Kate has started touching the side of my face as I lean over her as I tuck her into bed at night, just as I always gently stroke her forehead and cheek when I sing to her. When I stand up to leave her room at night she says, “Ni-night mama. Yuv you.” She rubs my back during hugs and rests her cheek on my shoulder. When Ember is crying Kate crouches down next to her, and asks, “Emmer, you okay?” She mimicks all these things, picking up these mannerisms and expressions and enfolding it into who she is, learning compassion and care – learning how to love. I’ve read some things lately that reminded me that not all children get that much.

Ember now frequently reaches her hand outstretched towards my face. If I get close enough to grabs my lip or pats my cheek in that not-quite-under-control-yet way of babies. She laughs with delight when I say “Nom nom nom!” and pretend to eat her fingers. She also gets very excited about random things and loves to jump in her jumper. She also attempts to jump in the exersaucer, but that doesn’t go as well.

::

Both kids have been sick all week and I am pretty frazzled to be honest. Kate doesn’t act sick but she has a stomach bug and there are many diapers of horror. There is much gagging going on in this house. Ember doesn’t have the stomach bug (yet?), but she’s all congested and every time I turn around more snot is running down her face. And because of the congestion getting her to fall asleep is a huge pain in the ass – I have to lay down with her for a good 15-30 minutes and she won’t let go of my boob. This is a big problem during the day when it’s me home with both girls! And after all that work getting her to fall asleep she frequently wakes up after only 30 minutes because she was snorting. She’s also spending all night cosleeping in my bed because I don’t dare move her once she’s finally asleep, and that means I’m getting very little sleep because I can’t get comfortable. (And when I do finally fall asleep one of the two children wakes up crying.) The kids don’t even appear to have the same virus so on top of everything I’m paranoid that someone’s going to get the other thing. I had a minor form of both but am over it now.

Ember is also starting to drop down to two naps a day instead of three, which means that instead of one nap at the same time as Kate’s she’s now napping before and after. They pretty much tag-team me, one waking up just as I get the other one to sleep. Bugger. It was ever so convenient to have two sleeping children at the same time.

Somehow Ember is now 6 months old. Seriously, when did that happen? How did half a year already go by?

She is such a sweetheart. She’s still a very calm, mellow baby who will happily sit in the living room playing with blocks and toys. She turns them over in her hand, bangs them together, waves them around… but she doesn’t put them in her mouth. Weird.

At 6 months old she is still entirely breastfed, she has not had any solids yet. In fact she is now completely refusing bottles of pumped milk. I’ve gone out a couple times recently and she has refused to eat anything at all until I come home, even if that’s 5 hours later. Now granted she does sometimes go that long between nursing anyways, but if I was out and she was hungry she used to at least take some from a bottle. Den said he tried yesterday and she gave him the most disgusted look ever and screamed at him. So. That complicates things a little bit! Starting solids at some point soon will at least give her some option when I’m out and hopefully she’ll take some breastmilk from a sippy cup. I don’t mind limiting my time out (obviously, since this hasn’t been much of an issue for us), but it’s nice to know that she has options. I also have a freezer full of milk that I would cry if I had to toss. (And because I know people will bring it up: I’ve tried donating it. I’m on an SSRI, so it doesn’t surprise me that no one wants it.)

Today was her doctors appointment, which I almost missed due to a flat tire. (I was late, but they got me in.) She weighs 16lbs 9oz and is 25.5 inches long. That’s around 65th percentile for weight, 30th for height. Apparently my kids are just shorties! Ember is over 2lbs heavier than Kate was at this age an nearly an inch longer. She is certainly not a petite thing like her sister. But we all knew that just from her leg rolls! Hee hee.

After we put Kate to bed we could hear her singing and talking and thumping around for an unusually long length of time. “Did she poop today?” I asked Den. He told me he had not changed any poopy diapers. Neither had I.

An hour after that, as I was attempting (and failing) to nurse Ember to sleep I heard Kate start crying. Den went in to see what the problem was and sure enough it was a poopy diaper. She needs to work on her timing a little bit. After a change she was wide awake and pointed to the living room with an “Go out dere!” We were still up so we just turned on some cartoons and let her play with her blocks for a while.

She asked for crackers and Den went and got her some. She was carrying a pillow around, then would put it on the ground and sit on it. All over the room she’d do this. I thought it odd, but children are nothing if not odd. It wasn’t until Den went to get her a cup of water that Kate pointed to the floor next to her and said, “Picnic! Mama picnic!” She even went and grabbed me another pillow to sit on. So there we were at 11pm, sitting on cushions and sharing a bowl of crackers in an impromptu picnic. She was very pleased about the whole thing. I’m not even sure where she got this idea of a picnic, it seems a little out of the blue to me but she’s been coming up with a lot of pretend scenarios lately.

Years from now, after I have done many horrible things in the eyes of a child and later a teenager, I hope she looks back and remembers days like these when I had picnics with her in the middle of the night.

I had forgotten how kissable and huggable 6 month olds are. Strangely Ember has gotten more and more cuddly as time goes on, and now she loves being snuggled up on my shoulder as I kiss her cheek and rub her back. So I do it often, despite the line of snot she always leaves on my shoulder right now. I LOVE cuddles. Which is weird because I am generally not a touchy kind of person. With animals and my own children, however, it’s a very different story!

I think Ember is teething hardcore. I say “I think” because it’s still just an educated guess, teething is one of those things that may or may not be true until you actually see the tooth erupt and then you can be all “Yeah I knew it!” But she is sucking on everything, the drool is out of control, and the nose never stops running. There have also been a couple nights recently where she was tired and fussy but then started kicking and screaming at me when I layed down with her. To say that is not her usual is an understatement. I think it may actually be completely unprecedented. She never cries at night! She was a very unhappy girl and I could just tell it was more than tired with a sniffly nose, it was something hurting her. :( The next day I tried tylenol before bed and she puked all over me. Super. The day after that I tried ibuprofen. Success! I gave it to her about half an hour before I tried putting her down and she went out peacefully.

I just really hate teeth. I feel like just as you get into a nice routine with your baby the teething starts and everything goes to hell at night. I was starting to move her into her own bassinet and now I’m lucky just to get her asleep, period. I still try to put her down at the same time as Kate, but it’s hit or miss and she wakes up a half an hour later. It takes me so long to get her fully asleep that I often don’t even bother to try getting her back to sleep, I just get her up and let her sit with me for a while. It used to take me 5 minutes to nurse her and get her asleep so I could leave. Now it’s like 30+ minutes. She’s not eating, she’s comfort nursing (which tickles and is not a very pleasant feeling when it continues on for such a long time). But she’s not sinking into a deep enough sleep to let go, she remains right at the edge, whimpering and snorting randomly, and when I try taking my boob away she wakes up hysterical. It is very frustrating! My poor baby doesn’t feel well and I hate that, but eegads I can’t just lay there all day with her! She’s only been taking one nap a day because I only have the time to put her down when Kate is also sleeping, and also by waiting until mid-day she’s really tired and tends to take a 3 hour nap instead of a 30 minute nap. Thank goodness for one good nap.

::

On the topic of sleep I feel myself very torn. Ember is a pretty “normal” kid when it comes to sleep – not high needs like her sister was. I think it would be pretty easy to get her sleeping in a crib (when she is well, at least). I know from the start I just started cosleeping mostly out of habit, it’s what I’m used to with a baby. It would be nice to be able to sleep in my own space again, and it would be nice to encourage her to sleep longer stretches without waking up freaking out for a boob. But…. and here’s the problem: I am loathe to give up this time with her. I’ve been through this before and I know that changing a sleep routine is pretty much an all-or-nothing deal. Right now her sleep association is nursing. Once she has a new association I’m going to have to be consistent – no more nursing to sleep curled up in the bed. Every time I think I should just make the change I think about how this is it, she’s my last one, once she’s in her own bed that’s it for babies sleeping snuggled up with me. And I get sad and end up cuddling her a little bit longer.

Yes I know, older kids can/will start coming in to crash the big bed. Kate doesn’t do that yet – she sleeps until morning and that is that. I’m sure at some point when she’s sick with something and Ember is in her own bed I’ll end up bringing Kate into our bed for an early morning snooze. We actually kind of look forward to it (as long as it’s just mornings!). I fondly remember sneaking into my parents’ bed when my dad would get up for work… I’d snuggle in to his spot, the sheets all warm and soft. Or on weekends I’d wait until my mom got up first and I’d dive into her spot.

But still… it’s not the same as a sweet little baby kneading my shirt with her tiny little hand. As uncomfortable as it can be to be stuck between her and the husband it still seems worth it.

This year was Christmas at my parents’, which means a long day of travel to Canada. It also means no writing because I was very tired – and I don’t like to advertise the fact that no one is home at our house until after the fact!

The travel on the way there went better than expected, overall. The night before we left we told Kate we were going on an airplane to see Nana and Grandad and she liked that idea. Unfortunately her concept of time is pretty non-existent, so the “tomorrow” fell on deaf ears and she was crying at bedtime because she wanted the airplane. Once we were at the airport and in the airplane she was great. About an hour into our first flight she said, “Done airplane. Out? No airplane.” Considering we still had approximately 5 more hours of flying left that wasn’t so good! But she dealt with it. The car seat was installed on the plane for Kate, and that was mostly a good thing… except when she woke up confused from a bad dream and was freaking out until we took her out and held her for a while. We had a movie and some TV shows loaded on the tablet for her to watch, which was good. She also had a good time just playing with her daddy and a stuffed animal. She also slept quite a bit, very thankful for that… it was an early morning and no one likes a tired and cranky Kate. Ember did fine, sleeping and waking and grabbing everything she could reach. In the airports I wore her and she was a happy and very quiet little girl.

It was certainly an adjustment being at my parents’. The first night Kate collapsed in her bed and didn’t rouse until late morning, she was so exhausted from traveling. The next day, however, was a different story. She’s in my old room and there’s a TV in there, a bookshelf, a mattress for Den. She was bouncing on the beds, reading books and stacking VCR tapes all long after we put her to bed. It got a little better as the days went by, but only a little bit. Kate was still waking up at 3am, hyper as hell, crawling all over everything and asking to watch movies – which we let her, because she was waking her sister up. It was mostly Den getting up with her at night, but a couple nights I did all the night wakings for both kids just so he could get a night’s sleep. Both kids functioned on very little sleep for the entire two weeks. Kate was perpetually in that crazy-psycho-hyper-overtired mode that every parent knows and hates. Ember just cat-napped her way through it all, but she doesn’t get phased by lack of sleep like her sister does.

Being home, as always, was just such a wonderful thing to me. I love just being in that house, familiar things everywhere I look. It just is really hard knowing that I can only go back once every two years, that I can’t drop in with my children, can’t just hang out watching movies all the time. I also got to meet my brother’s girlfriend (first girlfriend!) and we got along really well, I could see hanging out with them if they lived close.

The kids had a lot of fun, I think. Kate really loved having Nana’s attention, she got to bake cookies and put together a gingerbread train. She loved Grandpa’s real train downstairs, she kept begging to go down and see it again – and she was very good about not touching it. Nana had picked up a ride-on car for her to use, as well as random other toys and bowls and stickers and things. Mom kept apologising for not having many toys but I think Kate was just as happy with the bowls and spoons as with any other toys, plus she did get some things for Christmas. She did watch some TV, enjoying my old collection of VHS and a couple new DVDs. We discovered that she loves Monsters Inc and Toy Story 3 (in addition to her prior favorite of Toy Story), but had zero interest in Finding Nemo. My brother’s girlfriend brought over her dog one day and Kate totally spazzed out with excitement. She was shrieking with joy and running around and laughing so hard she could barely breathe. It’s a smaller breed, a young dog, and they were pretty evenly matched though the dog was a bit confused as to why suddenly he was being chased around. My brother’s dog, a rottweiler, did interest Kate but he’s so big that she was a little bit shy. She really wanted to play with the cat, but needless to say the cat did not want to play with her!

Ember was just miss happy girl, same as usual, despite the fact that she had a cold when we arrived and a non-stop runny nose. (The congestion cleared the second week…. and then she caught another bug. Now she’s all snotty and snorty again. Sigh.) Everyone just loved her, even my verifiably crazy uncle. She has been practicing a lot of new sounds lately, including very loud shrieks, motorboat noises, growls, and mimicking vowel sounds. Laughter is the most common sound – the kid just loves to laugh and smile. She continues to be a totally easy-going kid, hanging out with me wherever I go and not really needing much besides something to grab with her hands, a clean diaper, milkies, and now and again a nap. She is not a fan of being left alone in a room, there were times when everyone would go to grab food/bathroom/check something and we’d forget she was just sitting in the living room and she’d let out a cry to say “Hey, what about me?!”

It was all around a really good trip, a nice vacation for us to not worry about food and housecleaning and to always have someone around to hand a kid off to (especially at 7am after getting little to no sleep!). It’s just so damn expensive – I now need to pay our credit card and I don’t really want to look at it. Between the flights, the dog kennel for our dogs, the catsitter, the baggage fees and airport meals plus the stuff we bought while there… well. There’s a reason we only make the trip every two years.

That plus the trip back home was not quite as smooth as the trip there. We were all so very tired, having slept for maybe a couple hours before getting up to get to the airport (thank you, Ember, for choosing that particular night to freak out and not sleep at all), I had a headache, we had two stopovers, Kate slept on the short flight so she wasn’t tired enough to sleep on the long 4 hour flight. When I think back I can’t actually think of any one thing that made the trip horrible, I think we were just so worn thin by that point. And then we finally got to our house at 11pm and neither kid would sleep. Thankfully now it’s been two days and we are all catching up.

Pictures to come later.