Mondays are weird.

Mondays are strange. I work part-time as a nanny right now, and I work two evenings a week and all day Saturdays and Sundays (about 7 hours a day). I am off on Mondays so its kind of like my weekend with him.
Well Jake gets a bottle of course when I am at work. And I almost think he misses the boob because Mondays we spend 85% of the day nursing. Literally he was up at 6:30 this morning and he has maybe slept for an hour and a half total (on me of course) and it is now noon. When he isnt sleeping he is nursing. This has become a pattern on Mondays. We spend most of the day on the couch just hanging out, playing, nursing, and sleeping. It seems to even out on the rest of the week where he will just eat and be done with it. But on Mondays he wants the boob all.day.long.

I have to giggle sometimes. Because bottle-fed babies are supposed to prefer the bottle because its faster and lose interest in the breast. Not my kid, he will pick the boob every time. Cant complain about that, and what better way to spend a day than cuddling with my boy?

And we have a roller!

3 months and 3 days old and he rolled from tummy to back! I was in the process of trying to get his picture and he rolled over! I quickly shouted to DH "Holy crap he rolled over!" But alas he refused to do it again for DH's viewing pleasure. Yay for Jake!

How true it is...

I hope my children will look back on today
And see a mother who had time to play.
There will be years for cleaning and cooking
But children grow up while we're not looking.
Dusting and scrubbing can wait 'till tomorrow
For babies grow fast we learn to our sorrow.
So quiet down cobwebs and dust go to sleep
I'm rocking my baby and babies don't keep.

Fathers Day...

We had a very nice first fathers day in the sunshine. We started the day off with a nice long walk on the beach looking for turtle nests. Although we didnt find any actual nests, we did find two "false-crawls" in which the turtle comes out of the water to lay her nest but decides (for whatever reason) that its not the right time and leaves without laying her eggs. Here is a picture of the proud papa wearing little man on his back for the first time:

Then because I had to work DH took Jake to his parents house for a nice Fathers Day breakfast. And when I got home from work we went to my parents house for a nice dinner. It was great to see family (as always) and I am glad I got the opportunity to see my dad. I dont get to see him enough. I didnt get to do as much for DH as I wanted to, but such is life. He will have many many more Fathers Days for me to make it up to him. I did a photo shoot with little man last week to put together a nice photo collage for DH to put on his desk at work. I think it turned out well!
I used some props and put together this layout in Scrapblog. Then I printed out 4x6's for my DH, my father, and my father in law (I changed the wording to match their titles). I hope you all had a great Fathers Day too, whether it was the first, or the fiftieth!

3 months old!!

Okay so I am a day late with this post....sue me! Jake is 3 months (and 1 day) old! I will never understand how you can start with a tiny (in comparison) chicken-legged baby boy and get this chubby, smiley, and chatty baby in such a short time. Its such a struggle too between the excitement of seeing him grow and develop, and the sweet sadness that comes over me when I realize he is getting bigger and that he will never be that small ever again.

Only three months old but life is unrecognizable from just three months ago. Nothing can prepare you for how difficult those first few weeks will be. But it just gets better and better. I commented the other day to my husband about how lucky we were. He is truly a good baby and I am not sure why we lucked out so much!

So in Jake news:
* He is now completely sleeping through the night. The sleep situation around here is good, real good. I take no credit for this, as I have done nothing to encourage it (aside from praying of course). But as it stands now (and dear Lord please keep it this way) he goes down for the night between 8 and 9pm. He sleeps through until 6 or 7am. Up until a week ago he was waking up sometime around 3am for a nursing session, but he just recently dropped this.
*Another milestone on the sleep front is the WAY he is going to bed. We used to have to make sure he was deeply asleep before putting him down. But now I can put him down drowsy but awake and he goes to sleep on his own. This to me is the most exciting thing! I can simply pat his bottom until he is drowsy and just put him in his co-sleeper with his sound machine on and his binky and he is good to go! Amazing!
*He is quite the talker now. He started saying the ever-popular Ah-goo around 2 1/2 months and that is a favorite. But he makes lots of sounds and LOVES to sit and have a conversation with you. This usually includes lots of smiling and eye contact. He always looks so serious when we are talking too, like he knows what he has to say is of the utmost importance.
* I have officially retired his 0-3 month clothes. I think I have 1 Circo onesie that still fits in that size. All the rest are done for. We are squarely in either 3-6 month or even some 9 month clothing. So much for all the nice winter clothing (and the halloween costume) that Nana and I bought for him in 9 month size! Although I wont lie, I HAVE been enjoying buying him more clothes.
* He will now tolerate "tummy time" for about 10 minutes at a time. After that it gets ugly.
* He has a flat spot on his head. Not a huge one, but its just getting a little flat. I noticed it about a month ago and the pediatrician confirmed it. The pediatrician advised we put him on a rolled up receiving blanket at night on the opposite side, but he just ends up flat on his back in the morning. He seems to push it away or roll off of it somehow. So I have just been trying to get him off his head more during the day and let him sleep the way he wants. I am NOT about to go messing with bedtime, heck no!
*The pediatrician also commented on how good his eye contact and tracking was. She was talking to him and walked across the room and he followed her.
*He had two more vaccines last month, and got a little bit of a fever with them.

Stay tuned for a look at the Fathers Day pictures I made for DH!

Huge news here in the blogosphere!

I really should be cleaning my kitchen right now. But I HAD to jump on and write a blog post. Huge changes are coming to a theater near you, well, near me anyway. I know, I know I havent posted in forever. But I swear that anytime I am online anymore I am nursing and or feeding a baby. Thus I am reduced to the use of one hand at a time to surf the interwebz. And I HATE typing long messages (i.e. blog entries) with one hand. It makes my hand want to curl up and die, slowly. Buuuttt anywayz.

Here comes the huge news.....wait for it......

The "wannabe" teacher is now a REAL teacher! Well, sort of. I have been hired as a kindergarten teacher in my all-time favorite elementary school! I feel like that idyllic Disn.ey song "A dream is a wish" should be playing as the background of this post. I have been trying for a looonnnggg time to get a teaching job. And even though I *knew* (really just hoped) I would eventually get a job somewhere it was always extremely difficult to feel like you were being passed over or ignored for a position each year.

So this means I need to change the name of my blog...any suggestions?

I am way too overly excited about this. But I am also a teensy bit sad. This means that little Mr J is going to have to go into full-time daycare. In my head I KNOW this doesnt make me a bad mother. I TOTALLY know this with the sane portion of my brain. But this small part of my heart wishes I could stay home with him and never miss a second of his life. Crazy I know, but whoever said motherhood was a rational experience was obviously not a mother. As happy as I am to be working in my dream job, I am devastated at the thought that I might miss one of his "firsts" (rolling over, sitting up, crawling, laughing, etc). It hurts my heart more than I want to focus on right now for fear I will burst into tears and curl up into a ball on the floor sobbing irrationally. With the sane part of my mind I know that millions of mothers have children in daycare full-time, and these children lead happy, healthy, and fulfilled lives. But I will be brutally honest, it doesn't help right now. I think its just something I have to get used to. And I think it may take a lot of time.

Here is a little short story that I feel illustrates the job of a teacher perfectly I really love this story and wanted to share-

"One day a man was walking along the beach when he noticed a boy picking something up and gently throwing it into the ocean. Approaching the boy, he asked, “What are you doing?” The youth replied, “Throwing starfish back into the ocean. The surf is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them back, they’ll die.” “Son,” the man said, “don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish? You can’t make a difference!” After listening politely, the boy bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it back into the surf. Then, smiling at the man, he said…” I made a difference for that one.”

Isnt that what we teachers do? We consciously realize that we cannot help every single child, but that we CAN help those in our class? That it makes a difference to them! And isnt that why we as teachers work so.very.hard, blood, sweat, and tears kind of hard for our kids? Because although we might wish we could make a difference to every.single.child we can be happy with just making a difference to those children in our class, or our school.

I will leave you with that, and go clean my stupid kitchen. Unless Mr J. wakes up. Not that I would *ever* wake him up purposefully so I could get out of cleaning my kitchen. No....never.

Keep an eye out for a 3 month update this weekend!!