This year was my first Mother’s Day as a mother of two and it was DOUBLE the fun! We celebrated all weekend long!

It started with Truckeroo on Friday afternoon. I threw both kids in the car and picked Ben up from work at 5. Then we drove over to the Navy Yard to attend the food truck festival. They had lots of delicious food and live music. They hold this festival monthly during the summer and I highly recommend it if you’re in the area!

Then on Saturday we walked in the March for Babies, which raises money to improve the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth, and infant mortality. The weather was beautiful, though a little warmer than we expected, and the walk was very scenic.

Saturday night we had a very little date night. After the kids were in bed, we walked down the hill and had wine and desserts at a newly reopened wine bar. It was delicious but I started feeling sick, so I came home and went straight to bed (side note: I normally do a dream feed at 10:30 before I go to bed, but I skipped it on Saturday night since I was so tired. But Campbell slept until 6:45 — a whopping 11 + hours!! So I have been skipping the dream feedings every night since then, but sadly she has woken up an hour earlier each night, so I think tonight I will be going back to the dream feed.)

On Sunday morning, Ben and Sam went out early to get some breakfast supplies and flowers while I stayed in bed with Campbell. Then I was treated to a lovely homemade breakfast and beautifully colored Happy Mother’s Day card. Later we went to Rustico for a delicious lunch. Sam and Ben had the biggest french toast I have ever seen! That evening, Ben made flour tortillas for tacos, grilled up some Mexican corn, and made me a delicious Tequila Sunrise, which is my favorite drink these days! It was a great day filled with lots of outdoor time, delicious food, and family!

Campbell is turning into the sweetest little baby girl. I have decided that this is one of my favorite baby stages. Campbell is really smiley and interactive, but she is still a little baby and likes to cuddle and snuggle and will fall asleep on your chest — best of both worlds! I think this time around I am able to really enjoy this early stage, because although it presents its own challenges, I know it is so fleeting.

Here are her stats:

• I am not sure of her weight or height, since she doesn’t have another doctor’s visit until 4 months, but everyone remarks on how long she is (just like big bro!) and Ben and I think she is getting really fat! She has the cutest little rolls on her thighs and arms. I love it!

• Campbell really like sitting in her bouncy chair, but she gets overstimulated fairly easily. We usually take her toy bar off once she starts to get fussy, and then she is happy again. She likes her car seat, but doesn’t fall asleep in it very easily, so if it is nap time and she is in her car seat, she will probably be in tears until you get moving!

• Campbell likes her hand, but not as much as Sam did at this age. She likes to look at it, and occasionally will suck on it.

• I tried swaddling her a couple of times so that her hand was out, but she didn’t suck on her hand. So I am back to swaddling her like normal. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, right?

• Sleeping at night has been a little bit hit or miss lately. She goes to sleep after nursing at 7:30, and then she has a dream feed at 10:30, and then she mostly sleeps until 7:30. But for about a week, she started waking up between 4 and 5 again, which sucked. So I worked on making sure she was getting plenty of milk during the day and that helped a lot and she went back to sleeping until 7:30 a.m. most of the time. However every couple of nights she still wakes up between 6 and 7 in the morning. I remember Sam doing something similar so I am sure she will grow out of it.

• Schedule: Right before the 3 month mark I switched Campbell to a new schedule and it is going great! She has her first nap from 9:30-10:30 then gets up and eats and stays awake for another 2 hours. Then she has her mid-day nap from 12:30-2:30. She wakes up and eats and stays awake until 5:30, when she naps for an hour. And then she eats and stays up until 7:30, when she eats again and goes straight to bed.

• Being awake for two hours between naps is sometimes tricky for Campbell, but if she gets too fussy, I can always plop her down with the mobile. She still loves that thing!

• She is really talking these days. Of course, every time I try to video tape it, she completely stops! I will try to get a video to post soon!
• Campbell is full of smiles. All you need to do is make eye contact and her face lights up. I really love when I am busy doing something and I take a second to look over at her in her bouncy seat and she is smiling away with the salt shaker, or whatever other object is in her sight line. So precious!

I  can’t believe Campbell has already been in our family for three months! Can’t wait to see what the next three months hold!

What? You don’t garden in your underwear?

When Sam was two months old, we had Kelly Crawford come take Sam’s baby pictures. They were beautiful. Unfortunately for us, Kelly’s husband is in the foreign service so they moved abroad just a few months later. Fortunately for us, foreign service employees come back to the DC area every two years for training. I was so happy that Kelly could take Campbell’s baby pictures too!

Kelly is such a sweet and generous person that she actually came over last week to show me how to use Photoshop to edit my own pictures. I will be doing a blog post soon with some of the photos I have taken since then. I think they look amazing!

Last month, as Campbell reached the two month mark, Sam turned two and a half (they were both born on the 6th!). I guess Sam has overheard us telling people he is 2 1/2 because even though we didn’t tell him directly, I have now heard him tell two people that he is two and a HALF. I guess he listens to us more than I thought!

Sam is turning into such a little boy. Sometimes I can’t even believe how old he seems now. Hard to imagine that he was just a newborn 2.5 years ago! We love him so much and are really enjoying getting acquainted with his fun personality.

• Weight: We don’t go in for another well visit until 3, but I weighed him while we were at the doctor’s office the other day and he was 31 lbs. I think he has weighed about that much for about a year!!
• Height: Not sure, but he must be getting taller. Everyone keeps remarking on how tall and skinny he is getting so I think he is just growing up and not out right now.

• Food habits: Sam has been getting a little pickier lately and will often say he doesn’t like something before he has even tried it, which is new. However, we have a rule that he has to at least take one bite of something before he decides if he likes it or not, and he almost always says he likes it after he takes a bite. Some days he will eat a ton, and sometimes he just picks at his food. I think that is pretty normally toddler behavior. Sam ‘s favorite food is a smoothie (or as he says it smyuuuzee).
• Manners: Sam always gets complimented on what nice manners he has, which makes this mama so proud. Even though he is shy, he is pretty good about saying thank you to strangers when they give him something (like waiters bringing him his food). Sam is also really good at using “please” and “thank you” at home. Of course, sometimes he will demand something in a rude voice from us, but we always just say, “Is that how you ask?” and he tries again in his little sweet falsetto voice reserved for making polite requests. I have caught him saying excuse me to inanimate objects, like a park bench, and he often mutters, “oh thank you” to himself when he picks something up.

• Social: Sam has gotten sooo shy lately. This isn’t that surprising considering that Ben and I were both super shy children, and somewhat shy adults. So I understand how he feels, but I am also trying to teach him to not be so shy that you come across as rude. We have a rule that if someone says hi, you have to at least wave back to them and he is pretty good with that little compromise. He really doesn’t like going in to big groups of people, like a play date or party, and often starts walking backward or says “mommy hold me!” which can be tricky for me when I am trying to get both he and Campbell into a room! However after the initial shyness wears off, Sam gets pretty outgoing and has fun running around and playing with his friends. Sometimes he even gets too comfortable and starts yelling at or swatting his friends when he wants a toy they have, for example.

• Language: I can’t even imagine that not that long ago, we couldn’t have conversations with Sam. He talks so much and it is really nice to know what is going on inside that head. I love that he can tell us what is bothering him or what happened when we weren’t there (like at school). He makes funny grammar mistakes. For example, his latest phrase is “watch my do!” which means “watch what I am doing.” Of course, we understand what he means but it is funny to figure out how he came up with some of these constructions. He also always says “pick” instead of “pick up,” as in “I want to pick Campbell!” He still has a hard time with /G/ and /K/ sounds (which are basically the same sound) and pronounces them as /T/ or /D/ (so Campbell is pronounced Tampbell).

• Discipline: Sam is generally happy and sweet but when he gets mad lately, he gets sooo mad. His recent new trick is going boneless so that when you pick him up he just noodles out of your grip. We have had to do a lot of timeouts lately, but they do seem to work pretty well. I also have been counting a lot. Like, “Come over here…1…2…3!” which is pretty effective with him (It worked for me as a kid too!).

• Imagination: Sam has really gotten into pretend play lately. It was funny because one day, he decided that the landing of our stairs was the back of the garbage truck, and since then he is imagining things like crazy. He loves to pretend he is riding a tractor when he is out on the back patio, and uses a big rock as a steering wheel. The other day he grabbed a metal strainer and said he was catching butterflies as he put pretend butterflies (small toys) in it. This was especially funny because I wouldn’t have said he even knew about the concept of catching butterflies. In the shower lately, he has been pretending that he is riding in a helicopter and makes the helicopter noise (“copter, copter, copter”). He also pretends he is a bug that crawls all over us or a dinosaur that rooooaaarrrs!

• Music: Sam has gotten really into music lately. He likes to drum on anything, sings made up songs into a “microphone” (usually a spoon or the baby gate, which I think is supposed to be a mic on a stand), and loves to play the ukelele. He also loves listening to music watching music videos. He often makes requests, like “Tighten Up” by the Black Keys or “the one with the funny eyes!” (He’s clearly well on his way to being a hipster.)
• Sleep: Sam normally naps from 1-4 but some days it takes him FOREVER to fall asleep (like 2 hours). Yesterday he took a 1 hour nap which has never done before. I really hope it was a fluke and not a sign of the end of naps! Today he was being very noisy during his nap so I went in and he had pulled out a bunch of toys from a box near the side of his bed. I took the toys away and moved the box and he fell asleep shortly after. I love that it wouldn’t occur to him to get out of bed and go get the toys again. He gets in and out of bed on his own (once I come to get him) and is no longer using a sleep sack (!!!) but he is very obedient and doesn’t get out of bed without permission. Every night, he goes to bed by about 8 and wakes up at about 8:30.

•  Potty Training: Sam is still doing really well with potty training. He never has accidents when he is with us and only has an occasional accident at school. For awhile he stopped going to the potty at all while he was at school (from 9-1). I don’t think he likes the public restroom. But lately he has been using the potty there with great success! However, since Campbell was born, Sam has woken up with wet underwear in the morning about once every 2 weeks. We aren’t sure if this is regression due to Campbell’s arrival, or the fact that since Campbell was born, we have been sleeping with a noise machine and our door closed, so we basically can’t hear him at all. We have started turning the monitor on so we can hear him, and since then he hasn’t had an accident, but he hasn’t called out to us in the middle of the night either. Time will tell, but I am ready for this issue to stop, for sure!

If you saw my FB posts today, you already know the answer. But if not, scroll all the way down to find out.

top: Sam

bottom: Campbell

Sam, Campbell, and I were so excited to see our grandpas on Friday! Grandpa Chuck (my grandpa, Sam and Campbell’s great-grandpa) and Grandpa Pat (my dad, Sam and Campbell’s grandpa) stopped by on their drive up from Atlanta to New Jersey.

Last night before bed, I put Campbell in her crib for some tummy time. I was snappng pics because I was so impressed with how well she was holding up her head, and then all of a sudden she rolled over! I was so surprised! I put her on her tummy again and took a video with my camera on the off chance that she might roll over again…and she did! This is about 2 months earlier than Sam learned to roll over, so I am really hoping this doesn’t signal an early crawler–I am in no hurry to have TWO mobile kids!

Our little sweetie pie is two months old! We had her 2 month check up today and she is doing great. Poor little thing had to have two mean shots and she was SO SAD! She wouldn’t stop crying for the longest time. And even after I finally got her to calm down, she would get upset again and have another little bout of crying. It was a little traumatic for mommy and baby.

Here are Campbell’s stats:

• Height: 24 inches (96th percentile)
• Weight: 11 lbs, 11 ounces (75th percentile)

(Look at those rolls!)

• Sleeping/eating habits: Campbell just started sleeping through the night!!! WAHOO! For the past week, she has been sleeping from 10:30 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. I give her the last feeding of the day at about 8 p.m. and then wake her up at 10:30 for a “dream feed.” She is often really fussy between 8 and 10:30, so I have been experimenting to make that better and the last few nights she has been sleeping better during that stretch (I think she just needed to have her feedings spaced out a little more before the 8 o’clock feeding). Right now daytime feedings are 2.5-3 hours apart. She is awake for about an hour to an hour and a half and naps are 1-1.5 hours long.

• Developing some great head and neck control! I think she’ll be using a Bumbo in no time! We haven’t been great at tummy time, but she gets it in here and there. The problem is she likes to spit up when she does tummy time.

(Sam likes to do tummy time too!)

• Smiling and making funny faces all the time. I love seeing all of her expressive faces!

• She has started doing a lot of cooing which is fun to hear. Sam thinks it’s hilarious! Here is a video of Campbell “talking.”

• Campbell is kind of obsessed with her mobile. If she is at all fussy, you can put her in her crib with the mobile on and she will cheer up immediately. It is a great tool when I am trying to extend her awake time. Fair warning, this video is pretty long and it is a lot of the same, so feel free to not watch the whole thing. I am leaving the extended edition up for the grandmas!

• Campbell spends a lot of time on her play mat. She is usually pretty happy there, but she would definitely rather be held!

• She has started to find her hand! In the last few weeks, Campbell has discovered that if she turns her head to the size, her hand is usually there to suck on. But in the last few days, she actually started purposefully moving her hand towards her mouth. She seems pretty coordinated–maybe she’ll be an athlete?

And here are a few more pics…

We have had a wonderful spring/Easter/Passover weekend over here at the Miller house! The fun started when Auntie Becca (or Auntie Betta, as Sam says) arrived. The weather has been great so we took several trips to the playground.

On Thursday, we went to an Easter egg hunt at Upton Hill Park with our friends Deirdre and Evie and Ellen and Katie (and little Susie too!). It was really funny trying to get the kids to stand still for this photo!

Before the egg hunt began, they had lots of fun activities for the kids like coloring pages, a moon bounce, and the Easter Bunny. But Sam headed straight for this tractor (it was not part of the planned entertainment, just a tractor that they use for park upkeep)!

Then Sam told Auntie Betta that he wanted to sit with the Easter Bunny. I knew that the moment he actually got to the front of the long line, he would decide the Easter Bunny was scary, but sweet Auntie Betta humored him and waited in line with Sam. And since we waited in line, I decided we needed at least one pic…

As predicted, he was not a fan. But then when he saw his pal Evelyn doing it, he decided it wasn’t that bad. Everything is better with a friend!

Finally, the actual Easter egg hunt began! This was so stressful because I wanted Sam to get at least one egg, but I also didn’t want him to take any eggs another kid was going to get! We decided next year it would be easier to just hide some eggs in one of our backyards and have a much smaller Easter egg hunt.

Thursday night, Ben and I went on a date night while Auntie Becca stayed home to babysit. It was sooo fun to go out to dinner just me and Ben!

On Friday, we dyed Easter eggs, got ready for Passover, and enjoyed a delicious Seder meal. The matzo ball soup was great! Unfortunately we didn’t take any pics.

On Saturday, we made up for the previous day’s lack of pictures. The amazing Kelly Crawford came over to take Campbell’s baby pictures and also got some of Sam and the whole family. I can’t wait to get those back and I will be sure to share them here.

In the afternoon, we went to our neighbor Jack’s 3rd birthday party, which included a petting zoo right outside our window!! Sam was a little hesitant to pet the animals at first but warmed up to it!

After a little while, he wanted to go play on the playground and while we were there he saw his friend Elizabeth flying a kite with her family. He was so excited when they invited him to come play with them!

(Are you tired of hearing about our weekend yet? It’s not over!)

Saturday night, the Easter Bunny came and made a special delivery for Sam and Campbell!

Sam was very excited. Campbell, not so much!

Then on Sunday, we put on our Easter best and headed out to brunch.

We had a delicious Mexican brunch at Rosa Mexicano at National Harbor. They even had a special Passover menu for those not eating leavened bread. After brunch we strolled around for a little bit and took a bunch of pictures. The weather was perfect.

Auntie Becca is on her way to the airport now. Bye Auntie Betta!!! We’ll miss you!