Treats and No Tricks

Today we woke up early with big brother Max at 4 & then 5 for a little bit.  Good thing Jason was able to get Max some cereal while we fell back asleep. The two of them love their cereal and milk!  Then after Max was ready & off to school, I got everything I could think of done - laundry, cleaning, dishes, breakfast, etc.  First nap for Eleanor is always the best/longest - and is usually on her own.  I think Max was that way as a baby too.  And then she eventually wakes up too & has to help.


I got a workout in today- what!?! It was not much, but I did do something!  I did 1 minute side planks (right/left), 1 minute regular plank, 25 leg lifts (right/left), 25 kickbacks (right/left), and 25 glute bridges with leg lifts (right/left).  I found this little workout from my favorite place for little workouts - pinterest.

Most of the day we sit around eating and napping.  In fact it is about 10:45 and I am pretty sure I am already soaked in milk.  Little girl gets a bit messy... good thing I haven't officially gotten dressed yet!  Here's my little Halloween baby (Max wore this too, on his first Halloween).


Fast forward to evening where Mr. Max was Monster Max!  He was the cutest little monster I have ever seen.  He also had a great time at daycare with his costume, and later trick-or-treating (scoping out our neighborhood with Daddy) and helping us answer the door for kids.  My favorite part was when a couple big kids with scary masks came up the steps & tried to be scary to Max... but Max decided the appropriate reaction was to laugh rather than be scared.  It was great!  We had 100 kids at our door this year (ok, 99 was the technical count).  Our neighborhood is pretty great - even though not everyone participates, there are plenty of homes with their lights on & candy/goodies ready to go.
 

Hope everyone else had a great Halloween too!  And perhaps some more creative pumpkins than myself this year...

Slowish Tuesday

Ms. Eleanor decided that I did too much the last few days, and needed to spend more time with HER all day.  We also both came down with a cold last week and so that could also be a factor here.  Good thing she's so cute.


Max is going to be a monster for Halloween tomorrow!  I bought this green hooded footie pajama and then cut out felt pieces to add eyes, teeth, and monster spots to the costume.  My awesome seamstress mom hand stitched the felt to the jammies.  I think it looks great, but am going to keep it a secret until I get a photo of him in it tomorrow.  He tried it on when it was plain old jammies and loved it, so hopefully he still likes it as a monster.

We also got out for a little walk today.  That doesn't happen all the time - the weather was a pleasant 50 degrees & Eleanor needed a nap anyway (she naps great in the carrier).  We walked down the parkway, alongside the creek, to "the rabbit" (mascot of our neighborhood in Mpls) and then came back home.


Our walk included my favorite hill!  I love running/walking hills.  You can sort of see it here.  The path winds up to the right and around, before coming out all the way up by the house on the top of the hill.


Later, we picked up Max & had baked potatoes and mushroom gravy before I headed out to my Tuesday night meeting.  It gets dark out SO early and I guess this coming weekend is already daylight savings time.

Rainy day and a 3 week old

It's another rainy day in Minneapolis. This is the view from my front door.  It still looks pretty, but is only about 48 degrees out this afternoon.  We were hoping for a dry spell for a walk, but no such luck.  I drank mushroom cocoa inside instead.


Little girl is THREE weeks old as of today.  She is starting to keep her eyes open so much more - generally a more alert baby.  Sleep has been going alright


Little girl is onto cloth diapers!  Hooray for no more back-leaks or stained clothing!  Aren't they so cute?  As she gets a tiny bit bigger she'll fit into the cuter covers we had picked up.

Family of FOUR.. Introducing Eleanor!

I saved about 10 posts in draft-mode, over the past few weeks & they are GONE.  So bummed. :(  Now I will just have to think really hard about all the cool stuff I wrote about, in order to re-share.   Oh, and this is me re-invigorating this blog (I might delete some old stuff), in hopes to share it!  For starters it will be my little public journal space, plus plenty of pictures.

Let's start with this one, today.  Ms Eleanor!  She is officially a month old now.  She arrived on September 19th at 12:59 pm.  The goal was to have a VBAC baby, but she chose to hang out with me for a little too long (11 days and counting), so the medical professionals suggested that we get her out via c-section.

Since I had a c-section with Max, this wasn't too new/scary.  However, a big difference is that with Max, I went through many hours of labor before he needed to come via c-section.  Since Eleanor was scheduled, it was weird going in at 10am on the 19th, knowing that she would be fully joining us within just a few hours.  And I was less out-of-it from so many hours of labor, so things like the spinal anesthesia, and pulling/pushing my body to get her out actually HURT.  My c-section with Max was quite blurry, and I was mainly just shaking so much from post-labor that I was a little distracted to notice anything else.  The weirdest thing about the anesthesia is that it made my whole body itch - I need to remember to tell that to anyone with a planned c-section baby, because I thought I had an allergy to a post-surgery pain med. until a nurse explained the correlation.  Anyway, here's our girl!

We had a beautifully decorated house to come home to, thanks to some awesome new-baby elves.

Visitors too! - both at the hospital, since we were there four days, & at home.  We unfortunately had to take the decorations down after a few days due to listing our house - but we thoroughly enjoyed them while we could. 

Max is such a loving and helpful big brother.  Lucky Eleanor gets to go on walks to the playground with him - though this picture was a Max-only evening of fun with my brother & sister in law.

We are loving our new family of four & are ready for all of the new adventures to come!