Hooray! After 4 weeks without it, we have internet access again! Whew! We're all alive and still taking cute pictures of the kid. I'll be out of town this weekend (hangin' with the fam in Colorado!), but I anticipate a barrage of posts coming down the tubes shortly. You'll have to bear with me a bit: We're on DSL instead of cable internet out here, so our upload times are about a quarter of the speed we used to have--it'll take me a while to get all these lovely pictures up.
We're still just kind of settling in here, 3+ weeks post-move. I finally feel unpacked this week. So far things are going pretty well. St. Louis is a really cool city, and our church branch is awesome. It's been CRAZY hot here, though (guess that's what we get for moving in July), and of course the humidity just doesn't help. It's such an oppressive kind of heat. The worst part about having to adapt to leaving the desert, for me, has been how it doesn't really cool down here at night at all. We keep having overnight low temperatures in the high 80s. Makes it a lot harder (or just more expensive) to keep the house cool for the baby. Between his sweat and his messy eating habits, poor Luke is just sticky all the time.
I think moving has been harder on Luke than I thought. He used to be such a great eater & sleeper, but now everything is rough and it seems like he's fussing all the time. Maybe I'm looking back with rose-colored glasses, or maybe I've just had to correct some unrealistic expectations; I think for a long time I kept saying to myself, "We'll get into a better routine after we move." I mean, I went back to work 6 weeks after he was born, and then those 5 or 6 weeks I was gone seemed okay schedule- and temperament-wise (hard for me to say since I wasn't home!), but it's just been so crazy since then--me finishing work, packing & moving all of my school stuff, Scott's graduation, visiting every friend & family member that we could, driving all over half the state to see our last sites, packing the house, moving to my parents' for a week, flying out here, unpacking... It's just been so crazy for so long that I feel like I don't even know what normal is anymore. Luke keeps hitting all these milestones and growing and changing in the blink of an eye, and it's all awesome, but I wish I could pause him or something for a few days just to catch my breath!
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Chef Luke (or just a sign that we need to go up a size
with his onesies) |
I don't think it's helping at this point that I've read (/am reading) so many baby/parenting books. I want so badly to do it all "right," but I'm (VERY slowly) coming to grips with the fact that I don't think even the experts agree on what "right" looks like. The kid eats, he sleeps, he poops, he smiles, he cries...how much and how often and when are all jumbled up right now, but he seems healthy and happy, at least most of the time. Mom less so; the OCD part of my brain has a hard time with his erratic schedule, and the sleep-deprived part of my brain has a hard time with his fussing. I've got to get over this perfectionist bit about keeping house and taking care of Luke. I need to take my own teaching advice: When my subs didn't feel successful or when other teachers would talk about having a rough day, I'd say, "Well, nothing is on fire, and no one killed anyone else--looks like a good day to me." No fires here, and the kiddo is still kicking, so I'll try to call it good and just enjoy the ride.
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Oh, hello there! A camera? Delicious! Here, let me drool
all over it, please! |
