Redesign, baby!

Finally - FINALLY - I have renamed and (slightly) redesigned the blog!  Still trying to work out a few kinks but it's good enough for now! 

Does this mean I'll be posting more than I have been?  Only time will tell, and if I was a betting woman I'd probably bet against it (I know myself pretty well...), but my hope is that I will be.  The renaming/redesign was hanging over my head and I was feeling a bit mired down by it.  And by the fact that I had birth announcements and thank you's to send out, which I finally did the other day (mostly - I still have a few cards to address).  So odds are I could possibly maybe post just a bit more.  Perhaps. ;)

Anyway, I hope you like the new look!  I kept the same background image because it's the coolest free design available through blogger and I was too lazy to find anything else, but I did get rid of all the side bar pictures - they seemed to be clogging up the works.  And I hope you like the new name!  No longer just the Dashiell Diaries, it was time to add Ms. Aurelia to the mix!

Enjoy!

Ack!  Where has the time gone?  Oh yeah, I have no time anymore!  But right at this moment both kiddos are napping, the house is not out of control (though I could be folding laundry instead of writing, I'll admit that much), and I'm ready for tomorrow - my first full day back at work, yikes!  So I'm going to quickly throw some pictures up here just so I can claim to still be a blogger! 

Aurelia is 8 weeks old - 8 weeks!!  And she's starting to look like a real person now, not just a wrinkly newborn.  She's smiling and making cute noises, and Dashiell was able to calm her down today by shaking a rattle, which was a first!  And which he was so excited about.  He still likes being a big brother and is always very concerned about his little sister, but there are days (um, today maybe?) when he definitely feels like he needs more attention and is super demanding. This will pass, right?  I sure hope so! 

Anyway, here are those pictures I promised!

Aurelia at one month old - I love how she just lost her sock and seems so pleased with herself!

My mom came to visit and we got a couple of good pictures of her with the kids - she was so happy to be able to visit, and we were sooooo happy to have her here!

Here she is making train tracks out of dominoes with Dashiell (in the most convenient spot ever, right in the doorway):

And here she is holding Aurelia in the kitchen:

And here's Dashiell showing off his accordion skills to her:

We also had Aurelia's baptism when mom was out here - we were much more on top of it this time around (Dash was something like 5 months old when he was finally baptized). 

Here she during the baptism:

And here we are with her Godparents, uncle David and soon-to-be aunt Lindsay:

Last but not least, one of my favorite pictures of Aurelia, where she shows off her lovely smile!

 It's the first smile I caught on camera!  Yay!

Sorry this post is short on content - at some point I'm sure I'll have more time to write about all the other stuff that's going on, like how Aurelia slept for 6.5 hours the other night (miracle!), and how Dashiell's favorite thing to ask is "what are you laughing about?"  Which he asks about 100 times a day.  Seriously.  It manages to be both funny and super annoying at the same time, in that way that only an almost 4-year-old can do.  But hey, at least you know that we're still laughing a lot around here!

Hey Look! We have a 2-week-old!

Introducing...

Aurelia Violet Hanson!!  Born January 7th at 11:24 am, weighing in at an impressive 8 lbs 1 oz and measuring 20-1/2 inches long.  We Weber women like our babies big!  :)

The birth was lengthy but all in all a much better experience than Dashiell's birth - Dashiell's was 30 hours of freaking out about his heart rate dipping, 3 hours of pushing, and an on-call OB who was kind of a jerk.  With Aurelia we opted for an induction a couple of days before her due date, which for the first 17 hours seemed like a really bad idea, until my water finally broke at 3:30 am.  After that everything moved along at a great rate!  And I only had about 30 minutes of pushing (or less - it was about 5 contractions-worth of pushes).  Aurelia looked great from the get-go, even though she had a full knot in her umbilical cord:

A boy scout couldn't have tied a better knot than that!  Yikes!

Everything has been going pretty well with the new little person in our house.  Dashiell loves his new baby sister, though he is still adjusting.  It didn't help that he had pink eye and a nasty cold the first week we were home - poor kid!  But he's been a trouper nonetheless.  He keeps saying, "she's so cute!" and giving her kisses on her head.  It's super sweet!

Sleep has been challenging, of course, but we're surviving!  Aurelia is a very noisy sleeper, so that's going to take a bit of getting used to.  And she is hungry all.the.time.  Seriously, we're cluster feeding almost non-stop, and have even had to supplement with formula to keep her satisfied.  It's crazy!  But she's gaining weight like a champ, and grew an inch last week! 

Alright, here's an inundation of photos of our little girly - enjoy!

Minutes after Aurelia was born.

Daddy and Aurelia in the hospital room.

Chilling in bed.

Dash meeting his sister.

Finally home!

Dashiell, daddy and Aurelia playing Angry Birds.

Zzzz...

Dash helping feed his sister.

Getting some important work done!

Awww...

Quick explanation of her name: Aurelia (rhymes with "Amelia") was my grandma Weber's name.  She passed away when I was in high school, and since then I have always thought that if I had a daughter I would love to give her that name.  My grandma was awesome. 

The original Aurelia

Not exactly the Christmas I hoped for!

 Happy Christmas memory!

It's been a crazy month (or more).  The brief synopsis goes something like this:  Thanksgiving was fine, we finally started working on the baby's room but haven't gotten far, we did lots of fun pre-Christmas activities (Santa visits, light displays, etc), my birthday was good, we had a semi-surprise visit from my sister Lisa, and the baby was breach but has since flipped.  Oh yeah, and Dashiell ended up in the hospital the day after Christmas, after being sick for 5 days prior to that.  Which is what this post really is about, I just felt the need to preface it with some fair-to-good news first.  I should also add that he's now fine and pretty much back to his usual self, but boy was the past week a lot less fun than it should have been!

Wednesday night, right after dropping my sister off at the airport (she was in town on business but was able to spend some quality time visiting us!), Dashiell started throwing up.  He was hit by that stomach bug that about half of my Facebook friends seemed to have experienced as well.  It was rough - the poor kid was vomiting like crazy and unfortunately for us was being very stubborn about doing it in any kind of receptacle.  We tried, really we tried.  Toilet, old tupperware, anything, but he would insist that he didn't need to puke, push the bucket or whatever away, then let it fly.  Gross, and not conducive to sympathy-gaining from those of us who had to be on clean-up duty.  But I digress.  Thursday afternoon he seemed okay, then he threw up a few more times after going to bed.  I was then hit with the same virus, so poor Rick had to nurse us both back to health (thank heavens for his strong immune system!).  By Friday morning I was less disgusting but Dashiell threw up a half a glass of water about 30 minutes after he drank it.  We called his pedi and he just said to keep trying to give him sips of pedialyte (which he hates and I don't blame him - man that stuff is sweet!).  We opted for Gatorade, but even that wasn't his favorite thing.  He did drink some of it, though, and by the end of the day seemed to be getting back to his usual happy self, climbing all over me and wanting to be tickled.  The worst of it seemed like it was over!

Saturday (Christmas eve day) was fine.  I was still recovering a bit but that morning Dashiell seemed to be okay.  We were still trying to keep him on a bland diet, and encouraging him to slowly rehydrate - we didn't want him to guzzle anything and get an upset stomach again, but at the same time obviously wanted him to be drinking something.  We did notice that he didn't really want much to eat - only had a small amount of toast for breakfast, and wasn't really interested in his grilled cheese at lunch.  He had a few grapes and a banana, and I think a few pretzels, but that was about it.  After his nap - right before we were about to leave to visit Rick's grandparents - he threw up again.  Ugh!  So no Christmas eve celebration with the family for us - I didn't want D to be infecting anyone else with this awful virus.

The present Dashiell really wanted from Santa this year - an ATM bank

Christmas day started out fine - Dash was so excited about Santa's visit and his new toys!  We opened presents and played with our toys for a few hours, then headed off to Rick's parents' house to open more presents and hang out with family.  It was good!  But Dashiell was completely wiped out after lunch - which he barely ate, again, after not eating much breakfast, again.  Oh, and he gagged a bit at lunch but didn't actually throw up.  He napped for a couple of hours, then we had to wake him up to go over to Rick's aunt's house for Christmas dinner.  He had some pretzels, and did seem to be drinking water just fine (though he'd given up on Gatorade).  Then he gagged again and said he needed me to take care of him.  So we headed home before he had a chance to throw up, which he ended up doing that night in bed.  Would this virus ever be gone from his little body??

The next morning he was obviously much worse.  Couldn't hold anything down, and was completely lethargic.  After trying unsuccessfully to get through to his pediatrician (the office was closed for the day and their answering service was a complete failure - and yes his pedi has heard about this problem, has apologized up and down and has since gotten rid of said answering service), and realizing that even urgent care clinics were closed that day, we headed to the emergency room.  We didn't think this was an actual emergency, but I guess we were wrong since we were bumped to the head of the line.  Turns out Dashiell was not only super dehydrated but his blood sugar was waaayyyy lower than it should be (if I remember correctly the nurse said it should be between 80 - 120, and his was at 47 when we got there).  Yikes.  He got an IV drip to pump some fluids in him and was administered Zofran for the nausea.  My stubborn kid refused to drink juice, soda, or sugar water.  The nurse had to feed him a packet of sugar to try to get his blood sugar level up.  He was offered popsicles but only wanted green, which took a while to find.  He didn't want any pudding, but somehow managed to consume a bit of ice cream (which he normally doesn't like).  His sugar levels started rising, but not quite fast enough.  The ER doc decided it would be best to admit him to the pediatric ward for observation and an overnight stay.

It was much more comfy in pediatrics.  D kept getting fluids and popsicles, but didn't really want any of the food offered to him as part of the "clear diet" plan - no juice, no chicken broth, no jello.  He is a damn picky eater, that's for sure!  He puked a teeny bit at one point, but it seemed to be in reaction to the fact that a piece of paper was stuck on his popsicle so we didn't worry too much.  Rick was the lucky one to stay overnight with him (ooh comfy cot!), and the night went just fine.  I came back in the morning, hoping that we'd be home shortly after that.  He got his blood drawn, all his levels were fine, and then we waited.  And waited.  And waited.   Turns out they were waiting for him to drink more fluids on his own before they sent him home - had we known this, we would have encouraged him to do so.  He didn't want to be at the hospital either, and once we found out what it would take to get him released it was much easier to encourage him to drink!  He did get some breakfast and lunch which consisted of way too much dairy - seriously, he wanted a grilled cheese for breakfast, and lunch was a cheese quesadilla.  Finally at about 4 pm we were sent home.  Yay!

 Not-so-happy Christmas memory.

Notice how he decided that his right arm with the IV was dead to him -

he could move it, he just decided not to.

Then came another setback - about 2 hours after he went to bed he threw up again.  We were all beside ourselves.  I called his pedi's office (at which point I found out they were no longer using their failed answering service) and talked to the on-call doctor, and after hearing all that he ate that day she was pretty sure the setback was due to temporary lactose intolerance.  His little belly was damaged from all the throwing up and he couldn't handle dairy products.  So the next day I had a good talk with my dairy-fiend son about why we couldn't have milk or cheese for a few days, and we adopted the mantra, "no more hospitals!" to remind us why we couldn't have dairy.  We stuck to a pretty bland diet that day, drank lots of water, and didn't get sick!  And his energy level was pretty much back to normal - though he didn't get a nap so by the end of the day he was completely wiped, but I don't think that had anything to do with being ill.  Thursday we added some more acidic foods and even sprinkled a very small amount of cheese on his pasta.  No puking - yes!  Today we're going to stick with the extremely limited dairy diet, but by Saturday we should be able to bring back milk and see what happens.

So that was our holiday week.  Not terribly stellar.  Lots of laundry and disinfecting happened.  Much worrying was done.  The upshot is that all of this took my mind off of the fact that I couldn't be in Minnesota for Christmas this year (really the first year EVER that I couldn't be there), and I didn't get that Christmas let-down feeling I always experience the day after.  I was able to count my blessing and be thankful for my family, and realize how much I love and appreciate them.

I sincerely hope everyone else had a much better holiday!  I don't know about you, but I am so looking forward to the New Year!