What a crazy beginning to a week! On Monday Sam and I went to her 9 month checkup with her doctor. My guess what that she weighed close to 30 pounds and was 28 inches long. Wrong on both counts! She is 29.5 inches long (what a tall baby!) and only weighs 24 lbs 2.5 oz. Her napping schedule for the day didn't go quite as I'd hoped and she was ready to sleep again about half way through her visit. She's such a pleasant baby, though, and didn't fuss at all, except a little when she got her Heb B immunization. Poor thing now has a little lump on her leg.
Then on Tuesday we went early to visit a friend in our neighborhood. Sam went down for her nap and then we had to wake her up to take her to get her pictures taken. I gave her a bottle before we left, but I didn't think to take any food with me. They were running a bit behind at the portrait studio (big surprise, huh?) and by the time it was our turn she was hungry and getting tired. But, even for all that, she had some adorable pictures. Brent came with us. He help her smile big for the camera. They rolled the ball back and forth and Daddy even helped her stand for a couple shots. They were very cute together. She fell quite asleep on the ride home and wasn't interested in waking up to eat once we arrived. So she didn't get "lunch" until 4:45 that day. Because the picture stuff took so long, Brent was about 25 minutes late for his class. Oops. Then I was off to go with some women in our ward to the Museum of Art at BYU. They have an awesome exhibit entitled "Beholding Salvation: Images of Christ" We had a gided tour through the exhibit and it was simply spiritual. I was going to bring Sam, but at the last minute my friend's husband said he'd watch her as his sister was over to help him with their brand new baby. So all in all, Sam did a lot of visiting on Tuesday.
The nightmare of it all comes from my personal beliefs about what I owe Samantha as her mother. I feel that I owe it to her that she gets the appropriate amount of sleep each day and that she is properly fed. When Sam first joined our family my life kind of went on hold. Everything revolved around getting to know Sammi and learning to take care of her. I couldn't really manage much more than that because it was all so new and took so much of my attention to do it as right as I could, that there wasn't much energy left over for other things. Now that Sam is older, she loves to play by herself and can content herself for quite some time. This has opened up some of my resources and energies to pursue other projects (housecleaning, cooking, blogging,
podcasting, creating my
website, and hopefully, eventually, exercising). But, with this added freedom comes quite a bit of headache in trying to coordinate Sam's schedule with the outside world. So, when we have days like Tuesday where her schedule was completely thrown off, I'm a little bit at odds with myself over the whole things. All I can say is that Wednesday she seemed to have recovered fine, although her nap schedule was a bit late. And today one would hardly notice that her schedule was so out of whack on Tuesday. Even now she's playing contentedly in the other room. I'm listening to sweet coos and occasional squeals as she engages her toys in her play world.
Things may not go perfectly, even if they go as planned, but the blessing of children is the wiggle room they provide for us adults as we figure out what works and what doesn't.
Elizabeth had her two month check up last week. I can't believe I've been so slow about reporting it! She is growing well. She weighed in at 11 lbs 13 oz and measured 23 1/2 inches long. She is definitely fitting into 3-6 month clothes now! I spent all last week packing up her newborn clothes and pulling out the new set.
