Pimp my Exersaucer

Rini gave us a hand-me-down Exersaucer, which we love. The only problem was a missing "dog spinner." This was easily enough solved by going to the Evenflo website and entering the model number. Cake. $2.80 plus shipping and the Exersaucer would be whole. But wait, if it was this easy to get the replacement part, wouldn't having some parts from other models to switch out be awesome? Long story short, $50 later, Samara has the most pimped out Exersaucer ever, with tons of toys to switch in and out (not even half of them are in the picture). Maybe having the laptop at the nursing station is not such a good idea...

Where did I leave off?

Oh yeah, Samara. So the first few months were a bit of a challenge for us. Samara had horrible gas (I hesitate to call it colic, but Rob and our doctor dubbed it that). We invested in a cradle swing (awesome, wonderful, life-and-sanity-saving device). We walked almost every day, wearing the tread almost entirely off of the tires on the stroller and spraining Rob's ankle badly. We slowly got the hang of it and she got a lot better. At about 2 months, she started genuinely smiling at us. It was wonderful. She also developed a few favorite toys at that point, which she greeted with as big of a smile as she would greet one of us after we had been gone for a few hours. I guess it is good that the smiles we got were as big as those the teddy bear rattle got, though the equity was a little disheartening. Rob had some crazy traveling to do, so Samara and I went to Portland to meet him between flights. The trip up was great. She slept until we pulled into the hotel. The trip home - well, it took us 4 hours to get from Portland to Monmouth (and there wasn't traffic to speak of).
We got her first shots at two months, a process that went surprisingly well. She slept all day afterward, waking only for the occasional meal.
The rain started (in earnest) and we needed t upgrade the stroller cover to maintain our routine of walking.

Getting started

So it has taken me a while to get started blogging about Samara, something I told myself I would do all along. Actually, it's been about 4 1/2 months, so I probably ought to give the sum of that time in this post.
Samara was born August 14. We got a 4 day mini-break in the hospital, since I had to have a c-section. I remember very little of this time, which likely has something to do with the pain meds I was on. We started breastfeeding right away and she was much better at it than I was (I read in one of my baby books that some babies are "barracuda" feeders - this is my baby). After much coaching, I finally got better at feeding and everyone was happy.
When we came home, Samara mostly slept, ate, and cried out in agony from gas pains. My friend Jen came over and gave me dietary advice (who would have thought tomatoes were bad in large quantities?) and the agony screams improved. We hooked the three dogs up to their leash and took her walking in the stroller almost every night. The dogs even got some off-leash time during these walks, until an unfortunate encounter with a skunk in early October.
Rob and I learned that parenting is a whole lot of work! We got lots of good advice and learned quite a bit the hard way.
We were appropriately excited when her umbilical stump fell off during a late-night diaper change a week after we came home (yes, back in those days, we both got up for feeds and diper changes). Against most of the advice we received, we introduced a bottle (of breast milk) at 10 days and not long after that I left her for the first time to go do work stuff. We were horrified at her 2 week checkup when the nurse had to poke her foot repeatedly and squeeze and squeeze it to get enough blood for the PKU test.
On October 7, we hosted a baby shower for a friend of ours, five or six days after the skunking of '07 and after having hosted out of town company the day before. Perhaps not the brightest move on our part - it was way too much stimulation for her, but I think most folks had a good time anyway. We started on alternative diapers when she was two weeks old (and almost gave up on them - many early leaks) but eventually got the hang of them (oh, the g goes in back!) and have bee gDiaper converts ever since.