Hello Noro Virus, Lonliness, and Samara - the light of my life

Seven Months Earth-Side

Well it's been a long time since I've been able to just sit down and write. There are a few reasons, one of them being that Samara sleeps in our room which is where my computer is located and I can't blog while she sleeps as the computer screen is too bright! Another reason is that my husband is in the depths of school and so he sometimes takes the laptop with him which is our other computer and so when he does is when I seem to remember I have a blog and when I go in to write it's gone!

So here we are, it's February 2017 and I think my last posts were written in October 2016! So I decided to sit down, write my post for having a seven month old baby and then I will work backwards from there. I do have a draft for month 1 and 6 (oh my word!) My baby is sitting in her rocking chair with her toys, pulling the sheep skin over her face and giggling as she poops.

Can I just say, I was blessed with a happy, healthy, alive baby! Each of those things I do not take for granted. It seems that I hear more and more stories of babies fighting terminal illnesses or being found in their cribs not breathing or having colic or just crying a lot! It's so heartbreaking and I send up a prayer for each one I come across.

Well month seven started out tough. She started it by throwing up between 1-3 AM, projectile vomit, the kind that makes an adult cry. She took it like a champ and I held and soothed and encouraged her while my husband ran around doing laundry and cleaning us up. Then we went to the home of my old job and looked after two of the sweetest kidlets (that I miss like mad) for two days while their parents got away together. It was so much fun and I couldn't have done it without the help of my husband. Together it was fun, all of the 3 kidlets were cared for (nobody was left out) and it was a really great experience. This month I have baked, cooked, had visitors, gone to Chilliwack a couple of times, cleaned, laughed, and cried. I have started a YouTube channel and my instagram is alive and well with pictures of food and Samara.

Month seven has found Samara to be sitting even better, lounging and going in between the two to practise her sit ups. She is so strong. She has started to laugh more fully without cutting herself off and she smiles and chats. She has started demanding that I hold her standing up to put her to sleep as she has grown again and is too long for me to snuggle her sitting down unless she's crunched up a bit. She loves to sing with me and lights up when music comes on. She is so good at sitting and playing beside me while I fold laundry or eat breakfast. She always wants a taste of what I'm eating and loudly proclaims "MMMMMMMMMM" so I know she would like some. She is an absolute delight and I am so blessed, happy and privileged to be her mom.

Some things that she's not doing is rolling onto her stomach, she really protests being on her tummy and rolls onto her back almost immediately. While she has proven strong enough to go on all fours, she doesn't practise that as she doesn't want to be on her tummy but would rather sit, jump, stand, or be held. She is also a little slow in the eating department as she's had an upset stomach twice now (we just got over a 9 hour projectile vomiting trial that turned into her still throwing up most of her milk the next day but not projectile) and so I don't feed her a lot. She likes to try new foods but when I offer her the left overs tends to turn her nose up at them.

This month finds Samara at 20 pounds and over 2 feet long. She is super strong and for the most part healthy. In total she has battled one cold and two rounds of the noro virus (what our mom's would have called the flue) in her seven months of life. She is due for her 6 month shots (she's two months behind by my choice) but we won't be getting them until she has a clean bill of health, but hopefully soon so she's not too far behind. She loves our cat Alfi and he loves her back. While she does pull his fur occasionally, she's also learning to pat him nicely and he puts up with the pulling and patting which I'm very grateful for.

This school semester we have found ourselves housebound which is very hard on me. While I am a home body, being trapped at home 7 days a week isn't pleasant for anybody. For the month of January and now February Samara and I have gotten out of the house maybe 5 times. So starting this week we will be getting the car on Wednesday every week and my husband will be busing to work in order to give us girls a little more freedom. The lame part is that none of the baby and mom groups run on Wednesdays! So I'm not sure what we will do but I'm determined to get up to something.
For myself personally I have been struggling with not getting down. I have found that for myself personally becoming a mom isolated me from friends and our families live farther away. I gained a friend who had a beautiful baby boy a few days after Samara was born and I am SO grateful for her but non of my friends have been able to have babies yet. This means that while they are killing it in their fields of work and while we all used to be busy working, I now stay at home without a car and it's been a long winter so to speak. Something else for me is that I have been learning to balance my home, cooking, having a baby, being a person and being married. It has not been easy. And because my husband is a full time student of engineering we don't have much time to give each other which is difficult. Going back to my old job for two days felt like a vacation because he was there with Samara and I and was a huge help to me, it was so wonderful having him with us. I keep telling myself there's only one year left but to be honest he will be hopefully starting a new job and engineering tends to try and suck the life out of their workers. So I'm praying that we will be able to finally be a family when he starts working again, not drifters in the night.
Well that's about all for now! She is napping way longer now but our nights are still full with nursing sessions and something new I try and do each day is go onto our deck with her (rain, snow or shine) and blow bubbles. Alfi comes with us and jumps on them all.

Keep searching for healing and sunshine!
Love your friend,
Laura

You can find me on instagram @elizabeth_oosterom or on You Tube at Laura Elizabeth