Darcy 1 Month + Other Happenings

Darcy baby turned one month old. I got these onesies with the month printed on them to take her monthly photos with. The first one was sized 0 to 3 months. It looks like it's drowning her. She was so tiny!

She wasn't really smiling yet. But that didn't mean we didn't love taking photos of our sweet baby.

Aunt Norma gave us these amazing custom swaddle blankets which made the perfect back drop for her pictures. I'm sure they'll be making a lot of appearances.

Let's see, Darcy at 1 month still very much felt like a newborn. She was still sleepy, and learning how to nurse without the shield. It took until she was almost 2 months old until breastfeeding was smooth and pain-free.

All the breastfeeding issues really dominated my stress at that time. Fortunately her sleep habits were not causing too much stress at the time.

This was because we let her sleep in the swing. For some reason that cradle position enabled her to sleep so much better than laying flat.

The swing wasn't even on most of the time. It was just the inclined more cuddled position that was just magic for her.

Unfortunately, we didn't have a great place to put the swing upstairs where we all sleep. Our bedroom is quite large but with the way the furniture is situated, there wasn't a good place to put the swing where the air conditioner didn't blow full force down on her.

So for a while, we kept the swing downstairs in the front room, which is where she slept.

We were uncomfortable with her sleeping downstairs by herself, so John slept on the couch in the front room with her. He's such a great husband and father.

After just a few weeks of since birth, Darcy got into a little bit of a rhythm of going to bed midnightish, waking up at 4:00 or 5ish, nursing, then going back to sleep until 8:00 or 9ish. So I only had to feed her once in the middle of the night.

She is a very slow eater though and I pumped a little bit to help maintain my milk supply. So that feeding took no less than 2 hours.

She was worth it though! I love those arms stretching so high!

John got his one month of parental leave off. Then he went back to work for a week. Then he had a week of furlough. He has never had so much time off before. It was painful to not take it advantage of it and go on an awesome vacation. But there was no way we could go with a brand new baby especially with coronavirus.

Unfortunately we even had to miss the Deru family trip this year. My mom rented a home over the 4th of July close by Yellowstone National Park. I heard they all had a great time, but there's no way on Earth we could have attended.

This post has about a million photos of Darcy, but I just couldn't narrow it down any further. Clearly we love photos of our new baby.

These sleeping ones in her new swaddle blanket just melt my heart.

Sleepy smile!

We had to take some fun photos when we first got the blankets. We also put Darcy in her coming home outfit. Also, I'm still a fan of the stretches.

Okay, back to sleeping. This girl has kind of played musical bed locations in her short life.

She started out in our room as a newborn. But we quickly learned that she got cold with the air conditioning blowing on where her cradle was under the window.

Next we started moving the cradle into the bathroom. We thought she would sleep a little better in there and we would sleep a little better further away from her.

We also tried our inclined in the cradle at the end of the bed. None of these situations lasted very long, because she didn't sleep very long at a time in them.

we finally figured out that she slept much better in the swing. Like I said it didn't even have to be moving. Just that reclined more cradled position made such a difference. Although truth be told, we did have to turn on the swing occasionally.

Eventually though we got tired of having John sleep downstairs, and Darcy wasn't napping as well with everyone in the same room with her. This prompted us to move the swing into Holland's room.

But then we started getting stressed about how she's not actually sleeping in a bed. We were really concerned that she was going to have a really hard time transitioning to a flat surface. Because everything that we tried was failing miserably.

But I wasn't willing to tackle that issue until we had breastfeeding nailed down. Which, thank goodness, eventually happened.

Our idea was that once we had breastfeeding figured out, we could introduce a binky and that could help her transition to a flat surface. This is much easier said than done. I think she sucked on a binky maybe a total of five times despite how often I tried to offer it to her or how many how-to videos I watched to learn how to convince her to take it.

Nope, not a binky girl.

But in the meantime she was sharing Holland's room which was okay but not great. It turns out Holland needs a place to retreat to and also a place to have a timeout. If Darcy's napping in there she couldn't do that. 

At around 3 months old we ended up sleep training her. I'll talk more about that in a later post, but she was able to transition to a flat surface, which enabled us to change her sleeping location to our closet. 

Darcy was no exception to the 1-month-old, old man look is that all of our babies get. Poor sweet little things loose the hair on top.

Doesn't she look so much like a newborn? I love how she keeps her likes bundled up close to her. I guess that's how she had to be positioned inside of me.

This is our first family photo of all of our family. What a good one, can you hear my sarcasm?? Although it does seem appropriate in the pandemic situation we are in.

I don't know if I mentioned this elsewhere, so So I will go into a briefly here. But Arizona was in a spike when we had Darcy of Coronavirus cases. Like we were the hottest spot in the entire world for Coronavirus spreading. Fortunately with mass mandates, our situation has gotten better. John's mother sent us these homemade masks, so we had to take a photo wearing them and send it. Darcy's not wearing a mask obviously you can't give a baby a mask, but she did get a homemade bib which she is sporting. Holland's big Bear got a mask as well. 

My kids did their summer list in order to earn summer bucks to buy rewards. I've probably talked about them before, but it's a system that seems to work okay for our family. Hopefully it's encouraging the children to be productive with their time over their summer, learn to be patient and earn rewards, and enjoy the fruits of their labors.

Ellie bought making homemade donuts with her summer bucks. It was kind of a process over the course of two days. But they were amazing!!!

Maybe it's just that I've never deep fried anything before, but it turns out that's delicious. We use the tutorial from the website we always use--Mel's Kitchen Cafe. We made three different types: glaze with sprinkles, chocolate ganache with glazed drizzle, and apple fritter. They all were amazing. And the coolest part was that we found out if you freeze fresh donuts and warm them up in the microwave they still taste fresh! We were eating those donuts two months later. 

Darcy quickly turned into a baby who likes to lick her skinny little legs. 

Heart melted...

When Darcy was 5 weeks old, she smiled for the first time! Needless to say we're all big fans of her smiles! These are the first photos we caught of them. And now we can't stop taking photos of them. She's so precious!

Seeing John hold our babies is the best. They look so tiny in his arms. 

I know, I am including a zillion of these photos, but they are just so sweet. 

And the bonnet...

Okay, another summer bucks treat night. Cinnamon roll ice cream cones. We wrapped cinnamon roll dough around foil cones and baked them. Then we topped them with ice cream of course. It didn't work as well as we hoped, but it was still yummy. 

Looking more alert all the time.

Or not so alert.

We all still adore the lil sis.

Miriam took some photos of me playing with Darcy. 

Can't resist the striped outfit with the bonnet.

One day as part of devotional, we made our own title of liberty. It was fun to have everyone think of things to include.

We used sharpies so a table cloth and art shirts were in order. 

Holland did the rainbow. Miriam wrote life is a test. Eliza wrote families can be together forever and drew the scriptures. John wrote remember the savior Jesus Christ. I wrote we are already kind and grateful and we are children of God who loves us. 

Over the last couple of months, Miriam has started leaving us a nightly note. Sometimes she puts a lot of work into them that makes them really beautiful. Sometimes it's a quick I love you on a torn piece of paper. She is such a sweetheart! Of course we write back and is turned into a fun nightly tradition. She might want to do it just because it delays bedtime a little, but we love it. Eventually Ellie joined in on the fun and even Holly sometimes leaves us a note. All of these notes has started piling up. The notes you see pictured on the bed here are just the ones from Miriam from about mid April I guess to about mid July. She's continued since then but they tend to be a little quicker and more and more often just on a whiteboard, so they get erased when we write her back. This definitely helps with the clutter in our home to have them be on a whiteboard, but it is fun to see the vast amount of notes altogether. She's such a sweetheart. I hope the girls enjoy getting ours too!

A nice woman in our ward made this beautiful quilt for Darcy. I don't even know her very well, and a quilt is such a big project. I had to take some photos with the baby on it.

Notice that the top is different from the bottom.

Holland joining in on the whiteboard fun.

As Darcy gets older she's more of an easy smile.

the magnetic tiles that Kayla gave my girls still see a lot of use. Holland made this one evening and needed a picture taken with it before she could clean it up. She wanted to make sure she could recreate it exactly right. 

Darcy is growing and changing so quickly!

Rocking in the chair with Miriam 

Even though Darcy is an easier smile now, John still gets the best smiles from her. I don't know why he's so amusing, but Darcy clearly thinks so.

Bonnet and striped outfit again. I love it so much!

Sleeping angel.

We don't use the stuck on bows as much, but that hasn't stopped me from buying a lot of headbands. When we do stick a bow to her head, it makes her look so much like baby Miriam.