Three’s Company

So I saw Dr. Hammar today, which marked Charley’s 14th day without a bowel movement, and she was very reassuring. She examined Charley thoroughly, which included a tummy massage to make sure it was soft and that she didn’t fuss when pressure was applied to her stomach, which she didn’t. In fact, she seemed to enjoy the massage! Then we went over her “symptoms” which include: NOTHING. If you didn’t know she hadn’t pooped for 14 days you’d never know there was anything wrong. The worst part was that Dr. Hammar did rectal stimulation, which sent my sweet baby over the edge, screaming her little head off, but out came some poop! It was soft, yellow; the normal breastmilk variety. Anyway, Dr. Hammar said she’s known pediatricians with breastfed babies that poop once a month, and while it isn’t “the norm” she sees no reason for concern. In fact, she said that apparently the cause is that I have very efficient breast milk, likely related to healthy eating habits and genetics, which allows Charley to absorb most of what she’s eating. So, as long as she continues acting well and happy we’re good and I’m going to stop freaking out about.

Cuteness: Andy came to the appointment too (he’s such a good daddy!) and after the terrible rectal stimulation he picked Charley up and cuddled her which calmed her down, no paci, in about 30 seconds flat. It was so sweet, she wrapped her little hands up in his shirt and looked like she was clinging for dear life, I wish I had a picture of it!

Also, my little chubbette weighed 12 pounds and was 23inches long (90th percentile for both length and weight).  I’d say we’re doing good!

I know everyone is anxious to hear about the house, and it is coming along, but this is a break in house talk for some brief baby talk. I am wondering, Moms who read my blog, a few things. First, I have to take Charley to the pediatrician on Thursday because the little stinker has not had a bowel movement in 12 days!!! Now, before everyone freaks out I’ve been in contact with my pediatrician, Charley is happy and content, eating very well, fever free, and not showing any signs whatsoever that anything is amiss…except for lots of wet, but never dirty, diapers. I’ve done rectal stimulation, given her prune juice, and a glycerin suppository…all to no avail. All I get is a lot of stinky gas (from Charley, not me). Anyway, we’re going to see Dr. Hammar on Thursday and I’m so nervous that they’ll have to do a bunch of tests. So far the doctors opinion has been that strictly breastfed babies often make very little waste, but clearly this can’t go on forever without it being a sign of something being wrong. Please pray for her.

Also, does anyone out there have a strictly breastfed baby who slept through the night on only breastmilk? When I say through the night I just mean like maybe 6-7 hours. I’m wondering if there’s any chance of her sleeping that long at night prior to my starting her on solid foods, which I want to delay. I’m trying to be patient, I mean she’s only 7 weeks old, but I think if I know there’s a chance it will be easier to wait, if that makes any sense.

Here are the before shots of the house, wanted to post them now while I had time:

This is our family room. I’m standing in the front doorway. That AC unit is gone as is that fake fireplace (there was nothing behind it…weird people) and the floor will be wood laminate. Oh, and that “lovely” light fixture is headed for dumpsterville!

This is the dining room. It gets great light from two corner windows. I’m standing in the doorway that is now gone as we tore down the wall between the family room (behind me) and this room so we’d have a more open feeling and more room for a table.

The Kitchen! The dining room is through that doorway you can so over there on the right, the hallway with all the bedrooms is behind me. We’re ripping out that half wall right there so we can open up the space and put in more cabinetry on a wall you can’t see here that is to my left. You can just barely see that there is a door there out to the driveway, easy access for bringing in groceries!

This is the hall bath. It’s in pretty good shape, the tub is clean, but the toilet needs a good scrub and a new seat. I’d like to re-tile the bath tub at some point, as well as the floor, but there’s no rush.

Okay, bedroom 1. The paneling is all pulled down, the carpet will be ripped out and replaced with wood laminate. This will be our den. I’d like to replace the 6 panel door with a French style door to sort of set it apart as the “office”.

Bedroom 2: this will be the guest room until we need more kid rooms. The carpet is going, again for wood laminate. All the closets need organization systems and doors.

Bedroom 3: Charley’s room! That white cabinet is in good shape so I’m going to move it into possibly a bathroom or the garage for linens or storage and spend some time and effort organizing Charley’s giant closet really efficiently. The room is on the small side so I want to utilize the huge closet as much as possible. (Like maybe a cute reading nook for her to sit in?)

Master bedroom This is at the back of the house. You can see the French doors there that lead out to the back yard (really it’s the side of the house, a quick left and you’re in the back yard). Our room is really big. I’m standing in front of our walk-in closet to take this picture.

Master bathroom. This bathroom is pretty nasty and we won’t be using it much until we have the money to re-do it. The tiles are hideous, the bath tub is atrocious, the door on the shower is all rusted and gross, yuck! The cabinets aren’t bad, we can salvage those but I’d like a new counter. I’d like to spend some time and money making it a little oasis master bath with a big soaker tub/shower, and do everything in slates/blues.

So I have no pics yet of: laundry room, guest house. I’ll try to get those up when I get to the house Saturday. All the walls are being primed white and all the floors are going and being replaced with wood laminate except those in the bath and kitchen.

First, I promise there will be pictures of the house up very soon, I will be there on Saturday and will take a million pictures so I can do some before and afters as we go along.

Anyway, so far this week Andy has been really productive! He’s done all the demo and tonight he’s going over there with a good friend of ours from church (who, lucky us, grew up working with his contractor father!) to patch holes and get the walls ready for paint. The front of the house is the only original part and it’s plaster, so we need to sand it. The majority of the house, however, is two additions built within the last 3 years so that’s all drywall and just needs to given a good scrub. Sitting vacant, plus whoever the old owners were (not very clean people) has made the walls too dirty to paint over unless we want to paint dirt into the walls!

We also have the flooring guy coming out to the house next Monday to give us an estimate. We’re putting down laminate wood flooring in the entire house except for the bathrooms and kitchens (laminate and water don’t mix). As much as I’d love to do something more exciting than laminate, we’re doing all this renovation with resale in mind, and that means keeping the costs down so we don’t price our home out of the market it’s in. We’ll be replacing those floors with new tile at some point, but for now the tile is in good shape so we’re leaving it. We’re hoping we can put down new tile in the kitchen when we re-do it in October, but budget will determine that. The only tile I like is in the laundry room, it’s black and white checkered and I think it’s cute for a laundry room, I’d like to paint that room a light shade of blue/green or turquoise just to make it a little spunky :o)

I’ve also reserved our Uhaul truck and the moving help we wanted. I’m doing all the packing, but we hired two guys to come help with the heavy lifting the day of the move through this great website E-Move. They have tons of moving help listings with prices and reviews so I picked the cheapest guys with the best reviews.

I’ve also ordered our appliances! We needed a stove, microwave (because we need a ventilation system for the stove and I chose to go with a re-circulating microwave), and a dishwasher. We get a good deal through GE so I only spent about $1500 for all three! I think as the next few months go by it will be hard for me to watch our hard earned savings dwindle…but it’s going to a good cause, a beautiful home!

So I’ve been concerned about how gassy Charlotte is, and while I think she’s probably fine and I’m probably overreacting, I thought I should try a few things to help her. I had already stopped eating all nuts, and now I’ve stopped eating dairy. It’s been 48 hours of no dairy and today she seems more content. It’s only one day, so I can’t really judge based on that, but it’s encouraging. I might be being silly, but breastfeeding my child is a lot of pressure, everything I eat can affect her, and I’m the only source of food she has. So, even if dairy isn’t the issue, it makes me feel better knowing I’m trying something.

I am not color blind, but sometimes I think I might as well be. The thought of choosing colors to paint our new home is overwhelming me and I haven’t even gotten started. We’re going to just prime the entire house, basically just getting a blank slate, and then paint the rooms as we go along. I’m sure it would be nice to paint all the rooms before the furniture moved in, but that just isn’t practical with all the other projects we need to tackle this month. Just priming over the hideous bright turquoise and peptobismol pink is going to take long enough. They even painted the ceilings in some places…ugh.

Anyway, the one room that will be painted completely is Charley’s room. I want to have that done and aired out with some time to spare before she moves in and starts sleeping in there, even though I’m going with low-VOC paints. I’m going to choose a shade of yellow, something buttery and subtle. I wanted it to be gender neutral and with her bedding and current decor my choices are: pink, purple, orange or yellow, so I chose yellow. I spent some time looking at samples at Lowe’s, but beyond that I’m pretty much clueless. I thought about getting samples to try out on the walls, but I don’t want to pay for paint I don’t use. I think I’ll have to rely on Andy to help me choose, he has a much better eye for color than I do. Gr…I hate this, I wish I was a millionaire and could hire someone to come do this for me.

So I’ve taken Charley out a few times this week and discovered it’s not quite so scary. Especially when I started wearing her instead of putting the car seat up in the cart. I put my Moby wrap on before we leave the house and then when we get where we’re going I take her out of the car seat (generally she’s asleep since car rides do that to her) and stick her in the wrap and off we go! It makes me feel better too because first of all she sleeps great all cozied up in the wrap and I never have to walk away from her. Anyway, babywearing is the answer to all baby problems…ok, maybe not, but pretty close!

This was a wonderful book and I definitely recommend it. It’s the story of two young girls growing up in rural China during the foot binding years. The strength of the story are character development and the authors poetic writing. I found myself not wanting to put it down as I was fascinated by the characters and anxious to see where they went. Anyway, I’m not feeling too profound so that’s about all I can say about it, but definitely it’s a “you should read it”.

So it finally happened, I experienced my first earthquake! I was sitting on the couch, having just finished feeding Charley, when it started. It took me about 3 seconds to figure out what I was feeling and grabbed Charley and ran into a doorway. It was only about 10 seconds long, but it felt longer. I held Charley close and prayed “Please God, please God, please God”…not very coherent, but I’m sure He got the idea! It was super mild where we are, the worst thing that happened was that my water cup fell off the table, but I was still freaked out. I just kept thinking that if it had been worse I wouldn’t have known what to do. Andy called me the second it ended to make sure we were ok, and it was a good thing because after his call came through my phone stopped working for about an hour, overloaded cell towers I’m sure. If I learned one thing it’s that we’re definitely getting a land line in the house! Anyway, we’re all fine, but I definitely do NOT like when the ground moves!

So our official closing for the house is tomorrow! I can’t believe it’s here already, being distracted by a new baby made the month of escrow fly by. We get the keys tomorrow and Andy is already making his list of projects to start on this weekend. Here is the plan:

1. Remove two old AC units that are installed in the walls (the house has a new central air system, we aren’t sure why the former owners didn’t remove these eye sores) and patch holes.

2. Rip out nasty baseboards

3. Widen doorway/possibly remove wall between family and dining room

4. Rip out fake fireplace/mantle (strangest thing: the old owners built out the wall in the family room to install a mantle, it looks sort of like someone dry walled over an old fireplace but there is no fireplace or chimney in this house…it’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen)

5. Get flooring guy over to the house soon to give us an estimate for our new laminate floors in the family room, dining room, hallway and bedrooms.

He’s hoping to get a couple sets of extra hands to help him since obviously he’s just one guy. His Dad was here this last weekend and bought him some new tools as well as walked through the house with him and talked him through how to do a couple of projects. These are things we want done before we paint and the new floors go in. We’re planning to just prime all the walls back to white to have a blank slate and deal with decorating later on, there’s too much to do to worry about that right now. (Except Charley’s room, which will be painted a pale yellow before she moves in.)

We also priced out a new kitchen from Ikea…we’ll see when we can afford that. It will depend on the estimate for the floors. So much to do…one thing at a time I guess!