A Happy New Year

I'm not going to lie. 2010 is going to be hard to beat. Although I won't miss being pregnant, which I was for most of 2010. Not that Brennan was a difficult pregnancy or anything...it just gets old after 9 months and really uncomfortable towards the end. As I sit and write this, our little man is 9 days old! Here's a picture of him on his one-week birthday:
Cate is still a proud big sister. She's definitely tried to "test" mommy a few times by doing things she knows she's not supposed to do when I'm feeding or changing Brennan (aka: I can't put him down and she knows it). I've heard this is totally normal though and will end soon. Really though, I can't complain. She's been pretty awesome about the whole thing. I think it helps that friends and family who come to meet Brennan also come bearing gifts for Cate.
Incentives work well for her right now too. And I'm trying to be very intentional about my time with her. For example, the other day I told her that if she could be good while I nursed Brennan and not rip pages out of my Bible (which happened to be sitting on the coffee table and she was threatening to do it), that we would play with Play-Doh when I was finished. She put the Bible down and walked away, still whining, but crisis averted. We played with her new Play-Doh ice cream set that she got from Eric's parents later on that day (a gracious friend called right as she was starting to melt down with the whole page-ripping incident and asked if she could borrow Cate for the afternoon-- I didn't turn her down).
So all in all, it hasn't been a bad first week home. Brennan is a snoozer for sure. He wakes up enough to eat and fill his diaper and is pretty much out. I'd say he's awake for one, maybe 2 hours total each day. He might actually be awake more-- like when he's in his bed at night-- and we're just not awake to notice his eyes are open. At first this concerned me, but his primary job is to grow and if he's eating, wetting, and pooping, he's fine. Just a sleepyhead.

And for the first time in probably over a decade, I fell asleep before midnight last night. Don't worry, I had to feed Brennan around 11:50, so we did see the ball drop and Eric did go into the kitchen and poured us each a small glass of sparkling wine to mark the moment. We spent New Year's Eve decorating some penguin cookies from a kit a friend bought for Cate:
Cate decorated two and Mommy decorated two.
We all ate one and there was one left over for Cate to enjoy today.Today we celebrated the New Year with the purchase of a new washer and dryer. I know you're jealous. Our dryer went ka-put a couple of days ago and we figured we'd just get the washer too. Nothing fancy or front-loading. Just your standard Maytag washer and dryer. And they won't be here until the 12th. So we'll be spending tomorrow doing as much laundry as possible at Eric's parents' house in order to make it through to the 12th.

I also started thinking about resolutions, but since this has been a long enough post, I think I'll save that for another post.

Happy 2011!

~Melody :-)