I’m so glad that I found National Blog Post Month. I have had this blog for quite a while, and my hus­band, Jason, was always encour­ag­ing me to write more often. I did occa­sion­ally, but really what was hold­ing me back was know­ing that he was prob­a­bly the only one who read any­thing that I wrote.

When I found NaBloPoMo, I signed up for a group and made a com­mit­ment. I was going to do it! Dur­ing this month, I blogged at 11:50 after my baby went to bed, I blogged from my in-law’s com­puter, and even from my husband’s phone! I enjoy updat­ing this blog as I knew I would, and now there are even peo­ple to read what I write.

Now, I prob­a­bly won’t con­tinue to blog every sin­gle day, but it will def­i­nitely be more often than it was prior to the begin­ning of November.

There are a few par­ent­ing books that I would really like to find the time to read in the next cou­ple months. The No-Cry Dis­ci­pline Solu­tion by Eliz­a­beth Pantly, The Fussy Baby Book by Dr. Sears, How to Get Your Kids to Eat but Not Too Much by Ellen Sat­ter, Adven­tures in Tan­dem Nurs­ing by Hillary Flower, and Adven­tures in Gen­tle Dis­ci­pline by Hillary Flower are all on my list right now.

I’m not quite sure when I’ll get to all these, because with a tod­dler and a high needs, fussy baby I don’t tend to have a whole lot of time for sit­ting down to read, but I think that all these books will be worth the time that I put into them. Has any­one read any of these? Any reviews?

A has been in dis­pos­able dia­pers for a day now, and his rash is com­pletely gone. I’m sad that we can’t use our fun, cute, nice dia­pers for him. I guess now I’m look­ing for some new rea­son­ably priced non-suedecloth dia­pers for him. Darn!

A cou­ple days ago, I posted about K’s nurs­ing story. I decided to write down A’s story, too. Obvi­ously, it’s quite a bit shorter, but in the end, my goal for both boys is the same, child-led wean­ing.

When I got preg­nant with A, I was still nurs­ing K. I knew that 70% of babies weaned when their moms got preg­nant. I decided to fol­low a “don’t offer, don’t refuse” approach to nurs­ing with K. He con­tin­ued to nurse through my preg­nancy. When I had A, I expected that since I was still nurs­ing K, I wouldn’t have any sore­ness issues. I also thought that since A was my sec­ond, I would have a smooth road with him.

Ha!

A was born after a pretty quick labor. When I was hold­ing him after birth, I put him to the breast. I was con­cerned that since I had had flat nip­ples with K that I would have the same issues with A. Although I knew how to address it, I didn’t want to have to use the shield again. A latched on right away! I didn’t quite know what to expect with a baby who seemed to have no latch­ing issues. He ate for about five or six min­utes and seemed con­tent. I offered him the other side, but he pursed his lips shut and there was no forc­ing him to eat. He knew what he did and didn’t want.

When K was born, I was under the impres­sion that babies should only eat every 3 hours. If K was hun­gry before 3 hours, it took me some time to real­ize that was the cause of his cry­ing. I assumed that since I was told by nurses and lac­ta­tion con­sul­tants that babies should eat every 3 hours that if he was cry­ing prior to that it couldn’t be hunger. By the time A was born, I had come to believe dif­fer­ently. I real­ized that the 3 hour rule was an arbi­trary num­ber cho­sen by some­one and jumped on by main­stream cul­ture as a way to sched­ule and in essence try to con­trol some­thing that is really up to the baby to con­trol. So, when A was born, I offered the breast every time he was fussy if he wasn’t tired or need­ing a new dia­per. I think I nursed him five or six times in the first 8 hours of his life. I was okay with that, and I felt com­fort­able know­ing that he was get­ting the colostrum he needed. How­ever, through the day, he seemed to have increas­ing trou­ble latch­ing. He was tak­ing 10–15 min­utes of fuss­ing before he would latch. Once he latched, though, he was nurs­ing well.

At the hos­pi­tal where I deliv­ered, the nurses come around at about 10:00 every night and take the babies to the nurs­ery to be checked by the pedi­a­tri­cian and have their vitals taken. We sent A with the nurse and waited for an hour or so for him to return. Well, an hour and twenty min­utes later, he didn’t return, but the nurse did. She said that when the doc­tor had been look­ing at him, his res­pi­ra­tions had been unusu­ally high. Instead of hav­ing 50–60 res­pi­ra­tions per minute, he was breath­ing nearly 100 res­pi­ra­tions per minute, so they had admit­ted him to the NICU and would be watch­ing him until 1:00 a.m. We were more sur­prised than scared. We had just been with him and he seemed fine. It seemed weird to us that he would sud­denly be in the NICU.

They brought him back to us at 1 and said that he was doing bet­ter. I fed him, and after I fed him, I noticed that his breath­ing had sped up again. I knew he was breath­ing faster than the 50–60 breaths he should have been hav­ing, so we buzzed the nurse and she took him to the NICU again. I asked that he be brought to me as soon as he was show­ing signs of hunger. I didn’t want him put on a sched­ule or “held off.” The nurses explained to me that when it was time for him to eat at around 4, his breath­ing had still been to fast. The doc­tor was wor­ried that he would aspi­rate milk into his lungs, so instead they had been giv­ing him sugar water from a syringe. Although I wasn’t happy, I didn’t know what else to do.

The next morn­ing, A returned to us. He was doing fine and was ready to be back with mom and dad. He did alright through the day. He was hav­ing trou­ble latch­ing though. He seemed to be gum­ming my nip­ple instead of suck­ing. The LC came to see me, and she sug­gested that we do some suck train­ing. We were sup­posed to let him suck on our fin­gers between feed­ings so he could get used to the suck­ing action. Then, right before feed­ings we were sup­posed to get him to suck on our fin­ger and then trans­fer him to the breast. We tried that, but it didn’t seem to make much of a dif­fer­ence. He still strug­gled to latch.

Again that night, the nurse came to col­lect the babies for the pediatrician’s exam­i­na­tion. Again, she returned to tell us that A had been breath­ing more quickly than nor­mal, and his oxy­gen lev­els were drop­ping a lit­tle more than they liked. He was back in the NICU. I insisted again that they please bring him to me when it was time to eat. This time, they did bring him about every 3 hours for feedings.

We were told the next morn­ing that A most likely had TTN. The doc­tor explained this was most likely caused by his fast deliv­ery and the fact that not all the fluid was squeezed out of his lungs when he went through the birth canal. It wasn’t seri­ous, and it should go away by 3–5 days after birth, but just in case she wanted us to stay another night in the hos­pi­tal with A being mon­i­tored constantly.

We moved to pedi­atrics, and A was placed on a mon­i­tor in the room. He was allowed to stay with us all night. He nursed about every hour or hour and a half for ten min­utes. The nurses kept urg­ing me to nurse him longer so that he wouldn’t need to eat so often, but I knew that he was doing just fine and I con­tin­ued to allow him to eat on demand.

When we went home, A con­tin­ued to strug­gle with latch­ing. It was usu­ally tak­ing any­where from 10–15 min­utes to get him latched for a feed­ing, but once he was on, he did fine. I did notice though, that he seemed to be chok­ing and strug­gling with my let­down more than K ever did. A didn’t really seem to enjoy nurs­ing and he rarely com­fort nursed. He seemed to have sort of a busi­ness like approach. It sat­is­fied his hunger, and that was it. It didn’t appear to pro­vide any com­fort for him. Also, he seemed to be hav­ing more and more issues with gassi­ness. Some evenings, he would be gassy and arch­ing in pain for more than an hour as he cried and cried.

After a bit of read­ing and ask­ing friends who breast­fed for help, we real­ized that Asa had a cou­ple things going on. One was a dairy sen­si­tiv­ity. I’m still not sure if he’s sen­si­tive or aller­gic to dairy, but any time I ate dairy, he would have a lot of gas and stom­ach pain. I also had a very large sup­ply and a fast let­down, so when my milk let­down for him, he was prac­ti­cally drown­ing each feed­ing. I had to start block feed­ing to deal with this.

For a week, it seemed like all our prob­lems were solved. Then, the gassi­ness came back and so did the cry­ing. It was very frus­trat­ing. We took him to the doc­tor. We tried feed­ing him more, burp­ing him more often, and a bunch of other things. Dur­ing this time, I heard a lot of feed­back from those around me and most of it was encour­age­ment to stop nurs­ing. It seemed as though they thought I was caus­ing A’s issues by con­tin­u­ing to nurse.

Finally, when A was about 3 1/2 months old, we started him on some reflux med­i­cine, and that seemed to help. He was no longer cry­ing for an hour in the evenings and his spit­ting up went from fountain-like to min­i­mal. It was wonderful!

He’s still a fre­quent nurser at 4 months old. He nurses at least ever 2 or 2 1/2 hours dur­ing the day, and he is up any­where between three and eight times a night. I know that one day I will look back and this time will be just a mem­ory, but right now it’s hard. I feel tired all the time and most of the time I’m about one step from crabby, too. Poor K, and poor Jason. Look­ing back on all A’s issues so far, I do not for one minute regret choos­ing to breast­feed him. In fact, I think that because of his issues, breast­feed­ing has been the bet­ter choice for him, and I am glad I had the sup­port to con­tinue when things got tough.

We have been cloth dia­per­ing K and A for a while now. A has worn mostly cloth since he came home from the hos­pi­tal, and K has been in cloth since May. When A was very small, he had Kissaluv dia­pers with (mostly) Thirsties cov­ers. K has always worn Bum Genius One Size diapers.

Once A got to be about 12 or 13 pounds, we moved him into the Bum Genius dia­pers, too. It was won­der­fully con­ve­nient. They both wore the same dia­per. We sep­a­rated them by color. K wore all blue dia­pers, and A wore the green and yel­low. This helped us avoid hav­ing to snap and unsnap the dia­pers to resize them over and over. Another ben­e­fit of the dia­pers is that they fit babies from 10 pounds to 35 pounds. We bought enough for our boys, and at that point, we we were done buy­ing dia­pers for­ever! Per­fect, right?

Unfor­tu­nately, no. Some time after A started wear­ing the Bum Genius dia­pers, he started get­ting a con­tact rash on his tummy and around his legs. So, for about a month now, I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out what could be caus­ing the rash. Is it too much deter­gent? Not enough deter­gent? Is there not enough absorp­tion in the insert? Am I chang­ing him often enough? I’ve got­ten nowhere. I am hav­ing to admit to myself that it is pos­si­ble that he is sen­si­tive to the suede­cloth that lines the diapers.

Both Jason and I are frus­trated with this con­clu­sion. Unfor­tu­nately for us, the Bum Genius dia­pers are pretty expen­sive, and we have quite a few of them. It’s look­ing like we are going to have to either keep them for later and hope that A is less sen­si­tive at that point or buy new dia­pers. At this point, going back to dis­pos­ables is not an option that we are inter­ested in. There are so many ben­e­fits to using cloth dia­pers, and we like the dia­pers, so it’s hard to con­sider a return to disposables.

Many times on blogs and forums, I’ve read peo­ple share their birth sto­ries, but I rarely read anyone’s nurs­ing story. As much as my kids’ birth sto­ries are amaz­ing and won­der­ful and excit­ing, to me, so are their nurs­ing sto­ries. Many mamas want to breast­feed, but they don’t have either the knowl­edge or the sup­port to do it. When things start to become harder, some­times those who should be the most sup­port­ive end up say­ing things like, “Maybe you should stop nurs­ing.” “Maybe you should try a bot­tle of for­mula so you can get some sleep.” “Are you sure he/she is get­ting enough?” Unfor­tu­nately, in an attempt to help, state­ments like that can dis­cour­age a new, emo­tional mom even more. Nei­ther of my nurs­ing expe­ri­ences have been easy or with­out strug­gle, so I thought maybe if I share mine they will encour­age other moms out there to share theirs and sup­port the new moms who are just try­ing to survive.

So, if you’re a fam­ily mem­ber or friend and you don’t really want to read about 2 years of nurs­ing, this is your cue to stop. Every­one else, onward and upward.

Through­out my preg­nancy, I had a few peo­ple ask me if I was plan­ning to nurse my new baby. As most new moms who plan to nurse say, I also answered, “As long as I can, I plan to.” I read a few books on par­ent­ing, and in one book, I read that you should com­mit to nurs­ing for at least six weeks before mak­ing a deci­sion on whether or not to con­tinue. I decided that I could make that com­mit­ment. After all, how hard could it be to nurse for six weeks, right?

I knew that if I was able to have a nat­ural birth with no pain med­ica­tions and no inter­ven­tions, I had a bet­ter chance of hav­ing an awake and respon­sive baby. While I was pretty deter­mined not to have an epidural, besides the fear of the nee­dle in my back, my pri­mary rea­son was that I was afraid it would inter­fere with nurs­ing the baby. I also knew that it was impor­tant to nurse as soon as pos­si­ble after birth, because some babies have a period of very heavy sleepi­ness that can last for quite a while.

When K was born, I had the nat­ural birth I desired. He was born with the cord around his neck, but after the doc­tor did a lit­tle maneu­ver­ing, he was free and doing just fine. The nurses cleaned him up a lit­tle and brought him back to me. They asked if I wanted to nurse him and I said yes, so I tried to get him to latch on. In my mind, the process was about two steps long. One, I would offer my breast. Two, he would latch and nurse. Well, that didn’t hap­pen quite that way. I offered, and he looked at me. With the nurse’s help, I tried for another 15–20 min­utes to get him to latch, but he didn’t. The nurse told me that it wasn’t unusual for a baby not to latch right away, and so she said that I should try again in 3 hours. Since I was tired and needed a shower, I agreed. Jason held K as he slept, and I show­ered and moved to my new room.

Three hours later, we tried again. Still noth­ing. The nurse sug­gested I try a dif­fer­ent posi­tion. I tried the foot­ball hold, the cra­dle hold, and side lying. None of those worked. At this point, I was start­ing to worry a lit­tle. I asked for a visit from the lac­ta­tion con­sul­tant, but I was told she was unavail­able. The nurses told me again that it wasn’t unusual for a baby not to eat much the first day, so I shouldn’t worry. I could just try again in three hours.

Again and again, we tried to nurse, but K was hav­ing none of it. He would open his mouth, but then he wouldn’t latch. He just didn’t seem inter­ested. He would attempt to nurse for 15–20 min­utes or as long as I could keep him awake, and then he would sleep until I woke him 3 hours later.

After a day and a half of this, one nurse felt that he was get­ting to a point where he needed to eat some­thing soon. I began to pump after attempt­ing to feed him each time, and I got some colostrum. Colostrum is what your body pro­duces before your milk actu­ally comes in. It’s yel­low, thick, and full of anti­bod­ies. It’s won­der­ful for your baby. Because K wasn’t latch­ing, we started giv­ing the colostrum through a med­i­cine drop­per. I was get­ting about 10 ccs every 3 hours. After doing this a cou­ple times, the nurse came back and told me that I really should give K some for­mula so he didn’t get dehy­drated, because he needed more than what I was pro­vid­ing him. Both Jason and I were very frus­trated, anx­ious, and upset. We had asked to see the lac­ta­tion con­sul­tant a few more times on day two, and were told that she would come when she wasn’t so busy. She was also a NICU nurse and work­ing on a mother preg­nant with twins (31 weeks) to try to keep her from going into preterm labor.

So, with no idea what to do and no real help, we agreed to give some for­mula. The nurse offered K a bot­tle, and he latched on right away and sucked down about 2–3 ounces of for­mula. I cried for most of the feed­ing. We con­tin­ued all night offer­ing the breast every 3 hours and then I would pump and we would give what­ever I pumped through a med­i­cine drop­per. Then, we’d give some for­mula from the drop­per. Feed­ings were tak­ing at least one and a half or two hours. So, after almost two hours, we’d go back to sleep for an hour and start all over with lit­tle or no success.

Finally, on the third day, the lac­ta­tion con­sul­tant was able to come see me. She brought a nip­ple shield and a sup­ple­men­tal nurs­ing sys­tem. A nip­ple shield is a small, thin, sil­i­cone shield that goes over the nip­ple so a baby can latch when he wouldn’t be able to oth­er­wise. A sup­ple­men­tal nurs­ing sys­tem is a con­trap­tion that goes around a mother’s neck, and then a tube goes down to the breast and the baby sucks on this lit­tle tube at the same time as the nip­ple. When she watched K attempt to latch, she told me that I had flat nip­ples and that was what was pre­vent­ing him from latch­ing. She showed me how to use the nip­ple shield, and FINALLY K latched. I was so happy. I couldn’t believe it.

Because he hadn’t been eat­ing well, the pedi­a­tri­cian decided to admit K into peds, and Jason and I were able to stay in his room with him for another day to make sure he was still eat­ing well. K was now latch­ing, but we were still strug­gling a lit­tle bit. He was eat­ing for 45 min­utes or more on each side, and it was nearly impos­si­ble to keep him awake. After wak­ing him, we had to change his dia­per and take of his clothes to wake him up. Then, I fed him for about 1 1/2 hours before pump­ing for 15 min­utes. Again, by the time I fin­ished this process, there was less than an hour left before I had to wake him again for the next feed­ing. The good news though was that he wasn’t lost­ing any more weight. He was finally eat­ing, pee­ing, and pooping.

We went home, and feed­ings remained a chal­lenge. K woke every 2 1/2 or 3 hours at night to eat, and feed­ings took at least an hour. Dur­ing the day though, I had to wake him and strug­gled to get him to nurse every 3 hours.

That went on for about three months. Dur­ing this time, I tried to get him to stop using the shield and nurse with­out, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t. Finally, one day, I was try­ing to get him to nurse when he was three months old, and he refused to latch. As a last resort, I took the shield off and offered the breast. He latched right on! I was so amazed. Another big change that day was that he went from tak­ing 60+ min­utes for a feed­ing to only need­ing 15–20 min­utes. I even called my sister-in-law to ask her if that was nor­mal. It was such a quick change that I wasn’t sure what to do, but I just decided to go with it.

At that point, my nurs­ing goal became to make it to one year. Look­ing back, I can say that after that day when K was 3 months, we didn’t have many, if any, chal­lenges for quite a while. A week before Kael turned one, he got the rotavirus. He also ended up with an ear infec­tion from it. Dur­ing that time, he didn’t want any­thing to eat or drink. He only nursed. I am con­fi­dent that nurs­ing is what kept him from becom­ing dehydrated.

When he turned one, I knew that I had made my goal of nurs­ing for a year, but other than that noth­ing else seemed to have changed, so I wasn’t sure why I would choose to wean at that point. So, I didn’t. A week later, I found out I was preg­nant with A, and know­ing that 70% of babies who are nurs­ing dur­ing preg­nancy self-wean before the next baby is born, I decided to let K make the deci­sion about whether to con­tinue nurs­ing or not.

For the first 20 weeks of my preg­nancy with A, I didn’t find much dif­fer­ence in my nurs­ing rela­tion­ship with K. He nursed 4 pre­dictable times a day. He nursed first thing in the morn­ing, noon­ish, 4 o’clockish, and before bed. How­ever, right around 20 weeks, my milk sup­ply dropped dras­ti­cally. It was a very hard time for K. He went from nurs­ing 4 times a day for 15 min­utes to nurs­ing almost all day long. He would ask to nurse and he would latch on and nurse for an hour or more at a time. I knew that at this point nurs­ing was as impor­tant for secu­rity as it was for nutri­tion, so I allowed him to nurse as much as he wanted. Some days, I think he nursed more of his wak­ing time than he did any­thing else.

By about 30 weeks, I knew I had to talk to my doc­tor about my con­trac­tions. I was hav­ing brax­ton hicks con­trac­tions all day long and espe­cially while nurs­ing. I was hav­ing 30 or more con­trac­tions a day. Some days they were as close as 2–3 min­utes apart, but they never lasted very long. When I did bring it up with my doc­tor, she did a test for preterm labor and ordered an ultra­sound to check my cervix. Both came back with reas­sur­ing results. I was neg­a­tive for preterm labor, and my cervix was nor­mal, long, and closed. I was okay to con­tinue nursing.

I did limit K’s nurs­ing a lit­tle after this point. Since he had been born at 36 weeks, I was con­cerned about another early baby. Also, the closer I got to my due date, the stronger the con­trac­tions while nurs­ing got. At some points, the con­trac­tions were so strong that I had to hold my ribs and breathe very shal­low to man­age the pain.

At about 33 weeks, K started nurs­ing less. In fact, in May (A was due in July), he went an entire day with­out nurs­ing for the first time in his life. After that point, he would often go 2–3 days with­out nurs­ing, then, nurse 4 times in a day. I had decided at that point to let him do what­ever he wanted. I didn’t offer to nurse, but I didn’t refuse when he asked.

A was born three days after his due date, so I did not have a sec­ond early baby. A was also 9 pounds 12 ounces, so appar­ently nurs­ing K dur­ing the preg­nancy didn’t keep A from get­ting the nutri­ents he needed to grow and gain weight. While I was in the hos­pi­tal, K didn’t ask to nurse and I didn’t offer.

When I got home from the hos­pi­tal with A, he again didn’t ask to nurse. I waited a day or two, and finally, I was so engorged one day I asked if he wanted to nurse and he did. When he real­ized that my milk was back, his eyes got wide and he just melted. It was every­thing I’d hoped for.

Unfor­tu­nately, K got a pretty nasty cold right away after A was born. So, as I was deal­ing with try­ing to learn to nurse A (which is another story in itself), K was try­ing to nurse with a plugged nose. He was so excited to have milk again that he was nurs­ing as much as A some days. When he was sick, he would latch, and start nurs­ing. Then, when he had to breathe, instead of unlatch­ing and breath­ing, he would hold my nip­ple with his teeth to take a breath. Very uncom­fort­able, bor­der­ing on painful. He also had some issues with jeal­ousy of A nurs­ing. He never seemed upset at the baby or mad at him, but often, when I was nurs­ing A, he would stand on my feet and cry as he waited for his turn.

Slowly, we got into a rou­tine where K was less upset with A nurs­ing. I think he real­ized that there was still milk even if A did nurse first. He still gets upset while wait­ing for his turn some days, but that’s not nearly as com­mon as it was even a month ago.

K still nurses sev­eral times a day. Some days, he nurses as often as A does, but again, I’ve cho­sen not to limit his nurs­ing. I feel like he’s had to grow up a bit more quickly than he would have oth­er­wise since we chose to have another baby so close to him in age. I believe that if I allow him to con­trol the nurs­ing rela­tion­ship, he will be able to make devel­op­men­tally appro­pri­ate choices for when to nurse, how often to nurse, and when to stop.

So, that’s K’s nurs­ing story. As hard as it was in the begin­ning, I’m not sure I would change any­thing, because if I did, I don’t know where we would be now because of the changes. I feel like where we are right now is a pretty good place to be.

This year for Thanks­giv­ing, we went to my in-laws’ house. It was a lot of fun, and I love spend­ing time there. On Thurs­day, it was our fam­ily (4), Jason’s par­ents (2), his older sis­ter and her fam­ily (3), and his brother and his fam­ily (5). So, in one house we had 8 adults and 6 kids and a new puppy. It was def­i­nitely a loud, ener­getic day. We stayed overnight and yes­ter­day Jason’s younger sis­ter and her fam­ily (5) came over, so there was 10 adults and 9 kids and a new puppy in the house.

When we’re there, there is so much going on and K doesn’t take good naps. He plays well while we’re there, but as we were leav­ing I noticed that he had cir­cles under his eyes. We got home tonight and he was pretty tired. We put him to bed at 7, and we haven’t heard from him since. Now, I’ll say again that I had a very good time and I love see­ing Jason’s fam­ily, but I’m not sure exactly what I did that made me so tired, but I fell asleep in the car on the way home and did the head bob for at least 25 miles.

*yawn* Both boys are in bed, and I’m think­ing it might be time to join them.

Q: what do you call a bee that makes milk instead of honey?

A: a boo-bee!

Thanks to Kiley for the joke and to Jason for the use of his phone to write this blog.

We are stay­ing at my husband’s par­ents’ house right now. It’s been a nice time to relax, eat, and spend time as a fam­ily. Although we only had to travel an hour from our house, it feels like a mini get away. I get extra hands to help with the baby and extra eyes for my tod­dler while being fed and taken care of.

I hope you all are hav­ing a happy Thanks­giv­ing. Any­one plan­ning to be at Aero­postale at 3:30 am when it opens? I won’t be there, you can count on that! I might only be half way done with my night­time feed­ings by then. Eleven o’clock at Cari­bou Cof­fee sounds like some­thing that is more my style.

We are going to my in-laws for Thanks­giv­ing. I’m look­ing for­ward to a day with the grand­par­ents and the rest of the fam­ily. My husband’s fam­ily is so fun to be around! Of course it’s a bit crazy with so many kids run­ning around, but K loves his cousins, and I get lots of help with A, so it works out great for me!

Happy Thanks­giv­ing!

I’ll be blog­ging from their house tomor­row. Hope­fully I can get it fig­ured out. I haven’t missed a day yet in Novem­ber. I’m hop­ing Thanks­giv­ing doesn’t cause my first miss.