The Brown Brick Road

Capturing our adventures one photo at a time...

Weekend festivities

After our great Thanksgiving in Montgomery, we had a fun-filled weekend in Birmingham!  Saturday morning we had a visit from my college roommate Kristin and her little boy Lucas.  Kristin and I lived together at Vandy freshman, sophomore and senior years.  All those years ago I never thought that we would end up having baby boys within days of each other!  Lucas was born 9/9/10, just 10 days after Maxwell!  I’m so glad our little guys got to meet and hope they become life long friends like their moms!

Me with Lucas and Kristin with Maxwell.  Can you believe SHE has the red headed baby?!  🙂

A handful!  Thank goodness I don’t have twins!

Kristin and sweet Lucas…

Later that day we had a birthday party to go to!  About 6 months ago, I reconnected on Facebook with one of my good friends from summer camp only to find out she was moving to Birmingham!  Bette and I spent about 7 summers together starting around age 9 and wrote countless letters back and forth.  I can’t believe we have ended up in the same city all these years later and am so thankful to have an old friend around!!  Bette has a super cute little boy, Sam, and threw the most fantastic party for his first birthday.  The theme was “Sam I Am” and everything was all about Green Eggs and Ham!

The birthday boy…

All the cute decorations, including green deviled eggs!

Me and Bette…

Maxwell did great at the party and I’m so happy we were able to help Sam celebrate turning 1!

On Sunday we had a quick visit from two little pig-tailed girls…

Katie, Anna, Jenny and Ronnie stopped by for a minute on their way back to Montgomery.  It was great to see them!

That day I also I put on my favorite Kenny and Dolly Christmas CD (yep, that’s right, as in Rogers and Parton) and got all the Christmas decorations up!  Can’t wait to get our tree next weekend!

Ho Ho Ho!  Let the Christmas season begin!

Vermont Visitors

This past weekend, one of Robert’s good friends from high school, Lesesne, came to visit along with his wife Stephanie and 2 year old son, Elliott.  Lesesne lives in Vermont and rarely gets down to Alabama so it was quite a treat to see them for a few hours.

Good buddies…

Cutey Elliott…

Lesesne and Maxwell getting along like old friends…

and the two Stephanies…

Also, it’s nice to know Lesesne is teaching Elliott the important things in life, like how to “blow it up!”

It was great to see you guys!  Hope you make it back down again soon!

More visitors!

Another successful night of sleep last night.  My new mantra is swaddle, swaddle, swaddle!  Another favorite saying is “sleep begets sleep.”  The better and longer Maxwell sleeps during the day, the better and longer he sleeps at night.  I’ve learned that he can have about one hour of “wakefulness” and then he needs to go back to sleep.  I know these periods of staying awake will get longer and longer the older he gets, but, as of now, an hour is about the max for Max!  🙂  If I can get him to sleep for some good naps during the day, we have much better nights!

On to other topics!  Last week Maxwell got to meet some more of his family on Robert’s side.  Lou Lou’s cousin, Nancy Ellis and her husband Charlie came over from Huntsville for a quick visit along with their daughter Melissa and her two boys, Nate and Yohannes.  We’re so glad they were able to stop by!

Meeting Nancy Ellis…

Hannie just being cute…

and Nate just being cute…with a tight grip on Charlie’s finger!

It was a great day.  Maxwell got lots of attention…

and loved getting to meet his “cousins”!  Nate wasn’t quite so sure about this baby thing…

but Hannie couldn’t get enough of Maxwell!

Robert and Hannie had a good talk about how Santa gets down that chimney…

and cheese balls were enjoyed by (almost) all!

A good day all around!

A visit from the BFF

We had a fantastic weekend because my best friend in the world, Hannah, came to visit from Arkansas!!  This was her first time to meet Maxwell and they instantly got along like best buds.  I expected nothing less.

Since Hannah is mom to super cutie 18 month old Joshua, she was full of tips and helpful advice for us.  It’s always good to get a fresh perspective on how to do things!  She recommended the football hold when Maxwell is acting like his tummy hurts.  Let’s just say he’s a big fan of it and I’ve been doing it constantly for the past 2 days!!

Happy little guy getting carried around on his belly…

We’ve had a few rough nights in a row with Maxwell not sleeping much.  Unfortunately, Hannah got to witness one of Maxwell’s roughest nights yet.  I don’t know if it was being overtired, a hurting tummy due to reflux or what, but our little guy SCREAMED and WAILED for basically 3 hours straight Friday night.  Hannah didn’t know what she was getting into!  We tried everything, including a drive around town with Dad, and finally got him to sleep around 9:30 (partly thanks to a little baby Tylenol!) and he slept on me all night in the chair in his nursery.  Not the most comfortable night of sleep for me but I was more than happy to do it to get him to stay snoozing.

Not wanting a repeat performance of Friday night, we tried a few new things on Saturday and had HUGE success.  We got Maxwell to sleep at 8:00 with only 10 minutes of crying and he only woke up at 1:00 am to eat and then at 6:00 am!  WOOHOO!!  We are definitely going to be doing everything exactly the same tonight to try and replicate the success!  What did we do?  Well, we…

  • Made sure he took really good naps during the day so he wasn’t overtired.
  • Gave him some gripe water (I’m still skeptical on that but, hey, you never know!).
  • Elevated part of his crib to help with the reflux.
  • Most importantly, at Hannah’s suggestion, we swaddled him with his arms in like I did when we first brought him home from the hospital.  I had gotten into the habit of wrapping him up with his arms out because I thought he liked to have them free.  I really think those free-flailing arms were keeping him awake though.  When I swaddled him up super tight in one of the velcro swaddle blankets, he instantly seemed soothed and, when he did stir in the night, would just go right back to sleep.  Hannah swore by swaddling Joshua up super tight and I think she’s right!  We’ll be swaddling with arms in every day from now on!

We even swaddled him up for a nap today and got him to sleep in his swing for the first time ever.  Up until now, he’s taken all of his naps in the sling attached to me.  Here’s my little mummy all swaddled up for a nap.

Funny, right? Robert likes to call it a straight jacket…but I think it might be the only thing keeping him and me out of straight jackets in the psych ward due to exhaustion!

I used this swaddle blanket if you’re curious.

We also got a fun new toy out of the closet while Hannah was here.  Maxwell had a great time exploring his little farmyard fun play mat!

Reaching for the birdie…

and getting a little cross-eyed again!  🙂

Maxwell also rolled over on his play mat today…I think it was more like he fell over but still, he was on his back and then he was on his tummy!  A first!

Hannah – we’re so glad you got to come visit and hope you get to come back soon!   Thanks for all the mom advice and for reminding me that “he won’t go to kindergarten in a sling!”  🙂

We like visitors!

Guess who came to visit this week?  GJ!  Maxwell and I loved having her here.  She got lots of good snuggle time in with the baby because he did not want to be put down for one second!  I think he was in either my arms or my mom’s arms for the past 48 hours.  Spoiled?  Definitely.

GJ was just what the doctor ordered.  She let me sleep for 2 three hour stretches.  Considering most of my recent sleeping has been propped up with the baby like this…

It was really nice to be able to sleep in my bed with no interruptions!  I feel like a new person!