4 Already? How on Earth Did That Happen?!

Believe it or not, our little girl turned 4 years old yesterday. Here she is, waiting for us to serenade her with "Happy Birthday":


Opening up her gifts:

Someone's excited to be at Chuck E. Cheese's!

Riding with her pal Chuck:
And here we all are after an afternoon of playing (mostly Rachel & James) and feeding a baby/eating (that would be me & Ben, who wanted to eat constantly for the last 2 hours we were there):

Wow, Rachel, we can't believe you're such a big girl. We love you and thank God for you every day!

I'm Ready for My Closeup, Mr. DeMille

I can't believe it's taken me almost 2 weeks to actually get back to posting pictures, and I just realized I posted *no* closeups of Ben in the last group. That's just sad.

Anyway, here are more pictures from the first few days of Ben's life:

I'm not sure about this whole bath thing.

Okay, I definitely don't care for it at this time. (Not sure why the picture got turned or how to fix it, but hopefully James can.)

Looking like a little angel :)

Big sister waiting for some hand sanitizer.

Rachel is such a sweet big sister! She's really loving and gentle with Ben.

Captured a yawn :)

Just hanging out, being casual in my blanket burrito.

Our new family of four!

I Just Can't Wait to be Queen!

That's how Rachel likes to sing the song from "The Lion King." Obviously she thinks well of herself.

She loves to sing and dance. She's got very good rhythm and is really developing an ear for the tune of a song. I've been asking her if she wanted swim lessons or dance lessons for her birthday next week, and she's answered "dance" every time. So now I'm looking for an inexpensive class of some sort to see how she likes it. Hopefully it will be a good experience for her and something she'll want to keep doing, but if not, that's okay, too.

Rough Night

Ben has had some really good nights where he's given us 4 or 5 or even 6 hours of sleep since he was born. He's had some not-so-good nights where he wants to snack his way through the wee hours, and I end up with a night of interrupted rest. But last night was by far the roughest we've had.

He's had trouble with gas the last 4 nights or so to varying degrees. I didn't get him to sleep until about 12:30 last night, then he was up again crying at 1am. I brought him into bed and nursed him for a few minutes until he went back to sleep. That worked then, but not at 3am when he again awoke and was fussing and crying. I tried nursing him, but he was too upset to latch on. He just kept wiggling around, trying to get comfortable. I got a few burps out of him, but not enough for lasting relief. He and I were basically up from 3am until around 5:40, when I was finally able to soothe him enough to get him back to sleep.

But when 7:30 rolled around, he was again crying to eat, and Rachel came in 20 minutes later, so I figure I got around 3 hours of sleep altogether. So far I'm functioning alright, after a crankiness to the start of the day. I'll admit that the morning was filled with TV-watching for Rachel, but I also interacted with her without biting her head off, so I consider it a success.

She's in her room now, hopefully going to sleep soon for a nap. I'm eating lunch and trying to decide if I should also lay down to rest this afternoon, or use the time to update our Money program and get dinner started so it won't be a problem to finish it later, even if Ben needs to eat at an inopportune time.

Overall, Ben's been a mellow baby and the nights haven't been too bad, so I'm hopeful that this will be the exception rather than the rule, and that there won't be many times like this. But they stink when they happen.