I have thought of a different thing I want to blog about every single day for the last few weeks.  I haven’t had a computer to write one!

Now that I can sit here and write a blog, I don’t really know what to say.

I guess a few updates?

We moved.  Or, we are moving.  We found a renter for our home and moved in with Brock’s parents while we look for a new home.  However, the renter isn’t moving in until July 28th, so it is taking us forever to get OUT of our old place.  Sometimes I wish we’d had a shorter deadline just so we could get it all done at once.  I feel like details are slipping through the cracks, and I’m losing track of what needs to get done.

Besides that, I just love being here.  I love waking up on the lake, and hearing the birds.  I love how much time Ronan spends outside, and how much he loves it.  I love sitting by the dock with Ruby, and all of the light through the windows, and the amazing amount of help having family around really is.  I never knew how nice it could be.

Ronan hasn’t had a nap in 4 days.  It’s frustrating like crazy, but he’s also in a new place, not in his bed, dealing with fun new stuff all day every day.  Hopefully he will return to napping soon, because he’s not ready to go all day without a nap.  We have been melt-down central around here.

His speech therapy is on hold, which is incredibly frustrating.  We had seen so much progress, so fast.  New words every single day.  New sounds, new attempts, new excitement.  It felt like Ronan was getting used to the idea of speech therapy, and what we were trying to do.  Now, two weeks from his last session, I’m worried that it’s going to have to start all over again.  I really, truly hope that wont be the case.

Beyond all of this, Ronan is such an incredibly smart and sweet boy.  We’ve started seeing lots of 2 and 3 word phrases.  He knows what he wants, and how to ask for it.  He loves his trucks and cars, he loves to be tickled and chased, he loves squirting everything on the deck with grandmommy’s squirt bottle.  He asks questions.  He figures things out.  He eats EVERYTHING IN SIGHT.  He loves his baby sister, and hands out hugs and kisses even to people he’s just met.  He refuses to sit on the potty with no exceptions.  He laughs when he farts, and yells “TOOT!” when he hears someone else.  We’ve continued his Gluten free/Dairy free diet and very little television (sometimes going many days without any TV time at all) and it has done him a world of good.  He’s an amazing boy.

Ruby has been Ruby.  Incredibly sweet and cute, smiling all the time – except when she’s crying.  Brock and I tried to go out to anniversary dinner last night, and apparently Ruby screamed the entire time we were gone.  She was exhausted when we got home, and fell asleep almost immediately after I took her.  I hate it for her, and I hate it for whomever we leave her with.  I know she’ll grow out of it, but it doesn’t make it any easier while we’re going through it.

Even though I have been mostly pumping, I still haven’t been able to totally give up nursing.  Sometimes I’ll attempt a few sessions in a day, sometimes we’ll go multiple days without nursing at all.  There never seems to be any change – her behavior always stays the same.  I really feel like there just HAS to be someone out there who has gone through this, who has some sort of idea how to help, so I keep searching.  I keep looking for a way to get her to nurse comfortably.

I took her to a speech therapist to have her suck evaluated, only to find out that she has a very strong suck and no suck co-ordination.  The therapist said that normal babies will stop sucking to swallow and breathe every 5-8 sucks, while Ruby continued sucking like a maniac all the way up to 27 before she took the bottle out of Ruby’s mouth to give her a break.  We have begun paced bottle feeding and seen a pretty impressive improvement on the bottle.  We give her up to 7 sucks to take a break on her own before we remove the bottle from her mouth.  All in all, feeding is a lot more relaxed… but it doesn’t seem to be helping us get back to breast.  I felt the whole time like I was telling the therapist over and over that my goal was to return to breastfeeding, not to have a great bottle-feeder… but I felt like she wasn’t listening to me.

Oh wells.  I miss getting to sit and blog.  I have about a hundred amazing pictures on my camera that I want to share.  I think about things I need to say all the time and never get a chance to say them.  I feel like ‘mommyblogging’ is an oxymoron… if you’re a mommy, you’ll never have time to blog!