Something happy, something sad

Something happy: We celebrated Sam's 25th birthday! I love him so much!! 

Monday was Sam's 25th birthday. Since Sam has to get up a little bit after 6am to take the bus to school on Monday, I made him breakfast in bed on Sunday instead. I made this "Carla Hall's Pumpkin French Toast with Apple Cider Syrup and Spiced Pecans" from the show "The Chew" , here is the recipe if you're interested. The pecans tasted great itself but seemed not to go with the french toast to Sam's taste. But I sure enjoyed some spiced pecan snacks this week. 

I baked the cake on Sunday and decorated on Monday. Thanks to my friend Jenny and her daughter Camilla for coming over to play with Enoch, so I got a couple of hours in the morning to finish the cake. It turned out good.

We totally forgot the candles and so we had a picture like this:

Sam asked Stromboli for his birthday dinner. Mom give me this recipe that she likes to use. It's quite a lot of work for one person. I told Sam that I can make it twice a year. If he wants more often then I'll consider buying pizza dough instead of making it from scratch. I'm glad that it turned out good, the most important thing is that Sam liked it, or he pretended to like it which is possible too :)

Sam's birthday gift is hanging on our wall now :

It took some effort to find good deals of everything and assemble them together. I did not know anything about framing before, but now if you ask me, I can tell you something.

Enoch was annoyed that I got in front of him to take daddy and Michael's pictures, so I had to give him a shot too:

And you might want to see Michael's smiley face too:

Here is a pretty good picture of my boys:

Aren't they the cutest three??


Something Sad: The very next day, I started the weaning process to wean Michael off the breasts. 

Breastfeeding has not gone well with us.

When Michael was born, he took the bottles so well that I had the thought in my mind that I can breastfeed him for a year. I somehow saw the light in the breastfeeding life of mine. But shortly after, Michael totally stopped taking the bottles one day. He was just old enough to have his own opinions. I did not force it since that was merely the least important issue we have to deal with.

The most exhausting thing for me is that my right side breast is constantly hurting. It must be the shape of it and how Michael latches on, there are blisters and sometimes it bleeds. It's weird because the left side is perfect with no problem at all. So I'm just too tired to figure out why. The stabbing pain is so painful that I had to take pain medicine a lot. If it starts after night feeding, then I can only go to sleep after the medicine started working.

Michael has really bad gas problem, I faithfully give him gas relief medicine every meal at night and faithfully stopped eating dairy product. But there are still so many things that I couldn't even all figure out that would cause him gas. Michael would sleep perfectly for a day or two and then go back to be horribly again. Sam's birthday dinner was a trigger. I had s little bit of Stromboli and cake, and that night I did not sleep. Michael woke up every hour really gassy. I remember myself like a walking dead person in-between our rooms.

Yesterday morning, I finally decided that I cant take it any more. I have to wean him off the breasts, but give him pumped breast milk instead and give him formula at night to help him sleep. The past one day and half, our house is like hell,  filled with screaming. It breaks my heart to see Michael screams like that. I wish it could go smoother than this. But the battle is on, there's no going back any more.