Vacation, all I ever wanted

It's been several weeks since I last posted. Had a few days where I had to work, then went on vacation for a week. So let's get right to the updating...

Brendan is a wild thing. He is crawling like crazy, and pulling/pushing himself up towards a standing position pretty often. He likes to use pant legs to pull himself up, but he'll also put his hands on something lower and push himself onto his hands and feet. He's tried straightening up with no support a few times, and just plopped over onto his butt. I suspect if he keeps at it, he'll be standing and trying to walk within a month. He's really fast at crawling, so much so that he gave himself a blister on the top of his foot (from it rubbing on the carpet as he crawled). Not a big blister, but definitely an example of the friction he generates. I guess I need to keep socks on his feet to protect him. He eats pretty well too. He's now entirely on formula--the final breast was the first night of our vacation, more to calm him down than anything else--and eating quite often. He's obviously getting a lot more liquid than he was when he was breastfeeding, which makes me wonder if he was not getting enough to eat when he was still breastfeeding. Unfortunately, the added liquid is making the diaper issue a problem: although his diapers are supposed to be "12-hour nighttime diapers", he has exceeded the absorbancy several times at night, and then once yesterday (after about 5 hours sitting in his carseat since the last change). Nothing quite like a soaking wet baby. What it means is that I am now having to change him in the middle of the night, which I hadn't been doing before. It means waking him up a bit more than I would like (when he would wake up previously, I would barely be awake, and feeding him would make him go right back to sleep).

Sleep has definitely continued to be an issue. Brendan is still waking up several times a night, and having a lot of difficulty going back to sleep. My husband and I got into a disagreement the other night (in the middle of a two-hour waking period), because I haven't done a very good job of encouraging Brendan to self-soothe. He is right, I haven't, but it's been because I've been the only one getting up with Brendan, and I've been more concerned with getting him back to sleep as quickly as possible so I could go back to sleep too. I call it "survival mode". I do know that it can't stay this way; I am beyond frayed and totally exhausted. So I've really tried the past few nights to let him cry for at least five minutes before I go in after him, and if he's not crying really hard to let it go and try to let him settle himself. But he's also started crying with a different quality than he used to. I can't really explain--my husband describes it as a "mad" cry. I think of it more as a "sad" cry. The corners of his mouth turn down, tears just pour down his face, he sobs...I don't know what the cause is. It could be pain, maybe his teeth or an ear ache or a tummy ache, or maybe it's that he's starting to have major separation anxiety. I have noticed that he has been a bit clingy the past few days. Not that he has avoided other people or anything, but he'll come to me, grab my shirt, and bury his face in it. Also, at night it has become difficult to get him to go down in his bed. This past week he's been sleeping in a pack 'n' play, and I've always had trouble putting him down in there without waking him back up (it's hard to reach all the way down to the bottom to set him down). This week he has started grabbing my shirt as I've tried to lay him down, which made it even harder to get him to go to sleep. Last night wasn't quite as difficult, because I was putting him in his crib, which has a higher mattress (but now that he's able to pull himself to a standing position, we should probably move his mattress to a lower level, which will then make it difficult to put him in it). Anyway, I'm not sure what the problem is with the sleeping, but my husband has agreed to at least help put him down at night, so maybe we can break his attachment to me and get him to sleep better. Because I'm pretty much fried.

Then there's me. Despite my assertion at the beginning of the month that I would be working on my weight loss, I have done NOTHING to improve the situation. As a matter of fact, I weighed in this morning at 233.6, which is my heaviest non-pregnancy weight. I actually put weight ON during my vacation, despite a little more activity than I have done recently (18 holes of golf and a bike ride, at least). And I now have something else that I need to lose weight for: my brother is getting married in May of next year (2012). I would really like to be 175 lbs or lighter by then. That is just over ten months away. Basically, I need to lose six pounds each month. That's about a pound and a half each week. I SHOULD be able to do that. Heck, I should be able to do better than that. But I need to get on it. I need to start hitting the gym several times each week, and going for a walk or jog with the baby and the dog every day, and cutting back on my eating. Why is this so hard?

Summer, summer, summertime

Ah, summertime.

Let's see...where was I...

Brendan has started crawling and sitting up independently. He still tips over every once in a while, but he's pretty much good to go on the sitting. The sitting has translated to the bathtub; we stopped using his little bathtub seat thingy, and now he's just sitting directly on the bathmat in a few inches of water. Makes it much easier to play when you can sit up and use both hands. He's got the crawling thing down, too, although sometimes he chooses to semi-crawl, using one knee and one foot. Not sure what that method is supposed to accomplish.

We haven't done much in the way of baby-proofing the house, but we really, really need to. Brendan is drawn to electrical cords (he loves the laptop power cords), the laptops themselves, the electronic equipment under the TV (Wii, Xbox, BluRay player, cable box, power conditioner), and remote controls. We have put a baby gate over the top of the stairs, and outlet covers over the outlet in the hallway, but there are so many other things we need to do. Toilet locks, cabinet door latches, doors over the video games and DVDs...we really have quite a bit of work to do. I'm hoping this summer that we can spend some time downstairs (we're going to work on framing in the unfinished part and getting the bathroom down there finished), since it's a bit more kid-friendly. The only thing he could really get into down there is a big built-in bookshelf unit. We need to move a bunch of his toys down there and get some of his stuff set up down there. It'll make a good play area.

I'm disappointed in myself: nine weeks of teaching didn't do anything for my weight loss at all. I weighed myself yesterday, and I was still 227. Guess teaching isn't as active as I'd like to think it is. I took a step to try to fix things: I got a jogging stroller. I'm going to try to walk/jog with Brendan a few times each week. I'm planning on taking Brendan to his sitter a few times each week, so on those days I will also try to make it to the gym. I really want to get this weight off.

So here's my new goal...school will be starting up in about 11 weeks. I'd like to lose 1-2 lbs each week (that's all that's recommended for a nursing mother, which I still am, technically). So ideally I'd be at 205 when school starts. That would actually be my pre-pregnancy weight, as well.

We'll see.