Christmas 2014

Anders' first Christmas has come and gone and I must say as a rookie, he totally nailed it. Woke up super early, ripped open the wrapping paper, laughed with glee at his presents, dutifully performed all his circus tricks for family over FaceTime, double fisted his waffle, etc. We'll definitely keep him around for next Christmas. We were fortunate this year that Adam was able to hang out with us pretty much all day. He has been working nights at Harborview this week but has been able to get between five and nine (NINE!) hours of sleep most nights. Thanks to the children of Seattle for staying safe on Christmas Eve.

Adam picked out these Christmas jammies and I was a little skeptical. 

Needless to say, I have no regrets.

 Stuffed animal set from Grandma and "Pap-Pap" (not his real name) Wolfe

It was a very low key Christmas but I loved spending it with my little family.

Halloween Outtakes

Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone and we're all getting into the Christmas spirit, it's probably about time to post some Halloween pictures. Adam and I decided to forgo dressing up this year and channel all of our energy into making the perfect costume for Anders. Adam spent about 4-5 hours making a top hat (out of cardboard and some awesome velour fabric pants I found at the thrift store) fitted precisely to Anders' head measurement. Of course, Anders wouldn't leave it on long enough for a picture, let alone for our neighbors to see him in it. That's babies for you.

searching for the perfect facial expression...

 found it!

Gesundheit!

"does this wand make my cheeks look big?"

....aaaaaaand we're done.

what's up with the dad?

Sometimes our lives feel a little like they look in this picture:
And you know what? I'm ok with that.

But, since grown ups are people too, I don't want to forget about the second cutest member of our family. And as Adam recently had a pretty big milestone birthday (not 18) let's do a little post just for him. Mind you, he didn't ask me to write this post, he almost certainly won't read it, and there's a good chance I'm going to post an unflattering picture of him on here. Happy birthday baby!

So, we field a lot of questions about what Adam's daily schedule is like and...it's complicated. Let's start with the bad: on an inpatient rotation, like the one he's on right now (like...right now!) he works six 12-14 hour days a week. He also usually has a week of nights thrown in there and a couple of 24 hour shifts. He's currently (currently!) at the hospital, has been there since 7 this morning and will probably get home around 9 tomorrow morning. He most likely won't get any sleep tonight and will need to be back at the hospital at 6:30 pm tomorrow for a night shift. And his holiday schedule this year? We just don't talk about it.

On the flip side, he has four or five clinical rotations per year and he has a much more relaxed schedule those months. He works five or six 9 hour days a week. Breezy! He also has 3 weeks of vacation a year and we're looking forward to one of those in January. Not sure whether to lump this in the "good" or "bad" category but we're headed to Pocatello for 2 months this summer. More on that another time.

It's now pretty certain that Adam won't be pursuing any more training after residency which means that this time next year he'll start looking for jobs. He'd like a clinician job but may end up working as a hospitalist or in an urgent care until he finds something that is really the right fit. We're fairly sure we know where we want to move after residency but I won't put it on the www just yet seeing as how Adam doesn't have a job offer, we don't know where we would live (rent? buy?) and technically I've never been there before. So.

There's probably more to say but I've kind of run out of steam. The only thing left to do is post a bunch of pictures of Adam and Anders. I know why you're really here.

 baby's first stretch Hummer ride, sippin drinks from the mini bar the whole time

 matching plaid and ready to pumpkin patch

 baby swim class- 

back when I wasn't admitting to myself that Anders 

had outgrown his 0-6 month swimsuit

 puppets and pajamas story time at the library. Adam was waaaaay overdressed.

birthday brunch bike ride. Adam's sagging face in this picture is everything.

12 before 12

Anders is 8 months old now and, being the astute baby he is, has decided to set some goals for himself. He is admittedly late to the ___ before ____ trend but, to be fair, he wasn't even alive when it was in its heyday, so here it is now. Below are the 12 things Anders wants to accomplish, experience, or learn before he's 12 months old:

Stay tuned readers! And good luck Anders!

this post is worth about 20k words

Somehow, it's been 6 months since our little guy came into the world. Why didn't anyone tell us it would go by so fast?! Just kidding. Everyone told us it would go by so fast and everyone was right. Since I've restrained myself from posting monthly updates/been to lazy to do it (y'all know), I'm going to indulge myself with one fatty post about my main man.

 

Anders is such a happy little guy. He's seriously so quick to smile and laugh and it's my absolute favorite thing about him. We're pretty much willing to do any ridiculous thing to get him laughing. Sometimes I don't know if he's laughing at us or laughing at us, if you know what I mean, but it don't matter.

 

kickin' it in his bouncy chair

This dude is totally a nugget. Looking at his tree trunk legs and Buddha belly you'd never guess it, but at 6 months and a little over 15 pounds, he's kind of a shrimp. Or as Adam would say, "he's just so compact!" Yeah. He's a shorty. 

little Martha Washington in the bath

Anders' pallet has recently gone for quite a ride. We started solids with him a couple of weeks ago and he's been pretty enthusiastic about food. Mostly, he enthusiastically bangs it on his tray or throws it on the floor but hey, it's a start. Also, I feel like he poops out way more solids than he takes in. Like, he'll eat 1/3 of a sweet potato strip and I'll find an entire sweet potato in his diaper? It's magic!

First taste of broccoli. I feel like we could start an "Anders is not impressed" meme here. 
He has since come around to it.

Favorites seem to be carrots and melon. I also gave him this quarter of a bagel a month ago after I hosted a brunch and had some leftover. He was weirdly into it which is excellent news for me as one of my main reasons for having kids was so that they would eat all our leftovers. 

Anders + bagel from Allison Ottley on Vimeo.

Anders is a little bookworm but only certain books, please and be sure to make the animal sounds really convincing and don't even try that paper pages crap on me because I WON'T HAVE IT! This kid's got standards! We basically read all of his Sandra Boynton books 12 times a day. It's a good thing they're catchy.

The prince condescends to allow his cousin Emma to read "The Very Hungry Caterpillar".

Anders doesn't seem too interested in becoming mobile. He didn't earn the nickname "the beached whale" for nothing. He's very content to just lay around. Not much to report here.

 

Hanging out in his Jumperoo. Or, as Anders knows it, the "Loungeroo".

Anders is a pretty popular guy. He's in very high demand and his social calendar is always packed. Luckily, he lets me tag along to take pictures of him and his friends. Clockwise from top left is:  

Anders + Will: Future hiking buddies. Yosemite 2015, Mount Rainier 2035? Will might still be squeezing into that onesie....

Anders + Sadie + their dads: Tyler is Adam's old roommate from his single in Seattle days. Here we see Anders and Sadie sleeping through their meet-cute. Oh well. 

Anders + Audrey: Adam made a good friend while working in Seattle in 2007 and they've kept in touch ever since. She and her husband had baby Audrey in March and we happened to end up in the same PEPS group since they live fairly close to us.

Anders + Oliver: Adam's co-worker had a baby 2 months after we did and I watch him during the day. So far, they're not too interested in each other but I'm looking forward to the day when they can pal around.  

 fun! fun! fun! fun! (lookin' forward to the weekend)

So, the elephant in the room is...sleep. If you must know, Anders is not sleeping through the night. As in, he has actually never slept through the night. Which means that I also haven't slept through the night since before he was born. I kind of take the blame for this a little bit. We've trained him to put himself to sleep at night but I let him eat once in the middle of the night, usually around 3. I know he'd be fine without it but we're/I'm not ready to give it up. I also know that if I feed him, I can usually get another 3 solid hours of sleep out of him, so it's a bit of a crutch. Something will probably have to change in the sleep department when we get back from vacation in a couple of weeks. 

 Sleep? I don't know the meaning of the word. 

Anders, your dad and I feel so lucky to be your parents. I don't know how we ever got along without you but we're sure glad you're ours now! Thanks for helping us figure out this parenting thing together. xoxo! (and about 1000 more x's)

baby anders

I can hardly believe it but my little baby is a month old today. Its been the fastest and slowest month of our lives and it's true what they say...we can't imagine life without him! When I think that this little boy was the same one whose heart was fluttering away on the ultrasound screen in June and then wiggled around in my belly for months and months it seems unreal. I know birth stories are not for everyone but in my last month of pregnancy I scoured the internet for them so I wanted to at least give the Reader's Digest version of mine for anyone who's interested. Creating good internet karma for myself! (And then maybe Hanford will post their public tour dates for 2014? Pretty please?)

So...as I mentioned before, my due date was January 8th. Or 9th. Whatever. I went in for my (nearly) 41 week appointment on January 13th and in addition to the normal exam, they did a non-stress test to make sure the baby was still doing well. Things initially looked good, and then they started to look maybe not so good and when an ultrasound showed low fluid levels my doctor was like, "do you just want to have this baby?" and I was all, "I JUST WANT TO HAVE THIS BABY!" Game on.

We ran home and grabbed a few things and then headed back to the hospital for what we expected to be a long night of preparing my body for labor ("cervical ripening" is the technical term but I would never say "cervical ripening" on my blog) before they administered Pitocin in the morning. Once I was checked in, the nurse hooked me up to the monitors again to get a baseline for contractions before they started the medicine. After a couple of hours she came in and told me that I was contracting too frequently for them to induce me. Essentially, in the 3 hours between when we left my doctor's office and arrived at the hospital I had gone into labor all on my own which is just the kind of sassy thing my uterus would do.

We stayed in the antepartum wing for about 7 hours as my contractions got more intense and closer together. Around 2 AM, I was dilated to a 3 and my nurse told me they could send me to labor and delivery. Hallelujah! I kind of hated my time in antepartum and more importantly, I knew what was waiting for me on the other side. My contractions were now coming every couple of minutes and were so so painful. Basically, I was totally unequipped to handle them. I requested an epidural right away and 30 minutes later things were looking up!

Adam and I were able to relax, although I had a lot of trouble sleeping that night. Nerves? I don't know but whatever it was was not afflicting Adam in the same way. He probably had the best nights sleep of his life. I roused him a few times when things were getting exciting (every time I got checked) but other than that I'm pretty sure he got about 10 hours of sleep which is also (spoiler alert!) how much total sleep we've had since that night.

Around 6 AM I had progressed to 6 centimeters and by 10 I was at an 8. Do you follow? Around 11 my doctor told me that she didn't like how the baby's heart was reacting to some contractions I was having (the same concerning thing we saw during the NST) and that if this kept up there was a chance we would have to move to a c-section. I was pretty discouraged by this thought but knew that ultimately we would do whatever my doctor said was best for the baby.

Flipping me on my other side seemed to help a lot and by 1:00 I was completely dilated. I started feeling like I needed to push around 2:00. Pushing was so much more exhausting than I had anticipated. I don't know if it was because I had an epidural but it didn't feel really relieving to be pushing, something I had read in a lot of other birth stories. I was so parched and Adam fed me ice chips between contractions until I threw up (my first time all pregnancy!) and they cut me off.

Adam had initially hoped to be more involved in the delivery but a combination of a nuchal cord and meconium in the fluid meant he spent his time coaching me on the sidelines which turned out to be perfect. After about an hour the baby started crowning and Adam made an 11th hour switch in his gender prediction. "That looks like girl hair!" Ha! At this point the gender was actually the least of my concerns. My doctor told me, "ok, we're going to have a baby with the next contraction". I gave it everything I had and sure enough a perfect blue slimy little baby came out looking straight up at the ceiling! Adam announced, "it's a boy!" and our baby let out a wail that to me said, "peds team? who needs em?". To be on the safe side my doctor handed him over to the pediatricians who cleaned him up and looked him over and within a couple of minutes Adam brought him to me for some skin to skin time. He just calmly stared up at us a we marveled over his perfect little face. To me, he looked, and still looks, exactly like his Dad. It was the best moment of my life.

tears of joy from both of us

 

you say you want a revolution

 

those purple hands and feet that kept him from the perfect 10 

on the APGAR that Adam was hoping for.  #tigerdad

We spent the next hour holding him, nursing and settling on a name. I thought I would know just looking at him which of our 3 boy names fit perfectly but he didn't look like an anything and it was stressing me out! We eventually settled on Anders Wolfe and now I can't imagine him being anything else.

Well, that didn't turn out to be very abbreviated after all. I want to write more about our first month with him. Magic. We love him so much. I think we'll do this again.