Random thoughts from our tree...

The month of June has flown by! Sadly that also means that Mr.P's month of paternity leave has flown by. It has been so nice having him home, and I think it's been really good for him to have this extra bonding time with M2. It was great having him here while I was still suffering morning sickness, but thankfully the morning sickness has mostly passed. It occassionally rears it's ugly head (like earlier today when I was grocery shopping. The grocery store is not a good place to be when you feel nauseous).

I'm 15 weeks pregnant...yikes, it's going by so fast! Of course, I say that now, but I'm sure those last few months when I'm huge, achy and having to pee every 5 minutes it will feel like it's going by slow :-)

In other news...hopefully not jinxing things...M2 has started sleeping through the night (STTN)! This is a big deal. She had 1 month back around 6 months where she STTN, but then she started waking up once. Or twice. Every night. It became the norm, but an unpleasant norm. Lately she's been eating a lot more throughout the day and drinking more from her bottles, which has helped her fill up and not need that 3 AM bottle anymore. She often wakes up around 6 or 7 AM for a bottle, but she'll go right back to sleep after eating (she generally goes to bed around 9:30 PM and wakes up for the day between 9-10 AM). I can handled waking up at 6 AM to feed her, since it means I'll have had a solid 6 hours of sleep, those 3 AM wake ups were painful because I felt like it kept me from sleeping deeply.

This next thought may sound boring, but we've had some stroller drama here in the Phinney house, but it is resolving itself. Back in the fall we bought the BOB Revolution. A super nice high end stroller that we felt like we "had to have" (OK, actually I felt like we had to have it and I had to convince Mr.P of the same). We bought it and tried using it quite often, however, M2 didn't like it. She would whine and cry when we put her in it. She prefers to be carried, and so we often found ourselves carrying her and pushing a large bulky stroller around empty. With our upcoming cruise I decided we needed an umbrella stroller that was small and compact for getting around the ship. After much research I bought the Maclaren Volo because it came highly rated for tall parents and people seemed happy with the performance. Mr.P kind of freaked out when said stroller arrived, he couldn't believe I'd bought another stroller. But guess what - M2 loves her new stroller! She whines a little if she's in it for too long, but she generally enjoys going for walks in it and I think it's because she sits up more and has a better view of what's going on around her than she did with the BOB. After taking the new stroller on our recent road trip and using it quite a bit, Mr.P became a believer that the cheaper, simpler stroller was the way to go. So upon returning from our trip this last week, we listed the BOB for sale on Craigslist for $30 less than we paid for it brand new (because it still looks brand new given our limited use of it). Within an hour I had 5 people wanting it! A woman came by that afternoon and paid the full asking price for it. I guess what I've learned from this whole ordeal, advice I would recomend to others, don't buy a fancy and expensive stroller until you know for sure your kid is a "stroller" kid.