This week I am excited to be the Monday morning snapshot on PAIL Bloggers (a community resource for what comes next). Even though I do not post as often as I wish to on here. I get a lot of ideas through the website and strongly encourage anyone that is parenting after infertility to check it out.
Without further ado:
The daily grind can get tedious from time to time. Get home, make dinner, play, go to bed, wake up, work/daycare, rinse and repeat. Well, to help combat the daily grind, I try to soak in Ava and our precious moments during our nightly routine.
I have always done the bedtime routine mostlybecause of breastfeeding and also because Ben was scared of giving Ava a bath. At first I loved it and then I got tired of having to do it every night but now I realized how much fun it is.
It is my special time with Ava where nothing else matters but her. We start anytime before 7:00 PM depending on how tired she is, how late we ate dinner, etc. We first start with a bath. We play with a couple rubber duckies including one on a boat that winds up and spins around the tub. She giggles when the ducky runs into her leg or foot. We finish up and I wrap her up in her Minnie Mouse towel and lay her down on her bedroom floor. I put nighttime lotion on her while making sounds or silly faces getting her to giggle. I grab A Very Hungry Caterpillar, Snuggle Puppy, or one of our other books. I read it to her while we rock and she plays with her lovey. Next, I take her prayer dice and say the prayer that was rolled. Finally, we nurse and I just stare and try to soak it all in. I see how much she has grown. How long her hair has gotten. Man, I need to clip her fingernails again. Before laying her down, I rock her for a couple minutes after she has finished nursing. I lay her in her crib making sure she has her lovey and I tell her I love her and out the door I go. She falls asleep within 20 minutes.
I check on her before I go to bed and just stare again in amazement that she is real and she is ours.
