Life Update

Sorry it's been so long since my last post. As you can imagine, we've had our hands full with a newborn and a two year old. Well, Alex isn't so much of a newborn anymore. He's already close to outgrowing his 3 month clothes and he's only 6 weeks old (almost 7)! He's eating 5 oz of formula at a sitting, and only recently stopped eating every three hours. Now he eats more like every 4 hours, give or take a half hour. Last night, he went 6 hours between feedings, which was nice for me. I actually got to sleep a little. And he's getting baptized on Sunday! He's getting so big so fast!

Actually, a lot has been going on in our household since Alex was born. A week after he was born, my blood pressure skyrocketed and I had to, once again, be admitted to labor and delivery. It takes some serious talent to get admitted to labor and delivery when you aren't even pregnant, but I did it. Lucky me. Anyway, I got to go home that same night, they just increased my dose of Labetalol. A few weeks after that, my blood pressure started to stabilize and my dose was cut a lot. Today, I was taken off of it completely. So far so good. That was a scary ride.

The last weekend in July, James' family rented a lodge at Mina Lake in Aberdeen, SD. We hadn't planned on going since we didn't think camping with a newborn would be particularly fun. But we ended up going, against our better judgement, and I'm glad we did. It was the first time a lot of his siblings had met Alex, and he was really good while we were there. Also, Isaac had a blast playing, fishing, and swimming with all his cousins! We spend one day at Storybook Land in Aberdeen. We had a blast, even though it was hot as begeezuz that day. It was a very fun trip.

Isaac fishing with Daddy at Mina Lake

Family picture at the Oz exhibit at Storybook Land in Aberdeen

James went back to work on August 8th. He works at 4am, so I'm on my own with Alex at night. It's been tough, but thankfully it's starting to get easier. I like having James home earlier in the day, and he lets me take a nap if I need it. Isaac will be starting daycare again tomorrow, so I'll have about 5 weeks to get used to getting two kids ready in the morning all by myself before I go back to work. I think it will be good for Isaac to go back. He misses his friends. And it will be easier on me just having Alex at home during the day. Maybe I'll actually be able to shower before James gets home! :)

I'll be going back to work on October 3rd. I'm not particularly looking forward to it, but it will be nice to be getting a paycheck again, albeit a pretty small one after you subtract out daycare expenses. Sigh.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that we almost bought a house! Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, finished basement, awesome deck and  fenced backyard, two-car detached garage. We put in a lowball offer (the house wasn't worth what they were asking) and after counter offers on both sides, didn't get it. You didn't know we were looking for a new house, you say? We weren't. I always like to keep an eye on houses in our price range, and I just happened to see one that looked perfect for us, so we decided to go look at it. We liked it. It needed a little work, like new shingles, lots of interior paint, and eventually new carpet, but that doesn't scare us. Before putting in an offer, we decided to look at other houses in our price range, just because I would feel weird if the house we bought was the only one we even looked at. I wanted to make sure there was nothing better out there. Nothing else really struck our fancy, so we went for it with the original house we viewed.

We're disappointed that we didn't get it, but we're not too upset about it. We don't need to move. We'd like to have a separate bedroom for Alex, and another one for a guest bedroom, and just some more room in general, but it's not necessary. So we'll keep an eye on the market, but we'll probably do some more serious house hunting starting this spring. There will be more on the market then, and the longer we wait, the better our financial position will be for house buying, so we're okay with waiting. Plus, we like our house. It's cute and cozy and I'll actually be a little sad to sell it.

So there is an update about what has been going on in our lives for the past six weeks. Hopefully I'll have a little more time to blog in the next six weeks.