes very low.  He suggested I drink lots of fluids.  The anti-nausea meds should help make that possible. 

I'm to try all this for six weeks and then come back for a re-evaluation.  I'm really hopeful that I'll find the answer in one or more of these drugs.  I've taken the anti-nausea med before and I know it works really well so that alone makes me feel like I've finally got a safetly net.  The others, well, I'll wait and see. But I really think it's going to be okay.

(And the nurse I saw told me they would only take Sarge's lisence for three months, not six.  So WAHOO! for that!)

Off to see the neurologist

The doctor's last name is Penny.  Do you think it's okay if I ask him "Penny for your thoughts?" at the end of the appointment?

Tell you all about it when I get back.

Happy 30th Birthday to me!

This guy is the best thing about my birthday:

  

And even though he's teething AGAIN and has an earache AGAIN and won't sleep and I am a year older and starting a WHOLE NEW DECADE...this year's birthday beats the last five years worth of birthdays combined.  Love you, little man.

Today

Today I woke up with a migraine and my knight in a waffle weave long sleeve t-shirt came to my rescue. 

I felt it coming last night--the tension that creeps up my shoulders, the slight visual distortion that makes me feel like I'm working too hard to see.  I tried to head it off at the pass by going to bed at 8:45 but I woke up at 4 AM, head slamming.  I staggered to the bathroom and took some tylenol and ibuprofen, drank as much water as I could without throwing up and staggered back to bed, praying that it would all take effect by 6:00, which is when my day starts.  No such luck.

My wonderful husband does the night shift, you see.  I go to bed at 9:30 and he wakes Sam up at 11 for a bottle and then gets up with him at 4 or 5:30, whenever he wakes up again and decides he's hungry.  If Sam wakes up every hour in the middle of the night, it's Jeff who gets him, leaving me to sleep peacefully.  So when 6 AM comes, Sam is all mine and I think that's fair.  We have a whiteboard out in the hallway on which we write notes, to let each other know what's happened in the night.  This is what I woke up to this morning, squinting to see out of my one working eye:



See how great he is?  (The last line was added later in the day.)

I told this awesome man how terrible I was feeling and being familiar with my headaches, he at once told me to go back to bed.  "Are you sure?" I asked, feeling horribly guilty.  I knew I couldn't hold Sam, that I'd drop him, but I felt like I should be doing SOMETHING.  "Go!" he said.  "I've got it."  I went.  I took some more drugs, drank some more water and I went.

And that's kind of how it went all day long.  I had to vote, so I couldn't stay in bed all day and I HAD to go grocery shopping because we had no food in the house.  Jeff even offered to take the list AND SAM and go to the store for me but that would have been far too much.  I bulled through it, came home and collapsed again and once again Jeff took care of everything.  He hauled the groceries in from the car for me (I still couldn't lift anything without going dizzy and nauseous; thank goodness the commissary carries out for everyone) and he chased me back to bed.  He fed Sam, played with him, changed a diaper so nasty it made him barf, did everything.

And I know that it wasn't a chore because that is just who he is.  He loves being a father and he loves being my husband.  And I?  Love, love, love being married to this incredible man.  He is all mine and I could not be happier!

All worn out from voting

Happy Halloween!

The Peapod hopes you get lots of candy!

The tooth, the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth.

Sam's been drooling up a storm lately and I'll admit, he's been a little crotchety. But we're talking about a kid who is rather...intense...by nature, so crotchety seemed kind of normal to me.  When Jeff suggested that Sam might be teething, I scornfully told him that he knew NOTHING ABOUT BABIES.  Babies don't get teeth at just barely four months old!  Don't be ridiculous!  Go back downstairs and build a circuit or something.  Just you leave this baby stuff to me.

Ahem.

This morning as my son howled in my arms, mouth wiiiiide open, I noticed he had a bit of something stuck to his lower jaw and attempted to wipe it away.  But that thing?  Was hard and SHARP.  In fact (cough) it was a tooth, newly erupted from my son's tender flesh.  Hence the screaming.  And the drool. 

I was too excited to care that I'd been wrong and woke Jeff up right away to let him know of his vindication.  He high-fived me, and Sam, totally confused at our happiness in the face of his meltdown, stopped crying and stared about in teary confusion.  We gave him some Tylenol and praised him for being such a clever lad.  He tried a tentative "Goo?" from behind his pacie.  He had no idea what he'd done but he drifted off contentedly in a Tylenol haze, his little mouth finally comforted.

My baby grew a tooth!  I couldn't be prouder!

trying to get just one good shot of the tooth:









Finally!  You can just barely see it on the bottome right.  (His right.)

Four Months

Sweet Boy~

Today you are four months old. 

For the past few days you have been eating like there's never going to be another bottle again and napping almost every hour.  You are ready to poop out for the night at 5:30 and we have to jolly you along as best we can until 6:15 when you give up and scream yourself purple until we put you in bed.  You are most definitely experiencing a growth spurt which makes my back muscles tremble in literal and metaphorical fear; you are already over 18 pounds and carrying you around all day has gotten to be rather sweaty work.  Aunty JoJo has a babysling for every stage though, so we have given her back the NoJo and now we use the BabyHawk, which you adore. 

Aunty Sarah lent us her exersaucer just this past week since you had begun crying every time we put you into your playgym.  You were bored with that! You wanted to be up.  You wanted new toys.  So Aunty Sarah and your friend Evan let you use theirs and you love it.  Your favorite thing is for me to tap out a rhythm with the rhythm sticks that Grandpa gave me last Christmas as you make the buttons on your toy play music.  You also love our rainstick from Chile and the emu caller from Australia, although the deep tones of the emu caller startled you when you first heard it.  Now you stare at me in puzzled fascination when I blow into it until I trail off into something that sounds very much like a fart because I am laughing so hard at your expression.  As I sit there cracking up, you start to smile and laugh too, dropping your pacifier, and then we are both lost in a world of giggles.  Darling, those are some of my favorite times.

This month your father went away for two days and you missed him.  We went to see both sets of grandparents while he was gone and even though you enjoyed yourself immensely at both houses, by the end of the weekend you were just plain done.  In the car on the way home you just wailed and wailed.  You'd fall asleep occasionally only to wake up and look around, then at me in the mirror as if to say: "Are we still doing THIS?  WHY?!"  And your tiny face would crumple and the crying would begin anew.  When we finally got back home and Daddy was there, you were surprised and confused for a second but then no one else would do.  You'd had Mommy all weekend, you wanted Daddy.  You screamed a lot to let him know how angry you were with his absence and with all the car travel and then we had to put you in bed early.  But you got up at 4 AM the next morning to make sure you didn't miss any time with your father and to make sure he was still there and didn't miss you.  

I still have nightmares that they've come to take you away from me, sweet boy.  But with each passing month they grow less and you grow more.  You are light and life and sweetness and an intensity that I've never before known.  I love you with all that is within me.

always~

your mother 

*Heh.  Apparently I've been playing the emu caller wrong.  I've been blowing into it like a didgeridoo when you're supposed to bang on it with the flat of your hand.  My bad.  No wonder I haven't been able to scare any emus.

Three Months

My dear sweet Sam~

Today you are three months old.  It hardly seems possible that you have only been here three months.  It feels as though you have been part of our lives forever and I cannot imagine what I ever did with myself before you arrived.  And yet simultaneously it feels as though you just got here yesterday.  How can you be so big already?  You are 16 pounds and 25 inches long.  How did my tiny baby grow into such a big boy?

Now that we have figure out how to make your tummy comfortable, you are an entirely different baby.  You have made up the developmental milestones you missed in spades.  You smile at me now, delighted to see me after a nap or a long night's sleep.  You laugh, gasping with glee as I ask you "MORE kisses?" and smother your cheeks and mouth with five years of pent up love.    You love to play the tongue game with me, smiling that wide smile as I stick my tongue out at you.  You look at me intently and then stick your tongue out hesitantly until I praise you, clapping my hands, and then you smile and coo at me, pleased no end with yourself. 

You love to play with the animals in the play gym Auntie Kath sent you, particularly the giraffe.  You take a savage delight in grabbing hold of his colored feet and yanking at him until he comes off his linky and crashes to the ground.  You shake him above your head like a trophy while blowing raspberries, a tiny little Lord of the Flies.

You are snuggly and sweet at night, a sleepy weight in my arms.  You follow your father and me with your eyes if someone else is holding you, making sure you know where we are at all times.  You are content with babysitters, especially Auntie JoJo who wears you around in her baby sling, but you seem happy to see us when we come back.  You have changed from a screamy, pain-filled baby into a happy, playful child and we find you just delicious.

Darling son, I love being your mother.  It is the single most fulfilling thing I have ever done and your very presence sometimes brings me to tears.  I know that everyone has glommed onto this fact already but I HAVE A BABY!  And that baby is you.  You are worth every tear, every sleepless night, every year we had to wait.  You are more than I ever dared hope for and I am in love with you so much that I physically ache.  You are a gift, my child, and I hope you will always remember that.

All my love,

your mother

Super Gerbil Baby Does The Crib

Jeff is narrating (forgive the heavy breathing; the man has sinus issues) but you'll hear my voice in the background saying "Thank you Jesus!" and "We should have done this two weeks ago!"

Sam had been sleeping in my room for the past month (has it really been a whole month?!) (and I say "my room" because Jeff snores so badly that he spends most nights in the guest room) but it got to the point where neither Sam nor I were getting any sleep together. 

In the beginning it worked great.  He slept like a rock, I woke up when he cried and fed him and then we both went back to sleep.  Then came the Gerbil Baby.  Sam would make these noises in his sleep (and sometimes while awake) that made me turn to Jeff and say "Are you sure we didn't adopt a gerbil?"  And then Jeff would pick Sam up and say "Little man, you gotta lay off the cigarettes!" because it seriously sounded like he had spent his tiny lifetime chain-smoking menthols.  At first it was kind of cute.  But then we realized he wasn't getting very good sleep because the gerbil noises were increasing to become nearly constant.  And he was spitting up a lot.  And smelling like sour milk an increasing amount of the time.

When my best friend Char, mother of four, came to visit, I asked her if any of her children had ever made these noises.  "No," she replied, looking vaguely alarmed.  "I've never heard a baby make noises like that."  That was enough for me; I was pretty sure Sam had reflux.  One visit to our awesome pediatrician later and I was proven right; my poor Gerbil Baby was gerbiling because acid was burning up his esophagus.  We tried thickening his bottles for a week to see if maybe some low intervention methodology would do the trick but alas, the Zan.tac, it is our new best friend.  I haven't heard from Gerbil Baby in three days.

However, Pirate Monkey the Wiggle Worm was still in da house and every time mommy rolled over in bed, his eyes would pop open (I imagine, I can't see inside his bassinet from the bed) and the screaming/whining/complaining would begin.  I see his point; no one likes to be disturbed during their sleep--I certainly don't.  Several nights of this brought me to the edge of a breakdown.  Sam started to sleep during the day and stay up all night.  Jeff ever so gently suggested Sam sleep in the crib, in his own room.

WHAT?!  HAVE MY BABY SLEEP AWAY FROM ME?!  He still wakes up twice a night to eat! I argued.  It's so much more convenient to have him near me!  He's too little to sleep on his own! 

You need sleep, insisted my husband, mostly out of self-preservation, I assume.  So, reluctantly, I tried it last week.  I put the reflux wedge under the crib sheet (he had been sleeping in his bouncy seat), put Sam in his sleep sack and put him in the crib.  THE KID WENT OUT LIKE A LIGHT.  FOR FOUR AND A HALF HOURS.  HE DIDN'T EVEN CRY.

All night I kept thinking: time to ditch the cosleeper, lady.  I should probably have put Sam in his crib a week ago, when he made it clear that he no longer needed or wanted to sleep with me.  He sleeps so well at night, barely waking to eat, and he's been a much happier baby since the switch than he had been previously.  He has a disturbing tendency to migrate off the wedge and into a sideways position but I rest easy knowing that the crib bumpers are piled safely beside the crib, instead of tied to the sides.  I still have to wake up to feed him but I hear him better than I thought I would (I've got the monitor turned up loud, just in case) and when he grunted in his sleep last night, I just pulled the pillow over my head.  He stayed alseep, I went back to sleep eventually and we all woke up happy this morning.

My little baby is growing!

Of Gardens and Wishes

Back in April, after Jeff turned over the soil in my garden, I put the seeds for my vegetable crop in the ground.  I was behind in my planting; the peas should have been in by St. Patrick's Day and where I live, the beans were more than ready to go in, too.  I was still a little tender from surgery but eager to be outside, taking advantage of the beautiful weather.  And I was eager to get back to my garden.

I crouched over the ground, sun fading behind me, fingers in the cold dirt, pushing the seeds deep down and patting them until they were covered with dirt.  As I planted, I whispered to them: "Grow.  Send roots down deep and grow.  I'm planting you in hope.  Maybe by the time you come there will be a baby taking root inside me, too.  They tell me there is hope, that though everything looks dead there is still the possibility for life.  There might be a baby in this garden before too long."  I whispered, my face close to the dirt.  The chill of the evening wind sent me inside, cheeks rosy and eyes bright with dreams.  I remember that I slept well that night.

It's July now and the cold April evenings are nothing more than a memory.  We bake during the day with temperatures over a hundred and humidity that makes me feel like I'm drowning.  Nights are cooler but still as humid and anyone who ventures outside is begging to be eaten by bugs.  The garden that I planted in April is a mess these days; I haven't been able to tend to it for over a month now.  There are more weeds than plants out there and my lone rosebush had to be cut back severly because it contracted black spot.  And I'm not sleeping much these nights.

But before the garden went completely wild, there were beans.  Glorius and green, bursting with flavor, we ate them the first week Sam came home.  It was sweeter than I can describe, holding Sam in my arms, savoring the taste of hope fulfilled after such a long, fallow season.  I stroked his cheek, watched his mouth move in lazy sucking motions and thought about that April garden, sleepy with promise.  I could hardly believe that after all this time, after so many seasons spent reaping despair, he was finally here, in my arms.  It's a miracle I'm still not over.

The yield was enough that there are bags full of beans in my freezer, stored away for the winter season when flavors go stale with the fading sun.  We'll eat them this winter, feed them to Sam as he tries solids for the first time.  Next year he will crawl across the lawn as I pick the harvest.  He'll be too young just yet to help me plant the next season's crop but he'll be old enough to "help" me pick it.   

I have half a package of bean seeds left from this year's planting.  Next year we will whisper to them together. 

Sheesh!

Would you look at the dust around here!  Someone has NOT been keeping this place up.

Sorry for the long absence, everyone.  Mea culpa.  As all of you have probably no dount heard, at the beginning of June Jeff and I were selected to be the adoptive parents of a little boy!  The shout of joy that went up from this house was probably heard around the world.  Sam was born on June 25th at 12:25 in the afternoon and has been with us since he was three hours old.  It was love at first sight! 

I quit my job at the library and am now at stay-at-home mom (SAHM for short).  Jeff is off school for the summer so both of us have been able to spend every moment soaking up the joys and sleep deprivation of new parenthood.  It's been amazing.  Sometimes we look at each other and say "We have a baby!"  We can still hardly believe it.  Sam's an amazingly good baby and so very sweet.  He melts our hearts with his snuggly ways. 

I'm hoping to get back here more during the coming days to let you know all about Sam and the adventures of our small family.  In the mean time, I'll leave you with some pictures.

   

Not Picked

Not us, not this time.  Didn't expect it to feel so horrible.

Unexpected

Our adoption profile is being shown to a first mother!!!

We're in her top five choices.

She's expected to make her decision next week. 

Please pray for her!

I'm handling it gracefully, as usual.

Still no news on the baby front.  This is one place where no news does not equal good news.  No news usually equals frustration. 

We got a heads-up from another adopting friend that one of the social workers at our agency had, with very little notice, packed up and moved to Africa in order to serve the people there.  Selfishly, I didn't worry too much about it since G. wasn't our social worker.  I commiserated with my friend, told her I would pray and (aside from the praying part) pretty much forgot about the whole thing.  That is, until we recieved word that due to G.'s abrupt departure, our entire branch of Bethany would undergo a restructuring and we would lose our social worker, too.  If you heard a small but ferocious freakout somewhere in the vicinity of middle Delaware last week, that was me, dealing with change the way I normally do.

We love our social worker, Christyn.  She's been with us from the beginning.  She's young and empathetic and she connects with us in a way that we don't think happens every day.  She's also the one that was willing to hear our whole story out and take a chance on us.  She believes in us as people and as future parents.  We're not your typical infertile couple looking to adopt; we've got a huge history behind us and daily challenges as we move forward.  Christyn is intimately familiar with our case, where we've been and how we've overcome.  To lose her now makes me feel like we don't have a chance.  She's our advocate and our friend in this process. 

I spoke to her about my concerns and I also called the director of our branch, the one in charge of the restructuring.  I understand why they are reorganizing cases; it helps evenly distribute the load among social workers so that no one person is overloaded and so that no one has to drive to three different states all the time.  I understand that they are in a difficult position.  And I am normally not a problem person when it comes to stuff like this; if I was I'd never make it with military healthcare, where you see a different doctor virtually every time you arrive on base.  But this is one time where I think it's okay for me to make a polite fuss.  Even if we are the only one of Christyn's cases to stay the same, I want to remain with her.  She wants to remain with us, too, which makes me feel better.  We have gone through so much of this process with each other, we all want to reach the finish line together.   Besides, the thought of telling our whole story again to another total stranger makes me want to cry.  It's a lot to tell, a lot to relive.  Those days were very dark.

We won't know anything for a while yet.  The director has to consider our request and talk it over with Christyn and our new social worker.  The most likely arrangement will probably fall somewhere into the middle; Christyn will go with us to meet potential birth families whenever that opportunity should arise and perform our first post-placement visit.  The new social worker will probably handle everything else.  I'm not overwhelmed with joy at this compromise but it's better than not having Christyn at all.  And my friend Lorie is still in the back of my head reminding me that God can take care of this, too. 

Yeah, yeah.

Well, since you asked....

So many of you have supported Jeff and I during our years of infertility.  You've offered us your shoulders to cry on, your prayers and your own tears on our behalf.  We couldn't have made it this far without you.  Along the way, many of you would ask "How are you doing?" and I would hem and haw, trying to think up an answer that was socially acceptable.  Most of the time I just said "I'm ok! How are you?" 

Catherine Hockmuth wrote a very good article for the New York Times the other day about what it's like to be infertile.  Much more gracefully than I ever could, she explains what we all feel and think every time we fail, every time we lose another pregnancy.  This blog is mostly about adoption, I know.  I promise not to beat you over the had with infertility (much.)  But we wouldn't be here if it weren't for that long grieving process and I'll bet that we are not the only people you know who are going through this.  If you want a thoughtful read, try this article and then let me know what you think.  In the mean time, I'll be organizing my closets.