My 21st Birthday!!

Today is my 21st birthday!!!! YAYA I am now VIEWED as a legal adult. Sure 18 meant that I was no longer in high school, and 20 meant that I was NOT a teenager, but when your 21, suddenly you have more responsibility and more respect. For some reason society is just like that. There is no real difference from age 20 to 21 or 21 to 38 for that matter.

So far, my life has been pretty great! I am happily married for time and all eternity. I have a house that my loving husband bought for me to make into our home. I'm so honored and lucky to be a mother to an almost two-month old that I can nurture and help provide for. I have the gospel and the Lord and Heavenly Father on my side and a wonderful ward family who is there to help me every step of the way. I'm so grateful for me parents and the way that they raised me in the gospel. I feel like they prepared me completely for the trials and tribulations of the world around me. Life is pretty dang good.

So far Lilly has been an excellent baby. Last night was one of the worst nights of her life though! She cried (on and off) for about 8 hours last night starting at around 6 to 2:30. Christopher and I tried everything, You know, feeding her (she wouldn't take the bottle), changing her diaper (including helping her poop), giving her a bath (which she thoroughly enjoys each time), burping her, helping her pass gas, and rocking her to sleep (she WAS way overtired on top of it all, and the crying wasn't working in our favor). At around 12:30 Christopher let me sleep for about 2 hours. Those two hours I slept HARD. I got so stressed out and uncomfortable that I couldn't calm myself down. There was one point where I had gotten her to go to sleep for a little bit passed her REM cycle (a whole 15 minutes which was a miracle in itself because it was the longest we got her to sleep so far throughout the night) because I had taken off all of her clothes including her diaper and my shirt down to the skin and held her and rocked her to sleep. (There's soooo many benefits of skin-to-skin contact with your baby but we can get to that later.) So I began slowly and very quietly moving her off my body. I started with my right arm and was successful. Then I gently laid her on my leg (I was sitting indian style at the time) relieving my left arm and started to pull my chest off of her (particularly my right side) and she just jumped so high and fell right back to sleep because of the "startling reflux" all babies have until they are about three months old. When this happened I just about lost all my marbles! I began cracking up laughing so hard that I stared to cry the whole time trying to hold it in as much as possible (and that made me cry more). Christopher thought I had gone completely bonkers. I was laughing because I was so happy that I had gotten her to sleep and the fact that she had slept through her startling reflux for the first time that night (she usually sleeps right through it if it happens on a regular day). I was so happy I started to cry. For me that's saying a lot. Anyway, she woke up shortly after that. I let Christopher go back to sleep at around 2am and then I rocked to back to sleep. I kept track and between 6 and 2, we had gotten her to eat about 20 ounces. I thought that was crazy because before she was only eating about 2 ounces every feeding and that was every two hours. That meant that she usually eats about 10 ounces for the stretch of 8 hours. So she had doubled her eating amounts last night.

It wasn't until this morning when I started looking up how much food my baby should be eating as a 7-8 week old when I realized she was probably FAMISHED last night and finally got full when I gave her the last three ounces at around 2:15 am right before I got her to go to sleep for four straight hours. As a 7-8 week old, a formula-fed baby should be eating around 6 to 8 ounces A FEEDING. That meant that when I was feeding her she was only getting about half of what she was wanting. Thankfully she only decided she wasn't getting enough last night because before that she was just fine with getting only 2-3 ounces every feeding. My thoughts were confirmed today (well actually yesterday now) when she was happy all day and hardly cried. I gave her four to five ounces every feeding. She ate about every three to four hours which meant that she ate 24-28 ounces today. She was just a completely different baby because she was getting enough food. I felt so bad! I had no idea because whenever we would try to give her the bottle she wouldn't take it. I found out that if I would have kept the bottle in her mouth a little longer for her to calm down and realize that it was there, she would have drunk it down in a heartbeat.

Long story short, Lilly was a very fussy baby because I had failed to recognize that she was still hungary and needed to eat about double what I was feeding her.

So bad day put aside, my flower is an excellent baby.

My house is STILL under construction. I'm starting to get really mad at Christopher because he keeps on promising that he'll finish spackling the wall so the I can paint it and get my dining room back to how it's supposed to look like. He is starting to remind me of my dad who, to this day, has not put together the wood flooring that he and my mom bought for the upstairs floor when I was living with them while was in my sophomore year of high school. (I was 15 and now I'm 21. That brings it to a whopping 6 years.) Will I have to wait 6 years for my house to be back to normal? I hope not!

On a different note, my husband got me a Mac-book for my birthday! Yes it is an older one and yes it is used, but I found it on EBAY and got it for $200.00! My computer screen broke on my other computer so I was forced to used Christopher's all the time for my homework so he was getting really annoyed at me and told me that I needed to get my computer fixed. To get the screen fixed it would have costed around $300.00. I figured, why not get a refurbished computer off of EBAy instead of going through the struggle of fixing my old laptop? So that was my birthday present from him.

I feel so much more relaxed because my financial aid reimbursement came so we were able to pay off all of our debt that we accumulated through the year. (i.e. my credit card bill, and money we owed people from borrowing when we were less financially stable.) AND with Christopher's new job (well old job but new position) we are very stable even with having a new house note and baby which is yet another reason why I love my life. I don't have to leave my baby with a nanny while I go back to work. I'm lucky enough to have a husband that can support me while I be a full-time stay at home mom with my baby.

:-)

Well, that's all for now! Thanks for reading about me and my excitingly average life.