Meet Jacob Kolbe!

You guys. Has it really been almost a year? 😳

Well, I have no viable excuse for that. Seriously, none.

Kids are back in school after a very challenging summer vacation, and I've been giving some thought to the blog world again (partly because my Facebook page keeps guilting me). We had a new baby in May, right before summer break began for the kiddos, so I guess the first thing to do is introduce you to our newest addition. Meet Jacob Kolbe.

He took us on quite a crazy ride, beginning with a diagnosis of gestational diabetes about three months before he was even born. I had to do Valentine's Day AND Easter without chocolate y'all. I gave up fasting for Lent. (I kid, but it seriously is harder for me to follow a proper diabetic diet than to just not bother with eating at all during the day). My numbers refused to come into line with metformin, which led us to insulin and spending the last month of my pregnancy spending one day a week at my regular OB practice, and another in St. Louis being seen by the maternal-fetal medicine specialists at St. Mary's. 

It. was. exhausting.

It was the first time I've ever been "done" being pregnant, and I don't think it was the pregnancy so much as the constant medical appointments and the brutally long drive to the city and back every week.

It was also (not coincidentally) the first time I've ever tried a home remedy to try and induce labor. (Relax, I was scheduled for medical induction just a few days later.) Midwives' Brew, you guys. It took me two tries to get more than contractions that eventually went away, but it actually does seem to work. And since I'd been induced with every baby except my first, that's no small thing to me.

Then, he refused to gain weight. By three weeks old, he still hadn't regained his birth weight, despite spending all evening every evening nursing. His pediatrician suggested that we try pumping and bottle feeding, theorizing that he was burning all his calories nursing, leaving none for him to grow on. We struggled hardcore with the pumping journey, but we persevered (thank you, supportive husband and older children), and about six weeks in, I learned Jacob had tongue and lip ties, which likely impacted his ability to transfer milk from the breast when nursing. (And also cleared up the reason why my milk supply was so "barely enough" when we first started pumping; lactation operates on a system of supply and demand, and my baby's oral anatomy wasn't allowing him to "demand" it!) A friend who'd been through tongue ties with her children referred me to Little Flower Family Medicine in O'Fallon (known as a "preferred provider" in the world of tongue tied babies), and I requested a consultation. We were seen less than a week later, and, due to the distance between our home and their office, his ties were revised that same day. I'll write more about our pumping journey in a separate post, perhaps, but Jacob took back to the breast like a fish to water, and I could not be happier about that.

There has been so much this past year that I could, and should, have blogged. We've missed birthdays, and our first wedding anniversary, and some rearranging of the house around income tax time. New shoe storage bench, coat hooks, and vacuum cleaner, yay! Seriously, adulthood is weird. One day, you're cool. The next, you're excited for a new vacuum cleaner. 😕 We went with a Shark Rotator Powered Lift-Away Deluxe, if anyone is curious, and I absolutely love it. And no, they didn't pay me to say that, but hey. . . if they wanted to, I wouldn't complain. 😂 It pops apart and back together in so many configurations, and so easily. It's seriously a breeze to go from vacuuming the carpet to sucking up cobwebs on the ceiling, or dusting crumbs off the bookshelf (just me?) I haven't bought the extra filter package yet, but I will eventually.

Now if I could just convince my kids to keep their crap picked up off the floor. . .