Night Moves- The Rhea edition

As I am driving home tonight the song Night Moves by Bob Seger was playing on the radio.  Since I have not shame I was singing along out loud.  Rhea decided to get in on the singing with me and proceeds to yell "nice boobs".  I stop singing thinking I heard her wrong but she kept going adding her own lyrics which went something like this "Nice boobs, Nice boobs, boobies boobies boobies.  Mommy's boobs.  Mommy's boobies".  I honestly have no idea where she gets it from (side eye glance to my husband)

Back seat driver

So Pugly

Driving to lunch today I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I stated to Justin  "After I have this baby I think I want to get Botox in my forehead.  I hate all these lines and wrinkles.  Don't you think I would look better without all these wrinkles?" Justin looks long and hard at me and said " I like the way you look.  Your face reminds me of a pug with all your wrinkles"

So yes as soon as I give birth I am getting Botox.

Tickle Tickle

Rhea is very ticklish.  She gets this from Justin because he too is extremely ticklish.  She begs Justin to tickle her and laughs hysterically when he does it.  Sometimes you just have to say the words tickle tickle and she cringes and giggles.  So last night Justin was using his soldering iron in the kitchen (don't even ask) and he was kneeling on the floor.  Unbeknownst to Justin, Rhea snuck up behind him grabbed his foot and screamed "tickle tickle"  Picture if you will someone who is extremely ticklish using a blazing hot soldering iron while getting his feet tickled by a 20 month old.    Needless to say, he will no longer be using this equipment outside of the garage.

Today's Griswald moment brought to you by the Wnukowski Family

Justin & I had a night out on the town last nite.  Justin was in rough shape today so we were looking forward to a quiet night at home with Rhea and Duke.  At 7PM I picked Rhea up to give her a hug only to become covered in poop.  She has a massive blowout.  An hour goes by and she goes to bed.  She refuses a bottle but goes down without a fuss.  This should have been my first warning sign that something is not right.  At 9:30 I am laying in bed and no sooner do the words "I am going to sleep.  This was such a relaxing night"does all hell break loose.  Rhea starts crying.  Justin goes in to find that she had puked all over her crib.  I strip the bed and he brings her to the living room.  She proceeds to puke some more which caused my hungover husband to puke.  I tell him to leave the room and I left Rhea finish puking.  Justin comes and takes her and I begin cleaning only to find Duke eating the puke which made me pretty much puke.  Needless to say it is going to be a long night in Grafton!

Breakfast of Champions

When I got home tonight I noticed the baby yogurt I bought yesterday had not been open.  Strange because Justin had to feed Rhea this morning and she eats yogurt and Cheerios every morning.  So I asked him what he gave her for breakfast.  His response?  "Goldfish because it's what she really wanted.  But don't worry I gave her some applesauce too"  Sometimes I just have no words.

Belated Grandparents Day

Grandparents are a funny breed of people.  One day they are just Mom and Dad and the next they are these crazy people obsessed with one thing and one thing only.  Your Baby.  My Dad took Rhea on Sunday to spend the day with him.  He also brought her to Toys R Us and let her go on a mini shopping spree letting her get "whatever she wanted"  When I tried to argue with him that I had sent toys for her to play with he insisted she needed new ones.  I mean she is 10 months old.  She would has the attention span of a fly.  She ended up playing in a cooler with her cousin Noah all afternoon.  Go figure.  The thing about my parents being grandparents now is that it makes me miss my grandparents.  I had amazing grandparents.  There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about them in someway.  Grandparents offer unconditional love.  I am not saying your parents don't love you unconditionally but during periods of your life your parents have disliked you.  But not grandparents.  My Papa swore I hung the moon, anything I did was amazing.  And once you see your parents with your children, you can actually visualize the love they have for you.  It is pretty powerful stuff.  Justin's Dad is a great example of the "grandparent effect".  He is utterly nuts about Rhea.  And she in turn in nuts about him. It is heart warming watching him sit on the floor and be goofy with her because he usually is so reserved.  Rhea is lucky in the fact that she not only has two sets of loving grandparents, but two Great Grandmothers who think she is the best thing since sliced bread!  Conversations usually go like this when we are with them "She just smiled, can you believe it, she is AMAZING!" "She just stood up, that little bugger, how does she do that?  AMAZING" I had a re-occurring dream when I was pregnant that I was riding in a car with my Papa.  It was so real.  And I think it was his way of telling me he is watching us and is nuts about her too.  Either that or he was trying to warn me about what my parents were going to turn into and was trying to help me escape!

Sleepless in North Grafton

Let me preface this post by saying I am not complaining about the lack of sleep.  What is the point?  Most of you out there are not sleeping for one reason or another.  It is amazing how you just adjust to running on four or two hours of sleep.  From the beginning Justin and I were blessed with a wonderful newborn who slept through the night almost immediately from birth.  On the nights she didn't make it through the night, she would only wake once and fall back to sleep immediately with the either my boob (when I was breast feeding) or a bottle.  Fast forward 9 months and her sleep has become sporadic and tiresome.   I mean last weekend she slept through the night until 7:30 AM.  Justin and I were so well rested, we felt like a million bucks.  That is until Sunday night and the rest of the week when she was awake at midnight, at 2, and at 4.  We started sleep training at the end of July but she came down with coxsackie, then cut her first tooth, then got coxsackie again, and is now in the process of cutting another tooth.  Sleep training doesn't work when you are sick and cutting teeth because the only thing that makes those things OK are Mommy and Daddy (mostly Mommy).   I probably should have spent last month reading up on sleeping and infants instead of reading the Fifty Shades Trilogy .  At the time I was staying up reading those books so sleep was something I wasn't doing anyway.  Now I want to sleep and I cannot.  I guess I am a glutton for punishment.  If anyone has any suggestions, I will be happy to hear them.  We have tried letting her cry it out, we have let her sleep with us, we have tried feeding her, not feeding her, and teething tablets which work to an extent but nothing is the solution.  And I know there is no one "solution" but I am willing to try anything at this point!

Happy Fathers Day Justin!

This Father's Day is a bit different for me.  Instead of celebrating my wonderful Dad, I am also celebrating Rhea's wonderful Dad.  Justin and I entered "the 'hood" (parenthood) in November and we have been scared as hell since!  We are still trying to figure it all out.  There have been plenty of ups and downs.  And though at times I feel I have struggled with doing things my way (the right way!) and Justin's way, I am learning that his way may not be what I consider "right" but just another way of doing things.  An example of his way of parenting is rigging pillows under her bottles so she can feed herself while he continues on his i-Pad.

Or when he used his nose to hold the bottle because he really needed the extra sleep

Drinking beers while walking her around the neighborhood ( I feel like Nana "what will the neighbors think!!!!)

Yelling out "She looks like the mailman!!!" to a room filled with doctors in the delivery room

  

But all in all he has been wonderful.  Rhea has him wrapped around her little finger and he loves her with all his heart.  His way is the road less traveled as a parent and I wouldn't have it any other way!  I love you Justin.  Thank you for being a wonderful husband and wonderful father.  The past year has been a roller coaster for us both but there is no one else I would want to share this ride with.  I am so lucky you picked me to be your wife and so happy Rhea has you as her father.

Ramblings of Rhea

After months of me coaching Rhea and repeating over and over again "Momma, Momma" she uttered her first rambling words this past week. And it wasn't Momma.

Irony?

So my new addiction is Pintrest.  And on Pintrest I discovered this cool recipe to make lasagna cups using wontons and red sauce.  This worked out perfectly for me as I had left over wonton wrappers I needed to use up and a ton of veggies.  I made them Monday night.  I thought they were a success.  Justin ate them.  He said they were good.  On Tuesday night I prepare to re-heat the left overs and Justin stops me.  He tells me he cannot eat them on the second night because they will make him sick.  This is coming from the man who ate moldy beef jerky last week because he didn't want to waste it.  Apparently my lasagna is as appealing as moldy beef jerky.

Cereal Offender

Justin loves cereal.  I buy lots of it.  Justin opens a box of cereal, eats it, leaves the cover open, cereal goes bad, he will not eat the rest of it.  This is a cycle that keeps repeating itself if my house.  We have talked about it, fought about it, laughed about it.  At the present time he has 2 boxes of Cheerios, 1 box of Corn Pops, 1 box of Total, 1 box of Shredded Wheat, 1 box of Pink Frosted Shredded Wheat, 1 box of Raisan Bran, and one box of Oatmeal Squares open.  I don't eat much cereal but when I do I usually eat Kashi.  So last week Kashi was on sale and I bought myself a box.  Justin tried to open it last week and I argued that he has 8 other boxes open and that he needs to eat them first.  Today he opened the Kashi cereal, took it out of the box and hid the box in the recycling so that I would not find it.  But I did.  We argued about it and I let him know because of my diabetes I need the box label to count carbs.  He agreed to get the box out of the recycling bin and put the label with the hidden cereal.  When I checked to be sure he did it I found a Wheat Thins nutrition label in with the Kashi Cereal.  When I confronted him about it he confessed that he just grabbed any box from the recycling.   Starting today I am not buying him cereal anymore.  Mark my word!!

The Nose has it

The Wnukowski family have very large noses. It is part of who they are. The noses get stuffed up, get in the way of kisses, they can hardly smell anything. And apparently that huge nose can feed a baby. Pictured below is Justin going hands free to feed Rhea and still play his iPad. If she is happy then I am happy!!!

"And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?"...

Well John Lennon, I had a baby.  And it has been the most exciting, scariest, wonderful, terrifying, exhausting, happiest, challenging time in my life.  As most of you know I have Type 1 Diabetes.  What most of you don't know is how challenging being pregnant with Type 1 diabetes was for me.  And I don't mean challenging because of complications or anything like that.  I mean I truly challenged myself over the past two years to get my A1C results down to a near perfect number.  I  restricted my diet and accounted for nearly every morsel of food that I put in my mouth.  I couldn't have done this without the support of my husband Justin.  At times I could have hurt him, like when he asked during my first trimester of severe blood sugar lows "Why are you doing this to yourself?' (side note- blood sugars run extremely low in 1st trimester for T1 diabetics)  Other times I could have hugged him when he would talk me down from the ledge when I was convinced an out of range sugar was killing the baby.  Or when he drove me in the middle of the night to Beth Israel because I was convinced I had a blood clot only to find out it was water retention.  I also could not have had this baby without the support of my parents especially my mother.  She drove me to countless appointments, held my hand at my EMG, and cried out of excitement the first time she saw Rhea on the ultrasound screen.  My parents let me stay with them when Justin was busy with work and could not make it to my appointments.  They cooked me food and took care of Duke when I was restricted from walking.  And now that she is here it has made all the sacrifice worth it.  They say it takes a village to raise a child and I truly understand that now.   I am so thankful for my family and feel truly blessed this holiday season

I am not Nesting but...

All the books say I should be "nesting" at this point in my pregnancy.  I have yet to feel an ounce of this.  I have been Listing though.  I write down lists and lists of things I want to do before the baby arrives but I have yet to start doing anything.  Partially because I am on a more formal bed rest now but mostly because I am lazy.  Also because I have this condition called pregnancy brain that lets me think of thing one minute and the next steals the thought straight out of my head.  If I don't write it down I will not even remember that I wanted to do it.  Like making soup.  I put a pot of soup on last Sunday for lunch.  An hour later Justin asks me if I was trying to burn the house down.  I had left the soup on the stove cooking for an hour and most of the liquid had dried up resulting in a partially burned pan.  I am just going to stick to my bed and my lists and leave the cooking to Justin!

Family Heirlooms - Starfox Edition

Justin informed me last night that he is going to pass down his legendary Starfox Jacket to our daughter.   He claims that the jacket is probably worth like a million dollars and will be very cool, in a retro sort of way,  when she is old enough to wear it.  For all of you that don't know, I am married to a Starfox legend (at least in his mind).  When Justin was younger he beat out a bunch of kids playing the Nintendo game Starfox at his local Toys R Us.  But he didn't place #1.  He placed #2 so he won a jacket with the Starfox logo on it.  He keeps the jacket in a safe place (his bedroom in Douglas) as he does not want anyone tampering with it.  I think in his mind he envisions our  daughter walking down the street one day in the future and someone will say "Where did you get that jacket?  It is so cool"  and she will smile and say  "My Dad is a Starfox Legend"  As lame as it is, it just melts my pregnant heart!

Hoarding-Buried Alive

Justin and I have a finished basement that we have used only twice since we moved into the house 4 years ago.  Both times were for a St Paddy's Day Party.  But with the baby on the way and the piles of items that come with a baby I am hoping to utilize the space down stairs as a playroom/baby storage center.  In order to do this, I need to get rid of the mounds of crap we have accumulated over the years.  Now, I have been know to hold on to things but I am nothing like my husband.  He keeps everything.  And he keeps things he finds or that other people are getting rid of.  We have a weight set in our basement that he took from Dennis when he moved to Arizona.  Neither of us lift weights but he thought it would be useful for when he starts working out. (Like that will ever happen)  I found a broken scale that I have thrown out on more than one occasion in with his stuff.  He claims someone will need it and I should leave it alone.  He has every video game he has ever owned and the original packaging that they came in.  And empty boxes.  Millions of empty boxes.  Empty boxes everywhere.  He claims they are for when he needs to mail something.  I informed him that the post office gives boxes away now for free! I have tried throwing things out but since he is the one who takes our trash to the dumpster nothing gets past him!  And he knows when any of his empty boxes are missing, it is like he has a mental checklist!  I am this close to calling Hoarders!

Baby Names

So everyone keeps asking "Have you picked out any names yet?" To be honest Justin and I have thrown around a few but we haven't been able to agree on any.  And since we don't know what we are having yet, we haven't put serious thought into it.  Except Justin.  He has thought long and hard about it.  Justin's first pick is Kuzay which sounds alot like koozie which is my family's favorite thing to hold a beer.  His argument is everyone will want to hold the baby, just like everyone wants to hold a beer.  I have put a veto on that.  His second choice includes a girl and boy version.  Mac for a boy and Apple for a girl after his favorite computer.  I actually don't mind Mac but the poor kid will have to know he was named after a computer and I am not naming my daughter after a fruit. Justin said to me tonight "What about Cecil?"  I thought about it but I don't really like that.  I asked him why he likes that name.  I swear this was his answer:

 "Because that was the name of my favorite strip club in Vancouver"

I think we are going to leave the baby naming to me!

My Loving Husband

So my husband wanted to go out last night to watch the Bruins Game.  He made plans with his cousin Matt to go to the Celtic Tavern in Westborough.  He told me I should come and I went back and forth about it.  When I finally decided I would go, I started to get ready and that is when my loving husband walked over to me, farted, and then whiffed the fumes with his hands into my face.  What did me and my pregnancy nose do?  We projectile vomited everywhere.  Needless to say he went out alone and I suffered from sour stomach for the rest of the night.  What he doesn't understand is what smells bad to him, smells 10 times worse to me.  I have animal like senses when it comes to smells now.  I am fully planning my revenge though I am not sure what can top this!