The first of many posts in my “Let’s Catch Up On The Blog” campaign, here’s a little (big) photo memory dump from the first three months of this year. I initially tried to do a full recap from January to September but it was way too much for one post so we’re gonna keep it bite sized with a quarterly breakdown.
December ’21 – January ’22
^^ Our very first family holiday card. <3
My Mommy Ma moved in with us on Christmas Day with the plan to stay for a year to help with Beau and I am so so so so so so so grateful for the timing of her retirement and her ride or die support.
Did I change Beau into 3 different outfits on Christmas day? Yes, I did… In my defense at the time, he had a really bad reflux that 2-3 spit ups a day and so I was prepared for the possibility of needing a couple outfit changes.
New Year’s Day – My Ma made her special oxtail pho to ring in the new year and it was ah-mazing. I also made a holiday floral arrangement that I was pretty proud of.
Hmmmm what else… Oh yea! Can’t forget Beau’s first snow. Charles plopped him in it and Beau was okay with it for about 5 seconds before he started crying so that was a short lived experience lol.
Overall, January marked the end of my parental leave and it was a *rough* transition getting back to the workflow especially keeping up my pump sessions throughout the workday AND night.
February
After a bit of back and forth throughout January (because I was still trying to do *everything*), I finally let go of control and let my Ma take over the kitchen. Since then, we’ve been eating almost exclusively Cambodian/ Southeast Asian food since my Ma doesn’t really like American food but I’m not complaining (neither is Charles lol). ^^ Pictured above from left to right: Nom Makow, Lemongrass Mussels, and Beef Lok Lak.
Valentine’s Day started off with me finding the sweetest card from ‘Beau’ in the fridge, next to his milk – shoutout to Charles for the perfect placement. It was a pretty lowkey day since it was a Monday workday. We made the most of it by ordering in some Olive Garden (I love, love, love their Zuppa Toscana soup) and attempting my Gramma’s cheesecake brownie recipe.
Overall, February was a fairly quiet month of just working and caring for Beau. It was a month that marked him turning 6 months (4.5 months preemie adjusted developmental age), rolling over for the first time and babbling/clicking and sticking his tongue out – such sweet milestones.
March
First week in March, my Ma noticed that Beau was making a soft whistling sound while breathing so I messaged our Doc just to be safe and she told us to bring him in. What we thought would be a routine check up turned into us being referred to Children’s Hospital ER in DC on a Friday night (not for the feint of heart – our total wait after checking in at 6pm was SEVEN hours ).
After finally being admitted, Beau was put through a bunch of tests and, after finally figuring out what was causing his heavy breathing/really high resting heartbeat, had to get an IV line put in to receive medication. By the time we were formally admitted to the pediatric cardiology wing of the hospital for 48hrs observation, it was 12pm on Saturday… Me and Charles were parental zombies.
For background, Beau has a health condition from since when he was in the womb (I had a high risk, two ultrasounds a week pregnancy experience from beginning to end) so we are in and out of the hospital for routine monthly check ups and bloodwork.
But this situation was completely unexpected, not related to his existing health condition and it threw us off a bit energy-wise for the rest of the month… Just as we were starting to feel comfortable with managing one health condition, another one was added to our responsibility and my new mom anxiety really went through the roof. It took me a couple weeks to finally mentally calm down the paranoia and fully lean into the fact that (in the words of Charles) we’re just gonna be some ‘hospital ass parents… it’s a forever lifestyle.’
We eventually found our flow again and closed out the month with our very first family outing to the DC National Zoo to celebrate my niece, Mia’s birthday. It was so great to see my brother, sis-in-law, niece and nephews. Beau was the cutest in his lil bear winter suit. This outing also marked the very first time I *ever* used a public restroom changing table to change Beau’s diaper which was a very novel experience lol. Very grateful for my sister being there and jumping in to help when I had a little struggle moment.
Let’s see, what else happened in March…. Oh! We introduced oatmeal/watered down rice porridg/applesauce into Beau’s diet which he honestly wasn’t a big fan of initially but warmed up to with consistent offerings throughout the month.
And so concludes Q1 of 2022. Not a fully comprehensive recap but these are the memories that immediately came to mind as I was putting this post together.
Q2 coming next week.
xo, Setarra
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