Welcome Bo!

Dear Bo,

I hear that you've made your arrival to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and let me congratulate you on finding a nice new family. Let me give you some advice as a new puppy in a new home, since I have some experience with this myself. I hear you love running, playing, and jumping around in your fancy new digs. Be sure not to pee on the hardwoods, the beds, couches, tile, cabinets, and every other surface you can find - I did that and I yelled at... A LOT! You might also want to avoid chewing on hands, toes, couches, pillows, cups, furniture, remote controls, cell phones, cameras, and everything else you can get your teeth on - that might get you spanked, and that ain't fun. Follow these rules and you'll be golden. Let me know how that works out for ya!

Meanwhile, I look forward to following you in the news outlets. Be good, or at least be good at it!

Love, Baci

Happy Earth Day!

Today, in honor of Mother Earth, I'm heading downtown to meet up with a moms group for coffee and a trip to the farmers market. Uhhhh, how suburban housewife/ wannabe hippie am I?? Seriously, who would have ever thought? :) But I dressed Patrick up in his tie dyed onesie, packed up our green grocery bags, and we're headed out to stock up on local, organic fruits and veggies. Dinner tonight is gonna be yummy!!

All is well in the household. Patrick is doing much better after about 6-8 weeks of seriously challenging times. We finally identified his gurgling, rumbling, farting tummy issues as acid reflux and with his baby Zantac, we have a new baby on our hands! We have also started with a more consistent nap and sleep schedule and P is feeling and sleeping a million times better, which makes for a happy FAMILY. He's started interacting more with us, including lots and lots of smiles and it's so fun to watch his little personality blossom. I feel so grateful to be home with him during this really special time and although I'm starting to eyeball going back to work soon, I'm definitely glad to be home with the the little dude.

More updates and photos to come!

Love, Mer

Praise Jesus!!

I'm not sure if it's the result of his first night in his crib and resulting 8 hours of mostly uninterrupted sleep, or the Zantac helping out with the reflux, but look at THIS:


A picture says a thousand words. I'll just leave it at that.

Love, the happiest woman on the planet right now, Mer

:))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

Procrastination Station (Here)

Well, right now I should be doing about a million things, including sending out about 100 thank you notes, bathing my child (I'll do that after the next time he eats!), finally unpacking my shoes from our move in JANUARY, cleaning the kitchen and oh yeah - bathing and cleaning MYSELF!! But instead of that, I thought I'd take a few minutes to write down a few of the thoughts in my head. I have quite a few, so I better get them down on "paper" before they escape me, which is highly likely given that I'm such a scatterbrain these days!

First of all, let me begin by saying that we took lil' Patrick to the doctor yesterday and he is now at 11 lbs, 8 oz. He's doubled his weight now in 2.5 months. Is that normal?? Anyway, the last few weeks have been rather challenging with our little milk monster... We were expecting for him to be fussy and colicky in weeks 6-8, but he'll be 11 weeks old tomorrow and we're still suffering with a rather sad baby. Once his spitting up started getting worse and the toots coming from his diaper started sounding like foghorns (see last post), I knew that something was perhaps not quite right. I finally took him to the doctor yesterday and as he cried his head off, I shed a few tears myself, and told the doctor that we just can't handle it anymore and basically begged her to help us.

We saw our very nurturing nurse practitioner and she said it seems fairly obvious to her that Patrick has acid reflux and has prescribed Zantac to help out with his misery. She said this should also help him sleep better at night and she said she wants to see him sleeping 8 hours at a stretch at night now... WHA?! Since he's been reflux-y, he's only been sleeping about 3 hours at a stretch (he had gotten up to 5, but when the reflux got worse a few days ago...forgettaboudit), so this sounded a *little* unreasonable! But she said with this medication, he has no excuse to sleep so little, so she wants us to drop the feeding in the middle of the night. WHA?!

With that, last night, at 2:30 when P Diddy started crying for his mid-night feeding, I rocked him back to sleep and repeated this just about on the hour until 6:30 a.m. SO that does mean that the kid won't starve and can actually survive without his middle of the night session!! Apparently we now need to teach Patrick to *put himself* back to sleep when he wakes up in the middle of the night, and we'll be in business. I have a feeling there could be more tears attached to this endeavour (again, by both of us), but once we get to the other side of this, I have a feeling we'll be in great shape! So please wish us luck.

Getting back to the first comment I made, please note that if you are one of the lovely people that has thought of us and sent a wedding or baby gift, we are very grateful for all the wonderful goodies, love, and blessings you've shared with us! I promise to send out those formal thank you notes soon and the birth announcements are forthcoming, too! :D

On another note, I'm excited to announce that our little dude has finally made it to his 3M (three month size) section in his closet... He had quite a few newborn outfits and has many 3M outfits, but didn't really have much to wear for that in-between period. I've had him stuffed in his newborn wear for about 3-4 weeks now and the poor kid has had his toes practically popping out the end of his footie pajamas. (OMG, I'm such a delinquent mother...) But thanks to all the lovely aforementioned gifts and a very generous hand-me-down donation from a friend of a friend, he's going to be a well dressed dude for at least a year! I've had so much fun playing dress up with P Diddy the last few days... Here's a shot of him in one of his snazzy new outfits!

So.............. I was totally planning to get on top of the post-baby Operation Fatass, but it hasn't quite started yet. As soon as I'm able to get a consistently good night's sleep for a few days, I'll be ready. But for now, it takes everything I have just to get dressed and feed everyone every day, given how completely exhausted I am. And I mean E X H A U S T E D. Please pray that this Zantac works for our little lovemuffin and that we're able to settle into a rested, consistent routine soon. Then, I'll be ready to get to jiggling and whittle down the waistline once again.

OK, enough procrastination. Time to get back to life in the parking lot!

Love, Mer