Day 129 - This is Life Now

I have very little motivation to blog anymore because I don't feel like I spend enough time with Milo and I am literally on a computer for work 8-10 hours a day. But Carolyna asked and it is the weekend, and Milo is sleeping peacefully in his little chair...

I'm pretty settled at my new job. I'm learning things every day still and expect to keep on learning for quite some time (my boss says he expects about 6 months or so). My main job so far seems to be to keep Amazon from stealing too much money from us. Seriously, they charge fees for everything and if you are not vigilant they will start charging you more until you contact them to fix it and ask them to give you your money back. Aside from that, I am in charge of our inventory in Amazon, our listings and advertising, customer support, and reporting. It's a pretty big job and they are currently looking for someone to join my team so I'll be training someone new in no time.

Milo is doing great. His doctor gave him the green light to sleep through the night (which he has done twice now) without needing to be woken to eat. He is growing so well, that as long as he makes up for it by eating more during the day, there is no harm in letting him sleep if he wants to.

He's growing strong and currently weighs 12lbs 12oz. He is a little short of his age, his head size is exactly average, and his weight is in the 99th percentile! We won't need another doctor visit until he is six months old.

Well, we won't need to see the pediatrician until he is six months. We are scheduled for a hearing test soon and his doctor noticed a hydrocele on the same side he had his surgery so we will be going in to see the surgeon about it next week. A hydrocele is a buildup of fluid in the testicle and is pretty common. They generally go away on their own (sometimes as late as a year later), but since Milo's is on the same side as his hernia surgery, we're seeing the surgeon again to get his opinion.  Milo has had his for over a month but since the only course of treatment is to let it go away on its own or perform surgery we are just keeping an eye on it to make sure it doesn't become painful. It doesn't seem to be bugging him, thank goodness.

Milo is getting stronger every day and can hold up his head really well. He's been having longer wakeful periods too. Last night he decided to stay up from 9:30pm until 1am just hanging out, wide awake. He practiced moving his mouth, making little sounds, and moving his feet. Super cute except my bedtime lately is 8:30pm so I was pretty tired by the time he went to sleep.

Shelly has been doing pretty well at home all day with him while I'm at work. She has been taking Saturdays to get out of the house for a bit (like right now) and do some errands or go shopping or anything, just to have the opportunity to leave. She is pretty much stuck all day while I am at work since I take the car into Ashland and we do not live on a street with anything interesting in walking distance.

We're still working on getting Milo mostly breastfed. It has been slow going and he seems to have developed a bit of a feeding aversion. He gags a lot when he is eating but at least he still loves to eat and will even overeat if we let him. Milo did really well at breastfeeding yesterday and then today just screamed instead of eating. It's been like that with him; really exciting and easy one day and a demotivational struggle the next.

Milo with Nona in his bear suit around Christmas

Nona holding Lizzy and Milo

Candid Photo of Daniel Dressed Up for His New Job

Napping with Milo

It snowed and I couldn't get to work for a week

Milo ready for a walk

He was so sleepy, he stayed right where I set him

Christmas Morning

Skyping presents because there was a cold we didn't want Milo to get

Good thing he wore this bearsuit so much because it doesn't fit him anymore

Day 99 - A New Job

Ok, I hate to admit it but I have officially accepted that I will not be sending out Thank You cards for all the wonderful gifts and support we've received from Milo. If you did support us in that way, please know that we really truly appreciate your thoughtfulness - all the baby presents we got were perfect and are being put to good use. Thank you a million times. I feel bad for not making time to send out individual thank yous but I hope you will understand why I never managed (here's a picture of the reason).

A picture of why I never got around to sending out Thank You cards

My brother officially got offered a job as an actuary, a long-term goal of his that he has been diligently working towards. He was offered the job last week and they would like him to start as soon as possible. This shift will leave his current job open and after almost everyone in our family suggesting it (and after an in-depth conversation with Shelly) I decided to apply. Yesterday, I had an interview with the CEO of Discover With Doctor Cool, a company that sells earth science kits for kids, and he offered me Daniel's job on the spot.

Today was my first day training with Daniel. I will have him for another week while the office is closed for the holidays and we train at home and then a couple more days after the office reopens. He has promised to stay available for questions though and by living with him, I make his vast stores of experience easily accessible if I need it. I will be taking over everything related to Amazon for the company which is a huge spread of duties. We spent six hours today looking over the portals and support programs I'll need and we barely scratched the surface.

Milo is doing great. I hate to have to leave him every day to accommodate a 40-hour work week, I had hoped to have more time at home with him before that happened. Financially, we would have been fine for another couple months however, this seemed like too good of a job opportunity to put off as it would not be there available for me if I waited. Today was Shelly's first day alone with him and it went fine. She wasn't able to put him down while he slept though meaning that she couldn't do much more the bare basics of feeding him and pumping. I missed him so much when I got home.

We did a lovely Christmas photo shoot the other day and the pictures turned out so good!




Here are various other random photos I have taken since the last blog.

Milo's outfit matched the bed

Milo sleeping in his bed

Milo almost fits hit big overalls and they make him look so cute and chubby.

Cute sleep shirt we got in Portland

Milo enjoying our giant bean bag chair

Grandma Cat holding Milo for the first time (they've all done it now)

Morning snuggles

Day 92 - Week 13 (2 Weeks old adjusted) and exactly 3 Months

The good kind of chubby

Time for another update and a lot of cute photos. Milo is getting so big. We had a doctor's appointment yesterday and he weighed 9lbs 14oz! Exactly 7lbs more than when he was born. The doctor said he is doing so well we can let him sleep 4-5 hours between feeds if we want and our next check up will be in a month instead of weekly slash every two weeks. I was very excited when I got the news about his feedings being okayed to be extended an hour because I often set my alarm and wake us both up for feedings. Too bad he had gas last night and woke up every three hours in discomfort and than realized he was hungry. Maybe tonight he will go a couple five hour stretches and let me get some good chunks of sleep.

I am glad we get another month before his next check up. For our last two doctor's appointments, his doctor wanted to check his anemia and scheduled a blood draw right after our appointment (and I believe we'll have another one next time). He is showing signs of improvement and his last results were really good. Unfortunately, the blood draw was a little rough. I think because he was "3 months old" they were no longer supposed to do a heal prick and tried to take the blood from his arm instead (perhaps not knowing that his adjusted age was only 2 weeks). He yelled the whole time they held his arm straight, more at the arm being held tightly than the need prick we suspect, and they ended up not hitting the vein right anyway. After that we requested the heal prick and he took it much better, a small whimper when they poked him and then relaxed and actually fell asleep while they squeezed the blood out.

Waiting to get his blood drawn

Oliver, Noah, and Megan were feeling a little sick the other day (after finding out a cousin they had visited was recovering from the stomach flu), so Shelly, Milo and I skipped town to stay at my mom's place in the hopes that we could dodge the illness. I knew it was a long shot though as I had spent a lot of time with Oliver, including sharing food with him the night before.

In the end, Oliver seems to have caught a cold not a flu? Perhaps he got it at his kid group and not from his cousin after all. I ended up getting a sore throat that lasted several days and no other symptoms and Shelly and Milo still seem to be doing well. I am hoping my sore throat will go away soon with no worse repercussions. We did manage to get nicely settled in at my mom's house and there are even some benefits to being here over being at home. 1. Mom is happy to hold Milo whenever we want to have a meal together or do anything giving us a free hand more often than we have at home. 2. The bedroom is way bigger making it easier to do sleeping and feeding in the same room. 3. The travel bed we are using is the exact same height as our bed and the side of it goes all the way down, unlike the heavy duty crib we have at home, making it much easier for me to snuggle Milo back to sleep in the middle of the night without waking either of us up too much.

Milo is growing so much! Today he managed to take a full feed's worth of food directly from the source which he has not ever managed to do without a nipple shield. He continued to show signs that he was hungry after eating 80mls from the breast so I fed him another 70mls from the bottle and we ended up with the biggest spit up event we've seen to date. It is great he got so much at the breast and a good sign that we can no longer completely trust his feeding cues. He had the same reaction after his next breastfeeding session except we purposefully limited him to his allotted amount of food, he stayed up another 3 hours giving us hunger cues and refusing to sleep until I finally (and for the third or fourth time), let him comfort nurse on me until he fell asleep. He is sleeping now and I am thankful that I have the doctor's okay to let him go five hours between feeds because otherwise I would need to wake him up right about now to eat. Instead, I'll see if he wakes up on his own in an hour or two. It seems he is losing his tolerance to loud noises while he sleeps just from being away from Noah and Oliver for a couple of days, already he fusses and wiggles at noises and just now he opened his eye from a dead sleep just to Shelly staring at him (we have no idea how he sensed it).

Ok, that's all the updates for now. Here are the promised pictures.

Milo in his going out hoody

Nona enjoying snuggle time

Christmas outfit

Afternoon snuggles/nap

Milo comforting himself with his own arm

We got a picture of Noah to compare to that old photo of Milo....

Old photo for comparison

*Need a new version of him in this seat but it started to sag too much and he doesn't like it anymore so we got a new one. I still may get that photo though, just for fun.

Noah enjoying the lovesac after a nap

Echo's "reward" for refusing to get off the nursing chair

Rocky's "reward" for refusing to get off the changing station

Cousin Time Photo Series (I couldn't pick a favorite)

Happy Boy

Milo's New Best Friend

Cozy Caterpillar (his foot escaped)

*Photos in reverse chronological order