Monday marked my
first real Monday back to work. It’s
official, Monday’s still suck, big time. But, we were all up and at ‘em, bright
and early. Eliza was off to my Mother in Law’s for the day…it was her first
time watching her, at all. She had a bit of a rough day, but according to her,
not nearly as bad as Amelia, so that’s good. LOL. I suppose it will just take
some time, but I was a little surprised since she did so well at daycare last
week. I picked her up after work, picked up the big girls, and we made our way
home for a pretty quiet night. We did some picking in the garden and seriously,
everything is coming in so amazing. It’s so exciting, especially after our
complete failure last year. I never
thought I’d see the day that I would be excited about gardening!
Today's harvest...getting better every day!
Tuesday started off
alright. I had my annual performance review at work (I thought I was going to
escape it, since they’re done in June, but apparently they received some extra
time for mine, ugh!). The review is pretty standard, pretty much the same from
year to year. I did work up the courage to ask my supervisor if I could start
working from home on a regular basis…once a week or once a paycheck. I wasn’t
sure what kind of response I would receive, but she seemed all for it. She told
me to go ahead and pick a date and whatever schedule I was most comfortable
with and give it a shot. So, starting next week, I’m going to be working from home on
Wednesdays. Even though I’ll still be up early, and bringing the girls to
daycare, it will be so nice not having to get myself ready and packed up, get
everybody rushed out the door and deal with traffic, if even just for one day.
SO EXCITED!! The day took a bit of a turn when I received a phone call from
daycare in the afternoon, letting me know that Eliza was just having a really
rough day. She wasn’t sleeping and she was just crying and screaming her head
off all day long. I could hear her in the background and it just broke my
heart. They didn’t need me to come
get her, just wanted to let me know what was going on, but I felt too bad
leaving her there like that. I finished up a couple of tasks, and used some of
my very little leave time to head home and pick her up. They were thinking she
may be constipated the way she was acting, but she has been going about every
other day, so it shouldn’t be that bad. She seemed to calm down a bit when we
got home, and eventually did go to the bathroom. Hopefully it was just a fluke,
poor baby. Definitely the time working can break you down, not being there for
those rough days (even though they’re the most exhausting as a parent).
Early sissy cuddles!
Wednesday started
off horribly. Back to work has been going pretty well, and today, I forgot just
about the one thing I cannot live without….my pump! I packed up all my stuff,
and all the kids, as usual this morning, loaded up the van, dropped the girls
off and made my way to work. As I was getting out of the van, I finally
realized I did not have my pump with me. I wanted to cry…right then and there.
We’re having a potluck at work today for lunch, so I had an extra bag with my
pasta salad fixin’s, and that threw me off. So, ALLLLL the way back home I
went. I couldn’t believe it. To make matters worse, I had an 8:00 meeting,
which I was facilitating, that I was most definitely going to be late for…so I
had to have a coworker get the meeting set up and let everybody know I was on
my way. Of course, everybody in the meeting knew I had just returned from
maternity leave, so when he told them I had forgotten something at home and was
on my way back, one of the people at the meeting immediately assumed it was my
pump, and announced to the entire meeting that workplaces should not only
provide the space to pump, but should provide a hospital grade pump for use as
well. I was mortified! Sometime after I had Amelia, insurance companies started
covering breast pumps…when I had Eliza, I debated getting another one (I’d just
have to pay 20% of the cost), if only for a backup, but I knew the one I had
was still working fine and I didn’t want to spend the money. BOY do I wish I
had now! After the meeting I finally had a chance to catch my breath, and got
through the rest of the day. We had our annual office potluck, which was
delicious (and, it’s nice to get out of the office once in a while), but
between that and my morning meeting, my pumping schedule got all out of whack.
I suppose as long as it doesn’t happen too often, it should be OK. Luckily, Eliza
had a MUCH better day at daycare today, so in the end, we all survived.
Hopefully yesterday was just a momentary breakdown. Needless to say, I was
pretty exhausted by the time we were home.
My Beautiful Babe, even a rare picture with sissy Mema
Thursday was my
Friday, YES! Next week will be rough though, being my first full week…but, at
least I’ll be working at home one of the days. I did use some time and took a
long lunch to do some shopping. My friend at work told me about a little shop
in Woodbury that sells little fancy outfits and headbands and stuff for little
girls, so I stopped in to get Eliza a couple headbands (specifically for
upcoming family pictures, and a wedding). It was the cutest little store; I’ll
definitely be going back. I also stopped into Old Navy to find myself a sweater
for our pictures. Finally, I swung by our clinic to finally pick up Olivia’s
medical paperwork for kindergarten, and back to work I went. I spent the
evening doing some last minute cleaning, and our friends from Indiana, the
Steveson’s, arrived for the long weekend. This is the 4th summer
they’ve come up to visit us, 3rd time they’ve stayed at our house.
We weren’t sure if they’ve be able to pull it off this year, as she and her
daughter came for a week when Eliza was born, but an annual trip they take with
his family was canceled, so it worked in our favor. It will be a weekend of
chaos, but so exciting!
Also, Eliza turned
3 months old today. SO crazy! She is up to 13lbs 4 ozs and is about 25” long
(for a gain of 5lbs 5ozs and 5” to date). She is still wearing 0-3 month
clothing, but it’s fitting pretty snug, especially around those delicious leg
rolls. She has been wearing some 3-6 month clothing. While I thought she was
reaching the end last month, she is
still in Size 1 diapers. She is becoming a very smiley little lady, and she is
starting to laugh more and more, especially since starting daycare and becoming
more comfortable with other people. She eats like a little piggy and is growing
like a weed. While some nights are all over the place, she’s fairly
consistently sleeping from 9ish to 4ish, eating, then back to sleep until we
leave for daycare. So that’s been pretty wonderful. Her naps are hit or
miss…some days nothing more than a few cat naps, some days a great, long nap.
Her focus is getting pretty good…she’s following us around the room, and she’s
working on her grasp. She’s “talking” more and more every day and starting to
mimic sounds we make. She gets more personality with each passing day, and I
just love her pieces!
Unfortunately,
Christian could not get Friday off of work with the late notice and recent
paternity leave, so he was off to work for the day. I decided to send the big
girls off to daycare as usual, and the Steveson’s started waking up and getting
ready one by one. Once we were all up and ready to go, Eliza and I joined them
for a trip to IKEA. I brought a bottle with to keep Eliza at bay for a while,
and other than needing to be held a few times, she did really well. I found a
few treasures that we just HAD to have (I mean, who doesn’t need stuff from
IKEA??), but didn’t go too crazy. After some shopping, and some lunch, we made
our way back home. I picked the big girls up on my way, and the kids went
swimming for a while and played in the yard. Dawn and I took a trip to Target
while the baby napped, and picked up some food for grilling and s’mores. We
made some hamburgers and Christian manned the grill when he arrived home. We
ate, the kids went crazy, we had a bonfire and some s’mores and even had an adult
beverage! Whoa! It was a perfect evening with friends!
Saturday was a
LOOOONG, busy day. I started it off by taking the big girls to their last swim
class of the session. Technically, Olivia passed Level 3, but the next level up
is more expensive, so we decided to keep her in Level 3 one more session.
She’ll have more time to “master” the skills, and then she’ll be almost 6 and
HAVE to move up at that point anyway. Surprisingly, they also passed Amelia.
She is still pretty chaotic in the water and doesn’t pay attention very well,
but they believe she’s ready for Level 2 (I’d say they’re just sick of dealing
with her, but she has a different instructor every time, LOL). We are signing
her up for Level 2, but it makes me nervous. They do some work without life
jackets, and she is just so unaware still. Hopefully she starts to catch on
quickly, and starts paying attention! After class, we stopped home to get
ready, and we were all off to spend the day at Mall of America. We made a quick
stop in the food court for lunch, and then spent most of the day at Nickelodeon
University. The girls had the time of their lives. Olivia went on her first
REAL rollercoaster, and on the “power tower” like ride, and LOVED IT (Amelia
was very upset that she’s not big enough yet, poor thing). Those two are
definitely little daredevils, they just LOVE going on all of the different
rides. Eventually, the Dad’s took all the kids home for dinner and to settle
in, while Dawn and I did a little shopping. We grabbed a quick dinner, then got
to work. The Mall is running a special right now that if you spend $250
throughout the mall in the next few weeks, you can get 2 free all-day ride
wristbands…so, I decided to do some shopping…back to school for Olivia, and 3-6
month clothes for Eliza. I pretty much got Eliza done in one swoop at Carter’s.
I got Olivia a few things at Gymboree and Old Navy, but she’ll still need quite
a bit. Dawn gave me all of their receipts from the day as well, so we’ll
definitely have enough for the wristbands – YAY! By the time we left, we were
both DYING. My feet were killing me – flip flops are not going to be my friend
for much longer, that’s for sure. The kids started heading to bed one by one
after we got home, and we parents weren’t too far behind. What a day!
Our Annual Family Pic...their oldest couldn't make the trip this year though.
Sunday was our last
day/night with our friends. This visit definitely went WAY too fast. We had a
slow, quiet morning around the house. Slowly waking up, getting ready even
slower. Wishing we could just plain slow down time. The men made a quick run to
Walmart – they were telling us about some device they bought to clean the
sand/dirt from their pool, so they went to check it out, and they picked up
some picnic foods. Once they were home, we were all off to Hyland Park for the
day. We had a picnic and the kids played the day away. It was pretty hot out,
so the girls spent a little time in the misters (still managed to get SOAKED in
the misters), and talked the dad’s into hitting up the ice cream man (how
convenient for the ice cream man to literally have a location at the park). I
gave in and let Eliza have a couple licks of my popsicle and oh boy it didn’t
take her long to get the hang of that! It was seriously so cute. Of course,
with Olivia, she was lucky to get cake at her 1st birthday…by #3,
all rules are out the door! I took Eliza to the van to cool off and eat while
the kids finished playing, and we all made our way back home. We got ready and
Dawn snapped a few family pictures for us. She’s taken them for us the last few
years, but since she had just done some Newborn photos for us, and they weren’t
visiting for long, I just wanted to do a quick “session”, mainly to get a
family photo. So, we all got ready, headed out into the HOT, HUMID weather, and
took as many as we could (which, wasn’t much)…Eliza was getting crabby and big
the girls were way too antsy. But, we got a few, so it’s all good. After
pictures, we all had some leftovers for dinner and the kids started heading off
to bed, one by one. We hung out for a while, and Dawn edited a couple of pictures
while we relaxed, and begrudgingly headed to bed. Back to reality tomorrow, and
the visit definitely went to way too fast.
Dawn managed to edit a couple photos...a family shot, and a funny little "collage" that just had to be done...
Until Next Week XOXO
