Trouble in Paradise

Our apologies for the lack of blog posts over the past week or so. Following my final exam of medical school (ever!), the three of us drove to Green Lake to relax. It was not a fast trip... The drive from our apartment to the house in Green Lake is listed on Google Maps as 187 miles and should take just under 4 hours. We have made the trip in 3 1/2 hours... but this time, after stopping to feed Dane 2 times (at ~40 minutes each stop by the time we feed and burp him and then get him back in the car seat) and changing 3 diapers, it took us 6 hours. We needed a vacation after just getting to our vacation destination. Anyway, after getting to the lake things got better for a bit. We slept pretty well Friday night. Then on Saturday morning our friend Katy drove up from Madison to hang out. She swore that she was too busy to stay for more than a couple hours, but we (or was it Dane's cuteness?) managed to persuade her to spend the night and stay until Sunday afternoon. It was great to catch up and hear news about her and what's been going on in Madison - we were extremely disappointed that we missed this year's Brat Fest! It was also good to have Grandma and Grandpa Anderson, Uncle Steven, and Great-Grandma Karin around to help with Dane. The grandparents were nice enough to take the midnight feed each night, although Dane decided he wouldn't let Larissa take advantage of it. Saturday night after the midnight feed, Dane was a bit colicky and was up from 1-6am crying for about 10 minutes every 20 minutes... Not great. As we have said, Dane is quite the dichotomy... he can be the cutest most perfect kid all day but once the sun goes down he turns into pure colicky evil. He did this again last night (Tuesday night). I sat up with him and we surfed the internet in the (soundproof) porch of my parents bedroom until midnight while he cried. It was great that the room was soundproof, however, because it allowed Larissa to sleep for about an hour even though he was up. She doesn't sleep very well at all when he's crying (as opposed to me, who can sleep well though anything.) After his midnight feed, however, I think he did alright (Larissa would know for sure as she was nice enough to not wake me up for the 6am feed, allowing me to get 8 1/2 hours of uninterrupted sleep - it was AMAZING and, while not caught up on sleep, I felt better this morning than any day in the past month!) Dane seemed to only be happy sleeping flat on his left side, not sitting in his bouncy chair, so we put him on the couch braced with blankets. (Yes, I know the recommendation is to have him sleep on his back nowhere near blankets or pillows, but I'm finding that this is only true IN THEORY and, in the real world, we do whatever he needs to sleep.)

It can be hard to deal with Dane and each other some days...after a string of nights of not sleeping enough and having Dane cry inconsolably throughout the day, our nerves can be frayed and tempers short. It is all we can do some days to keep ourselves from fighting (or to try and get past dumb arguments) and just enjoy our time together. We were looking at baby pictures of me in a photo album here (one of about 40 photo albums Great-Grandma Karin has in the basement) because Larissa wanted to compare how I looked at this age compared with how Dane looks. When we look back, we are surprised at how fast Dane is growing - he's nearly doubled in weight since birth and has grown several inches already! We were trying to remember how old he should be before he holds his head up or walks or starts teething or talks...all these milestones that we are excited for him to achieve. (Right now, after nights of not sleeping well, I'm joke that I'm excited for him going off to college...) But he's growing fast even though we don't see the changes from day to day. We have been noticing that he is holding his head up better during tummy-time (which means he isn't having his head sway as soon as he picks it up and then immediately having it face-plant back in the blanket...instead he is usually having it sway and crash down to one side or the other).

It has been great to relax at the lake. The weather hasn't been great the last several days...it was beautiful, albeit cool, this weekend but during the week it has rained a lot. While I was hoping to stock up on some sun prior to becoming a mole with the start of residency, even rainy weather has been good for us here at the lake. We mostly have sat in front of the fireplace watching TV. We've watched the entire first season of Monk, which my parents have on DVD. I also have been getting some things done off of my to-do list. I am most proud of renewing my Comcast cable and internet yesterday... our bill was scheduled to jump ~$40/month next month when our "introductory price" ended. I called them yesterday to inform them that that price would be out of our budget and I'd probably have to cancel my service and switch to DirectTV. They promptly offered to lower my current bill from $60/month to $43/month for the next 12 months. That works for me. Small victories, right? This was great because Dane is still competing with himself to see how many diapers he can soil each day and we have found that the "cheaper brands" just don't contain him (we need to use the Pampers Swaddlers)...

We are looking forward to another couple days relaxing at the lake, hoping for some better weather, before meeting up with our good friends, the Swees, in Madison this weekend (we wish you guys lived closer to us still!) and going to Larissa's high school friend Steph's wedding reception in Baraboo Saturday night. Busy times. Luckily, my parents will once again take care of Dane for a while on Friday and Sunday nights, so we can get out alone, and Larissa's parents will keep an eye on Dane while we are at the party Saturday night.

ps- we've been taking pictures but need to get back to Chicago to our computer to upload them... we'll hopefully get some new pictures up by Monday night.