The Girards dot com

Although this site has been all about Alice, the site itself is not allaboutalice.com, it’s TheGirards.com. There are 2 other Girards in this immediate family and I thought this would be an appropriate place to share Kim’s great news. Last night Kim was awarded with CAMH’s “Transforming Lives” award at a beautiful gala, held on the grounds of CAMH , here in Toronto.

With 900 people in attendance, the evening was a huge success, bringing in over $800,000 to support CAMH. Of the 4 Transforming Lives recipients, Kim was one of them. And her speech, in my completely unbiased opinion, was the best of all. It had people laughing and crying with Kim’s amazing ability to speak. Seems only natural that she is making public speaking her full time career!

Here are some pictures from the festivities last night. Again… congatuations (inside joke) Kim… Alice & I love you very much and are very proud of you! 🙂

Whenever we pick up Alice from a nap, we a guaranteed a little burst of ‘sunshine’… a smelly little toot or two that she’s been saving up for us. Alice, actually, farts a LOT, and yet not enough. She gets so much gas that her tiny little belly gets all bloated and hard, and she cries. Loudly. In a way, these stinky little messengers are helpful; when they REALLY start to smell like she’s crapping her pants, it means she’s about to do just that. Handy, huh? Sadly (happily?), Alice has only been evacuating her bowels once a day, or less. 🙁 While our pediatrician assures us that none of this will stop our little girl from being wildly successful in life, it’s probably hurting her a bit, and, frankly, I can’t imagine it will make her any little friends at the park, either. So, we’re trying two new sample formulas. The first has reduced lactose and partially-broken down proteins; preliminary results indicate that this gives Alice a) no relief and b) runny poop. <sigh> The second sample is completely lactose-free. We’ll keep you posted on how things turn out and/or come out (and I’m sure you’re delighted about that). 🙂

When it comes to formula, it seems that I’ve been lucky I haven’t killed Alice yet, or at least caused her leg to rot off or something. Example? I heard from a public health nurse that we have to mix the powder while the water is at near-boiling temperatures in order to sterilize the powder, which does not/cannot come sterilized from the formula factory. As such, I’ve been burning off my fingerprints trying to spare Alice disease… only to find out earlier today that the water should be at room temperature for mixing, as having it too warm will deteriorate some of the nutrients or some friggin’ thing. Next? I was told that we could feed Alice pre-made formula up to 24 hours old so long as she (or any hungry bystander) hasn’t actually had the nipple in her/his mouth (which triggers the end of the sterilization). So, for our roadtrip to Windsor, we keep a couple of bottles in the car at room temperature, and fed her one after a couple of hours, then another when we got to Windsor a couple of hours later. Alas, I am a BAD MOTHER. 🙁 Turns out you’re only allowed to have ’em out of the fridge for two hours, period, until they’re disease-ridden kill-your-baby meals, and only for one hour once the ol’ nipple is violated (we’ve been using them up to two whopping hours after this point). How, then, am I supposed to make it on, say, a five hour trip to anywhere?? Someone on the interwebs suggested bringing bottles of sterilized water and then adding formula as necessary, which is great, except that the same time limits apply to sterilized water, with or without the formula added. So, I just don’t get it. Then again, if Alice has lived this long with all my gaffes, we might as well switch her to diet coke or something. She’s tough. 😛

Below: Sometimes Rob lets me hold his camera!

This morning Kim left to go shopping with Toni, a friend of hers (and mine!). So what happens when the cat’s away? Hell ya, the mice will play! So that’s what Alice, Daddy & Sally did – photog stylez!

Alice has decided her 6 week growth spurt has started and her hunger has picked back up again, demanding to be fed every 1.5 – 2 hours. In between the rigorous feeding schedule, Alice and her Daddy and Sally decided to play photoshoot again. Hope you enjoy the pictures!

The last couple shots of Alice are her in her swing that Grandma & Opa gave her way back while she was still a zygote. We tried it out for the first time yesterday (she was too small for it before) and it works great! The pics I posted are before and after…. insert crying baby, wait 2 mins, observe happy baby. Rinse & Repeat 🙂

We have survived not only Alice’s first major growth spurt, but her first major road trip as well! This past weekend had the family loaded into the car and headed down to Windsor. Our main purpose was to provide some love and support to “Aunty Laura,” whose now-ex boyfriend will be singing the “You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ‘Til It’s Gone” song for the rest of his life… but that’s another story for another blog. Mostly. Got me thinking about how Rob will react when Alice is a much older girl and someone breaks his little girl’s heart; it won’t be pretty. Hats off to both Laura’s dad and Rob for not causing anyone any physical injury this weekend!

The road trip itself was fairly smooth sailing. It’s weird to have Alice in her rear-facing car seat in the back and not be able to see her at all. We have to find a few minutes to hang up the mirror that a friend gave us for that purpose, to avoid pulling over and discovering that Alice’s head is leaning 90 degrees to the left or something. (Oops).  The trip is 3 1/2 – 4 hrs, which is just a bit too long for Alice, so we stopped once at a roadstop on the way down to feed and change Alice, and did something similar on the way back. During the second stop, we fed and changed her in the car — mostly. I was in the midst of changing Alice on the driver’s seat of my car when she decided to poop! Proud of my mothering instincts on this one: I grabbed the child (supporting her delicate neck, of course) and swung her into the air — poop land where it may! The seat of the car was spared. Alice was fine. Hurrah!

Anyhow – child is now crying. Love to you all!

Sally (our beagle) met Alice for the first time today. I was amazed at how interested Sally was in Alice, and how much she seemed to respect Alice. Beagles probably have the best smell of all breeds… so I wonder if she’s able to “smell” the genetic link between Alice, Kim and myself? I’ve seen Sally around other children and babies before, but she never seemed to like and respect the other kids/babies as much as she did Alice.

When Sally Met Alice...

There’s a good chance I’m viewing this through the eyes of a parent with their own dog and own child… but I really do think that Sally knew where Alice came from. Pretty weird! Do others have anything to share with respect to their own children & pets?

Anyway… can’t wait for Alice to grow up a bit and enjoy spending time with her puppies and kitties 🙂

Apparently babies have growth spurts. And from what I can tell, they happen at day 4-7, again at 3 weeks, and then again at 6 weeks, 3 months, 6 months and 9 months. Alice has hit a 3 week growth spurt… with a vengeance! No more of this casual eating every 3 hours. Every 1.5 – 2 hours, she is hungry. And when hungry, she REALLY lets us know! We are about 3 days into her feeding frenzy and apparently it can last from 2 – 7 days. I took this picture because it is such a delightful scene: formula that’s ready for her to drink.

Ahh.... a fridge ready for a hungry baby!

The opposite of this what seems like only a few hours later. OK, more than a few hours, but much less than a day! That’s when we don’t have formula ready to go for her, and it’s most likely going to be in the morning after exhausting every bottle we’ve made over night. So far it’s only happened once where we had to result to a bottle of ready-made we had left over from the hospital, but we needed it FAST!

There’s not too much to making formula, but it takes planning and time. You boil water, sterilize bottles and nipples, let the water cool, measure water & formula, mix, and refrigerate. But from when you first start to having a bottle ready, is probably about 2 hours…. you don’t want to burn yourself making the formula, and you definitely can’t feed boiling formula to Alice!

And from the fridge, it’s another few minutes in the bottle warmer. No biggie… just a few minutes, right? Unless you’ve got a screaming baby who’s just decided feeding time started 15 minutes ago and you’re late! Small price to pay, but worth documenting so when I look back at the sleep-starved first few weeks, I can remember all the formula I made, a couple times a day. And you can’t get ahead of yourself… it’s got a shelf life of 24 hours once you mix it. And once served to Alice, that specific bottle and its contents are good for only 2 hours, max. Just another one of those things you don’t see yourself doing until you’re doing it. I’m sure this is barely just the tip of the iceberg of things I never really anticipated doing….  🙂 It’s OK for all you parents to be snickering at me… you probably shared similar experiences one way or another!

My post wasn’t all about making formula all the time. I also wanted to post a few random pics taken over the past couple days. 2 are from a couple hours ago when the 3 of us had our first family outing… a BBQ on a beach hosted by some friends of ours: Thanks Jana & Tomas!

The other 2 are a shot of Kim holding Alice in our kitchen, and the other is Alice’s view above her crip with Winnie the Pooh decals and a mobile Aunty Laura made for her.

I was looking through all our photos from the past few weeks and thought it might be a good idea to post pics belonging to a similar theme. Today’s Theme: Friends of Alice! Thanks to everyone again for coming by for a visit at the hospital or home, and for your very thoughtful, generous gifts and kind words 🙂 Alice is so fortunate to be able to be brought up around so many great people! 🙂

Wow… Hard to believe that it’s been three weeks already since Alice was born. Admittedly, the first (almost) week flew by while we were in the hospital. It’s true what everyone says — one ought to enjoy her time in the hospital and treat it almost like a hotel stay, because life gets a bit wompus afterwards! Bringing Alice home was exciting, but a bit of a shock, even though we were expecting that shock. I promptly marched her upstairs to her nursery, swaddled her, and placed her lovingly in her crib to snooze while we unloaded bags and got ourselves settled… except that she didn’t snooze, of course. She screamed. And we (I?) kinda ran around like a headless chicken realizing that (unlike at the hospital) we didn’t have any formula ready, we didn’t know how exactly the cloth diapers worked, and — ack! — we were fully, completely, 100% in charge.

We’re a bit more sorted now. 🙂 We have the diapers all figured out and the formula-making under control (Rob has been AMAZING at keeping on top of this). We’re still 100% in charge, but as we’ve settled into a routine, it’s been getting easier. Mostly. I’m not going to lie — this post-partum stuff has been a bumpy ride. Given my history of bipolar disorder, I was at high-risk for post-partum depression, and I wish I could say that that ship set sail without me. Frustratingly, I had a ticket on the SS Tears Anger Misery. Not to worry — I’ve seen my doctor and asked for a full refund, which we’re working on. Administrative delays, of course. 😉 These things take time.

Generally, however, life is amazing. 🙂 Alice is the most beautiful thing in the world; you’re shocked, I know. I think she’s changing everyday. I know she has gas (baby toots are hilarious! Probably funnier for me than for her, but what can ya do). We took her first hand and foot prints today (thanks, Aunty Laura) and went on our first family walk with the stroller. (Alice loves it – falls asleep easily to the swaying – which is good because I find it has very sensitive steering and drove it over some pretty big rocks on someone’s lawn, hee hee!) We’ve been trying to take supreme care of her, of course, and she’s been accepting us with reasonably good humor. She didn’t LIKE getting shot in the face with formula, for example, but she dealt. She thinks I’m a moron for taking 45 minutes of her screaming to figure out she was cold, but she warmed up quickly enough. As I say – we try our best around here.

Alice and I are bracing ourselves for change, as Rob (World’s Best Husband and Father and General Godsend) is back on the hunt for work. It has been incredible having him at home with us for the first few weeks — I’m so very grateful that things worked out they way they did — and am now looking for and at the bright sides of having him back at bread-winning. It’ll be my turn soon enough, I suppose. Anybody looking for a professional speaker, speaking on mental health and addiction with a side of humor and personality? 😛

Thanks to everyone for their love over the last few weeks. We’re taking it in with open arms, and love you back. Lots. <3!

Since we just setup this site (thegirards.com), we might as well make use of it! And what better way than sharing a some new pictures? 🙂 Fresh out of the digital darkroom….

OK, to say this is Alice’s first photoshoot is a little misleading. For all of you who know know me even a little, you know I’m a shutter bug and have already taken hundreds of pics of Alice. However…. this evening I decided to put Alice under the lights for the first time. And interrogation? No…. just a “friendly” photoshoot! Using my new Alien Bees B400’s (lights) I recently picked up off eBay, I turned our living room into a photo studio. This certainly won’t be the last shoot of Alice, but it is the first.

Although I wasn’t able to create the images I had in my mind’s eye, these were a great start. But of course, in my mind’s eye… Alice was VERY cooperative. All in all, she was a real trooper and cooperated quite well, even if it took a milk coma to do it. How fitting!

Come back soon for more pics and blog entries about Alice. Enjoy!

Click on any of the pictures below for a larger view.

That’s all for now… see you soon!

And for those of you who are tech-savvy and use an RSS reader, feel free to subscribe to the site to have updates pushed your way.

This website is dedicated to keeping family and friends connected with us as Alice grows. We know that most of you live far away, so hopefully this little glimpse into Alice’s start in life with help you feel closer to her and us.

Kim & I will both try to post updates, but as we are still trying to get into a routine with Alice, I have no idea how often we’ll be making updates…. but we will sometimes, so check back from time to time. And for the tech-savvy readers that use an RSS reader, this site has a feed, so subscribe using the link at the bottom of the page!

These are some of the first pics of Alice, all taken in her 5 days of life, at the hospital. More to follow!