3 Months Old

Our little baby is 3 months old this week!  My how time flies...

We did, in fact, get more snow last week, as we had hoped for since it was going to be so darn cold.  It was somewhere around 6 inches, and it was beautiful:

The view from our front porch last Wednesday evening.  Unreal.

On Wednesday afternoon, all 3 of us bundled up and headed outside in the 20-degree weather to play in the snow for a few minutes.  Sweet Susannah could hardly open her eyes because the snow was so bright!  She liked it for a few minutes, until her mean ole mommy and daddy decided we wanted to see how she would react to lying in it...

Daddy had a hard time opening his eyes, too.

POOR BABY!!

We are heading to Harrisonburg for a few days this week since Pete has a conference near there; we are pumped to spend some more time with family!  Here's hoping the 3-hour trip there and the 3-hour trip back go better than last time...

And the day after we return from Harrisonburg, Uncle Eric, Aunt Lauren, Hudson, and Holland are coming in town to visit!!!!!!  My exclamation points do not do our enthusiasm justice -- we are SO EXCITED to have them come spend a few days with us.  I've been researching for 3 weeks things for us to do in our little, rural town without a whole lot of luck.  Fingers crossed there's at least a live auction or something that pops up...

A Glimmer of Hope

We have been so lucky that Susannah has been relatively easy during the nighttime hours.  Since about 4 weeks, she's been only waking up once, and over the course of the last month, she's been extending her time between night feedings like a champ.  This past Friday night, she cried for her paci at 4:05am, and that was it!  No feeding!  She went right back to sleep after it was popped in and slept until 7am.  WOW.  The next night, we had a dinner party to go to, so her schedule was a little off, but she still slept from 9:30pm until 4:15am, when she ate an early-morning breakfast and went right back to snoozing until 7:15am.  Two nights in a row of 7+ hours straight??  I thought we had arrived.

Then Sunday night happened.

Bedtime at 8:30.  Dreamfeed at 10:30.  Should sleep until at least 4, according to new pattern that she would obviously stick to...  Wakes at 1:30.  Wakes at 3:00.  Wakes at 5:00.  Wakes at 6:00.  Wakes at 6:45.  Poop EVERYWHERE.  Mommy picks up poop-soaked, crying Baby to remove poop-soaked swaddle and clothing only to notice these were not the only poop-soaked items.  Mommy straps baby in on changing table so she can strip crib of all things soiled -- everything but the mattress itself.  But if you know anything about cribs, you know that entire mattress must be removed in order to strip it of anything.  Mommy wakes Daddy to share in this poopy experience so crying Baby can eat and be happy and laundry can be relocated to washing machine.

And that's how our Monday began.

Of course, in the hour of play time that followed, Susannah was cooing and smiling more than ever, so all was forgotten.  I seem to remember using similar tactics with my parents as a teenager.  Interesting...it's learned so young.

And now, more proof of her cuteness:

Her favorite thing to watch, second only to the ceiling fan.  We play with this toy at least an hour a day.

Playing with Freddie the Firefly.  I don't think she even realized she was holding on to it.

Our dinner party outfit - cute as a BUTTON

We like Susannah to be versatile, so we let her nap in random places sometimes, such as a blanket pallet on the floor.

We lost power the night it got down to 15 degrees, so Pete put Susannah inside his jacket for a while, and she could not take her eyes off the candles!

Susannah will sit in my lap and follow my fingers up and down the keys for longer than she'll do most anything else.  Luckily, she isn't aware that I'm playing the one song I remember from middle school piano lessons over and over and over again...

And lastly, an adorable video of Susannah's reaction when I blow in her face:

Pete's Inaugural Hospital Visit

I guess living in the country and owning some land means that you will eventually have some mishap that leads to a bloody visit to the hospital (bloody meaning dealing with literal blood, not the British definition meaning dern, though I guess both would be appropriate).  We made it safely through our first month here, but the inevitable hit last night.

We had invited some neighbors over for dinner last night, and I was going to prepare my normal go-to impressive meal of Chicken Lasagna Florentine, which takes me like 5 hours to create.  (It should not take this long.)  I add approximately 18 unnecessary steps to any given recipe, however, so knowing this, I began preparing the meal with the exact amount of time it would take me to be pulling everything out of the oven exactly 10 minutes after our guests arrived.  They would walk in to a perfectly clean kitchen, a set table, and glasses awaiting me to pour their beverage of choice.  An enjoyable dinner depended on my appearing to be a timely and perfect hostess!  I mean, come on, I had even ironed my cloth napkins.*  They were bound to be impressed.

About 2 minutes and 15 seconds before it was time for the lasagna to be placed in the oven, I hear Pete casually call from the back door.  "Hey, babe?  Can you bring me some paper towels?  Um, a lot of paper towels?"  Pete had come home early from work to mow the lawn before our 6:00 dinner plans.  Because of the lack of urgency in his voice, I threw a few dishes in the sink, put some things back in the fridge, grabbed the roll of paper towels, and casually walked them out back to my husband.  The man was pacing around the deck, appearing slightly distressed, and holding something close to his stomach.  Upon closer inspection, that something that Pete was clutching with an increasingly blood-soaked t-shirt was his middle finger.  My immediate fear was that half his finger was out in the yard somewhere and he was holding on for dear life to what was left of his birdie.  "Pete?!  What'd you do?  What'd you DO?  Where's your finger??  Is it still attached???  Oh my gosh, that's a lot of blood!  PETE, WHAT'D YOU DO??" Looking back, maybe asking, "Are you okay?" or, "What can I do to make this situation better for you?" would have been better options.  I need to work on more appropriate knee-jerk reactions.

Needless to say, the next half-hour was spent cleaning, bandaging, and elevating a thankfully still-attached, though crooked and fingernail-less, finger that Pete had attempted to use to quickly swipe some grass off the mower while it was running.   Not phased, Pete still wanted to have our neighbors over for dinner and told me that he'd just go to the doctor the next morning.  Tough guy!  Knowing that my plans of appearing to be the perfect hostess had dissolved - followed shortly by the dissolve of my pride - I was quite phased, and slowly went back to preparing dinner on a cluttered kitchen counter next to a sink of dirty dishes as our neighbors came up the driveway and Pete headed to clean up.

The evening proceeded like normal, with the exception of Pete's constantly elevated right hand.  ("Yes, Pete?  Did you have a question?")  His visit to Urgent Care this morning confirmed what we had suspected: a dirty, ripped fingernail and broken finger.  More specifically, the end of Pete's finger is kind of, well, shattered, and the man is at this moment being prepped for surgery to either get it pieced back together or get the tip cut off.

If I were in that situation (as a woman) I would be FREAKING OUT about the physical appearance of missing part of my finger.  Pete, however, is still not phased because, as he said last night, "I shoot left-handed anyway..."  Life would only be bothered if hunting season was bothered!  He also expressed excitement over the fact that he now has a new story to tell our 4-year-old niece Charis, who always wants to hear stories about how you fell down and scraped your knee, or got hit in the head with a ball, or got a spanking, or anything else that took some physical toll.  Pete can't wait to tell her the bloody details of nearly slicing his finger off in the blade of a lawn mower!  Classic!

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* Included only because my mom will eventually read this and such details remind her that I haven't failed as a homemaker.

Beginnings

I’m currently looking out my back window at the biggest pile of horse poop I’ve ever seen.  A local farmer was more than happy to haul his excess horse excrement from his farm in a dump truck for the sake of our compost pile, and thus it sits.  Pete hasn’t had to leave town for work once since we moved in to our new house but is, of course, not here to do anything about it for the next 2 days because of a training, so I’m just stuck staring at it, imagining what the heck our neighbors are thinking.  I’m sure they already think we’re a little on the crazy side because Pete’s been spotted using a reel mower, planting broccoli in the dark of night, flipping tractor tires, and doing hundreds of squats/lunges/pick-your-poisons, all for the fun of it.  So in actuality, our neighbors think that Pete’s crazy based on logical observation and that I’m just crazy for tying myself to that strange man.  But they sure are nice to our faces, so we can’t complain about that. 

The anticipation of the poop delivery had been looming for several weeks prior to today’s dump truck deposit, while my excitement to compost began months prior.  My plan: we’d start with a trashcan, add my coffee grounds and some scraps, toss in the mowed grass, and build our compost from there.  Pete’s plan came out of the woodwork the day he found out that farmers give their animal crap away for FREE.  “Sal, they just GIVE it to you, no questions asked!”  The Ackers are a frugal people, and no good deal ever goes unnoticed.  A small trashcan would not do, I would soon learn; it would take a solid portion of our backyard to handle the amount of poop we just came into (for free, mind you).   

I was about to go outside to take a picture of the brown mass of a pile for you, but I just heard the next-door neighbor start up his lawn mower.  I’m not sure if I’m ready for the “what the hell ya’ll got that huge pile a’ horshit for?” conversation just yet.  I’ll let Pete handle that one when he gets back in town so the neighbors will continue thinking he’s crazy, and I was just blinded by love.

Okay, I made it in and out without being spotted.  It's hard to tell just how big the pile is because of the scale of our yard and our neighbor's yard combined.  Just trust me on this: the dump truck was fully loaded.