Independence Day

We had a pretty chill day. Last summer we hit up a small town parade. About an hour or more south of us in Edmond, they have a huge celebration and I had wanted to go to a parade but I really wasn't in the mood for a large crowd and dealing with a baby as well. So instead we just ran some errands, rested, and got ready for a BBQ with some friends. 

We BBQed brats and burgers, had yummy flag cake and pretzel jello salad. I put Griffin down for bed and we all went out back for some sparklers. Kort didn't want to hold his own but enjoyed watching when he wasn't exploring around the yard. We then went in the front yard and put off some fountains. 

We weren't supposed to have them more than three feet tall inside city limits. Don't know how tall they'd get and frankly I don't know if we're considered in city limits since we're pretty much on the outskirts of town. Oh well, everyone was at the city fireworks anyway, which I didn't want to bother with. We were able to actually see them though through some trees! 

I think Kort was just really tired since he just sat still in my lap the whole time. It was a fun night. 

I'm thankful for the land that we live in, that we're able to worship as we please, for all those who fight for our freedom and to keep us safe everyday. 

Kort is 2 1/2 years old!

I can't believe where time has gone. Just last summer I was counting down until Kort would be 18 months so he could go to nursery and we would take our family vacation to California. A year later and he is now quite the character. 

I was a little nervous when he turned 2 and wasn't really talking that much, or at least making much sense with his words. He has come a long way in the last 6 months. He still is only speaking in like three word sentences, but we understand him better and are able to help him get what he wants/needs. When I'm explaining to him what something is, I say "it's a/so . . . " whatever it is. So now that's what he starts everything with! The main things he uses that phrase with would be

Itso cold

Itso good

It's a bug

It's a ladybug

It cracks us up! We have this video that Clay took of him playing in his kiddie pool saying "it so cold" over and over and just laughing and screaming (which he has definitely learned how to do)! 

We'll sing him songs and say I love you when putting him to bed and he'll just interrupt us and say "nigh nigh". His "Ilove you" sounds more like "I rove roo". He loves giving hugs and kisses. He got to spend lots of time with his grandma Cita when I had Griffin and so he's always wanting to Skype her and says Cita over and over. He loves his baby brother and kisses him and says I love you baby brudder. 

It is just so much fun being able to communicate with him better. He loves cartoons now, but still won't sit still for the whole time. He loves saying Dora, even though I'm trying to get him to like Diego better ;) He loves saying Mickey Mouse and watching that as well. 

We have frogs in our backyard and caught one one night to show him. Now he sees things move in the grass and thinks it's one every time and says "fog" - and sometimes the g sounds more like a k :/ ha ha 

He's a champ sleeping in his toddler bed, which is still the crib while Griffin is in the pack and play. He sleeps from about 8-8 and naps around 1 for an hour or so. He is great about eating most food we give him. He's getting better drinking out of cups and water bottles. 

He loves grabbing things that he's not supposed to have and run away from us into the other room and jump onto the couch. But one thing he'll grab and has done a few times are the knives out of the dishwasher! Ahhh it scares us! He always goes for the sharp objects :/ He does love helping with chores like sweeping, vacuuming, putting clothes in the washer/dryer, and Oompa and Nana got him a bubble maker lawn mower that he loves pushing in the yard, even though he prefers the real one. 

Kort has an obsession with sitting in the driver's seat in cars. Any chance he gets he will run and open the door and hop in. So now we have to lock the doors and all he says now is "unlock" over and over! He is also starting to say prayers with us which is absolutely precious :) 

3 Months

Griffin is three months already! We have gotten back into a good routine and hopefully it'll last for a while now. 

I started sleep training a little over a week ago. It got to the point that once we had him asleep and put him down, he'd wake right back up. For his naps, I was able to put him down drowsy and he'd fall asleep on his own, but that became a thing of the past and he required to be rocked to sleep and that became harder since Kort has started getting into everything once I left the room. SO, I started what I did with Kort. The Good Night, Sleep Tight book. The first night I had to pick him up after him crying for over an hour. Second night he finally fell asleep on his own after an hour and a half. Next night was 45 minutes and got less from there. However, he's not as easy to just sit next to the crib and try to comfort by patting and shh ing. So the book says with those babies sometimes they do better without you in the room and just make quick visits every 15 minutes or so. That's what I've began having to do. I'm trying to work on getting him more drowsy so he doesn't cry as long. Last night he only cried for 10 minutes and he was out! So it's definitely getting better. And with this, he's sleeping through the night! His naps are about an hour or more now also! He cries a little for his naps but it helps him sleep longer since he falls asleep on his own. We also just moved his pack n play into our guest room and he's been still sleeping great. He may be in there for a while until Kort is ready to share a room. He wakes up around 9, awake for a little over an hour, about hour and a half nap. Takes usually 3 good ones and sometimes a short 30 minute one late afternoon/early evening. Bed time has been around 9:30 but I'm trying to make it a little earlier. 

Griffin has rolled over a few times from his belly to back. He likes to scoot on his belly already. I put him on his blanket and when I go back to check on him he's already off of it! He loves kicking his feet and has giggled a few times. He is very vocal now and jabbers nonstop! He's gained probably about another pound since his checkup and is 14 something! He's already wearing clothes Kort was wearing at 6 months. It's not like he's a super chunk and he only nurses about seven minutes each side. He's just a lot different than Kort. 

Things are going well though. He's getting to the point of starting to hit lots of milestones like more laughing, rolling over, and then sitting up! I'll take it week by week though :)

Memorial Day

I figure I am way behind on blogging. I usually do it all on the computer, but since it's in the everything room where Kort can't keep his hands off of anything and I take nap time for myself whenever I can get it, I am now resorting to the blogger app and trying to post from my phone. Anyway, moving on.

We had basically agreed that we wanted to go camping for Memorial Day weekend. The weather forecast didn't look too great, but we've camped in the rain before (nothing new to Washington), and just put up tarps over the chair area, etc. We were trying to talk our friends into coming so it'd be more fun. They bailed out the day before but I don't blame them. They didn't have the gear yet anyway. So off we went just our family. 

Eastern Oklahoma has more rolling hills and greenery so we found a state park about 2 hours away. We got there around 7, which was close to Kort's bedtime. Good thing Griffin napped the whole drive. Clay worked on getting the fire started, I was putting up the tent, Griffin was enjoying the bouncer, and Kort was running around trying to get in the car. Amid the chaos, Kort ended up in the car. I came to find he had dumped a 5 hour energy drink on the drivers seat. (This is important to know). Finally Clay got the fire going. He got Kort a hot dog while I was getting Griffin ready for bed. Later Clay was roasting marshmallows and after he took it out of the fire, Kort grabbed the other empty side of the roaster. Cue nonstop screaming. Good thing we had our first aid kit we just put together with all that stuff to help with burns. Finally I got Griffin to sleep and ate while Clay got Kort ready for bed. Maybe around 45 minutes later we were falling asleep around 11. Probably an hour later Kort was awake kicking all over and whining. This went on for an hour or so. Then he finally konked out again. About another hour later he woke up again doing the same things. More time goes by trying to comfort him and put him back to sleep. In the meantime, Griffin wakes up to eat. Oh, and about 3 campsites down the people were playing their loud country music radio (until about 3:00). Clay just took Kort into the car to fall asleep. I got Griffin back asleep and then they came back in to the tent. Finally some sleep. Kort was then up at the butt crack of dawn around 7. Clay took him to go play outside, and I couldn't fall back asleep. So we got about 3 hours of sleep. 

Ok, so our thoughts on why Kort slept (or didn't sleep) the way he did.

1. We have outgrown our tent. He needed his room just like we did.

2. Naturally if you opened a bottle of liquid, say a 5 hour energy drink that smelled good, you'd take a sip at least. Then dump the rest for fun on the carseat.

So he was probably wired on that energy sip he may have gotten and had a hard time sleeping. Boy, was that ever a fun night. The baby even slept better.

We had baked oatmeal for breakfast. Then we decided we were already bored. There was basically only boating and water stuff to do where we were at. We finally decided we didn't want to go through another night like that again and were packed up by 11. We hadn't even left the campground when Kort had already fallen asleep. Go figure. 

Griffin once again slept the whole way home. Thank goodness. 

We got back into town and went shopping to make our own slip n slide! That will be another post coming hopefully. We just relaxed and caught up on sleep the rest of the weekend. We also had some friends over for kabobs Monday night. It was nice to have Clay an extra day!

2 month checkup

Griffin had his 2 month check up just a few days ago. Today he is 10 weeks, so it's a little overdue. Here's where he stands:

Weight: 13 lb. 5 oz. = 79%

Height: 23.5 inches = 64%

Head circumference: 40 cm = 45%

I thought Griffin has been way more chunky than Kort was, but now looking back at Kort's 2 month checkup, it's showing that Kort was bigger! Here's Kort's:

Weight: 13 lbs. 11 oz. = 85%

Height: 24.5 inches = 85%

Kort's 2 month check up

Maybe Griffin looks more chubby because he's an inch shorter? Anyway, it's just funny how different they can be. He got his shots, screamed for a few minutes while I calmed him and did great. Slept a lot that day and has been a little grumpy the last few days and kind of cries while eating, or not really eating as much. These two posts compared are pretty much the same. 

I asked the doctor about putting Griffin to sleep at night, since he won't fall asleep on his own being drowsy, like he does for his naps. She said that we can just rock him for a little bit longer but once three months hits, that's when they start associating things like crying will equal us picking him up. So once again, I'm going to try and get him to fall asleep on his own, even if it means crying a little :( 

2 Months

(This is his Mickey from his Aunt JoJi:)

This little dude is two months! Two doesn't seem like a lot, but when you compare it to one month, holy cow, he's really grown up! 

One of my last posts, about my venting, obviously it's the hormones talking. That first month was really hard emotionally, but once your body does get back into the swing of things and you start getting a little bit more sleep, life does become a lot better. It's so hard getting past those weeks though. Ugh, I did hate it, but once right around six weeks hit, life started becoming manageable. 

At about six weeks, I had a routine down. Griffin would take a few good couple hour naps and then his evening cat naps. Well, that sure changed. It was frustrating me. But one of my good friends who also had her baby a few days before me said something that has totally helped me. She said that she stopped trying to adjust to all the changes. THANK YOU! :) As simple as that may sound, that has helped my sanity. Forget trying to make sure he's getting the right length of naps, certain time of day, whatever. However, I do try to coincide Griffin's and Kort's naps together and so far it's gone pretty well so I do get a little bit of "me" time - you know, to shower in the middle of the afternoon, or take a short nap, or simply just have some peace and quiet!

I used to wake Griffin up at the same time each day, but I've given up on that. He usually wakes up between 8 and 9. He'll stay awake for about 1.5 hours between naps. He's been giving me at least one good nap, usually in the morning. It was during Kort's nap which was awesome, but not so much anymore. If he does wake up cranky and Kort is still asleep, I'll rock him back to sleep and fall asleep myself. I'll put him back in his bed when I hear Kort wake up, and then sometimes Griffin will sleep for another hour, maybe. After his afternoon nap, he'll take a couple of 30-45 minute cat naps starting around dinner time. I've tried to keep him awake starting around 7:30 so I can start getting him ready for bed around 9:00. I have been having the hardest time getting him to fall asleep on his own at bedtime. I can put him down drowsy for nap time and he'll fall asleep on his own, but for some reason it's just not working at nighttime. I've been trying the sleep training I did for Kort with putting him down drowsy, staying by his side and just patting and shushing him to comfort him. It doesn't help. Once I pick him up after about ten minutes, he calms right down. Sometimes he'll start falling asleep. Obviously he was ok. So I put him back down and he start right back up crying and my comfort techniques don't help. We usually end up just holding him until he is asleep for a while. I'll keep working on this, but it gets so frustrating sometimes and Clay knows it does, so he'll just take him and put him to sleep so I can fall asleep in the bed on my own without baby sounds. Anyway, that's how his sleep is going. I'm so thankful though that he's falling asleep on his own at least for his naps. 

Griffin is doing great at nursing. He eats about every three hours and only wakes up once during the night, which he started doing a little after a month old. When I went for a weight check around three weeks, the doctor said he was doing great and I didn't have to wake him up at night to feed him - he would just wake up when he was hungry. I was always so confused and what to do about that. Some would say to make sure to wake them up every few hours to feed, which does make sense when they're newborns, but I didn't know how long to do that for. So this is for my own record - when I don't have to wake them up to feed them in the night :) With Kort, I remember setting alarms on my phone of when I needed to go feed him in the night. Yeah, that got pretty annoying fast. You definitely learn from your first one and so from that, it does make things easier with the second child.

Smiles are becoming a daily thing during awake time :) He loves my stupid faces and noises while he's sitting in the bouncer. His neck isn't quite strong to keep his head straight so he leans to the side since there's no neck pillow thingy, but he's getting great at holding his head up overall. Kort loves poking him in the eye and trying to bite his feet and roll him over. He's getting better with handling him though. Also, with Kort, he's beginning to really sit still to watch a show, or at least his Colors, Shapes, and Numbers DVD! I'm pretty sure he's learning from it, but I try not to let him watch it 24/7 and still play outside, etc., but it's been such a nice distraction for him so that I'm able to hurry and take a shower or like I'm on here posting :) ha ha It's been so nice though.

 I'm beginning to understand when people say it just makes their day when they get their smiley baby from the crib in the morning. Lately Griffin has been waking up happy in the morning or from a nap and when I go get him he begins to smile! I really do love it! I'm getting to the point where my hormones are getting back to normal and I can really begin to feel the love I have for this baby! Anyway, more to come when he has his 2 month appointment next week.

New Nephew!

Tyce Benjamin Lungren

May 8, 2013

7:39 a.m.

8 lbs. 11 oz. ~ 21.5 inches long

Janelle has had her other two kids two weeks early. Well, that time had passed for this boy and she hadn't progressed much at her doctor's appointment. But little did they know he was ready to come :)

Her water broke at 2:00 a.m., got her epidural and pitocin to speed the contractions back up. 7:15 the nurse came to check her and she was READY! The doc got there, gave two pushes and pulled him out! Super fast! So excited for another cousin for Kort and one as the same age as Griffin!

Love you guys!