Life with Samara

I mean it this time!

2008-06-09T15:00:00.000-07:00

Tooth alert. There they are, in her lower gum, you can distinctly make out two teeth. Only one has started to breech the surface yet, and the wait is on...

Samara meets the President!!

2008-04-30T15:04:00.000-07:00

Bill Clinton Came to WOU on April 26, and we were there! Poor Samara was a trooper. She spent an exciting day Friday in Beaverton with her cousins, Annika and Ethan, along with Aunt Rini and babysitter Jenny (mom wouldn't be that cruel to Auntie!) while mom was in a meeting.
By Friday night, she was a little grumpy and a little feverish. By Saturday morning, her fever was gone, but the grumpiness remained. I knew Clinton was coming and REALLY wanted to see him, so Grammy and I debated and decided to risk it. We waited in line for hours. Then got inside. It was horribly crowded and we were standing so close to folks, I thought we'd have to give up. Then, in order to accommodate more folks, they opened up more space, and we were among the lucky ones to go forward. Even more fortuitous, our new position had placed us right behingd the chairs, and there was an open one, which some kind folks ushered me into. We waited a bit longer and Samara went through stages of delightfulness and times when those around us really encouraged me to take her outside (sorry!). Finally he arrived! The speech was great - surprisingly substantive - and energetic despite being one of many that day. Samara continued to bounce between perfect and not-so-perfect.
The speech ended and he started to shake hands. We were 4 or so rows back, so itseemed unlikely we'd meet him, but it was worth a shot. Finally, he made his way around to us and a friend, Dr. John Rector, who was in front of us, shook his hand and urged us forward. Even then, we were a couple rows back. As the President got closer, folks cried "Pass the baby!" So I did. and the result was:

Ok, maybe not.

2008-03-09T14:59:00.000-07:00

Did I say teeth? Just kidding! After several days of grumpiness, everything returned to normal and Samara continued to give us her beautiful, entirely gummy, grin.

Baby's got teeth

2008-02-19T22:13:00.000-08:00

Almost. Samara is working on cutting her first tooth right now and is NOT happy about it. Before I realized what was happening, we spent one night up screaming (yes, I said we - well, I wasn't exactly screaming, but close enough!). Since then we have invested in teething tablets and life has been sooo much better. She slept for two five hour stretches last night! Oh bliss..
And, thanks again, Jen, who told me about teething tablets months ago.

All weather baby

2008-01-26T13:43:00.000-08:00

After an extensive bidding war on eBay (which resulted in the wrong size - it'll fit a little later) and some super bargain hunting on the web, Samara has two new snowsuits (for less than the retail price of one!). This is really exciting for continuing our outdoor lifestyle and pretty darn cute, to boot!

Goin' Bananas

2008-01-26T09:46:00.000-08:00

Samara was starting to grab our forks, spoons, and even the cereal in our bowl, so we decided that it was time to try some solid food. We read up on it and decided that mushed bananas it would be. More on this later, but we should have read more.
So, we ventured to the store, bought our organic bananas and let them ripen. The moment finally arrived - we mushed them up, pulled out the camera and... she liked them. Things went along great for a few days. Other than a few weird banana fibers in the diaper, life was good. Then we got cocky and upped the portion size.
She happily ate the bananas and... nothing. For 4 days. We read further on bananas as a first food. As it turns out, they can lead to this sort of problem. Who knew? Apparently everyone but us. After a call to the doctor, some Karo mixed with breast milk and a quarter of a glycerin suppository, things returned to normal. And we moved on to pears.

Pimp my Exersaucer

2007-12-25T18:31:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-12-23T10:57:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-22T10:19:00.000-08:00

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.