Farewell 2014

Mr. Google made me this video from my blog pictures. Click play. It's awesome. And I DIDN'T EVEN HAVE TO DO ANYTHING!

Nothing big planned here tonight. I am just hoping to be able to stay up long enough for the east coast ball drop. We just ordered pizza and there's a bottle of pinot noir with my name on it. Hoorahhh 2014! Mass in the AM of course, followed by BRUNCH. Dat's my credo.

As far as New Years resolutions go, I am just hoping to get our finances under control. We recently just doubled our income obviously, so I want to put as much money toward our my student loan debt as possible while I still have a job. Because we know we won't be at Scott forever! 

Well, I wish everyone the best in 2015! Thanks for sticking around. :)

Christmas 2014

On Christmas Eve, Will wore his "ho ho ho" bow tie and his Rudolph/Santa suspenders. And of course the cloth of kings (corduroy, that would be corduroy) for the birth of the King of kings. 

William loves his Little People nativity set. He regularly tries to eat the baby Jesus, which of course I find endearing. In time, my young Catholic . . . in time . . . 

Never mind that he also wants to eat the donkeys and the camel and the wise men and Mary and the angel and Joseph . . . .

Creep!

We went to the 4:30 vigil Mass at St. Clare. We'd never seen the church so packed! Last year we went to the regular 10am Christmas day Mass and we were surprised at how not-packed it was. Well, now it makes sense because all the families with little ones came to this Mass. 

I got a little carried away with the photo shoot and we ended up arriving only 10 minutes before it started. Rookie mistake. We had to park wayyy in the back and I was so worried we wouldn't find a place to sit. Luckily, it worked out in our favor because we were able to find two seats on the aisle (sooo necessary with the screacher creature we call Booger) and we didn't have to entertain him for too long while we waited for Mass to start.

Will and I both admitted to each other that we got a little choked up at certain parts of the Mass. William was his crazy self, but was also just too adorable flirting with all the ladies. We couldn't help but get a little teary thinking about our first Christmas as a family! But the waving after the sign of peace. (He has a thing for the 65 and older crowd, it seems.) Gnawing on his baby Jesus right before communion. And excitedly pointing at the pictures in his little Christmas board book (and also gnawing on the pages, but we choose to ignore certain details, right?) At one point, he started kissing me repeatedly. Over and over, W I D E open-mouth style. I'd never been so overjoyed to have someone's hot breath in my face.

Afterwards we snapped some family photos that just don't seem to do any justice to our church's beauty! Oh well. 

When an old lady asked us, "How old is he? Three months?"

Close.

She must not have kept a mom blog of all her baby's milestones to check back on. Further proof that this blog is totally necessary.

We got home and put William to bed in his special Christmas jammies and then I baked bread pudding while Will wrapped some gifts. Then Will and I watched The Nativity Story, ate half the bread pudding, and called it a night. 

Christmas morning came before the sun thanks to a 6am wakeup call. I guess Booger was just too excited for Christmas presents! . . . 

Wait. No. Just wanted to pull ornaments off the tree . . .

. . .and otherwise not really understand what is happening.

Nevertheless, I had to take pictures with my flash because YES, it was still dark out! There are pros and cons of your baby having a 6:30pm bedtime. Anyway, pretty much all the gifts under the tree were for William, and pretty much all the gifts for William were from grandparents. Santa brought him two gifts that only cost the elves approximately $15 (total) to make. We will get away with it for as long as we can, people.

He helped open the first couple of gifts, which was pretty exciting for us! He got bored pretty quickly, but I was able to capture a couple good photos.

Like this one, which I will treasure forever!

"Santa, you shouldn't have!"

William, amidst all his shiny brand new toys, zeroed in on one item: Chapstick (from my own stocking). He chewed on the unopened Chapstick tube for the rest of the day. He even had a diaper blowout that required a hose down/bath, and you know what? Do you know what he did? He clung to that tube of Chapstick throughout the entire bath. Never put it down. We know what to get him next year . . . 

The rest of the day I proceeded to declare everything a tradition throughout the day. "We are eating home fries! For lunch! New tradition!" "Will is changing a poopy diaper! Tradition!" "We Facetimed 17 different people. Tradition!" You get the idea.

In the evening, we went to the Shepherds for dinner and Grant made the most amazing Christmas dinner. Beef tenderloin, mashed potatoes, and broccoli casserole. I'm salivating just thinking about it. We also brought the other half of the bread pudding, which was a big hit. Mason and Reilly showed us every.single.toy they received from Santa, which was adorable and hilarious. And William just walked around putting his mouth on everything, spreading his Christmas germs cheer. 

It was such a great Christmas! I'm already looking forward to next year. 

10 Months

Greetings! I should be in line at the Post Office right now, but instead I need to post William's 10 Month update two weeks too late. It's more important than you receiving your Christmas gift on time, don't you agree? 

Will's most important milestone this month was starting school, of course! I'll just time-travel and focus on his first week with the transition because that's when he was still 9 months. Pics were taken at 10 months and 1 day, for the record. Accuracy is everything with blogging, right? So, I'll tackle how he's doing now in a couple weeks for his 11 month post. Bueno? Buenoooo!

EATS.

I was really freaked out about going from nursing full-time to being separated from each other for 9-10 hours a day. Rightfully so. It took me over an hour of pumping to get like 3 ounces, so I sorta nixed the pumping idea. Motivation is low when you have an almost-10-month-old and formula is included in your daycare school tuition. So, the last week of November, I started giving him one bottle of formula per day. 

NOM.

When he started, I would nurse him first thing in the morning (6ish), feed him breakfast, try nursing one more time before we left (around 7:20am, largely unsuccessful), he would get two 6 oz. bottles of formula (+ solids) at school during the day, and I would nurse him in the evening before dinner. He was still waking at least once during the night during this time, too (more on that later), so he was getting four nursing sessions and two bottles of formula per day, plus solids.

SLEEPS.

He had a rough start when it came to the new routine, which wasn't as surprise to us, especially with napping. Since we had to ditch the swaddle, he really hasn't been a great napper anyway, but when he got to school, i.e., no noise machine or blackout curtains, and lots of entertaining sights and sounds, he was napping very little! Like maybe two twenty-minute naps in the arms of one of his teachers. Bad. Especially because he was still battling some congestion/crud, so nighttime sleep was rough. He was not well-rested at all. It was a vicious cycle of not enough sleep because he was too sick, and too sick because he couldn't sleep enough.

POOPS.

We gave up cloth diapering when he started school. They mentioned that they would do it if I was adamant, but I just wanted everyone to get acclimated with each other before throwing cloth diapering into the mix. Now I don't think I'll even bother. I can't see myself wanting to spray poop after a full day of motherhood and work. If it was easy breast milk poop, it'd be a different story, but it's just not happening with the frightening solid poops. 

Between Will's help and the time that little William is at school, sometimes I can go like a three-day stretch without changing a poopy diaper. 

Glorious. 

Somehow this is an aspect of stay-at-home-motherhood I have no difficulty leaving behind. Certainly, it has something to do with Will thinking that he must escape the new diaper at all cost. 

Yeah, he just ate this thing during the whole photo shoot.

OTHER MILESTONES.

// Taking 2-3 steps at a time! So close to walking (foreshadow foreshadow foreshadow).

// Clapping like a pro when you ask him to "CLAP! CLAP! CLAP!"

// Waiving like the little politician he is. 

// Expanding his vocabulary from "dadadas" to "mumumus," "dadadas," and "bababas" etc. et al.

// Wide open mouth kisses to the face. Still pretty inconsistent about this, but he generally really likes to open mouth kiss animals and other children. 

All of the updates.

Going Private

Despite my best attempts at editing prior content and changing profile settings, this blog still appears as a top result when you Google my name. Since lawyering is a networking profession and we are basicaly all creepers, I expect at least someone I meet professionally to stumble upon this blog, in which case, I will be slightly horrified that they have access to such a wealth of information about my boobs and childbirth experiences. 

As a result, I am going private. I'm still going to blog. Will turned ten months yesterday, and my OCD self would never let me just cut off the documenting at nine months. The horror! So the show will go on, but if you want access, I believe I need your email address. And don't worry - if I have your email address and I know you've previously subscribed to the blog, I will probably just add you. I'm not sure how email subscriptions will work - I think that will probably be the best way to follow along since new posts won't pop up in your Bloglovin' or Feedly. We'll figure it out as we go, as usual! 

All pertinent information will probably appear on Instagram anyway. See @theresabreslin. Last night I posted a video of Will waving and clapping. Such a prodigy. So much interesting.

This blog post will self-destruct in 24 hours.