Mother's Day is Awesome

I hope all you mothers had a great Mother's Day, I know my first was great.
It's like having a second birthday!
Gwendalyn got up at 5am to wish me a happy Mother's Day with all her cute little smiles and wiggles. So we drank and cuddled in the bed for a while until we all fell asleep again. Then she surprised me when we woke up again to a big bouquet of flowers.
Then we went up to mom's for brunch and had waffles with all the trimmings. We all got mom some herbs for her kitchen garden.
Then we went down to James' parents where he cooked us all a wonderful Thai dinner of coconut soup and pad tai with shrimp. Gwendalyn surprised me again with a lovely picture frame featuring 8 photos of herself. She is so sweet :)

Hope everyone had a good Mother's Day, and have a great long weekend to whomever it applies :)

Also, Gwendalyn has done lots of other neat things in the past few weeks. She sleeps all alone in her own room in her own crib now. Which seemed rather easy for her to adjust to, but me, not so much. She laughs like crazy at silly faces and tickles, she can grab her soother out of her mouth and put it back in in less then three attempts. She talks like crazy! You cannot shut her up sometimes. And I think she has even tried to sing when we dance around to music. I'll have to post some movies, they are super cute.
She also rolled over from back to front the other day! I was so immpressed! I think it was more of an accedent on her part, and she hasn't done it sinse, but I was very proud of her none the less.

She is growing up so fast :') She weighs 13 lbs and change now, and is very long.

Wow, you guys should be proud of me, two posts in less then a month, go me!
Enjoy the pics :)

My Mother's Day flowers ^_^

Little Cute in the stroller.
She finally fits her little sweater that grandma bought.

My beautiful sleepy cute

starting to roll over

the end result :D (and then she started crying)

Talking very forcefully
Tummy time in the backyard


Hiking with mom and dad

Goodbye Kitty :'(

Welcome to my monthly update!
Seriously, I knew this whole blog thing was a bad idea :/

Well, a lot has happened in over a month since my last post.
For those of you that don't know, my dear little cat Terra has passed away. Well, that's a very nice way to put it anyway. She was actually attacked by a bobcat just outside my mom's house where she lives with her dear brother Cecil.
It's amazing she survived the initial attack at all as I'm sure everyone who lives or has lived on the mountain knows: when cats disappear, we all assume they have been 'eaten'. But my mom and her dog Mali managed to chase off the attacker, so it must have been a very young and inexperienced bobcat. Terra would have lived but had too much neurological damage that it would not have been much of a life at all. So mom and I had to make the terrible decision to put her down.
I haven't had to put many cats down in my years of loosing cats, and I don't know it if made it harder or easier. At least we got to bury her next to our old dog Cecelia. Out of the many many cats we've lost, we have only ever buried three.
I think I have been taking it extra hard because of my mommy hormones though.
But we all miss Little Thing.

Ok, so I started this post weeks ago, so I'll just end it there, as a tribute to my beautiful little cat, and maybe the next post will be alittle more light hearted.

Well, a lot has happened in the last few weeks.
Gwendalyn is now over 9 weeks old. She's growing up so fast!
She is starting to grow out of her 0-3 month size sleepers. When we were in for her two week check up she weighed 4.81 kg (10.6 lb). She is smiling, playing with her hands, tracking and making long eye contact, she even laughed for the first time on Saturday, and (dare I say it) she is SLEEPING THROUGH THE NIGHT!
I am very excited about the latter. She's been doing it for about two weeks now, and it's great. And not just 5 - 6 hours either. She goes for about 7 to 8, and sometime even 9! And she still naps a lot too and drinks like a fish.
Other then that, the laughing is so cute! She has only done it twice so far, but we managed to get the second time on camera. I'll try and post it sometime. So cute!

As for me, now that she is sleeping longer, I feel like I have the energy to have a bit of a life too.
Two weekends ago I had my first post baby photo shoot that my lovely friend Maple arranged. Lesha joined us too, along with some photographer friends in downtown Vancouver, and it was great. I've really missed doing artistic things since the Little has been around, so it was a really great break for me. I can't wait till she can join me too.






Also, Colin came out with us and spent a few days. Unfortunaitly James got really sick and was in bed for four days. So Colin, Geoffe, Gwen and I spent Sunday at my mom's house because they were away in Tofino. We went for a walks, took photos, raided mom's pantry and made fun of Twilight. We were only planning on spending the afternoon there, but it started snowing like crazy without warning, and we got snowed in! It was pretty great.
Yay to having a social life. I'm glad my friends don't mind hanging out with my baby too :P










Also, the week before that, my dear friend Annemarie came out for a wedding from Winterpeg. She and Diedre came up and we got to spend the whole day together! I only get to to see her about once a year, so it was super fun, but all too short. But we tested out the rope swing up on the Mountain, and it's still going strong and tons of fun :D

Diedre and I rescuing the rope swing that had been caught on a high branch.

Little sleeping in the snugly.

Having fun with all the attention.
Nice fohawk Gwendalyn :p

Taking a nap after a busy day.

It's been a pretty good month, but alas, now I am sick too. Thankfully the Little isn't. Yay for breastmilk and its magical properties.

Zzzz...

I remember for the first few days, when Gwendalyn was sleeping for two hours, waking up, eating, going back to sleep again, I thought that 6 hours in total of sleep a day was enough. Then the initial adrenaline wore off and reality set in.
Now I sleep whenever, and wherever, I can get it. Her sleeping patterns are still all over the map, and thus, so are mine.
And she never just wakes up and eats and goes back to sleep again. She is almost always awake for at least an hour and a half, usually closer to three.
Lately, she has been really happy in the mornings (she is starting to smile and it's so freaken cute!!) and then is really cranky in the evenings.
I tend to watch a lot of TV to keep myself awake in the evenings (and in the wee hours of the morning as well). Lately we have taken to watching Star Trek on Space, which is great. I love Star Trek. It starts at 9pm with the Next Generation which is my favourite, and then Voyager, then Enterprise, on to Deep Space Nine, and then it ends the night (or by then, the morning) with Star Trek the original series. When we make it to the end of that one, it has been a very long evening indeed. Though for the last few nights she hasn't made it past Enterprise, so that's good.
So we spend many hours of the late morning sleeping on the couch. She usally sleeps in her bassinette at night, but she seems to sleep so much better on me, so we both feel much more rested.
And James sure likes to take photos of us sleeping :)









She is sleeping again right now, and something is telling me I should be too.

Nature Conquers All...

...even crying babies :)

Gwendalyn has taken to bouts of crying for no apparent reason lately (as babies do) and we have finally come up with a solution that seems to work very well. We just bundle her up all warm and take her outside. It's like taking her through a magic doorway. One minute she's crying like the world is ending, but as soon as I step outside, she is fast asleep. It must be the power of the big cedar trees in our backyard or something, or the fresh mountian air. But whatever it is, it works so far, which makes me very happy.

In other news, we have taken Lisa's baby bath advice and now Gwen comes into the big bath with one of us. She hated baths before, and it was not a very fun experience or any of us. But now it's fun, and she is so cute floating in the tub ^_^

It's a Girl!

Gwendalyn Sequoia Lindsay has finally arrived! She was a week late, but worth all that waiting.
I think that sunny day at the lake made her decide that coming into the world wouldn't be that bad after all.

The labour and delivery went very well as labours go. My contractions started around 6pm on January 15th after going for a walk (and doing a little skipping down the trail for good measure) and eating half a pineapple. I called the Dr. at 7:00 and she said just stay at home, take a shower and relax. Which I did. Then I called again at 12am and she said I was doing very well, and just to stay where I was comfortable until the contractions got worse.
For some reason I expected them to be even worse then they were, but we left the house at 4:30am to beat the traffic and it was sure a good thing we did.
We got to the hospital by 6am and was 7 cm dilated. She was out at 8:40am on January the 16th, weighing in at 8 pounds. I only pushed for about half an hour.
The neat thing was that my water never broke until she crowned and this is considered to be very good luck in many cultures and traditions. I found an interesting read about it on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caul

Everyone was so overjoyed that she was a girl due to the possibility of me having a hemophiliac boy. Everyone but the hematologist that is, who was visibly disappointed :)

I'm just so overjoyed by the whole experience, with any anxiety that I wouldn't make a good mom gone completely out the window. It's amazing the instincts we have. And this is from someone who never changed a diaper or willingly held a baby in her life. I never really thought much of babies at all before, but I could just stare at Gwendalyn for hours on end and not get bored. She is just so beautiful it makes me want to cry.

My beautiful girl ^_^

Hardly an hour old

Daddy and Gwen snoozing in the morning

Sun at Long Last!!!

We saw the sun for the first time in what feels like forever today!
And since baby was still not about to make an appearance we decided to go have a picnic at Cultus Lake. I much prefer going there in winter when no one else is around. It was beautiful!
I've been feeling so cranky lately, and the sun and fresh winter air on my face sure made me feel a whole lot better.

I hope everyone else got a chance to enjoy this beautiful weather too. And it's supposedly going to be around for the rest of the week! If so, it will definitely make waiting for the baby a little more bearable :)

Soaking up the sun

Tummy getting some much needed vitamin D

James skipping rocks on the lake