So different the second time around

Mothering two, thankfully, has been easier than I thought it would. Still difficult, but not like I anticipated. The first month was rough mostly because nighttimes with Camille made me too tired to have patience for Daytimes with Daniel. But she's a great sleeper now (8 pm-6 am with only one short wakeup around 3 to eat) and I'm not feeling overwhelmed anymore.
Part of it is Daniel has hit a spurt of independence. I LOVE it. He can take himself potty (which reminds me, I need to go clean the bathrooms. Again). He can open his car door and climb into his seat by himself (which is fabulous since I'm usually putting Camille in on the other side- if only he could buckle himself in, too). The other day I gave him some toys and I *gasp* went to the next room over and sorted laundry by myself (well, by myself with baby Camille. She doesn't require much supervision though). It was amazing! That said he still has a ton of energy and is as exhausting to keep up with as ever.

I can't believe how different this baby is than Daniel was.

First, I don't remember ever being in awe of Daniel's looks. Oh, he was certainly adorable, but also a bit doofy. Even from the very beginning, he just made you smile. See exhibit A (from the same age as Camille is now):

Well, that's not entirely fair. He was actually very cute:

Still is pretty cute and doofy:


But this baby girl is just so freakin pretty. I can't get over it. (Mommies are allowed to be braggy and completely biased, right?)


She looks so like Baby Daniel, but like a prettier, female version of him.

Kenny was kind of... well, indifferent to baby Daniel. Oh, he wasn't a bad dad. Very dutiful. He just didn't get very excited. Newborn baby Daniel was mommy's thing, Daddy took care of everything else. Once Daniel got older and more interactive Kenny got more excited about fatherhood and is of course an AWESOME daddy now.
Whereas this time around, Kenny is completely smitten from the start.

It's adorable. Maybe it's because he knows now what good times lie ahead. Maybe it's because she's such a sweet little girl. Maybe they've got some magic connection like me and my dad. Whatever it is, it's so sweet.



Daniel has light, evenly colored blue eyes, just like Daddy. I think they're beautiful.

Camille has dark eyes with a ring of light in the middle, more like Mommy:


Daniel was very easy going and low maintenance. I had an overabundance of milk and nursing was really easy. Camille, on the other hand, takes a bit more upkeep. She tends to be very gassy, and for the first time ever I've had to put some serious effort into keeping up my milk supply (it randomly died this week but I think I've resurrected it). Last week she was outright colicky. I'm not complaining; she's not a harder-than-average baby, I don't think, but she's not as easy as Daniel.

Last time, within a month of giving birth I was back to my pre-pregnancy weight (but definitely squishier all the same). The weight just fell off without any effort on my part. This time, I lost down to about 5 pounds above my pre-pregnancy, then gained 5 pounds BACK. I may have to actually, like, diet or exercise or something.

Some things never change...

June 20th, 2008

 December 27th, 2010


May 2nd, 2008:

December 24th, 2010

Tell me a story

Camille likes to always be sitting up. I think I need to talk to the pedi about reflux. I woudlnt' say she's a hard baby, but she's not a super-easy baby like Daniel was either. Definitely a bit higher-maintenance.

Anyways, I was holding her up this morning, probably something similar to this:

But I needed to use the restroom, so I propped her up on the couch and told Daniel to keep an eye on her. I come back to see this:






(I swear, Daniel DOES wear clothes... just seems he only does interesting picture-worthy things when in his undies. To be fair, he's in his undies right now because he took himself potty all by himself today and couldn't get the pants back on. And yes, he is convinced one cannot potty with a shirt on. The happy news is he has decided to be potty-trained again. We only had about one week where he thought making a mess of himself was a great way to steal attention back from the baby. Glad we're over that. Anyways.)

In other news, Baby Camille LOVES grandma:

Funny Faces

Daniel refuses to give me a straight-up smile anymore. Well, that's not true, I caught ONE on film as a "before" pic for his haircut:

But most of the pics look like this (the "after" pic):


So yesterday at lunch I tried to work a good smile out of him, and these are the results:



(this one is his favorite, he does this ALL THE TIME)






Finally, Kenny tickled him to get this:


Of course, Kenny wasn't that much better:


Camille also loves to make some fun faces. For such a pretty thing, she sure can make some UGLY faces.But her favorite is this cute little pursed lip thing, makes her look so dainty:


Then she undoes it with faces like this:

"Baby 'Mille"

Life is crazy with two kids, so there won't be as many new-baby update posts as there were with Daniel.

(Yes I'm aware I'm breaking pretty much every SIDS guideline there is, but she doesn't actually sleep in the crib yet, she was there for just a couple minutes while I sorted clothes in her room).

Baby Camille is such a little sweetheart. She's gained about a pound and is "fleshing out" a bit. Her legs don't look so much like bent hot dogs anymore, and her round little belly cracks me up.


She still sleeps during most of the day, but is definitely still figuring out this night thing. We're very very tired.




Still, she rarely cries (just lots of grunting, goat and angry duck noises) and we feel very blessed to once again have been given an "easy baby".



More pics up at our december album.

We also got the professional pics back this last week from Zafirro Images (the same lady that did my maternity pictures did a free set of newborn pics too).








And in case that wasn't enough newborn squishy baby for you, I uploaded a video of her being a boring but cute newborn:

Our kind of Christmas

The baby's arrival put off our plans for decorating for Christmas, but we finally did get our tree up:

It's our standard red-and-gold christmas tree (and yes, it's an obviously fake tree), with a few additions. See if you can spot them:


A closer look- we have a few of these:

A couple of these:

And Two or three each of these:




.
All topped with one of these:


Kenny bought a bunch of the little candy tins from hot topic and ornament-ized them. I really like it, I hope to add to our collection each year. Daniel likes to get near the bobomb and pretend it is blowing him up. Very dramatic.
If you want to send any nintendo-themed candy tins our way, we're accepting donations (you can even keep the candy).

A few pics

Just real fast, I wanted to share a few new pics of baby Camille. We're actually going this weekend for her professional newborn shoot (same photographer that did the maternity photos for free is doing a newborn shoot for free) but I wanted a few pics at home, similar to some photos I took of Daniel at this age.
My external flash on my camera died:( so I wasn't trying for anything too fancy, and played with a lot of camera settings so some of them came out funky (plus I no longer have photo editing software), but I just wanted to show off her cuteness:










The whole album is up at smugmug.