Weaning update...

It's been interesting weaning Cal Boy. With some things it is so easy, but then we hit a little bump and it gets hard.

We have been doing milk in a bottle for 3 nights now and for 3 nights he has slept through the night (woooohoooo!). Last night, though, he had half of the bottle and shoved it away and started rooting on me BIG TIME. I had Eddie come in to finish the bottle, so he couldn't smell me, and when I walked away, I could hear Cal giggling. I love his laugh, but at this point, it was way past bed time and he needed to be asleep. I went back in to split the boys up and to try the bottle again, and he pulled down my top and was working on attaching himself before I could put the bottle down to redirect. He was SO mad and SO hurt that I would not nurse him! He was screaming and crying and trying his best to latch on to anything he could.....it broke my heart. Maybe I am doing all of this too fast for him...?

So, I nursed him for just a few minutes on each side, since he wasn't taking any more of his bottle, and then he went down for the night.

All in all though, I think we are doing really well. Yesterday, he woke up and ate his yogurt and cheerios, nursed before his morning nap, woke up and had a few graham crackers, played a while and had lunch and then had milk before his afternoon nap (wouldn't take much), and then I nursed a little bit before he went to bed. I have been pumping for a brief time before bed (when he didn't nurse), just to relieve some of the pressure to get me through the night.

It is definitely a painful process to wean down.... I think it's painful for both of us!

New at the whole bottle thing...

He did so well last night..... then we tried a new bottle during nap time.....

A little plug

HOW CUTE IS THIS LITTLE GUY???

A friend of ours out in Texas has started her own little children's clothing line, Petite Pineapples. Everything is ADORABLE and it's super inexpensive! This little t-shirt is only $12! I am getting one for Cal's first birthday, which is going to be here before we know it. Anyway, she has some of the cutest little girl stuff and a little boy's romper that I have my eye on... check out her blog by clicking here.

First night with cow's milk.....

....and he slept through the night!!!!!! THANK YOU, LORD!

(I know, I know.....it's about damn time, right? Yes, I know this. But I am starting to wonder if he just wasn't getting enough milk before bed and was waking up hungry? I guess I can't get too excited since it was only one night. He could have just been SUPER tired-- it can wear a kid out tearing things off of walls, you know.....)

We are going to try the same thing today: nursing before naps and then bottle before bed. Hope for the same outcome!!! Plus we are going to the pool today so I am going to just wear his little tail out! :)

PS- total side note....I took my friend, Julie, dinner last night. She just brought home her second baby. Her first is a little girl who turned 2 in December. She is convinced that Cal's name is really COW. We walked in and she started asking COW to come look at her toys! Then Julie asked her to say hi to CAL and she MOOOOOOOOed!!!! HAHAHAHAHA!!!! I guess that's what we get for such an....odd.....name! hahaha

He got the L

Above Cal's bed, we hung hand made letters: C, A, L. The A was a bit lower than the other two letters:

A while ago, I heard a loud THUD and went in to see the A pulled off of the wall. The C and the L were out of reach....or so I thought....

Today I went in and saw this: (notice the L laying in the crib--this is during NAP time....)

The Wonderful World of Weaning

This post is not going to be very interesting, but I think it will be helpful to me to look back later on in life to figure out how and when I started weaning Cal Boy.....

Cal is still nursing and for the most part, I LOVE IT. He is down to 4 times a day (not including the night time "visits"), but most of those are very brief. I have also started not nursing him when he first wakes up since I nursed him more than likely in the middle of the night. He is SO active and SO busy that it is super hard to hold him still long enough to nurse. Usually we are lucky to have 10 minutes of eating. He would rather be moving, wiggling, twisting, turning, etc....

I have been talking with the doctor about weaning him down for the trip Eddie and I are taking next month sans Cal. It is about 4 weeks away. Since we are nursing about 4 times a day, it seemed like a logical time to start introducing cow's milk. I was going to put it off another day, but as I was nursing Cal before his afternoon nap, he bit me. He has bitten me before and it hurt, but now that the top teeth are coming in, it REALLY hurt. I did the same thing I had done before where I say NO and put him in the middle of the floor and he just started cracking up (lovely, right?). After trying to nurse again, with again, the same outcome, we went to plan B.

We bought some vitamin D milk in anticipation of this week, and I had some milk pumped, so I mixed breast milk with vitamin D milk in a sippy cup (maybe we could skip bottles all together??). He loved it. He drank quite a bit, but was really ready to get moving again. I let him go around the room with his sippy cup and he would take a swig and then toss it. I put it in his crib with him during nap time, and he must have tossed it somewhere because now I can't find it.....

For bed time tonight, I used the only bottle we have (!) and mixed 2 ounces of breast milk with about 5 ounces of cow's milk and rocked him as I fed him. He immediately took the bottle from me and turned it up like a wino and started chugging. He couldn't get enough! He would stop to catch his breath and smile at me and then would go right back at it!

Once he finished the bottle, I sat him in the crib and he just toppled over to fall asleep with the fullest belly you have ever seen! I went back in not even 5 minutes later (to look for the first sippy cup.....??) and he didn't even lift his head to look at me. It will be interesting to see how tonight goes sleeping wise.

I am very sad to be done with nursing (or working on being done with nursing), but I know it's time. I just love snuggling with him and I love the way he feels curled up in my arms. I love having that special time just the two of us. I love the way he looks up at me while he's eating as if he is sooooooo thankful for me (and I am looking at him the exact same way: so grateful for him).

It will more than likely take a few weeks to be completely weaned, and I am okay with that. Cal will be 10 months on Friday and I am pretty proud of myself for doing it this long. Truth be told, I would have continued nursing until a year if we weren't going away. This trip will be really helpful to me though. I have to just draw the line and if I weren't traveling, I am sure I would try and do it just one more time.....

I'll keep you posted on the weaning wars :)

Goofy Boy!

Cal has been imitating me a lot lately and will match my faces and then we both crack up. Today, we did this for quite a while and we both had tears running down our faces from laughing so hard.

I tried to capture a little bit of it using my computer's built in camera, but it was hard to capture it all. Plus it is time for bath and bed, but I really wanted to try to take a snap shot of the day...you know, in case he forgets how to be a copy cat tomorrow (I know he won't, but still....).

Here is a link to the video. Ignore the girl in black.....

Who reads this anyway?

Eddie was giving me a hard time the other day because I really enjoy reading other's blogs and I like to update ours as well. He asked me if anyone actually read The Williamson Family blog.

It got me thinking... Most of my posts do not have comments on them, but friends will often comment in person that they loved the post about ______, or they thought the story about Cal throwing his poo was hilarious.

I added a "counter" button on the side of the blog and was blown away by the numbers! It has had over 3,000 views since I installed the button, and that was less than a month ago. Then, I added the device on the side so you can see where people are from who read your blog-- that is THE coolest part! I love to think of people in Indiana and Charlotte and Massachusetts reading this blog! Do I even know anyone living in Massachusetts??

I do not make my blog public knowledge on facebook or anything like that. I don't have a real reason not to, but some of the things I write are more private and I like to think of my blogging "family" as a little closer than my facebook family (which is ironic in itself because I can choose to be friends with someone on facebook, but I cannot choose who reads this....hmmmmm). If a friend on facebook asks for the blog address, I send it to them via private message as opposed to writing it on their wall. Again, I have no real reason for this-- a blog is meant to be public, right?

The whole purpose of this post is to say HI to those of you who read this that I don't know about. It makes my day when someone tells me they read my blog. I have several girlfriends from college who have told me that follow it now and I love that!

You think your life is trivial and who would really care to read about your day to day boring chores, but apparently, I am more exciting than I thought: YEEHAW, y'all!

(now post a comment, will ya??)

We've been gone...but now we are back!

The Williamson's just spent a week at the beach. Well, part of the Williamson's. Eddie had to work, so he was down for the 4th and then came home, and I stayed down there with my parents and Cal for the rest of the week. It was BEAUTIFUL! The weather was perfect, and at times it was even cool-- very unheard of for July in NC! The cool weather didn't last long though, and the heat and humidity came back in full force.

I took a TON of pictures while we were down there. Cal was so much fun and was always putting on a show. He didn't do very well at night down there (big shocker, right?). Our last night there, he got up FIVE times...!!! Come to find out, he has two new teeth coming in on the top and I think they are just killing his little mouth. He was in a lot of pain and it was breaking my heart (and making me super tired!).

Cal's first trip over to the ocean. He spots a bird long before any of us ever see it and starts pointing and saying "bah!" (or something similar to that). He gets soooo excited whenever he sees one and has to point to it. This day at the beach, there were a ton of seagulls out. It was almost more than he could take!

Cal is obsessed with his sippy cup-- the kid can drink some water!!

Didn't your momma teach you not to point?

This little outfit was a gift when Cal was born. I remember thinking it looked so huge. It is precious on him. I love how it has his name across his bum.

These are just a few other fun ones of Cal loving the beach!

Camp Richards was in full effect everyday with paddleboarding, boating, kayaking, and just enjoying being outside. We were all worn out at night and mom and I would play Rummikube and then crash hard. Oh, and I mentioned Cal's new teeth? They are on the top, but they aren't the two front teeth-- they are the FANGS! hahaha! His two bottom teeth will fit perfectly in between his new fangs- hilarious. I will try to get a picture of them if he'll ever let me.

Lemme paint a lil' picture...

I am still at the beach and will do a FULL blog post with pictures when I get home, but I had to share this little story...

On Tuesday, I was playing outside with Cal and I got an email from Tamara Lackey, the photographer who shot our wedding and Cal's one month pictures. She is in the process of shooting her second DVD. The first one was geared towards professional photographers teaching them everything from how to improve your client experiences to setting up a studio, etc. Her second DVD is geared towards everyday people who love to take pictures....uhhhh, me! Oh, and the crew on this DVD was the crew from Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Pretty neat to have them in my house!

So anyway....she emailed to see if Cal and I would be available to shoot the portion of it where she talks to a mom about her camera and gives her pointers on how to capture a busy baby doing busy things. That's my life!

So, while I am at the beach, and driving 3 1/2 hours with a baby and a dog are not at the top of my list, I felt like I should do it... I knew it would be fun and I love doing anything with Tamara. I also kind of felt like I owed Tamara for all of the wonderful images she has given me....I know it sounds crazy, but that's how I was feeling.

On Tuesday, Cal took a pretty good morning nap, played a while, then ate some lunch. I was going to let him sleep a bit while I packed up the car and then we were going to hit the road. He went down for his afternoon nap and I was running like crazy and stepped on a squeaky board and woke him up after 30 mins of sleeping. He was NOT happy about it! He was crying...okay, screaming, and really upset! (guess he was in the middle of a good dream...?)

So, I changed plans and got everything loaded up and put him in the car, thinking he would fall asleep before we got off of the island and probably sleep the whole way home. Ohhhh, sooooo wrong.

Here is the painting a picture part:

We got going and he screamed. We drove for an hour, and I stopped to get him out and stretch and he screamed. After 2 hours of solid screaming (I could not talk on the phone he was screaming so loudly), I decided to try to feed him. Well, with the dog in the backseat, there wasn't a lot of room for me back there too. I squeezed between Cal in the car seat and Hank, the 88 pound dog to try to feed Cal some green beans. I would have gone into a restaurant, but it was 102 out and I couldn't leave Hank in the car. Cal ate about 3 bites and then stuck his tongue out and started "spraying" his food everywhere. The entire back of the seat, my face, Hank, the carseat, the blanket, EVERYTHING was covered in green beans. But on the plus side, he was not screaming. Until I put the car into drive again and we continued the rest of the way....

Now, just to add to the fun of it all, I am 5'10'' and crawling back and forth from the front of the car to the back of the car is a challenge. I would have used the door in the back, but couldn't get by the carseat or the dog, so I had to try to crawl back up front. MUCH harder than it sounds. I had one leg in the front, one in the back, and my head in the ceiling, Hank trying to lay on my leg in the back, and Cal grabbing a handful of hair. It was QUITE the sight!!! By the time I got home, my nerves were shot.

The shoot went well-- Hank totally stole the show. They decided they wanted to show how to handle the most chaotic of a shoot that there could be--- yup. That's my life! Cal was sleepy and a little in shock of all of the people in my house and Hank was in heaven. He was retrieving sticks 5 feet long and bringing them over and showing off. It was fun and the ride back to the beach was much easier on me and Cal!