Well we're still moving...

We are still moving, but we knew that (yep, the two people I emailed at housing here NEVER got back to me). The exciting part is we know WHERE we're moving! We ended up taking over our friends sublet. We met with the rental office at her complex and they processed things really quickly, we just have to sign the paperwork tomorrow and we'll be in! So we'll be in her one bedroom apartment for 3 months, which during this time we hope that the perfect job opens up for Daniel. The job interview he went to turned out to be a job that he is WAY overqualified for (it is like a data-entry job in his field) with a lot of repetition and no room for actually helping the product be better and not much room for growth. So not exactly what we were hoping for.

Tomorrow

So hopefully tomorrow we'll know where in the world we're going to be living after Tuesday...

Sleeping Baby

For those of you who didn't know, E sleeps in bed with us. Generally when people find this out, they can seem a little unsettled/concerned (as did we awhile ago when our friends told us they were going to do this with their soon to be born baby). After reading a magazine (lent to us by the same friends - we're going to give it back soon I promise!) with some articles about bedsharing* and doing some poking around, we ended up doing bedsharing ourselves. Here's some of what we found:

Bedsharing needs to be done safely. Things to remember for safe bedsharing: http://www.nd.edu/~jmckenn1/lab/pamphlets/BSlpSafeEnglish.pdf

This comes from an article written by a professor of infant health at the University of Bristol, UK. I found the study interesting and very informative. They used a control group - the only SIDS study that I have heard of with a control group. For each infant death they looked at 4 live infants that were matched for age, locality and date and asked questions of their parents (the study had nurse-researchers ask parents of infants who died a bunch of questions within a week of the infant death).
What they found is:

... putting a baby to sleep in a separate room (rather than the room in which the parents slept) doubled the risk of SIDS. For parents who smoked, had been drinking alcohol, or were excessively tired (less than 4 hours uninterrupted sleep in the previous 24 hours), sharing a bed with their baby increased the risk of SIDS for babies less than four months of age. For babies over this age, or for parents who did not smoke and had not been drinking or taking sleep-inducing drugs, there was no evidence that bedsharing increased the risk of SIDS.
Sleeping with a baby on a sofa or armchair was found to be extremely hazardous, increasing the risk of SIDS by a factor of 25. (For those of you who may want to read the whole article it is here: http://mothering.com/where-should-babies-sleep-night-review-evidence-cesdi-sudi-study)

We've also learned that bedsharing is actually a cultural norm in a lot of places and was common in the US until the early 19th century when the idea of privacy and personal space became popular (http://www.mothering.com/sleep-me-trans-cultural-look-power-and-protection-sharing-bed).

In the end we realize that this is a personal decision so don't want to come across as if we're preaching bedsharing. In fact, we may not bedshare with any other children we may have if they prefer to sleep alone (as my older brother did), but we will always have our baby sleep in the same room especially after reading the above findings. We're always open to learning about good research done on childcare in general, so please feel free to share any thoughts/articles/etc. (For example, we recently learned that placing a child in an adult bed alone is not recommended, which is something we had been doing, luckily E decided not to press charges :)

*Note: Sometimes bedsharing is also called cosleeping. For us, we refer to bedsharing as having the baby in the same bed and cosleeping as having the baby sleep in the same room. If you're reading about this topic make sure you know how the author defines these terms.

They're back...

So the pictures are back... really the only thing that saved me was that when I clicked on the non-existent images the file name appeared in the window (so that saved a lot of work!)

So Daniel has a job interview next Friday (in a week), we wish it was sooner as that does not give us a lot of time to figure out what we're doing (4 days unless my email to housing here lets us stay a week longer... although I'm not that hopeful since they haven't responded.) If they offer him the job we'll be moving to Olathe, KS. If not, we may be subletting a friend's apt here in Madison (Middleton really). We'll see what happens next Friday. ;)

E at 3 Months...

So yesterday E turned 3 months old... I can't believe it has been that long! Here are pictures of E at 3 Months.

So E has been doing these deer in a headlight/surprised expressions a lot lately...

Oh, here is a toy, I think I will play with it while you're trying to take my picture...
And maybe nibble on this green monkey's hand.Actually, I think I like nibbling on my hands better... (he does this quite frequently, but we're okay with the fact that he is learning to be a self-soother.)
E also wanted to start to crawl after we took pictures, but as you can see he didn't figure out the need for his hands... We're okay if it takes him a while to figure that out though!

What will the end of this month bring?

So I realized that since E was born, the only posts I have done were about E. Understandable since he is so cute and adorable and I like to brag about him... but I figured that I should give an update about what is happening in our lives - besides E.

So Daniel finished his coursework and is trying to do a mad dash with his thesis (hoping to have it finished by the end of Summer Term). We are in the process of trying to find a job (at this point we're looking for anything that he will tolerate in his field, unfortunately Cartography is not a hugely hiring field at the moment, probably ever really...) This is all compounding on us as we did not renew our rental contract and it ends on June 30 (Quick complaint - WHAT college housing office expects its residents who are students to know 90 DAYS ahead of time what their plans are?!? Even most apartments in the area only required 45 days notice... HONESTLY!!)

Through all of this stress, I am remarkably calm. I feel that everything will work out and I just need to have the faith to let it. So I am currently trying to do just that. We're still looking, praying, etc, but I am not stressing over it. (This might change in 2.5 weeks though.)

Well that sums up our lives right now, and what would a post on our blog be without a few pictures of E.

Here's E sitting in our rocking chair... he just looked so cute in the big chair!

Daniel and I went birding yesterday and E wanted to look through the binoculars when we got home... ah a future birder!