I had no idea how unsettled Rowan was until he was settled. You know how, usually, when babies cry, you can carry them against your tummy and warm up their tummies, and they settle and sleep, all wrapped around your body? Rowan never did that. He was always wiggly. Which was fine, because he was a wiggly baby, and some babies are just wiggly! Right? But obviously, it has turned into something more, and while Rowan is still solidly active and loves to jump and roll and play, he is now a content baby, for the first time ever.

This evening, as I fed him his bottle, he lay perfectly still and drank it, playing with his hands the whole time. He had one point in the middle where he twitched like crazy under it, and spat it out really quickly. I teased him a bit and managed to get the bottle back in his mouth without any tears or much of a fight. And he continued drinking, easily finishing his bottle.

When I took the bottle out of his mouth, he was staring up at me, milk down his chin, with a big dopey grin across his face. From my perception, he was both proud of himself, and had a nice full tummy. It is amazing for me to see those reactions for him. Not long ago at all, his feedings ended with everyone sweating, himself all teary and soaked in milk, and everyone exhausted. This is SO much better. Its funny how successful feedings bring me to tears, but they really do. Its one of those things that I didn’t realize how difficult it really was until there was improvement, you know? It was our norm. Like how Dekker would vomit every time you’d pick him up. No word of a lie. It didn’t matter if he had just eaten, or not, or just burped, or not. It was just always. He barfed all the way down my back and into my pants multiple times a day, every day, for about eight months. And it was BRUTAL. But it was truly amazing when he started getting stronger and it became less. This is one of those things. As things improve, I am just extra grateful for them.

Rowan still has those panicky twitches, and he still sometimes struggles VERY hard during a feeding, so I think I’m going to go along with my doctors recommendation, and bump his medication juuust a bit. As in another half mil, twice a day. If he can be completely reflux free, we’ll be able to start improving a few more things and making life easier for him, and in turn, for us. We just have to help him get comfortable first.

I’m SO thrilled with the progress Ro is making. I’m sorry to those of you who are bored of hearing about this. I understand many other people and their children have much bigger fish to fry. But I’m all for celebrating all victories, big or small, and I believe that since we’re celebrating our own victories over here, I’m deciding that they’re all big 🙂

YAY ROWAN, FOR NOT TASTING ACID WHEN YOU EAT!!!!! THATS SO GROSS!!!!!

The title of todays post is based on my feelings today. I’m not sure whether my brain is fried, or I’m just toast. For some reason, last night, I was awake from midnight until sometime after 3:00pm, when I stopped looking at the time and just pretended to sleep in an effort to fool my brain. I did eventually fall asleep, but I was pretty zombified first thing this morning. I decided to adult after all, and got it together for the morning and afternoon! The kids had a lot of fun, they played together really well, and Rowan ate really really well! All things considered, it was a successful day! But I am completely. Wiped. Out.

Praise the Lord, we have learned about our kids well, and bedtime routine starts NOW! Tidying toys, brushing teeth, potty break and diaper changes, prayers and lights out by 7:00! So. Ready.

Brady has a side job lined up for the next couple of days, but thanks to the supplier not getting his finishing supplies to site until roughly 2:00pm, our schedule changed and we decided to go into the city for a bit of an outing. The idea was, after we did our stuff in the city, we’d stop by the job site and he could check over the materials, so any errors had extra time to be corrected.

We didn’t have tons to do in the city, but we did stop at a lot of places for one thing, or to check for something. So lots of stopping and starting, but without too terribly much success. But we did stock up on a few staple groceries, and have a really nice time just being out and about with the kids. They were super positive all day, in great moods, which was super refreshing!!

We got supper and Brady went and checked his materials at work, which seem to be in order. Everyone ate well, and we listened to my new favorite music on the drive home. Now, the two big ones are tucked in, and Rowan downed his bottle!! Bradys mixing up a few more ounces to see if he’ll willingly drink more still! But Ro seems so happy to be home, laying on our bed, soaking up the attention and being able to roll around. He is at that stage of life where he doesn’t like to be held or contained constantly, yet he’s not really able to go very far on his own, if you know what I mean. So being free to roll and be on his own is a huge gift for him.

He’ll be down for the night soon, and we’ll rest up in the tub and hopefully have a good nights sleep before he’s back at work tomorrow. So glad he didn’t go in today and just putter while he waited for the materials to show up. That would have been a pretty unfortunate time suck. But he’s learned that lesson the hard way before, and thankfully, this time, it turned into a great family day.

Ro continues to improve every single day. While he’s been a royal pain to feed today (oh. my. gosh.) he slept so well at night! He woke up for milk at 1:15am, and not again until 7:00!! He still eats much better at night, but we’ll take what we can get.

Since I got home so late last night, and I was kind of wired, Brady and I stayed up together for a while so I had a chance of getting sleepy. I admit, I’m somewhat dependant on him for this. We always go to bed together. Always. So on nights like last night, of course I said we needed to go to bed sooner than I was ready, so that he could get some sleep before his inevitably early morning, but I lay awake until Ro woke up at 1:15. I was able to sleep after that, thankfully, and sleeping until 7:00 was beautiful! Shorter than I’m used to though. Tonight will be a much, much earlier night!! My mom always says any hours you get before midnight count for twice as many, and I think she’s onto something.

I’ve got to get my soak in first, though. I missed it yesterday, though my entire evening out was completely worth it! But I think anyone who also has a soak every night can appreciate how much I miss it when its not there. Halloween candle and bath time!

I’m old now, and I’m rarely up late. Ask the friends that I usually text in the evening. Lately, I’m closing up shop and cuddling in for bed slightly before 10:00pm.

Tonight, however, I had an outing with Kim. We did a bit of shopping, got some supper and coffee, and had a nice little date in the van while her baby boy slept in his car seat. We had such a nice time! But when the baby lulls, we head back home. We were met with an absolutely dark town. The power was out everywhere. The only lights we saw were those of headlights of the other few vehicles driving around. Thankfully, Kims husband met us in the driveway and helped carry everything inside. We said our goodbyes, and I drove off.

I decided to quickly duck in on my mom. I know she doesn’t need any “taking care of,” but I was around and wanted to have a quick visit. Our visit quickly became a two hour affair, which was honestly completely lovely! I’m sure lots of you can relate to how things change once you have kids, and when I get to spend time with my mom, I feel like I’m always competing for her attention with my children. I’m pretty familiar with that scene, and its fine, but it was such a treat to just sit in the living room and have a little candlelit visit.

I don’t even feel tired, but I left at 11:00, and am only home now, around 11:30. I feel fine, almost refreshed even, but my body is tired and angry, so I’m heading off to bed. Brady ran a bath 2.5 hours ago, so thats sad, hahaha! It was worth sacrificing it this time, though. I had such a lovely evening with Kim, and my mom. An outing is always a treat, but I sure have some wonderful people in my life. I wish I could have roped them all into the same evening, but these two are pretty high on the list, so I count myself lucky 🙂

I know its only been a few days since I last talked about Rowans eating situation, but I know at least some of you follow our family pretty closely, and if I’m fired up about something, sometimes you guys are too. So here’s the latest on Ro.

I could not be happier with the way Rowan’s medication is improving just his general quality of life, it seems. At our worst, he was up every two-ish hours every night, not napping in the day, always unsettled, and of course, HATED drinking his milk. Since he’s been on his medication (basically just the liquid form of a generic Zantac) SO many things have changed!!! He’s up twice in the night still, but that is a large step up from where we were, so I’m certainly not complaining! He naps so much better in the day, too, which I didn’t necessarily expect to come from this. Two nice long naps for sure, sometimes three shorties, depending on the day. He likes rolling around on the floor considerably more than he did literally just last week, when he was only happy in the jumper, in a standing position. Best of all, when he is good and hungry, he cries for his bottle. And better than best of all, he takes it!

The one struggle that remains is that he still really isn’t a fan of taking a bottle. He doesn’t get half as upset, because it doesn’t hurt him anymore. (Disclaimer: This is obviously just as far as we can tell. We don’t know anything for sure!) But I think its sort of built into him that he hates drinking his bottle because he always has. So he’s pretty unimpressed every time we set him up for a feeding, unless he’s reeeaaally wanting it badly, but once we get him latched onto the bottle, he’s good to go. He’s adapting well to his new bottles, I’d say. Its taking a little while, but he’s catching on.

All things considered, we’re hopeful! We thought we’d need quite a bit more outside help, and we were fine with asking for it! But he’s really doing an amazing job of working his stuff out on his own 🙂 He’s eating more in the day, and we’re learning more about his preferences. We don’t have to be afraid of him having opinions now, because we know he’s not in pain or discomfort anymore. At least we sure hope he’s not.

So thats the skinny on Rowan. Thanks, everyone, for being so patient with the blog switching over and having some glitches. I think things like some people seeing pictures sideways and different borders and such will just work itself out over time, as its totally out of my control what your browsers see. Hopefully everyone will be seeing the same thing soon 🙂 Thanks again, guys!

This was the crazy busiest Sunday we’ve had in SO LONG! It was awesome, but sooo full! To a lot of you, it probably doesn’t seem too full, but we’ve been feeling stretched a little thin for one reason or another for quite some time, and being out all day takes a lot out of all of us. Our bodies are physically aching, but it feels like that good ache that comes with accomplishing something, and just being worn out from all of the fun activity. Its been a great day.

We actually made it to church!!! Brady had been asked to drum this week at church, and also next week, so we knew we needed to go, even though the kids were wiped out from Halloween the night before. It was good to go, though, and the kids were all anticipating it. Dekker was in a bit of a bad mood most of the morning, unfortunately, but we tried to keep it upbeat. I actually convinced him to try out childrens church for the first time, and he went with me! I snuck out after a few minutes, and one of the lovely women supervising told me she’d bring him up if he got upset. It was only a few minutes before he came up. He was completely fine, but she has a fabulous radar for him and decided not to stress him out, which is EXACTLY what he needs. So he came back up for the service, but said he had fun down with the kids while he was there. We’ll try again next week.

After church, we lurked for a bit, but then went to the city for lunch. My parents had lunch plans with friends, and we had afternoon plans anyway, so we just grabbed some lunch quickly before making the drive to our friends sons birthday party! He recently turned one, and his party was this afternoon. It was a pretty good drive from where we were, and we sooo hoped the kids would sleep, but none of them did :/

Thankfully, the party was full of loving people and was set in a school gym, so there was lots of space to run, and even some games set up! The kids got right into it, and thoroughly enjoyed themselves. It was even better when we took their socks off and they stopped falling on their heads. Always learning, lol! Anyway, they had a great time, and I got in lots of visiting with the other guests. I knew almost everyone from one place or another, so it was nice to catch up and see where they all are now. We had pizza and cake after some good play time. Blue cake, to be exact.

When it was time to start packing up, Laela followed around one of the guests as she swept the whole gym floor. It was so cute to watch her do laps ride alongside 🙂 But when it wrapped up, both kids were given a big coloring book and some crayons. They whined about not being allowed to color in their car seats, but once we were driving, they were asleep within minutes. Now, I’m sure a lot of you can attest to the fact that kids napping at 6:00pm isn’t ideal, but thanks to the busyness of the day, the kids slept the whole way home and are now all tucked in. They’re quietly talking, but no one is anxious to be getting up, or energetic, or hungry, or anything. Everyone is ready for bed, including Brady and I.

First a bath. Then a sleep. I’m so excited, haha!

First of all, my blog is down! I’m sure you’ve noticed, as I’ve had basically no hits today. We’ve been fussing with it for a very literal ten hours today and I think we finally have been tipped off about how to fix it. Unfortunately, you guys are the problem! Lol! I’m totally kidding. For the most part. We spoke to Bluehost IT and they said people’s browser caches aren’t caught up yet. The dude had the nerve to tell me to just ask all of my readers to clear their caches. I feel like I can’t really expect everyone to try to figure this out, and he said people’s browsers would eventually figure it out. I asked for a ballpark on what “eventually” looked like, but he wouldn’t tell me anything. Apparently “annoyed Hailey” isn’t the most likeable person 😉 He didn’t seem to like talking to me. I can’t blame him. I wasn’t his biggest fan either. But all of this considered, none of you can even read this! So why am I telling you how to fix the problem on here??? Le sigh.

That aside, today is Halloween! Our first trip out with three, and it was a lot of fun! It is hilarious to see the kids change so much from year to year. Last year, Dekker blew us out of the water by being surprisingly brave and upbeat, and this year he just took to it immediately!! Laela, on the other hand, was nervous and wanted to be carried almost the entire time. Dekker would call to her “I’ll knock, Laela, I’m not scared!” Rowan was hilarious and adorable and was basically just along to be stared at and ooed and awed over. Success all around.

We hit maybe 10-15 houses before Laela was toast, and it was time to head home. On the drive home, we changed into the fast lane to pass some vehicles on the shoulder and successfully drove over an already-dead deer. That was special fun, but thankfully, there was not a scratch or dent left behind!

The kids struggled pretty hard when it was all over, as they tend to do with most fun outings. So bedtime routine was quashed and they went to be pretty much right away. But it was necessary. They need sleep. Bad.

Rowan drank a full 8 oz bottle (yay!) and is now cooing in his playpen beside our bed while a bath runs and we continue to fight with ridiculous WordPress and bluehost and whatever else is going on.

Be patient with us, please! And clear your caches, if you feel so inclined!!

First off, I am SO pleased to say that we had a really good night last night!! By “good,” I mean that Rowan woke up only twice, which is better than our usual these days. He woke up at midnight and then again at 5:30. Usually, he thinks its time to get up during his second wakeup, but thankfully, he went right back down afterwards! So we all slept until just shortly before 8:00. We felt refreshed for sure!

So Ro had his first dose of his medication last night, and again this morning. I know its supposed to take a while to build up in his system before anything works in a huge way, but he doesn’t fight it too hard. Tho I can smell it and it doesn’t smell particularly pleasant. But I’m ok with that, and he is too.

As I said, Rowan woke up to eat around 5:30 this morning. Once we were up for the day, we began the transition onto new bottles. And it is for that reason that we are the end of the day and have managed to sneak a mere eight ounces into this boy He is unimpressed. But the nipples on the new bottles are SO different, and he has to open his mouth quite a bit wider to accommodate for them. He’s slowly figuring it out. Slowly. But if you think of us, pray for our night! He’s hardly eaten and he is not a fan of the change of bottle just yet. I know we could always switch back to the familiar bottles for night, just for now, but then he’s REALLY not going to eat in the day. So we’re persisting.

Ro has had his nightly dose of meds and is very slowly drinking some milk. Here’s hoping!!

I really had a lovely day, but in a very strange way. I’m thrilled to share with you guys that there are FABULOUS health care providers in this city, and I felt SO cared for today!

Lots of you don’t know, but we’ve had this constant battle with Rowan to get him to eat. I know. If you’ve ever seen the kid, he’s a tank. A TANK. So I haven’t talked too much about this to a lot of people, because it sounds like I’m making it up. But we struggle very hard getting him to eat in the daytime. He will eat very small amounts before getting very upset and almost seems to panic when we try to get him to eat more. Yet, at night, when he’s all dozy and unaware, he eats HUGE feedings. We’ve come to the tipping point now, as he’s getting older, where he’s getting up more and more in the night, because he’s so hungry, but we CANNOT get him to eat in the day. He cries and cries and cries after maybe 2-3 ounces, where he’ll eat 8 at night. We’re finally past thinking its just an attitude thing, and I called my doctor yesterday.

Unfortunately, she was out yesterday afternoon, so she didn’t get my message. I know her new clinic offers a few same day appointment slots, so I called the clinic literally seven minutes after it opened, and they were gone already. I was pretty discouraged. But my message was still in to her, and she would arrive for her day at noon.

Lo and behold, at 12:30, I received a call saying she wanted to see us if we could make it in by 4:00. Brady had today off, so we were already actually on our way in for some grocery shopping and such when we got the call!

When it was 4:00, Brady hung out with the kids and got them a really early supper, and I took Rowan in. We usually all go in together, but I knew Dr. Guselle had just squeezed us in at the end of her day, so if she was running behind at all, we would have to wait.

Lucky for us, we were taken back to weigh him within just a few minutes. The nurse who took us back asked “So he’s not eating well?” Then said she’d like to weigh him first. I laughed and said “You’re going to think I’m crazy when you weigh him because he’s so big.” And she responded with a very straight forward “No, I won’t. A mother knows better than anyone if something is up.” I loved that.

We were put in a room right away, and saw a first year intern first. He asked lots of questions, and didn’t make me feel like an idiot. When we just had Dekker, I was knocked down very easily by anyone would would suggest I was doing a bad job with my kids, or that I was being over the top. I’ve become much less concerned with that, but I didn’t even have to brush anything off. He took in everything I said, wrote a lot of stuff down, and even played with him a bit to help Ro get comfortable. He makes strange right now, but never with this doctor. That always makes things easier.

As it works in the clinic now, with the teaching and such, he came in and out with a few other questions before Dr. Guselle joined us. I love how she teaches and informs. She walked all of us through the possibilities and how we could rule certain things out. Lots of the bigger possibilities would have him be much much sicker, and not thriving. We all agreed that he was obviously thriving, but that there was an issue that was more than him just wanting to be up all night. I’d also like to say, for the record, that this isn’t about Brady and I wanting a full nights sleep. Sure, it would be great, but the issue is bigger. We’ll do what we have to do to keep our boy healthy and fed, but as he is getting older, he is hungrier, and he is waking up WAY more each night. But we can’t in good conscience let him just get himself back to sleep, because we know its because he’s hungry. I know crying it out in controversial, but we reasonably let our kids cry themselves to sleep. Rowan, however, wakes up and wails for milk. He’s struggling. And we need to figure it out.

What we all settled on was that he likely has a form of reflux that is bigger than what the average baby has. Rowan feeds better in certain positions, so thats part of the suspicion. Yet, after a night feeding, we lay him flat on his back, and if he had some awful severe reflux, that would hurt him so badly, which is doesn’t. While some of you are probably thinking that barfing comes with reflux, it often does, but there is a condition called silent reflux that feels exactly the same to babies s full blown reflux, but it doesn’t show itself in ways like that. Its just that. Silent. However, we can’t really know! Its all based on symptoms, and while this is the closest we can get to a diagnosis, there are holes it in.

I left feeling TOTALLY validated, to be honest. My doctor is exceptional. I also left with a prescription for liquid zantac and a few new ideas to try out in the next few weeks. I’m so pleased to have a direction now, at least. When the intern asked me what I hoped to gain from the appointment, firstly, I laughed, and then I told him totally honestly. I said I wanted to basically bounce ideas off of a professional rather than google or my friends who hadn’t experienced something like this before. I wasn’t coming in for a concrete answer, because I know there isn’t one, but I needed to toss ideas around with someone who knows way more than me, which Dr. Guselle definitely does. And I got exactly what I wanted. While we talked, Rowan clapped and shook his head, and screeched like a maniac. He’s such a ham. A loud ham.

So. We have some medicine for Ro, new bottles that should kiiinda work more like sippy cups, or better in a sitting position at least, and honestly, renewed motivation that we can figure this whole thing out.

Wish us luck, though! These rough nights are taking a bit of a toll. We’re trying to stay positive, but if you see us, and we look like garbage, be kind. We’re trying!

Look at that mug <3