2010 Ornaments

We finally went and picked out our 2010 Christmas ornaments. For some reason, this is a very difficult decision. The pressure is on. You have to pick out one that you'll be proud to hang on the tree for the next 50 years! It's a big deal. Tessa got to participate this year, although she didn't really care what she got. I can't wait until future Christmases though, when she has an opinion!

 Tessa's

 Joel's

Andrea's

Tummy Time

Tessa hates tummy time on the floor.
Absolutely loathes it.
Screaming bloody murder within 15 seconds.


But for some reason, if you put her on her stomach on someone else, or on our chests, or in her pack and play which is at an incline, she's perfectly fine. And she's perfectly fine on her back when she's awake. The other night after her 4am feeding, she showed me just how good she can be at tummy time. Granted, I was ready to go back to sleep and I thought for sure she was too, but the second I put her back down in the pack and play, it was playtime for her, and she was showing off all she had learned by practicing tummy time.

This went on for almost 20 minutes. At 4am. Usually after she eats, she goes into a milk coma and crashes, like turkey does to you after Thanksgiving dinner. But not this time. She was happy as a clam, mommy wasn't too excited about playing at 4am, but I have to admit, I was laughing at her pretty hard!

Then, yesterday, she decided she wanted to have tummy time on daddy's knees so she could watch tv. She's such a little weirdo!

Dave Ramsey

Joel and I have been inspired. We're starting the Dave Ramsey program! For those of you unfamiliar with the Dave Ramsey system, go here. The basis of the program goes like this:

Put yourselves on a tight budget. Figure out exactly how little you can live on, and budget for absolutely everything, a set amount, each month. Then, anything left over goes towards your debt. We have a lot of debt. Although we have 0 credit card debt, we've racked up a pretty substantial amount of school debt. Luckily, almost every bit of Joel's was paid for, but I went to private college for 2 years and then went a fifth year at ISU so that added up quickly.

The key to this system is to pay everything in cash. No credit cards, no nothing. Since you've budgeted exactly how much you are allowing yourself per month, you take that amount out in cash. Put it in envelopes, and when the money for that category is gone, you don't spend anymore that month. Anything left over at the end of the month in the envelopes gets added to the pot you pay on your debt. There's a specific order things go in:

Baby Step 1: Save $1,000 that you only use in the case of an emergency.
Baby Step 2: Everything extra goes towards your debt. Pay off the smallest amounts first. Once you've paid off one thing, use that money towards the next. Of course, you've got to keep paying the minimum on your other debts, but you add all the extra to one of them until it's gone, and so on and so forth. This is called the debt snowball. Within a couple months or many months, depending on the amount of debt, you will be debt free.

We're on Baby Step 2 right now. Today in the mail came 2 bills that I was very excited to get. I know, I know, it's ridiculous that I would be excited for a bill to come. But, I was excited to pay off our car and one of our measly student loan payments. Actually, I was ecstatic. I can't wait to write 2 checks and be rid of 2 of our monthly debt payments. Then, next month, we will have an extra 300, plus whatever is left over from our envelopes to put towards the next debt. See how fun that is? Ok, fun is open to interpretation, but c'mon.... we see that in the next 2-3 years, we'll be rid of a ton of debt, instead of spending the next 15-20 years paying off college.


And, because posts with no pictures are boring, here's a shot of the munchkin flashing a smile. That's right, we've got a smiler. And she's such a happy baby that I get to see this all the time!

A few more carseat pictures

Here's a couple more pictures I just found of her chilling in her carseat. Yesterday we had to run some errands so we got her dressed since we'd be seeing people. Usually she hangs out in her jammies most of the day unless we have somewhere to go. I had just gotten some babylegs in the mail that were supposed to be for Christmas for her, but I couldn't resist so I opened a pair early. For those that don't know about babylegs, I suggest you familiarize yourself with these.

They are like leg warmers, but fit newborns up to toddlers, so she'll be rocking them for a while. They are awesome to slip on when a onesie isn't warm enough but also very cute! They look like tights or leggings but they don't actually go up over the diaper, they are just up to the top of the thigh on each leg. They are great for when babies start scooting around and crawling, but for now they are just cute on her and make it easy for diaper changes and hanging out! 

 Sometimes she makes crying faces in her sleep, and I happened to capture this one!

 She fell asleep clutching her rings and I didn't have the heart to rip the ring from her hand.

Graduation Day!

That's right, Tessa's graduating. To a real carseat.
A very expensive, dust collecting thus far, carseat.

We have been doing some homemade tests to see if she's ready. First, we put her in her carseat in the dining room and let her lay in there for about an hour. We wanted to make sure her apnea monitor didn't go off, and luckily it didn't. Then, we put her in the swing for a while to see how she did in that, since they have similar angles. She loves her swing, which is great because now I can maybe get something done. Tessa did great in the swing as well. So, we took her on a short trip to the post office and to the P.D. to see how she did actually riding in the car. No alarms!

The true test came when we went to Des Moines last week, since this would be an hour trip.   We decided I should sit in the back just to see how she'd do, since she had never been in that position for long and we weren't sure how she would react. She did great, although she doesn't sleep in it. She looked out the window and played with her rings.


So, since there were no alarms on the apnea monitor, we have officially graduated to the real carseat We will be returning the stupid carseat bed to the hospital next week. I'm not even going to clean it first. I'm rebellious like that. I want it out of my house and out of our lives! No more this:

 We are now in the big girl seat! If you look closely in this picture, you can see how she really feels about things.

Precious Moments

With Joel working nights, it tends to mean he needs some sleep. This normally occurs during the day, although he may park the car in a deserted area and take a snooze mid-shift, I'm really not sure. Because of this schedule, he doesn't get up until mid afternoon so he misses all of Tessa's cute awake time, which is in the mornings. She's so happy in the morning just talking and laughing and watching T.V.

The other day I walked into the bedroom as Joel was getting ready for work and found this: it was so precious.

 He's getting some daddy snuggles in!

 In semi-related news, we bought her this fun outfit from Old Navy and Joel now calls it her jailbait outfit. She's so gangster.So here's our little pink and white striped jail outfit, right before she puked on it. She's had this outfit on 3 times.

She has puked on it twice.

Not a cute little spit up, I'm talking a full on puke, chunks and all. 

And it always happens right before we're about to leave. And she usually smiles afterwards like she's so freaking proud of what she's just done. Perhaps I should take the hint and retire this outfit? Nah, but next time daddy will be watching her when she's in the outfit so he can clean up the puke mess.

 She also is not a fan of tummy time because she can't see the TV during tummy time. We usually last about 2.2 seconds before she has a full on meltdown, but we're working on it.

 I'm late on these, but here are her 1 month pictures. Every month she'll take a picture with her koala bear and a onesie with the month on it. She was not impressed with month 1, as seen below! I can't believe she is 6 weeks old already!! Time is flying by, and I have to go back to work soon. 

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

We put up our Christmas tree the Saturday after Thanksgiving, which is our yearly tradition. Joel was acting a little scrooge like since he wasn't too keen on the mess I was making, but he got over it. Guilt trips like, "Is this how you want to remember Tessa's first Christmas" and "What kind of memories are we building here" made it pretty easy to convince him. He's a sucker sentimental like that.

We have a tradition that goes like this: Every year we each get to pick out an ornament for the tree for that year. We write the year on the back and hang it on the tree, replacing our new ones with a commercial, store bought holiday ball. When we first got a tree, we just went to Target and bought a bunch of colored glass balls. You know what I'm talking about, the boring, regular Christmas balls. Sorry, every time I say Christmas balls, I laugh a little. Anyways, as we get a new, sentimental ornament each year, we'll toss out the commercial, mass produced Christmas ball (haha). Eventually, we'll get rid of all the boring regular Christmas balls (hee hee) and replace them with these cute, yearly ornaments.

Now that we have Tessa, we will also add her to this tradition. This year of course, we'll pick it for her, but I can't wait until following Christmases when she can pick out her own! With it being her first Christmas, she's already gotten a couple ornaments as gifts that we hung up, but we also wanted to get her one for our family tree. We haven't picked out our ornaments for 2010 yet, but we will soon! I am also slowly building my Christmas stuff stash so I have more things to decorate the house with.

 We also got new stockings this year. Obviously Tessa needed one, and Joel and I needed new ones. We had been using the same ones we had since our first Christmas, back in 2001. These were silly ones from some novelty store. Mine had a Yankees emblem and Joel's had a Cowboys one. We kept these for fun, but we will use the new ones!

What are your Christmas traditions?

Barium Swallow

This past Tuesday we had to take Tessa back to Des Moines for another test. Since she is still having apnea episodes that they didn't expect her to have at all, they want to rule out a few things. This test was at Methodist and it was a barium swallow. They were testing to see if she did in fact have a hiatal hernia. She got to have a sweet hospital gown, which was adorably huge and didn't really serve any purpose because it was too big to actually do anything. See? And she's flashing gang signs while she waits.

They gave her barium sulfate in a bottle, which is a metallic substance that shows up on x-rays. They watch her drink it and see how it goes down, fills the stomach, and then empties the stomach. I've had this test done before, and it is quite unpleasant. Think berry flavored chalk in milkshake form. Yum. And it messes up your bowels so much. Seriously, cramping, gas, and then BAM.... white, and I mean white like marshmallows, diarrhea for a day or two. It's quite uncomfortable. I felt terrible for my baby going through this, but dang, she took it like a champ. She chugged that bottle like she usually chugs milk.

Luckily the radiologist saw nothing abnormal in her anatomy, which ruled out the hernia. We had previously ruled out heart/lung problems with other tests, so this was great news. It looks like the culprit of her apnea episodes is reflux. We even saw the reflux during the barium swallow, it was pretty cool. I mean, cool in a medical way, not cool in a my baby's uncomfortable and has reflux kind of way. You know what I mean.

So now we've ruled out all the anatomical problems. The doctor thinks it is reflux that is the culprit. But, he said when she does reflux and have milk coming back up, her defense is to close both sides, meaning in order to keep the milk from coming up into her mouth, she closes the breathing side too, or something like that. So, she'll stay on the apnea monitor for a while until she grows out of it, which could be several weeks or several months. And, the doctor said we may be able to transition to her regular carseat soon! So, hopefully not much longer in this ridiculous thing!

See? Ridiculous. And it takes up over half the backseat in the car! Hopefully soon we'll be graduating!

Thanksgiving

This year for Thanksgiving we went to Des Moines and split our few hours between both families. Joel had to work the night before Thanksgiving and the night of Thanksgiving, so we were on a limited time schedule. We went to Joel's family's Thanksgiving for lunch and Tessa got to meet most of his side of the family. She is blessed to have a set of great-great-grandparents, which to me is just crazy. Joel's great grandparents are 88 and 86, and have been married for like, 60-some odd years. My grandma is 82. He is an entire generation ahead of me. Anyways, he has a lot of family and they all like babies. I seriously didn't see my daughter all of Thanksgiving day unless she was nursing, because, well, I'm the only person that can feed her. We took a 5 generations picture and then ate some delicious thanksgiving food.

 Great-Great Grandpa Roy (named Poppa), Great Grandma Judy (GG Judy) Grandma Laura, Great-Great Grandma Alyce (Nanny) and proud Daddy Joel

 All the great grandparents, grandparents, Joel, and Tessa. Apparently I wasn't needed in this photo because we realized later that I wasn't in it, even though everyone else was. Hmmm.

Tessa's great-great grandparents

 Then, we went to my family's Thanksgiving hosted by my aunt. Although we missed the dinner, we made it for dessert and drinks, which was just as delicious! We made our Christmas lists, which is an annual tradition in my family. By the time you leave Thanksgiving, you must look through all the ads and create a list of Christmas ideas for Grandma and for whoever has drawn your name. So, we did that, and made one for Tessa too. Then, we had to head back home quickly so Joel could get ready for work. Boo for work.