6 months, 3 weeks

So many things!

1.  Pulling up
Baby Man can now pull himself up on anything and everything.  He first did this last week (I think on Tuesday), and now it is not surprising to walk out of a room, and to walk back in only 30 seconds later to find that he has crawled over to something and pulled himself up.  We'll be lowering the crib later this week.  I'm not going to lie though, it is one of the cutest things to walk into his room to see him standing in the crib, smiling!

2. Cutting teeth
As of Saturday, Maxwell's lower left font tooth has begun to appear.  The gum is gone completely, so the little tooth is making its way to the surface.  On Sunday, he decided that it would be fun to bite me while nursing... I can tell you that it was definitely not fun.  He hasn't done it since then (knocking on wood), but I'm guessing that I startled him pretty well when I yelled out in surprise!  People don't lie when they say that the baby teeth are sharp.

3. Food
While Max still loves his bottles and nursing, he's starting to seem to enjoy food a bit more, especially if he thinks that he is feeding himself.  We have been offering more pouches in hopes that he'll try more things before trying to shove a rejected spoonful in his mouth.  This past weekend, he enjoyed a strawberry banana pouch, and devoured it over 3 feedings.  He also has been loving his sweet potatoes.  Puffs have officially entered out house, and half the time, the puffs don't make it into his mouth, but he does really seem to like the few he eats!

The first food he ever ate was mashed avocado.  He HATED it.  Gagged, spit it out, turned his head away... we tried it again, still hated it.  Fast forward to this week.  I cut up slices and offered the full slice to him.  It was too slick and kept sticking to the table, so I tried freezing the slices.  The next day, he went to town on his popsicado!  Hopefully he continues to enjoy the avocado, so he can get those good fats (not that he isn't gaining mega rolls already)

4. Discovered his penis
If we were ever uncertain of the sex of our child, all uncertainty is now gone, and this one is all boy.  Luke called me into the bathroom the other day, as he was giving Max a bath.  Lo and behold, I walk in and see that Max is grabbing his penis.  He has joined the brotherhood of men. Al Bundy style, hand-in-the-pants men.

5. Stairs
Max also decided that he wanted to attempt the first couple of stairs in our basement.  I assisted him through the first stair, and then I called it quits.  I'm not ready to have a baby that can climb stairs!

6. IKEA
On Sunday, Max had his first IKEA experience.  The last time Luke and I braved the crazies was before Max was born, so it was funny to realize how much more time we spend in the baby section than we ever have in the past.  We ended up buying some starter track for Max's train collection. Luke had a ton of fun setting up the train, and Max had a ton of fun destroying everything that Papa put together!

6 months, 2 weeks

Happy Tuesday!  We had an extended weekend due to Presidents' Day, so Luke and I were able to enjoy an extra day at home with Maxwell before jumping into a shortened, but crazy busy week.  Why is it that the shortest weeks always feel the longest?  We've got 3 more work days, and then two full weeks before the end of the Trimester.

This past week, I finally got a chance to work on our taxes.  In the past, I used to LOVE putting together and filing our taxes because we always got some money back (I know, I know... free loan to the gov't... should try to get as close to $0 as possible...blah blah blah).  It was always a welcomed chunk of cash that we could put toward something fun.  Then, two years ago, Luke got a promotion and it bumped us into the lowest part of the next tax bracket.  That year, SURPRISE!  We owed a couple grand in taxes.  We made some adjustments for the next year, but apparently we weren't actually savvy enough to figure out the amount we needed to have withheld, because again, we got slammed in April, owing another couple grand.  Thank goodness I have all the money I make for night school deposited into an extra account, so about half of that went to paying off the amount owed each year.  For this tax season, we were excited to add Max as a dependent.  The second I entered his SSN, I watched our total owed roll down, and this year we only owe about $150 (much better than the thousands we thought we might owe!).  Just for shits and giggles, I took out my night school job to see how much we would owe if our income dropped, and I found that if I didn't work my night school job, we would get back just about what I make teaching 1x/week (after we take out what we typically owe).  Which takes me to my big announcement:

I'M QUITTING NIGHT SCHOOL!

I've totaled it up, and after tonight, I have only 14 more sessions to teach, and then I'll be free.  While this year has actually been the most rewarding night school experience I have had in the 5 years of working here, I miss being with my son more than I am enjoying teaching at night.  You have NO idea how badly I want to run around the halls, telling people that I'm not coming back next year, but I figure that I will save that conversation for May.  I really like the students I have had this year, and I will miss them, but I will definitely be much happier spending the evenings with my kid.  I know it's cliche, but he is growing up SO fast, and I don't want to miss a minute.

Speaking of my kid....

Coasters are the best.

Max and baby cousin Adeline chilling in their carseats.

He's been a blast lately (90% of the time).  He's so smiley, and so proud of his ability to get himself wherever he would like to go.  His crawling skills have improved even more, and he crawls up on all fours without dragging his belly on the ground!  He also does a perfect downward dog, and attempts to "walk" like the dogs do in that position.

We have found that he really likes the Happy Baby sweet potato pouches.  He has been wary of the spoon lately (probably from the time we tried to feed him pear with cinnamon, and he HATED it), so it has been helpful to let him play with the pouch, open it, let him put it in his mouth, and then give it a little squeeze so that he eats a bit directly from the pouch.  Once he's remembered that he likes the sweet potatoes, he'll accept it from the spoon (with occasional slurps from the pouch).  He wouldn't be a member of our pack if he didn't have some strange little quirks :)  He also likes the Happy Baby teether wafers.  He had his first one yesterday, and it was fun to see him feeding himself.  He's also tried feeding himself steamed broccoli and seemed to enjoy the fact that he could put the food in his own mouth.  Luke and I get nervous when he tries pieces of real food, but he's getting pretty good at figuring out how to mash things with his gums.

My kid now has chunky thighs!

The other 10% of the time, he's been a bit of a terror.  This happens almost exclusively at night.  The last two nights, he's been so clingy, and refuses to sleep in his crib for longer than 1-2 hours, and then he needs to be touching me.  Two nights ago, he was up nearly every hour, and it was hard to get him to go back to sleep (he hadn't pooped yet, so he was uncomfortable).  Last night, after his hour in the crib, he woke up SCREAMING, and it took us a good 20 minutes to comfort him to the point where he was ready to go back to sleep.  It hurts me to see him so upset :(  I'm glad that these moments aren't too frequent, and that he is a perfect kiddo for my mom during the day.

Hopefully next week's update will include more positive sleep news, but if not, that's okay.  He won't want to sleep in bed with us when he's a teenager, so it will end someday... I hope...

6 months 1 week!

It's tough being 1/2 year old...

But most of the time I'm a happy camper!

Max had a great 6 month appointment last week.  I tried to update the blog this past weekend, but he kept us very busy since Thursday!

The official 6 month report for MaxJack is:

• 16lbs 12 oz (~25th percentile)
• 28 inches long (~95 percentile)
• Perfect head shape
• Minor Eczema (prescribed a cream to help with the spots on his back)
• Possible allergy to something (he's had reoccurring minor redness, with no goop, under his right eye)

As of Thursday, I made it half way to my initial breastfeeding goal of 12 months.  Originally, I was dead set on 12 months, but when I had some issues with my supply dropping a bit last week, I realized that for my own mental health and well-being, I needed to make a mental adjustment to take breastfeeding one month at a time.  Yes, my long-term goal is still 12 months, but after having exclusively breastfed for 6 months already, I know that is a huge accomplishment in itself, so every extra month I make it past this point is a great bonus.  I've read that many women experience a scary supply drop around 6 months, so hopefully that's just what I am experiencing (Maxwell may also be going through a growth spurt- causing him to eat more at night, and making my 5am pumping session less effective).  I'm loading up on oatmeal, drinking lots of water, and keeping up with eating enough calories, so hopefully my supply will adjust itself again.  I'm still meeting all of Max's nutritional needs, so I shouldn't panic, but the crappy thing with pumping is that the change in output is glaringly obvious, and can be very stressful. I have a decent freezer stash now, so when I have an off day, I can pull a few ounces from the freezer to make up for what I didn't produce.

Now that we have hit the 6 month mark, we are being more purposeful with his solids intake.  For awhile, we'll be making sure that he gets at least two sessions of solids, and eventually bump it up so that by 9 months, he's getting a lot of his nutrients from solids (in addition to however often he wants to breastfeed).  Last night, I pushed his final solid feeding to closer to 6:30pm, and with that, we managed to get a much longer stretch of Max sleeping in his crib for the first part of the night!  He slept from 8:30pm-12:30am before needing to eat again, so I'm hoping that we can start to get a bit more food in him before bed, and perhaps he'll sleep even longer!  We'll be attempting some sort of sleep-training come the end of March when I am on Spring Break and can afford to be lacking in sleep for multiple days in a row, but for now, I was just grateful to see him sleep so soundly for that long of a stretch.

As for the solids, he was on a bit of a strike a week ago, and was refusing much of what we offered to him (though, I am attributing that to the fact that his tummy seemed to be a bit upset, which resulted in a huge increase in his #2 output).  After his appointment on Thursday, I decided to try plain oatmeal cereal, not expecting him to swallow any of it, but he really enjoyed it!  I had mixed it with warmed breastmilk, so I'm sure that the flavor was a bit more familiar to him.  Now, I've been adding apple puree to it, and he's been chowing down.  It takes a few spoonfuls to get him into it, but for the most part, he's been a happy camper.  With the introduction of a better routine with solids, we've been offering a sippy cup.  He LOVES our glasses (especially my water bottle), and freaks out whenever he sees us drinking, so we figured that now would be a great time to let him practice drinking on his own.

Baby Man continues to improve on his crawling, and seems to love the fact that he can make decisions on where he wants to go, and decides what he wants to see.  As of Saturday, his newest obsession is the dog dishes.  He can be anywhere in the back room, and as soon as he lays eyes on the shiny silver bowls, he is on a mission!

Tomorrow...

... Maxwell will be 6 months old.

His doctor's appointment is on Thursday, so I will update after I have his newest stats to report!  In the meantime, I'll leave you with this adorable face:

5 months, 4 weeks

Over the last couple of months, my enrollment for night school had been waaaay down, allowing me to more easily update this blog and how things are going with Max.  Last week, I had an influx of new students, and a lot of them are pretty needy, so my posts may be shorter as I work with getting them acclimated to the courses they are taking, and build up their confidence to get through a chunk of work before needing my help.  I'll continue to update while on my 20 minute pumping break!

Max is now 25 weeks old.  Next week, my baby will be 6 months old.  It's been almost a year since we first got to see our little man on the ultrasound screen.  It was a surreal moment.  Yes, we had heard his heartbeat with the doppler by this point, but to actually see him squirming around, looking like a real little person was astounding.  During that visit, we learned that he was healthy and that our chances of him having Down Syndrome or Trisomy 18 were 1 in 10,000 (basically the best odds they can give anyone).  Now our squirmy baby is SO close to crawling, it's still hard for me to really believe that Luke and I made him, and that he grew so much in the 40 weeks he was couped up inside me.

I've been uploading videos off my phone (apparently being a new parent means that you use up all the space on your phone regularly, so you need to upload everything to the cloud frequently!), and thought I'd share a few recent ones of Max:

The last week has been pretty eventful in Max's life.  On Saturday, Luke and I were supposed to have our first baby-free date since October.  Granny was going to babysit, and since we didn't want Grandpa Lorenz to miss out on seeing Max, we brought in him to Byerly's to see Gampa at work.  Max is at the developmental stage right now where he doesn't give away his smiles to strangers as freely as he used to.  Now, he looks at them with a bit of concern while he tries to figure out who they are.  He was a bit wary of Gampa at first, but then warmed up to him right away, so it was nice to see Max hanging out in his lap, looking at him as he talked, playing with the wrapper of his breakfast sandwich... It warms my heart to see Max interact positively with his family.

Then, just as we were about to leave to go drop Maxwell off with Granny, she called to let us know that we needed to get over there ASAP so that we could drive her to Becca's house.  We had been on Lewis Baby Watch for the last few weeks, ever since she was placed on bed rest.  At just over 36 weeks, we were no longer nervous about the arrival of our newest niece.  At 36 weeks, developmentally, she would require little to no medical interventions.  It was go time.  I had a feeling that this was going to happen.  I had been emailing with a friend the day before, and I had mentioned that I thought that there was a good chance that our date would be canceled anyway, and low and behold, it did get canceled!  We picked up Katy to take her to Becca's so we could watch Lily while waiting for their friend to arrive.  By the time we got to the Lewis house, we saw Mike and Becca tearing out of the neighborhood, and we saw their friend's car in the driveway, meaning that Lily was taken care of.  Since Luke's mom didn't have a car, we drove her to the hospital.

Little did we know, that despite being only 5 minutes behind them, by the time we got to the hospital, our newest niece would already be born.  Adeline Marjorie made a fast and exciting entrance into the world- she apparently feels the need to keep up with her big sister already!  We had no intention to have Max meet his little cousin so soon, but since we were already at the hospital, we took advantage of the fact that we didn't have anywhere to be, and hung around until we had a chance to say hi to Becca, and meet Baby Ade for the first time. We are so happy that they got to bring Ade home yesterday, and that they all got to leave the hospital together, rather than spending weeks in the NICU.  Once they are all settled in, and the influx of visitors dies down, we'll take Max to go see Lily and Adeline at home.

On Sunday, Max got to see his friend, Penny again!  The last time we got our babies together was back in September.  Penny is about 3 weeks older than Max, so it was fun to see how much they have both grown since her last visit.  I'll have to add photos from this meeting later, as they are all on Luke's phone.

One of my all-time favorite photos!

First time sitting in a restaurant high chair (At Key's Cafe)

Sitting up in the bath

He absolutely LOVES frozen bananas in his mesh feeder

Hop on Pop?

His chins crack me up!

So happy

Awesome sweatshirt

Sleeping habits have been a bit better lately, though we do end up co-sleeping at some point during the night.  He at least has been spending the first part of the night in either the crib or the pack 'n play.  For foods, MaxJack recently tried pears for the first time, and love them!  We also reintroduced sweet potatoes, and he likes those as well (not as much as banana or pears, but he'll still eat the entire tablespoon- though a decent amount of it winds up on his face or hands).  It's cute- when he eats he likes to shove his little fingers in his mouth at the same time.  He has also learned that slapping his palms against my skin (mainly my chest) makes an awesome thwap sound.  It's cute right now, but I'm sure I'll have to put a stop to it, and stop laughing at it so that he doesn't think that hitting is an acceptable thing. For now, we'll allow it as he explores cause and effect!

Winter walks

Blue-eyed boy

What does one do with their best friend? Chew on their face, of course!

As bittersweet as it is, I enjoy seeing his day to day changes, and catching new quirks before they disappear!

5 months, 2 weeks

I'm officially at the point where I can't remember how many weeks old Max is!  So, for simplicity sake, I'm going to go by #month,#week (in that month). I'm pretty sure we're in week 23 now, but to know for sure would require me to go back, check my last post, and then return to this entry- and we all know that's a bit much :)

The biggest thing to be going on in Maxwell's world is that he is one step away from crawling!  You can't leave that boy anywhere, and expect him to be where you set him down.  He rolls and scoots all over the place, and now, he gets up on all four and rocks himself.  He ends up crawling backwards at this point, but soon he'll be moving forward!  Luke and I have no idea where to start with the whole "baby proofing" thing, so we better get on it soon...

Max is becoming more and more fun each day.  Yesterday, when I got home from work, the second I walked into the house, he was all smiles and gaspy laughs for me, and he clearly recognizes who I am.  He loves playing with the baby in the mirror even more, now that he has realized that he can swat at the mirror and touch hands with that magical handsome baby.  He LOVES that baby in the mirror, and seeing him light up while playing with his reflection is the only time I have any regrets about him not being in daycare.  I worry that he is missing out on that type of socialization.

Another change in our world is the introduction of the Baby Merlin Magic Sleep Suit.  While it doesn't help Max sleep through the night, it has made transferring him into the crib after being nursed to sleep a whole heck of a lot easier.  He doesn't startle himself awake, and force me to start the whole process over again.  It has also helped to use our electric blanket to pre-warm the crib mattress for him, so that makes the transition easier as well.

Yesterday, I made Max's next doctor appointment for the first week of February.  How can it be that we are already at the point of counting down to his six month check?  While I really enjoy that he is growing and learning new things, and becoming much more entertaining to be around, I find myself already getting nostalgic.  Yesterday, as I held him while he was napping, I just started to cry when I realized that these days are truly numbered.  While breastfeeding has been one of the hardest things I've ever done, I'm really going to miss the closeness and the snuggles.  One day, he won't want to be snuggled or carried around all the time.  One day, he's going to be a high schooler who is too cool for mom.  One day, he's going to be a grown man, with a family of his own, and I will no longer need to take care of him anymore.  Oh, man, I'm getting teary thinking about this- need to stop so my students aren't concerned when I come back in from my pumping break...

I love my little man with all the parts of my heart that I never even knew that I had.  

5 months

It's hard- I don't really know what to write tonight.  I'm struggling being back at work, and after my two week break from school, I learned that I would definitely rather be home with Max, experiencing everything he does and being there to take care of him, than deal with my students lately.  I really wish were able to afford for me to stay home for the year, and I find myself extremely jealous of those who took off more time than I did.  Oh, well.  There really isn't anything that I can do about that, but whine for a moment.

Over the last two weeks, Max has celebrated his first Christmas Eve with the Lorenz side of the family, Christmas Day with my family, and he has experienced his first New Year, as we celebrated the end of 2014, and the start to a fresh 2015. We also watched our little chunk turn 5 months old on January 4.  How is my baby nearly 1/2 year old already?

He tried his first solid foods (his doctor said we could try tastes of things if he seemed really interested), and so far he has hated avocado and sweet potato, but he LOVES bananas.  We might try applesauce next, but there really isn't any hurry, because we are going to start feeding him substantial amounts for another couple of months.  Eventually, we'll have him taste avocado and sweet potato again.  Along with trying out solids, he has been enjoying sitting in his high chair and throwing his toys off the tray.  He can sit up unassisted, and will scoot around the room by rolling or sliding his body to the side to get to where he wants to be.  The dogs are still his favorite thing in the whole world.

I don't have easy access to my photos at the moment, but if you are interested in checking out where I dump a good portion of my phone pictures, you can go to the following site:
https://maxwelljacoblorenz.shutterfly.com/
password: max

One other thing that I wanted to make sure to mention tonight is that Luke and I found out that his oldest friend, Aly, is pregnant!  She has had quite the journey and out of all the people in the world, she is the one I've been rooting for and thinking of the most.  They had been trying since 2012, and after numerous doctors appointments, unexplained infertility diagnosis, rounds of clomid and IUI, they are finally going to be blessed with the child they want so badly.  They were told that their only shot at having a child was going to be IVF, so they took a break from all the fertility drugs, and miraculously got pregnant!  We are so excited for them, and they deserve every bit of happiness that this baby will bring into their lives.  Luke and I might have to plan Max's first trip to Texas for next summer to visit Baby G after his/her arrival!

My apologies for this scattered post- you'd think I'd be better at doing these things on the fly, but I am tired, and also ecstatic that I get to stay home from work tomorrow (school was canceled due to extreme windchill)...

Updated: Here are the outtakes from our 5 month photo session!  Getting a squirmy baby to sit or lay still for a photo is definitely getting more difficult :)