Slacker Mom

I clearly have done a less than stellar job of keeping the blog updated. Yikes. It's been a busy few months. Guess I have some catching up to do!

Last time, I mentioned that we were going to be taking Lyla down to Riley to have her hemangioma checked out. The opthamologist that saw her determined that it was exerting enough pressure on her eyeball to cause some astigmatism, which would lead to a lazy eye as she got older. SO, something had to be done. Within the past year, that doctor has started using a blood pressure medication to treat hemangiomas. It's still an experimental treatment, but the results have been so instantaneous with so few side effects that the treatment is spreading like "wildfire" across the country, according to the resident. The medication previously used was a high dose steroid, which comes with its own set of issues and side effects. This blood pressure medication is really one of the first highly effective treatments discovered to treat hemangiomas, so we feel very blessed that Lyla has been able to be on it. Literally, within two days we were able to see a difference. At her appointment with the opthamologist in November, she had no astigmatism in her eye!

We are also past the little hitch with her bottle now. Thank goodness! She has gotten into the habit of taking her bottle at night, and now she will gladly, if not impatiently, take it from anyone who will give it to her, including myself. Sometimes, I think she prefers the bottle to the breast. We have a lot of flexibility in our daytime routine, but the nighttime one is pretty rigid. In fact, the routine led to her first temper tantrum. Lyla loves her bath time. She is a busy, busy child, and you can tell that it is the time of day when she starts to wind down. She loves to splash, lounge in the tub, and play with her toys. One night, Jay took her into the bathroom for her bath, and she peed in the tub as soon as he put her over it. He yelled, so I ran into the bathroom to empty the tub and refill it. As soon as I emptied the tub, she stamped her feet on the side of the tub and started screaming! It sounded like someone had whacked her in the head, and I thought maybe I had accidentally hit her. But no. The second I started to fill the tub back up, she was all smiles. What a stinker!

I probably don't need to mention that Lyla has developed quite a bit in the last few months. She started on cereal at about four and a half months and is eating new foods every week. We call her Miss Piggy. She will open her mouth for anything on a spoon, except for bananas, and even those she will eat with some encouragement. I have been making the vast majority of her foods. I wanted to feed her organic baby food, but the jarred foods were so expensive that I thought there had to be a more cost effective way to do it. I buy organic fruits and veggies, cook them, puree them, and freeze them in ice cube trays. It's not as time consuming as I thought it might be. It only takes about 20 minutes to make anywhere from 15-20 servings of whatever I'm making, and I feel like she is getting better food to eat.

Right round 4 1/2 months, she started sitting up! She was so PROUD of herself when she figured out what to do. At first, she would topple over anytime she started to concentrate on anything other than sitting, but by 6 months, she was much less wobbly. Rolling continues to be her main mode of transportation. Just recently, she started to get up on her hands and knees, so crawling will probably be in the not so distant future. No worries. I just bought the childproofing house kit last week!

And of course, I can't forget that we have entered into Lyla's first holiday season. This thought leads to an inadequate thanksgiving on my part, which probably should have been done sometime closer to the actual Thanksgiving...but hey! Better late than never. :) Simply put, I cannot describe how fortunate Jay and I are to have such a healthy, happy baby. When I think about how much God has blessed us in the last year, it quite literally brings tears to my eyes. This time two years ago, we were wondering if we would ever be able to conceive, and now we have the world's most precious little girl. A year ago, I was sitting in this same spot on the couch wondering what my house would look like (a wreck), how much sleep I would get (minimal), and how much stuff one kid really needs (a heck of a lot more than I hoped). I could never have imagined that parenthood would be 100% worth every single little annoyance. And to be honest, none of those things are even all that important anymore. She makes our days before we had her seem empty.

And on that note, here are a few pics from her holiday season to date.

All dressed up for Thanksgiving in Mattoon with Jay's family. First Thanksgiving meal? Carrots!! Mmm...yummy!

Lyla, Santa. Santa, Lyla.

On Saturday, we took Lyla to meet Santa at an organic dairy farm in town that does "Santa on the Farm." Live reindeer, sleigh rides, live Christmas music, and for the parents, some sweet eggnog. We took the video camera in hopes of capturing some sort of funny reaction to Santa, i.e. crying, tugging on the big man's beard. Alas, she was pretty indifferent, and the video was, consequently, pretty boring. Oh well. Jay and I enjoyed ourselves. And she enjoyed watching the reindeer.