year in review

This year hasn't allotted my usual amount of time to blogging. Or internets in general. 

I'm truly not complaining, because though the first 3 months were the most challenging of my life, I've spent the past 10 months parenting the most amazing little boy. 

We gave him a 4 week early greeting into the world on February 19th. He was colicky, had acid reflux, and has some minor heart abnormalities, but he's still perfect to us. 

A few years ago I remember assigning the theme "change" to a year. That sounds hilarious to me now. 

This year has contained the most amount of change in it than any other year I can ever remember.

• We had a baby (it's so odd to think that just at the beginning of this year, my sweet boy still lived in my tummy)
• We sold our house
• We moved across the country
• We moved again, into a house
• C has a new job
• We travel so much (which is always dreaded, but not as bad as it probably seems)

I adapted more easily than I anticipated to being a stay at home mommy. I went back and forth with the decision, but the honest truth is since I had the opportunity to do it, I just couldn't imagine sending my baby to someone else. Don't get me wrong, I have my days where C comes home and it's my time to leave the house alone for a bit.

We love living in San Francisco. I miss people, and that is a hard aspect of it. But, I'm in love with this mild, perfect weather and I'm not sure how I could ever return to living somewhere with weather like southeast MO. I hate cold. I hate hot. I hate snow. I hate flooding. I seriously felt like there were a handful of weather days that pleased me each year in MO. 

I love living by the ocean and bay. I love public transportation. I love all the stuff there is to do. 

It's exciting here.

C loves his new job. They have play rooms, free drinks/snacks, and they cater nice food for lunch everyday (and breakfast a few days a week). He had stock options in the company, which is the dream, right? Small start up gets bought out or goes public. He likes his co-workers and boss. He also likes working on challenging projects to keep his skills fresh. 

It's been an exciting year, full of change and challenges, but also smothered with joy. The Lord has blessed us more than we could ever deserve. The Lord's generous amount of mercy and grace on us is overwhelming. I hope to follow His will for us with all these new directions our lives have taken. 

With that, I'll review my resolutions from 2013:

• Finish out my pregnancy (I'll admit, this one is a freebie… clearly I'll finish my pregnancy this year)
• I guess the small details of this one would be to stay healthy, keep doing my prenatal workouts, attend the remaining classes offered by the hospital that I want to, do what I can to eliminate the early labor scares, etc

I did it. I even did a workout just 2 days before my water broke. My water broke on the day I was to take one of the classes, so I did miss that ;) . I rested a lot. I drank a ton of water (I puffed up nicely, as a result with water retention). I went to weekly appointments, due to all the early labor scares. I did exactly what the doc said. I did my best. 

• Breastfeeding
• This is so important to me. I'm such an advocate of breastfeeding. I think it's different if you have problems with milk supply or some other medical/physical condition that hinders your ability to do so… but let's face it… it's why we have breasts ladies. I've even spoken to the OB and Pediatrician about supplementing goats milk if something happens and I can't breast feed. Because goats milk is the only other natural, raw milk that comes very close to exactly matching the nutrients and antibodies found in human breast milk. If I'm physically able to breastfeed, then for me personally, there are no excuses not to. I'm well aware of the discomforts this goal can present, but I also know that you have to do things you don't want to sometimes.

Still going! :)  Nursing is so much harder than I could have anticipated (or was in the beginning anyway). I always heard that 'if you do it right, it doesn't hurt.' That's straight up false. I'm guessing even if I hadn't had latch problems due to my anatomy the mere act of a baby nursing takes some getting use to. We were about 12 weeks into when it suddenly occurred to me that we had it down and it was no longer painful. It's so hard to believe we've actually made it this far, and even harder to believe that in just a month it's time to start weaning! 

• Establish routine
• I'm pretty routine oriented anyway. But, as someone who studied Child Development and is a strong personal advocate of the theories, I know how important routines are for infants. Part of deciding to have a baby is also deciding to change my life in order to be a good parent. My baby will always come first. When I say establish routines I mean feeding every 1-3 hours (like you're suppose to with infants), changing diapers every 2-4 hours (or as needed), getting on a nap schedule, developing a pronounced (and steady/consistent) bedtime routine, etc. 

I'm the routine queen. I adopted a strategy and stuck to it. These people who say their babies aren't on routines or don't need them, that's another straight up false thing. Just because your baby makes it through the day 'just fine' doesn't mean they don't need and crave routine. That's one thing that most baby theorists will agree upon.

• Lose the baby weight and reach goal weight
• At this point, this one might be a lost cause. Lol. But, I'm not losing hope just yet! I'm so determined to raise my child in a way that health/fitness/exercise is all that he knows. We always were pretty active as children, but admittedly my parents didn't stress health and fitness very well in our childhood. I'm a role model to my son. He will learn from me and he'll mimic me. It's important to live my life the way I'd want him to live his. 

You guys know this didn't happen, right? Good news, bad  news. About a month ago I finally broke down and went to the doc for some odd symptoms I'd been having. Along with getting a questionable mole removed. He ran every test in the book: basic blood workout, nutrients/vitamins, hormones, a couple of auto-immune diseases, arthritis, and the mole biopsy. I'm perfect on paper ;)  I was smack in the middle of the ranges on nearly every single thing. I have excellent cholesterol, good protein levels, all vitamin levels were good except one. All the basic blood work was good. My biopsy came back benign. But, I was low in vitamin D and I have a hormone imbalance due to breast feeding. 

It's a rare imbalance too. When breastfeeding your body burns more calories, which is why a lot of women are able to lose the baby weight so efficiently. My body is burning calories at a faster rate, but because of whatever hormone imbalance I'm having it's also hoarding fat to avoid going into starvation mode, because it thinks it's about to. Great. Just great. 

I knew something was off. I lost nearly all the baby weight within a few weeks after giving birth. Then it slowly started packing back on and I hadn't changed a thing. So, I started hitting the workout and basic dieting again and actually gained weight. I was spot on with everything and when my weight kept fluctuating like that, along with weird, intense, flu-like body aches I decided something had to be wrong and went to the doctor. 

He feels it will rebalance itself after I wean Nolan. Which is just a few months away! But, he's going to check me again in April, which should be a few months post-weaning. 

• Learn something new
• I'm probably making this one a yearly event. Learning new skills/things is good. It teaches me discipline. I'd like to push this one outside of my comfort zone this year - try to learn something I'm not already acquainted with in some way. 

I'm so excited about this one! I started learning web design. Cory's always tried to get me into programming, or basic computer languages. I can usually survive a lesson or two, but then I'm too dumb. My brain cannot learn it. So, he found me a course in web design and I started it just for kicks. I got really far into before it got challenging. I can make pretty basic web pages, which I'm openly proud about. I'm like, 'Dude, I made this from scratch.'

But, around November with holidays, house hunting, etc. I got too busy for it. But, I'm going to pick it back up now that things should calm back down. It's an exciting new skill that I hope I can expand on! I'm also in the perfect geographical location for some free lance/contract work if I get decent at it :)

• Finish my book! 
• I have the setup just right now. If I can conjure up the time to write, I know I'll have no problem with this one, this past year I hit a writers block. I wasn't sure how I wanted it to end, but now that I do I'm so ready to finish it!

I refuse to say this will never happen. I know where I'm going with it. I'm this close. But, my project remains unfinished. Someday, when it is finished I'm going to send out rough drafts to my reader junkies for constructive criticism. And then I'll say, 'three years running, but that resolution is done.'