Strength

It's amazing how much strength K has. I'll set her on my lap and I just have to hold her body because her neck is stable. She loves sitting up and she loves when I hold her so she can look over my shoulder. If I hold her like that though, I have to be in the mood to have a really wet shoulder. She's quite the drooler.

K's Room

Sometimes when K's grumpy, I will take her into her room. I'll tell her it's a special place and ask her if she remembers why. She always just stares at me which I take as a no. I go on to tell her it's special because it has all of her things in it. It's hers.

And that's what I love about her room. At the end of the day, I go to my room and she goes to hers. She never slept in our room. She's taken a few naps in our room but we never let her sleep with us like many people do. We realized after the first week or so that even if we did, it would do us no good. If something was wrong, we would have slept through it anyway unless she was crying pretty loudly.

Plus after we put her to bed for the night, we stay up and read, play games, and watch the most recent television show we missed in our room so it's nice she has her own room so we don't bother her. The cut down on noise is also supposed to help train her to know that it's night time.

I didn't actually remember that people keep babies in their rooms with them until last week and so I've been really curious to know what it would have been like if K was in our room with us. ... Guess I'll never know.

Parenting

One nice thing about now being a parent is that I get to make the decisions I think are best for her. Mike and I have a lot of ideas on parenting and we agree 99.9% of the time which is so nice. I always worried a few years ago that the person I married would be one who was okay with spanking and yelling at a kid because they did something wrong. We personally believe that both are types of abuse but there's a lot out there who do not and that's okay for them. It's just not okay for us.

One thing Mike's mom always says and reminds us of is that we are the parents and we now get to and have the responsibility to do what is best for our little K. And I agree. Parents should be very responsible for their children. Everyone else is just lucky and gets to enjoy the kids how they are.

Today I had an incident where a person was interacting with K and I asked this person to not do what they were doing. Instead of complying with me, the mother of the little one, this person said, "well, would you rather me..." like what they were currently doing was so much better than what they could have done. After my reply of "no," this person went back to what they were originally doing and did it in my plain sight, like they didn't believe me or that they thought they knew best for MY daughter.

I think one of the toughest parts about being a new parent is everyone telling you what to do, what's best for you and the baby, and what privileges they have because of their relation to the baby. It's overbearing and very stressful, especially for a pushover like me. I've tried to tell people how I really feel these past few years but sometimes it's best not to even argue, you know?

K is my favorite person on this whole earth besides my husband and I have been given, along with my husband, the responsibility to raise her. I've promised Heavenly Father that I will do all that I can to teach her how to survive in these last days and to teach her all I can about the gospel. I've promised to do what I think is best for her. And all of this is so hard when others don't respect that.

spit up and all the goodies

I don't think I've ever had so much wetness on me that wasn't just water. K spits up and drools on me all the time. I've even been peed on a couple of times. And surprisingly, I'm starting not to care. She spits up and drools all over my shirt and finally, and the first thing I do isn't change my shirt. I've realized it's just not possible for me to change my shirt every few hours.

Plus she's just so darn cute. I just can't get over it.

Straightjacket Feeling

I used to love that song by All-American Rejects. In fact, I used to love most of their songs but I haven't been a fan of their music lately.

I think K kind of knows what they're talking about in that song though. The past two nights, she has been wrapped in what my sister-in-laws call "the straightjacket." It works really well in keeping K's little arms wrapped in a blanket all night. I feel sort of bad when I wrap her up and pin her arms to her side but I'm sure she's grateful that she doesn't wake herself up because she smacked her uncontrollable fist into her face.

This morning I woke up to her cooing and talking. I got up to see what she was up to since usually I wake up to her beginning to cry since she had just messed her diaper. But this morning when I walked in, she was just looking at the side of her crib, smiling, and talking away. Way too fun.