Hair, Rhinos, and Breastpumps!

I have been having small, random thoughts about KK for the last two days, but since none of them could individually become a post, I haven't messed with it.  However, I now feel as though I have enough small thoughts to compile them into one hodgepodge blogging event -- incoherent though it may be...

Kynzie is going through an unfortunate hair phase.  And by that I mean that her hair is falling out!  Turns out this happens to babies?  I had no idea.  This, in itself, is not so bad.  Yes, we were pumped when she came out with so much beautiful dark hair. And yes I was enjoying watching her hair grow and get longer.  But just having hair fall back out would have been a minor setback.  What we have is something far more bizarre.  Kynzie has lost all of the hair on the top of her head except for a small racing stripe down the very middle.  It's a weird monk-like do with a small mohawk added in...I've been trying various come-overs, but nothing's working so far.  And let's not forget that none of the hair in the back is falling out, so it is becoming a lovely shade of mullet.  Beautiful.  Actually, it is still beautiful, which is the most shocking part about it!  How can she still be this gorgeous with hair like that?? It seems to defy all logic and reason, but it is so nonetheless.  I am, however, looking forward to the time when her hair begins to act normally!

Kynzie has changed so much in only a month!  When I think back to how much she was awake and alert the first couple of weeks, it's astounding to see how far she's come so quickly!  I bought her an activity gym for her one-month birthday and she loves it! She will sit and look in the mirror or stare at the monkeys.  Her favorite part, though, is the rhino and bird mobile in the middle.  She will stare and smile at it for minutes at a time!  Minutes are like hours to a baby much in the same way that one year is like 7 years to a dog...so you can see how huge this is!

I think James and I are becoming more adept at this whole parenting thing, as well.  When she cries (which is on the whole much less often than before) we can calm her quickly and know more readily what she wants.  I am starting to feed her before she cries because she's hungry and get her to sleep before she works herself up and cries for an hour!  Now, this is not happening 100 percent of the time, but we are trying really hard! Today was a great day, so this is a good day for a blog post of this nature.  Yesterday would not have been a good day to discuss my parenting skills, as I spent most of the day confused about what she wanted and sad that I couldn't seem to give it to her.

**Warning!  The following is of a relatively personal nature, so be prepared**

I am breastfeeding Kynzie and have not yet started pumping at all.  It has been a pretty daunting task for me.  I have this amazing pump (Medela) and I've known that I should probably start soon, but until late last week I hadn't even opened the backpack to see what was inside!  When I finally did it scared me even more because there were soo many parts and tubes and buttons...oh my...  So I found the manual online and read the entire thing.  I even started reading it again in Spanish and then remembered that it would be all the same information and stopped.  That helped a ton.  I sanitized everything and got everything ready last week and it has been sitting in the corner of the living room since then.  Just staring at me.  The only time I have felt the need to pump is at night.  KK is sleeping so well that she will go 8 or 9 hours without eating.  Great for her, not so great for my boobs.  So tonight it begins!  Maybe...if I don't chicken out...I think I am going to go read the manual one more time.

cloth diapers, anyone?

Today we begin a new experiment: cloth diapers!

We got a couple different kinds from showers and I had been waiting for her to get big enough to use them! I have used soo many pampers swaddlers and feel bad every time i have to just throw it away. I know it seems silly, but it seems so wasteful to just throw away all of those diapers...

So I am officially starting her in cloth diapers. Pray for me.

For today I put her in the littleG diapers from babies r us. They were super easy to put on. There is the outer cloth diaper, then a plastic liner that snaps in, then the "pad" that absorbs everything just fits into the liner.  I am not a huge fan of the velcro on the cloth, though.  I would much rather have snaps.  And I have both microfiber pads that are washable, and biodegradable pads that you flush down the toilet. Somehow it doesn't hurt my conscious so much to flush the pads instead of throwing them away. I dunno...

So over the next week or so I will try every variation and see what works best for us! Hopefully I will be comfortable using these instead of having to constantly throw away diapers, but I am not above returning to the "poop and trash" technique!

Oh, and here are a couple of pictures of her in her littleG's! Shockingly, I decided to start her in the green one!  And she looks too fat for them, but she isn't; it's just to way she is sitting :)

Mission: Find the Hand

So today Kynzie decided it was time she explored the world around her a little bit more...and by that I mean that she was bound and determined to 1. find her hand  2. bring it to her mouth  and 3. suck on it!  This is more difficult than you might first imagine. She was at this for a good 2 minutes or so before I got the flip and began getting a video of it.  It's too bad because most of the quality exploration happened before I was filming (per usual).  However, this was too cute not to share anyway, and I have been wanting to figure out how to post videos to this thing.  She ended up quitting and just sucking on my fingers, because that is way easier, but we'll get there eventually!!

Silly Monkey

I don't have any stories to share this morning, but this picture is the background on my phone and I absolutely adore how cute she is in it!

You're welcome :)

When you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you

KK has started to smile!

Well, sort of... Let me explain:

Kynzie has started to really get on a schedule--ish.  She wakes up around 8 or 9 and stays awake until about 10 or 10:30, then she is back down until 1 or 2, then she's awake until 4 or so, then asleep until 7 or 8, then awake until 11, then she does her big sleep until about 5, then goes back to sleep until 8.  It's a pretty awesome schedule!  Except for the days when there is no schedule and she keeps me guessing all day :)

My favorite time of day is definitely from 8 until 10 in the morning! She is the most awake then and the most aware.  We do most of our "play" during that time.  I put that word in quotations because she is still not really playing by any sort of standard except the one that I made up for us.  According to that standard she is blowing the top off the charts :)  Anyway, we play in the bouncer, the swing, or just on my lap.  I sing to her (mostly old hymns and Beatles--because it makes sense to us! Although I always start with the good morning song that I made up after she was born), I let her feel different textures, I make silly sounds, and sometimes I just talk to her and let her follow the sound of my voice with her eyes. She normally can't handle more than 15 minutes or so of any of them before she loses interest, but it's been fun!

The best part of our morning together time is when she smiles!  When I put her in my lap and sing or talk to her, she will look right at me and smile!  It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen!  I am not saying that she necessarily knows that she is smiling at me, but she is and I love it! James and I tried for several minutes Saturday morning to get a picture of it, but it comes and goes so quickly we just couldn't quite catch it!  It almost makes me cry when she does it, because she is so beautiful and it just melts my heart! It's a good thing she can't talk yet, because that gummy smile would get her an-y-thing that she asked!

KK and Pooh Bear

So I am not a photographer by any stretch of the imagination, but sometimes I have a camera and a baby and a giant classic Pooh Bear, and this is what happens...and by sometimes I mean earlier today.

I've decided to provide a running commentary with what I think KK was thinking with each picture. Enjoy!

How did you get way up there, Pooh? Don't you want to come down here with me?

This isn't exactly what I had in mind...

That's more like it! This blanket is nice and soft isn't it?

Pooh, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I have plans to get REAL photographers to take REAL pictures of her eventually, but this was fun :)

Happiness is a Loud Vacuum

My Kynzie is 3 weeks old today! These 21 days have gone by so quickly AND so slowly all at the same time. I cannot believe that she has been with me for three weeks already; yet I am having a hard time remembering life before her! Here's a picture I took this morning :)

So about a week ago Kynzie's digestive system decided that it didn't want to work as well as it had been -- meaning that she started to have bad gas!  (suddenly a little weirded out that I am blogging about gas...welcome to my life) We went one 24 hour period last week sleeping no more than an hour at a time.  And we pretty much cried the rest of the time. I say we because I am sorry to say that I didn't hold it together very well.  It is such a hurtful thing to watch your baby scream and have no way to fix it. James even came home in the middle of the day because I had called him sobbing. Then we realized: when KK toots or poops she all the sudden stops crying. What could this mean?? It took us longer than I want to admit before we connected the screaming with the pain of gas. But once we did we were on a mission!  I stopped eating broccoli, peanut butter, and milk automatically. This may not sound like a big deal but those are three of my all time favorite things to eat. But we read somewhere that those three things can give her stomach pains... We tried tummy massages also, but if I have pains I don't want anyone pushing on me, so I stopped that almost immediately. After several trial and error sessions, we finally discovered the key:

The Vacuum

Yeah, the vacuum is awesome! She will be screaming like crazy and then we flip the switch and she calms instantly.  It's as if she has a switch too, and it is inversely related to the vacuum!  Vacuum - ON.  Kynzie - OFF.  A-mazing! We also bought her some Mylicon (thank you Kay for that suggestion!!) and the combo of drops and the vacuum have made a much happier baby, and thus a much happier mommy!

This is clearly a short-term fix, mostly because eventually the vacuum will overheat and die.  BUT, I am not really that upset about it. I want a Dyson :)

Great expectations...

Kynzie Kay is officially two weeks old!!  These last two weeks have gone by soo fast! She is already so different from when she was first born.  She is awake during the day so much more, and I am enjoying having that time with her.  She is gaining weight like crazy and I am loving putting her in a different super-adorable outfit every day.  Wanna see today's?

I thought you did :)  She is the cutest pooh bear in the whole world!


On the other hand...

I keep forgetting that it's only been two weeks.  What I mean is, she has only been "outside" for two weeks! 14 days! Things are constantly changing in her world.  Her stomach is really new at digesting food; her mouth is barely becoming used to drinking and swallowing; her eyes can only see 12 inches at most. I keep expecting her to do things the way that I have seen other babies do them.  You know, other babies that I have been around before. I have babysat young babies and I even worked at a daycare for about 6 (truly horrible) months and spent large amounts of time in the infant room. So why are my expectations of her behavior soo off?  BECAUSE SHE IS ONLY TWO WEEKS OLD! She's not 6 months like the baby I babysat.  She is not even 3 months like the youngest baby at the daycare...she's 14 days old. She is just at the beginning of figuring out the world around her. She is scratching the surface of her environment.  So of course things startle her, or course she becomes overstimulated, of course she is confused when awake!

I guess what I am saying is that while she is learning to live outside of the womb, I am learning to throw off everything that I thought this would be and just be thankful that I have had 14 days with the most amazing little girl.

And tomorrow will be even better than today!  I am so lucky!

SuperMom

Kynzie dreaming is probably the cutest thing I have ever seen. At least it will be until she does something else...then THAT will probably be the cutest thing I have ever seen. It seems to be a pattern. Like first I was obsessed with her eyebrows. I don't think you realize how adorable her eyebrows are!                       Look ------>




Then it was her ears and the way they are sort of flat at the top. After that came the fingernail fascination. Tiny fingernails are crazy cute.

So the last couple of days have been so great! I have learned how to let her sleep in something other than my arms. You should congratulate me. Seriously, that is not as easy as it sounds! She slept with me for almost 42 weeks! I always knew when she was awake or asleep and I kinda miss it.  So having her sleep on my chest is my closest substitute for that.  She still sleeps with me at night, mostly because she sleeps longer that way (or that's what I tell myself...) but I have been putting her in her bassinet for day naps.  It definitely has its benefits. Like being able to use my hands for things like typing, making lunch, answering the phone, etc. I miss her though...

 

I think that's all the time I am going to have for today! She is fussing...

Mom to the rescue!

Hello World!

Welcome family and friends to the Payton family blog!  I have had blogs on and off again for years, even dating back to the ever-prestigious livejournal my freshman year in college. Hopefully this blog will be longer lived than its predecessors (which pretty much means more than 4 or 5 months), but it will last at least until I go back to work next fall...which, now that I think about it is about 5 months from now...

Today I thought I would just throw out some of the observations that I have had over the last week having a daughter. Speaking of...

• So, James and I have a daughter!?!  I haven't really been using that word much yet. I have been having so much fun just using her name; I hadn't even thought about the term "daughter".  Then yesterday James was showing Kynzie off to everyone at RockSports and he introduced her to a coworker as his daughter.  Woah.  His daughter! My daughter! That was definitely a weird, but truly amazing feeling.
• No matter how tired I think I am, I would rather be up with a crying Kynzie than be anywhere else without her.  It's nuts how I can want to cry out of frustration one second (mostly from 11pm to 2am when KK wants to be up and screaming) and then a second later I want to cry because she is so beautiful and I love her so much!
• After driving on I-35 with Kynzie for the first time yesterday, I have decided that I am not taking her out of the house again unless everyone else agrees to stay home while we are out. I can't handle taking her out in a car (aka death trap) when there are other people around. Other people are stupid. Honestly, I don't think it's an unreasonable request. Right?
• Several people mentioned how much I would enjoy staying home with KK because I would be able to catch up on reading, have some hobbies that I haven't had time for, etc. Ummm, I don't know what YOUR first week was like with an infant, but mine has had about 10 minutes of free time so far. She pretty much requires both of my hands at all times. Maybe other mothers hire someone to hold books for them? Or make lunch for them? Or go to the bathroom for them? I don't know. Supposedly it gets easier as she gets older, but for the last week I sure haven't read one single thing and in fact it's taken about 10 attempts over the past two days just to write this post!

I'm not complaining about the no time thing.  In fact, it has shocked me how quickly our days go by!  I can't believe she was born over a week ago already! Every day I am amazed at how much bigger she is.  She can raise her head and keep it up (for a little while anyway), she can find her fist and suck on it (she can almost fit the whole thing in...just like her mom!), and she has such a strong grip!  I can't wait to see what she comes up with for tomorrow! Every day is truly a blessing from the Lord, and James and I are doing everything in our power to take full advantage of each one.  Kynzie Kay is our miracle. I hope you will continue to check in with us because there's no telling what He has in store for our KK!!