A First Birthday and Easter in Pictures

This is what one would call "picture heavy".  What can I say, it was a busy, busy weekend!  

On April 17th, Oliver turned ONE!  Grandma M was out visiting for Oliver's actual birthday.  I had plans for a fun visit to a local "ghost town" I'd heard about, a Western town used for filming back in the 50's and 60's, but it turned out to be more "ghost" than "town".

Only the foundations left!

At least it was a pretty stroll.

Mmm, birthday lunch.

And birthday yogurt... the first that was all his!

Oliver got some pretty fabulous birthday gifts, too.  (We're kind of rewinding to the morning here...)

See that tricycle in the back there?  This is what it looked like at 11 pm the night before:

Our first late-night gift assembly!

And in the morning:

(What you can't see in the picture is the handle parents can push (and steer!) with.)


Anyway.  Aunt Jessica arrived on Friday in time to help with some last-minute birthday party preparations.

Cake pop construction

Halfway!

And Grandpa R made it just in time for the party Saturday!

Monster munchies (snackers got there before the camera)

Monster cake pops

Monster cakes (one for Oliver, one for his birthday buddy J)

Modeling the birthday party tie I made

Initial "frat" banners for the boys

Happy birthday, dear Oliver!

Face first!

Mmm, I think I like it!

But I DON'T like the hat.

Messy!

Overall, I think the party was a lot of fun!  Of course, I didn't get to visit with anyone enough, I hardly ate, and, if I'm being honest, I'm pretty glad it's over.  But I'm also glad we did it!  Happy birthday, Oliver!

And then after the party, because all our family was in town, we went out to dinner to celebrate Oliver's birthday one more time.

Tuckered out!

As if a birthday party wasn't enough for one weekend, it was also Oliver's first Easter!  (Because of how Easter fell, it was before he was born last year and after his first birthday this year.)

Family!

Easter egg hunt

Visiting an old town historical park

With Grandma M and Grandpa R

With Mom and Aunt Jess!

Modeling the Easter tie I made.

It was such a busy day we didn't get to the Easter basket until almost bedtime.

First Easter basket

Complete with nap bed-head

It's been too long a day to humor Mom with the ears.

And there it is!  Happy first birthday, happy Easter!

Twelve Months

I almost feel like the first birthday is really more a congratulations to the parents than a celebration of the child.  Awesome job, guys, you kept someone completely dependent alive--pretty healthy, even--for a whole year! (Did you ever play The Sims?  In my head, I see that little Sims baby magically turning into a toddler after three hard days of keeping the baby from being hungry, tired, and in a dirty diaper.)

So.  ONE!

Dear Oliver,

You are one year old!  You've been seeming less and less baby-ish over these past several weeks and at the same time, I'm mourning your baby days and awed by what a cool little dude you're growing into!

You say seven words:

Mama - Mom
Mama - More
Mama - Pick me up!
Mama - What are you doing?
Dada - Dad
Dada - That
Dada - Pay attention to me!

You have one consistent sign: more.  Right now, it's really just a clap, so we're working on doing it right, but it obviously means what you think it does. You also do all done--sometimes.  But you recognize more, all done, eat, water, and milk.  To be honest, those are the only ones we do with any regularity.

I don't think I've gone through the hand signals you do.  You wave, which is something you picked up around 10 months from a baby we stood by in a restaurant on the drive home from Oakland.  You clap, and I have no idea when that started.  You will kiss my cheek (open-mouthed, of course) when you feel like it, which has also been going on a month or two.  You will blow raspberries on anything you can get your mouth on: my shoulder, my cheek, the leather couch, Dad's leg.

You've been playing peek-a-boo with a blanket for months, but you just started playing it with your hands.  Where's Oliver?  THERE he is!!  You also do How big is Oliver?  SO BIG!
 

In a really rough week at the beginning of this month, your two top front teeth popped through.  So now you're up to four.

Your daycare teacher has said on a few occasions that you can be "a little stinkbug."  Sometimes you hit the other babies, which you have to have learned from somewhere, but we're working very hard on not doing it.  In my experience, you hit most often when you're excited.  And yes, it's my face your flailing arms make contact with.  On the flip side, one day you came home with an obvious four-toothed bite mark on your wrist, and that was before your top teeth popped through, so I know you didn't do it to yourself.  When I brought it to Ms. B's attention, she was surprised.  She said you'd never cried, so she didn't know who had done it.  So you're not just doling it out.  Either way, we're working on it.  We're working on "gentle" and "share" and "nice".

If there's one bad habit you got from your mom, it seems to be not wanting to do things unless you're sure you can.  Like standing.  You can stand without holding on if you're not thinking about it.  You took a few steps several times tonight before defaulting back to your hands-and-feet gorilla crawl.  The minute you realize you're doing it by yourself, though, you stop.

You definitely figured out how to open doors, so that's the new Big Thing.  Open, slam shut.  Open, slam shut.  Open, walk through.  Once or twice, you've caught your fingers in the door, and that hurts.  But mostly, it's the greatest new game!

All this is to say, you've come a long way, baby!  Just look!

Love you, love you, love you!

Happy First Birthday!

Love,
Mom

Weight For It: The Detox

A few things are true:

1. My weight is always an issue.
2. I'm addicted to sugar.
3. Breastfeeding doesn't help.

And a timeline:

- I gained 42 pounds while pregnant.
- I lost 25 of them by the time I went back to work in September.  (A lot of that right away, the rest rather slowly.)
- By November, I started having trouble with milk supply and pumping enough to send to daycare.  I started making lactation cookies, which helped.
- The holiday season hit, and with it never-ending treats at work, parties, and goodies everywhere I looked.  Between Thanksgiving/my birthday and Christmas, I gained eight pounds.  (If you're counting, that's 25 pounds to lose to get back to my goal weight.)
- Every time I've made a solid effort to lose some of the weight, my milk supply would tank.  Lactation cookies and oatmeal genuinely helped.  More than Fenugreek.  More than More Milk supplement.  More than Mother's Milk tea.  More than any suggestion I tried (and believe me, I tried many.)  I was eating oatmeal every morning, and 4-6 lactation cookies a day most days.

So.  Not only was breastfeeding not shedding my pounds like friends and nurses and books and the internet "promised", but to keep up my supply, I was working against my weight loss efforts!

Here I am, less than two weeks away from Oliver's first birthday with 25 pounds to lose*. 

Enter: The 10-Day Sugar Detox Diet.

There's a book, which I didn't read before starting, and haven't read in its entirety, even six days in (which is today... I ordered it from Amazon and got it mid-week).  I got my information from the internet.

The goal of the detox is to break your sugar addiction.  (There's a lot of interesting science behind it, which I do believe, but I'll let you read that for yourself if you're interested.)  The method is eating nothing that turns to sugar.  So no grains, starches or sugars (real, processed, artificial, etc.).  Including cutting out fruit, alcohol, and dairy.  Oh, and no caffeine, either, for good measure.

Simply put, I'm eating nothing but protein and vegetables.  To a sugar-addicted person like myself, it sounds horrible.  Not only do I love dessert, but I have carbs with every meal!  Did you see my mention of oatmeal above?  Every day.  Dinner very often consists of a meat (chicken or fish), a vegetable, and a grain (farro, quinoa, couscous, brown rice).  Dinner feels like it's missing something without that grain!

BUT.  In six days I've lost five pounds.  Have I broken my sugar addiction?  Hard to say.  I still wanted to stop at Yogurtland on our way home!  (We didn't.)  Eating like this long-term isn't realistic, but I don't think it's supposed to be.  I definitely feel better.  My milk supply is as tanked as it ever has been, but I'm so close to being done with pumping that my freezer supply can pick up the slack.  Hopefully I can continue this momentum, incorporate low-sugar(/carb/starch) eating going forward, and continue losing weight.

My one note, though, is that the program seems way harder than usual, cooking-wise.  And we eat mostly home-cooked meals already!  Just to compare, my usual breakfast, as I mentioned, was a bowl of oatmeal.  Sometimes with a banana mashed up in it, usually with some Spenda.  But that's it.  Easy-peasy.  Now, I'm making a low-sugar smoothie, which includes cranberries, blueberries, almond butter, chia seeds, walnuts, pumpkin seeds (those last three soaked overnight), avocado, coconut oil, lemon (with rind), almond milk... I might even be forgetting something.  I intentionally left out the Brazil nuts and hemp seeds because my grocery bill was already soaring.  Way more complicated than oatmeal. 

So.  Ten days.  Six down, four to go.  I think this is good for me.

*Before I started the detox I had 25 pounds to lose.  Now I'm down to 20!