Life with Lauren: Happy Birthday!

Happy birthday, big girl!

Our beautiful girl is one year old. ONE! It's so crazy to me that a year has already passed, and yet so normal and beautiful that I'm having trouble finding words to describe the day, as well as the past month.

I'll start out with stats, because facts are easy to state. Her weight is 23 lbs, her height is 30.5", and according to the doctor, her head measures 17 cm (yes, cm). Obviously that last reading isn't right, but I didn't really care to measure her noggin. She's a plump girl, and I think she's just perfect. I feel great joy when we go to the doctor's office and there are no problems with weight gain. After watching how much this girl eats, there is no surprise that she is at a healthy weight! She eats pretty much everything, including salmon, which I didn't expect to share with her. She waved her arms, fussed and pointed at my plate (and I was the only adult at home) so I had to be the bigger person and give her some of the delicious, wild-caught salmon, straight from Alaska.   

This is the same basket Lauren was in as a baby for newborn pics. How she has grown!

Lauren is walking all of the time and is into everything. Every drawer and cupboard is her territory, which makes our kitchen look like a wreck. I keep saying we need to install more kid locks, but we haven't yet. Her favorite place to get into is my bathroom drawer (contact solution, deodorant, makeup, etc. are all gleefully pulled out and dropped on the floor) and the baking cupboard (those little bottles of extract are the perfect size for her to cart around). We've just started playing outside as the weather has gotten cooler, and she'll happily walk around the backyard for 30 minutes to an hour, climbing up and down the stairs to the deck, and playing with rocks. We both love the vitamin D and I love how it wears her out. 

Her routine still consists of two naps, three meals plus one snack, and nursing before sleeping and when she wakes up in the morning . She isn't a talker, although I think she says dog. Not quite sure about that. Reading books is still a challenge because of her boundless energy, but we certainly read AT her as she goes about her business. Getting bruises is practically a hobby, with new and creative ways for bumping into things occurring each and every day. Her favorite toys vary from day to day, but consistently she loves Ross (the cabbage patch kid) and a wipes box full of scarves, which she never tires of pulling out and then wrapping around her shoulders. 

As for her actual birthday, we had visitors. Uncle Andrew, Aunt Shelley, Ben and Caleb all came to visit, and we celebrated by eating apple crisp and vanilla ice cream both the day before and the day of. Her father and I celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary (same day) by going on a breakfast date without Lauren -- woo hoo! (Thanks for watching her, visitors!) She got a few sweet presents -- a slide, a bike, and musical instruments -- and I'm already wondering what possibly she could need for Christmas and where will we store it. (Why bother to store it? They just get torn out of their baskets and strewn about the house.) Our house is going to be overtaken by toys, but they make her happy and our house fun.

Happy birthday, dear Lauren! We can't wait to see how you grow over this next year. 

Life With Lauren, 9 months

Loving her avacado.

One of the most wonderful parts about being a parent is that each new milestone Lauren reaches brings a different joy to our relationship. Each stage is a little different and it is amazing to watch her grow! Friends and family who are a little bit further along in their parenting journey will say things like, "Now he's able to play with us... He's really getting to be a lot of fun!" I've heard that from them at various times, so I'm confident that this sentiment will continue as Lauren develops. Right now, though, we are having a lot of fun with our 9 month old.

I love her expression here. 

 Lauren is crawling and pulling up on objects and taking steps while holding on to hands. Pulling up is her favorite thing to do. She has a few bruises to show for her increased mobility too. Currently she's sporting a bruise in the middle of her forehead from taking a fall into the corner of a crate. Ouch! These bumps don't slow her down too much and sometimes particularly spectacular falls merit no response whatsoever. She is an extremely active baby. She is not a snuggler and only likes to be held if she can see what is going on.

The look on her face says it all.

One delightful change this month was sleep. Praise the Lord, Lauren has started sleeping through the night. Prior to a few weeks ago, I was fairly certain that I was not going to let her "cry-it-out." It felt too mean to let her wail in her crib. But after several awful nights of sleep torture, I was at my wits end. All of the old tricks that would help Lauren sleep suddenly stopped working. So with Dan's support -- I put him in charge, actually -- we let her put herself to sleep in her crib. It was rough the first night, but I knew in my heart that it was time for Lauren to learn how to go to sleep by herself. And it worked. Now she gets onto her tummy and snoozes peacefully for nights and naps, with a few off times here and there. Lauren sleeping has made me feel like a real person again. I am so, so thankful that she has learned how to fall asleep without the very strict conditions that would lull her to sleep before. And for all of the moms out there who are struggling with their baby's sleeping, I'm sorry. I feel your pain. Someday you will feel like yourself again.

Camping was an adventure. 

Lauren finally got a tooth this month, followed a few weeks later by her second tooth. She has continued to chow down on food without any major issues. She is plump and sweet and active. She is starting to be somewhat clingy to me. We've been traveling (camping with Dan's family and now we're hanging out with my family), so the changes in location and people might have thrown her off. I'm hoping the mommy-only stage doesn't last for too long. (That said, she still managed to hold it together during nursery at church, so she's not having a terrible case of separation anxiety.)

With Aunt Joanna.

Lauren's next doctor's appointment is in a few weeks, but her unofficial weight is 20 lbs and length is 28" (which I think is 1/2" shorter than last month, so something wasn't very accurate!).  Growing like a weed -- growing out of 9 month clothes and into 12 month outfits. As she gets more plump, her resemblance to me as a baby grows. We will just see who she ends up looking like!

Life With Lauren, 4 months

Here she is at four months old. About a week ago, Dan and I were eating our dinner while Lauren played in her stim gym on the floor. She managed to grasp two of the toys in her hands and was earnestly pulling them towards her mouth. We laughed to see the look of determination in her eyes, and asked each other if she could get any cuter. Apparently, she will, but oh my. I can hardly imagine.

At her four month doctor's visit, Lauren weighed in at 11 lbs 9.5 oz. We were thrilled. It was nearly a two pound weight gain this month, which puts her back on the chart at the 8th percentile. We've settled into a rhythm for her feeding cycles for now at least. After every time she nurses during the day, she gets 2 oz of formula. The last feeding of the night normally knocks her out and no bottles in the middle of the night. I finally came to peace about using formula during the middle of the month. For a while there I was still obsessing about milk supply, but seeing how she was growing and blossoming, I realized that this is what we needed to do. Fortunately, Lauren didn't have any major reactions to adding formula in to our routine. (From certain books, I picked up the belief that she was going to be fussy, sick, and miserable the second the formula touched her lips.) So to any moms out there who are struggling with their baby's failure to thrive and yet are hesitant to follow the doctor's advice by adding formula, take heart. It'll be okay.

Apparently, Lauren shrank between visits to the doctor, but I think her most accurate length is 24.25", although I think that is even on the short side of her actual length (I might just have to measure her myself). I'm not sure what the percentile is on that, and her head circumference is 15". She's outgrowing her 3 month clothes and is transitioning to her 3-6 and 6 month outfits. A whole new wardrobe, already!

Sleeping continues to have its up and down moments for our girl. After Christmas, she transitioned to her crib (yippee!) and she's been pretty happy there. For almost two weeks, she would sleep for really long chunks of time, sleeping either the entire night through or waking up once in the early morning. She fooled us for a while because halfway through the month, I was so disappointed when she started waking up every two to three hours. Darn growth spurt! Then she slept through the night for a couple of night when my parents were here, probably because she did not sleep a minute during the day, afraid to miss something fun. Now we're settling in on waking up twice per night. She's loved being swaddled up until now, but she's starting to break free from it, so we might be in for another not so fun transition from being swaddled to being free. (She's so jumpy when I lay her down without being swaddled that she will almost immediately wake herself up.) As for day time naps -- as unpredictable as the emotions of a pregnant lady.

Fun moments from this month:

• Lauren will mimic Dan when she is feeling talkative. If he says "hello," she'll do her best to sing the vowels back to him, even with the same intonation. 
• A visit from my parents and my aunt and uncle. Lauren loved the commotion, except for being fussy because she was exhausted. 
• A little giggle! She did this early in the month, but has only repeated it a couple of times following. I was so tickled that I teared up while smiling oh-so-big. 
• Play time is more exciting now that Lauren grabs things to stick in her mouth. At first I thought it was just a coincidence that she managed to grab on to the toys, but it has happened too many times. 
• Lauren looooves the Moby wrap a friend loaned me. Thank goodness for some extra mobility. She likes to snooze in it as opposed to taking a nap in her crib.
• About half way through the month, Lauren also decided that she does NOT like being carried like a baby. She wants to sit UP, thank you very much, and will do these little crunches to attempt to pull herself up to sitting in your arms. She likes facing out in the Moby wrap, too, so she can see the great wide world, both in our house and outside. 
• A dimple! My dad noticed it when they were visiting and has christened it the granddad dimple.

Each new day has something different, from sleep to new discoveries to emerging mannerisms, and we are doing our best to enjoy each day as it comes. I wonder what will show up this month!

Looking at 2012

The first time I remember making a resolution for the new year was when I was in middle school. At that time, The Brink -- our middle and high school youth group -- did an all nighter at the church. It pretty much involved lots of pop, pizza, movies, and silly dares such as running outside in bare feet. Yet in the midst of the craziness, probably before we popped in our traditional girl movie, Little Women, I pulled out a new journal to record my goals and aspirations for the year.

A new year always brings a feeling of quiet anticipation, just like before my pen hits the first page of a new journal. The story of my life will soon be written there, but I don't know what it is yet. If I were really awesome, I would try to coordinate a new journal with each new year, but my rate of filling pages ebbs and flows over the course of the year, and I inevitably finish a journal mid-year, with a new journal to start on an inauspicious day such as March 13 or September 25.

This year I didn't really make an resolutions. Recently I made a 30-before-30 list, so that gives me some goals to work towards over the next few years, but I didn't want to make a resolution just because the clock was ticking. But last week, I was challenged to pick a word that would highlight an idea that I would like to dwell on this year. The word that has emerged from my contemplation has been humility.

Humility, synonymous with lowliness, meekness, submissiveness, an antonym of pride. Yikes, right? In our world, humility is not a valued trait. We'd like athletes to be humble, but as for us, the regular folks, we want to be revered and loved. We're encouraged to endorse ourselves, to highlight our best characteristics, and to be blunt about our best qualities. But as someone who is not of this world (1 Peter 2:11), I'm called to live a life of humility, mirroring Christ's humility.

"In your relationships with one another, have the same attitude of mind Christ Jesus had: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing, by taking the very nature of a servant..." (Philippians 2:5-7)

There are an abundance of verses about humility, and I could copy a bunch of them down, but let's be honest: if Jesus exemplified it, that's what I need to emmulate. Enough said. For me, as this year begins, humility means thinking of others more than myself. It means using my gifts and talents for the glory of God, not for my own gratification. It means serving others, day in and day out. It means making myself nothing that He may be glorified.

When all is said and done in 2012, I want to look back and see how the year was characterized by the indwelling of the attitude of humility in my life. I'm praying that it grows within me, even though that's a terrifying prayer. Growth is worth the discomfort, and I'm anxious to becoming more like Christ each day. Life is fleeting, much too short to remain stagnant. Therefore, let 2012 be filled with growth!