Buying a House! And Mental Health Check In

We are currently under contract with the most awesome house in the world.  I feel like such a fan girl every time I talk about it.  The house is awesome.  I get giddy just thinking about living there, serving dinner in the elegant dining room, decorating the mantels for the holidays, watching Benjamin take his first steps in the totally cool playroom I'm designing for him.

But..............

I'm just so nervous about it all because it's CHANGE and change and me are like woah.

Is it really going to work out?  Is it going to suck all of our finances or mental energy to adjust to living in this place? Is it the best thing for our baby?  To be honest, just trying to define our design aesthetic keeps me up half the night in a state of paralysis.

Isn't that crazy?

Did you think I was normal?

That was your first mistake.

I started this blog when I was first pregnant and I thought I'd write a lot about my mental health issues during pregnancy.  Then, amazingly, I felt really good throughout the whole pregnancy and even during the early months of motherhood. Better than I have ever felt in recent memory. That doesn't mean that it hasn't been a process.  Sometimes I wonder how the hell I will get through the night. Sometimes I just go to bed right after Benjamin does because I am mentally (more so than physically) exhausted. My life is so different than it was a year ago that it's hard not to be completely sidelined by the enormity of it all.

I'm sort of word vomiting right now but I just want to normalize mental health issues.  I know I wouldn't be as strong and confident as I am right now without regular therapy this past year and a half and I'm so thankful for that. And it's totally okay to be totally fucken freaked out every now and then.  Am I right?

So anyway, wish me luck with the house.  It has seven fireplaces.  If all goes well, I will own it by this time next month.

Benjamin - Five Months Old

Benjamin is five months old!  Actually he's just about 5 and a half months old but since his four month post I started a brand new job and entered into a contract with a really old house! So much excitement and so much paranoia about new job Internet monitoring means little time to blog.  But we are doing awesome.

In the beginning of the month I weaned from the breast pump.  I was hoping to exclusively pump for six months until Benjamin could get his flu shot but it just got too hard to handle pumping and everything else all at once.  I'm happy that I made it as long as I did though and that Benjamin got five months of breast milk.  And not having to wake up and try to wrangle an increasingly animated baby whilst pumping breast milk and prepping his bottles every morning is a nice change.  Now I just show up with three empty bottles because formula comes free with our day care tuition.

I found the O and the H blocks.  Or H found them.  They were just underneath some clothes so that shows you how disorganized we are.  I'm looking forward to a fresh new start in the new house.  So much room to organize!

Weight and Other Stats: I don't know.  There's no five month appointment.  Maybe he's 15 pounds?  I think he's HUGE!

Size: Still in Size 2 diapers and clothes are sort of all over the map.  Some three month onesies still fit but he fits best in nine to twelve month pants.  Maybe he'll have long legs like me?

Eating: I don't really know since I don't send breast milk anymore but even when I did day care usually was giving him a fourth bottle right when I was picking him up.  He never eats four times in eight and a half hours when he's with me but he also doesn't really nap for them. I'm over it.  On the weekends he eats his regular 24-28 ounces and seems satisfied.  We started solids two weeks ago, right after five months, but it is going incredibly slowly.  Benjamin is disinterested in purees and bananas made me freak out and rip it out of his mouth.  BLW fail.

Sleeping: Much better!  We went back to the swaddle for a while but now we are firmly with the Magic Sleep Suit and he is doing okay.  He goes down religiously at 6 pm, so only about thirty minutes after we get home and will sleep until around midnight or 1 a.m.  If we're lucky he will go back down until 5 a.m. after that but then can be "pacified" until after 7.  DH and I trade off nights which is the best system ever.  Even if you have a terrible night you know you can sleep a solid twelve hours the next night if need be.

Benjamin loves sitting up.  He can't really do it for any sustained period of time but he looks so proud of himself when I put him on the couch and just let him be...until he falls over.

Just this week he has started developing a touch of separation anxiety which is pretty sad.  I wasn't expecting that for a while but he got so upset playing Hide N Seek with H and kept looking at the door when I was in and out of the bathroom drying my hair.

He loves music and will shake a rattle to a tune if encouraged.  He's been in Music Together for two months now and I think it's paying off.

Life is good.

Benjamin's First Halloween!

I had such high hopes for Halloween this year.  The weekend before Halloween, I planned to dress up in our awesome costumes and take Benjamin out on the town to the amusement and delight of many.  My husband always said it wasn't going to work but I was optimistic.

In the end we stayed home.  Sigh.  The night we were supposed to go out it was so friggen cold and we had to wait for our groceries to be delivered and after all that happened Benjamin was asleep and the idea of taking a cranky baby out into the cold night was just ridiculous.

But I wasn't going to let the holiday pass us by.  On the morning of Halloween I jumped out of bed as soon as Benjamin woke up so I could start dressing him up.  First up, I put him in the dalmatian costume my mom got him.  He thought it was great fun!  He also loved to eat it.

As soon as my very patient husband woke up, I directed him to don his smurf costume so we could take a family picture.  We had been smurfs for Blue Night on our cruise in January so we already had the costumes and I knew it would be a huge hit - at least on Facebook since we never actually got to go out in public with them on.  I'm glad we took the pictures first thing in the morning because there is no way Benjamin would have been a happy camper right before bedtime.

The fun didn't stop there! Day care had told parents that costumes were not allowed but "Halloween themed pajamas" were encouraged.  Being the Mother of the Year that I was, I didn't set out to buy said pajamas until the day before Halloween so we got stuck with a Robin costume. He still looked adorable though, if I do say so myself.

In all the excitement, I actually forgot to feed him so Super Dad swept in and did it while I got changed out of the smurf costume and into my work clothes.  And I wasn't even that late!