2 Months

At 2 months life is happier for us all. Aubree has settled into a 3 hour schedule and is sleeping in her crib for all her naps and even at night now. It is wonderful! My goal wake up time for her is 8am. She is waking up between 6 and 8 each morning. Most mornings she will take a pacifier and go back to sleep until 8. If not, she will drink part of a bottle and sleep until 8. There have been a couple nights this week where she slept until between 5:30 and 6 and it was wonderful!
As of June 1st she is 22.75 inches long 55.32%), 12.5 pounds (81.74%), and a head circumference of 39cm (47.7%).
Over the last week her drooling has kicked into high gear. Today after getting home from Target she had a puddle of drool on her shirt. She chews/sucks on her fist a lot more also. Brigham's drooling started at about this age and he didn't get any teeth until I think 6 months and his drooling didn't stop until I think 12 or 18 months. It will be interesting to see if she follows that same path.
She drinks 4ozs when she wakes up from each nap and stays up for an hour then sleeps the next 2 hours. We do this 5 times a day which comes out to 4 naps a day.
Aubree is especially smiley when she first wakes up and as long as she is kept on schedule she is a very easy baby. We adore her to pieces and we are so happy she picked us to be her family.

The Man of the House

Things He Loves:
Robots
Dinosaurs
Trains
Cars and Trucks
Running Fast
Watching tv
Kissing Aubree
Hiding
Playing Tag
Slides
Climbing on Anything
Jumping Off Everything
Playing with Carolina, Hayden, and Madison Winn
The iPad

Television:
Before Aubree I limited Briggs' tv watching to 2 hours a day. Now it is more like 3-5 hours a day. He will watch almost anything and be completely entranced. His favorite shows are:
Dinosaur Train
Super Why
Curious George
Fresh Beat Band
Blue's Clues
Team Umi Zoomi

He discovered the movie Cars and asked to watch it several times a day everyday. Since then he discovered the movies Bolt and Shrek which he now asks to watch daily.

He has become very independent and doesn't want help with anything. He loves to cuddle especially on the mornings while he watches tv and drinks strawberry milk (strawberry protein shake). He has also started climbing into bed with us most mornings around 4 or 5. The best part of that is that he then sleeps most mornings until 8 or 8:30. Now if we could just get Aubree into her own bed and sleeping through the night life would be peachy!

7 Weeks Later

Our sweet Aubree-Rose is 7 weeks old today. Sometimes I can't believe she has been with us this long and sometimes I can't believe it hasn't been longer.
While I was in the hospital with her Brigham spent the night with Madison on Friday and Mark picked him up Saturday night. This was his first sleepover without us and he did great! He is completely in love with Madison though so I am pretty sure he would live there and never miss us. He ate food that I can never get him to eat for me just because Madison was eating it I guess. When they came to the hospital Friday night he couldn't care less about us. I was so glad he was having such a great time since he didn't yet know how much his life was going to be changed once we got home.
Aubree and I got to go home on Sunday. We had to wait for Mark to finish his Spartan Race before he could come and get us. I wish we could have been at the race but a baby is worth missing a race for! On Monday morning I was sitting on the couch holding a sleeping Aubree when Briggs came running down the hall. MOMMY!!!! He was so happy to see me. Then he saw I was holding the baby and he burst into tears. It was heartbreaking. At 3 weeks in he had a lesson in nursery at church about family. After that he has been in love with his sister. He hugs and kisses her all the time. He wants to hold her and feed her. If she is crying he pats her back or belly and tries to give her the pacifier. He is always talking about how cute and pretty she is. I love watching him with her and I am so grateful for whatever was said during that lesson! He liked her ok before that but he mostly ignored her.
Aubree has slowly adjusted to life. I have tried establishing a 3 hour eat, play, sleep routine but she has her own agenda. For a while she was eating full feelings every hour or two. I could not pump every hour and after a couple weeks of trying to keep up with her and not succeeding we got some formula to supplement. This was a life saver. She was no longer hungry all the time which meant she was a happier baby which meant we were a happier family. She only cries when she is hungry, sleepy, or occasionally if needs a diaper change. Up until then we thought she was just a crier. Poor thing was just always hungry. Luckily she was on track with her weight gain so she was getting the calories she needed. At 5 weeks she weighed 10lbs 5oz. When we left the hospital she was 8lbs 5 ozs.
She now has days where she will sleep more than 5 minutes without being held. Then there are days where she refuses to not be held. This would be ok if there was a baby carrier that she liked but no luck there. She will occasionally enjoy the Moby but not consistently. She hated her bassinet so I finally just sold it yesterday. I bought a crib mattress and today we will put her crib together and hope she likes it. I need a safe place to put her so Brigham can't get to her and I need her to start sleeping on her own so I can give Brigham some one on one time, cook dinner, shower, clean up, ect.
She gets up twice at night usually between 3 and 3:30 and again between 5 and 6. On Tuesday and Wednesday night of this week she got up once at 4 and it was glorious and I was hoping it was a new thing but that is not the case. She was up at 3, 5:15, and 7 this morning. She sleeps pretty much all day until 5 or 6 at night. She usually won't go back to sleep until between 9 and 11.
Last Saturday she came down with a stuffy nose. This made her very cranky. She is still a little stuffy which you don't really notice until she is sleeping but she has seemed unaffected once Saturday passed.
On Monday we took her to have her ears pierced. I had several people talk me into it. I have always thought it was cute but I didn't know if I could do it. I thought Mark really wanted it done from what he was saying so I agreed to do it. Well he just thought I really wanted it done so he was saying what he thought I wanted to hear. Ha ha. She did great and barely cried. She cries a lot worse when she wakes from a nap hungry. I still feel awful about it though.
Here are pictures I will have to add captions to once I am on a computer.

The Story of Aubree-Rose Ellalee

It was no secret that I didn't particularly enjoy this pregnancy. My body hurt and the days were dragging by so slowly but it was mostly the constant back and pelvic pain that caused me to really not enjoy much of the actual pregnancy. I tried getting my doctors to commit to inducing me on March 23rd starting in November. They never would commit. As the 23rd slowly became closer and closer I started researching natural ways to induce labor. I wasn't willing to drink castor oil because it would taste gross and I had heard that it could make the baby poop while it was still in the womb and that would be bad. So it came down to me drinking raspberry leaf tea and doing lots of deep squats once Thursday arrived (the 22nd). I had had some signs that my body was preparing for labor so I didn't want to take any chances of it happening before Friday. On Wednesday I decided I would drink the castor oil if necessary on Thursday night. desperate times call for desperate measures. Well by 8:00 Thursday night there were no signs of baby after drinking the tea that tasted like dirt all day and doing lots of squats. I was about to leave Krystin's house when she suggested I just go ahead and drink the oil there. I hesitated for a second. I didn't want the other side effects hitting me as I drove home but I decided to go ahead and drink it. She gave me some seltzer water and I tried mixing them and drinking the concoction through a straw but the oil was too thick to really make it so I just got the seltzer water on the first try. I eventually got the oil down and I was glad it was over! Now all I had to do was wait. Briggs and I got home around 9 and I was still feeling fine. I got him to bed and started to clean the house. By 10 it was as if I had never drank any castor oil. I should have been spending the last hour in the bathroom if the junk was working like it should. I decided to drink another larger dose this time. I mixed it with chocolate milk and I couldn't taste it at all! It was perfect! I continued to clean and organize things and wait for something to happen. Well at 1am I gave up and went to bed. Mark had been in bed for hours since he had an all day interview at Vanguard the next morning. At 2:45 I was woken up with some cramping. I was half asleep and was just thinking it was my sore old body. About 5 minutes later I jumped up. I was having contractions!!!!! I was cautiously excited. It was early so I knew I had plenty of time to get this baby out but I also knew that these contractions could stop at any moment. I definitely couldn't sleep now. I was too excited and the contractions were too painful. I downloaded an app so I could time them on the iPad. I am so grateful that I didn't have to do anything other than push a button when they stopped and started. At 6:30 I went into our room to tell Mark the news! He decided that he would just drop off his resume at Vanguard and we would head to the hospital since the doctor's office said we needed to go ahead and get to the hospital (my contractions had been 5 minutes apart since I started timing them at 3). My friend Melanie told me earlier in the week that she would watch Brigham when we went to the hospital so I text her to see if she was ready because the day had come. We dropped the boy off after going by Vanguard an then went to the hospital. It was about 8:30. I was getting nervous that they would send me home. I was sent to triage where after about an hour it was determined that I could be admitted! I am pretty sure the nurse in triage may have said I was slightly more dilated than I actually was to help me get admitted. Later on my labor and delivery nurse checked my dilation and it was less than what I was told in triage. Ha ha. Either way, I am grateful for the nurse getting me admitted! I got my epidural a little after 11 and my water was broken around 1. I was not progressing at all so the pitocin was started. My blood pressure was scary low for my nurse so I had to lay on my side and every hour or so I would switch to the other side. I think this really prolonged my labor since I didn't have the help of gravity at all. At about 5:30 or so I gave a practice push and they said I was definitely ready. The room was prepared and 3 pushes later at 5:57 our sweet 8 pound 15 ounce Aubree-Rose had arrived! I cried this time and had a hard time stopping. I didn't even know why I was crying. The nurse was asking me questions and I could barely speak. Ha. The doctor could not believe that I had such a big baby. Maybe one day when I tell doctors that I have big babies they will listen. I was also even more grateful I had induced myself instead of waiting until my original due date of April 1st!
Now this labor process also gave me one of the most embarrassing moments ever. Since castor oil is a laxative it causes certain things to happen to your body. Well I had used the restroom 2 or 3 times while at home. At about 4pm I began to feel the full laxative effects and my poor nurse had to keep cleaning me up for the next hour and a half. She eventually asked if I had been sick or anyone I had been around because loose stools were not normal. Ha. I said no and I never mentioned the castor oil.

How She Got Her Name
Aubree had been our girls name ever since before we knew Briggs was a boy.
Rose was my grandma's name and when she passed last May Mark suggested we name our daughter after her (if we ever had one).
Once we were at the hospital and we knew we were going to meet our sweet Aubree on March 23rd (my other grandmother's birthday and the whole reason we wanted her born this day) Mark began to think he wanted his grandmother's included also. Their names were Sara Eleanor and Frances Willie Lee. I suggested hyphenating Aubree Rose and then he could do whatever he wanted with the middle name. We decided to combine 2 names and the best combo in our opinion was Ellalee. Aubree-Rose Ellalee Rufty is definitely a mouthful but it is sweet that she is tied to all 4 of her great grandmothers.

On a side note, my mom said she never thought castor oil would work and she didn't actually think I would go into labor Friday!

So at yesterday's doctor appointment I found out that I am 2cm and 50%. Technically I could go into real labor any time but this is the same place I was at 2 weeks before my water broke with Brigham and 5 hours after being induced. So I don't think this "progress" means much of anything. With Brigham I never had any contractions until I was induced but I have been having contractions for weeks with this little girl so maybe that will help get her here on Friday.
Today Brigham went to his first birthday party that wasn't for family. It was a princess party and he went as a prince. He was the only kid dressed up besides a couple girls that had on tutu's. Oh well. He had a lot of fun. He had so much fun in fact that he ended up getting diarrhea all over himself and the slide and the platform for the slide. That was embarrassing. Patti came and said that someone had diarrhea but she couldn't tell who it was. They closed off the swing set and brigham got a quick bath. Luckily I had some jeans in the car for him to put on and we went home. He acted fine and he still seems fine. I think maybe all the pineapple he ate caused it but who knows. I put a diaper on him when we got home so there would be no accidents while the missionaries were here for dinner.
Today was definitely day I won't forget!

35 Weeks and Counting

I wrote a much longer, more detailed post yesterday but it didn't save and there is no way I can write it again.
Everything is going great with Aubree. She is measuring right on track to be due March 29th. Hopefully she will be here the 23rd. My back, hips, and pelvis are pretty much in constant pain so it makes life pretty uncomfortable at his point. I am hoping to get the crib set up in the next week or two and also get the play room set up. We have been organizing and purging our home of things we no longer want or need. That is always a good feeling. I really need to go through my closet and get rid of all the things I don't wear. Maybe I will do that next week. I finally finished my to do list that I have had for months. Ha. What a good feeling that was!
Brigham is growing so fast and is learning so much! He can count to 10 and sometimes 20. He recognizes all his numbers up to 10 and a lot of the letters of the alphabet. Right now his favorite letter seems to be S. he loves to tell us what sound S makes. He also LOVES to dance, play basketball, be thrown in the air, dinosaurs, trains, BIG trucks, airplanes, playing guitar, slides, and running. We have so much fun with him. He loves playing tag and hide and seek also. He is doing pretty good with potty training. He can go 5-6 hours at a time without needing to go. He goes 10-12 hours at night with no accidents. He has started to tell us when he needs to go without us asking him and he has pooped a couple of times on the potty but only because I caught him trying to go in his underwear. It is getting better though because he will go to the potty when we realize what he is doing. He used to run from us and fight pooping on the potty. Another funny thing he does is say "you're a mess" any time we ask him to do something he doesn't want to do.
Here is a picture of what I came home to the other day. His crown is not a crown but a dinosaur and he loves wearing that necklace. We sure do love this boy!

Day 5: 10am