The L and D Story

I have to know my friends' labor and delivery stories. For whatever reason, I just need all the nitty gritty details, from the first contraction to the baby's birth weight. So, in case you're like me, here's how it all went down for me. First of all, I have to come clean, I was induced a week early. I was feeling a little guilty/embarrassed about it, but in the end, I went this route because my insomnia had gotten to the point where I could either stay awake all night long and lose my mind or take a heavy duty sleeping pill and sleep, but feel drugged and hazy and stress that these pills were doing harm to the baby. When my OB initially offered to induce me a week early, because I was already progressing, I said no, but after 3 really bad sleepless nights, I called her back and said "let's get this thing scheduled!" I have truly felt more healthy and rested these first 2 weeks of my baby's life, even with the constant middle of the night wakings, then I have in a long long time. Anyways, I will try and keep my labor and delivery story short because, well, it was short!

7:30 am - get to the hospital, am monitored for a while, find out I'm dilated to a 4, 70% effaced and having contractions every 5 minutes, which made me feel better about the whole induction thing. My baby was coming soon one way or the other!
9:00 am - started on pitocin
9:20 am - my water broke on it's own
10:15 am - got my epidural
11:20 am - started hurting on my right side, A LOT!
11:55 am - I've had it with the pain, asked my nurse if something can be done with my epidural, I got it for a reason! She checked me and told me to start pushing instead. I was very skeptical about this because there was no one else in the room and none of the equipment was out. I mentioned this and she says it's just to get things moving. Had she been around for my first quick delivery, I think she would have known this wasn't a good idea! So a gave a couple very half-hearted pushes and my nurse quickly told me to stop and ran and got the doctor (as I had expected)
12:00 pm - my doctor came in
12:08 pm - our baby was born!
12:10 pm - I got to hold her, the end! or the beginning :)

I do recognize and FULLY appreciate that I am very lucky with my labor and deliveries. I still can't believe how well everything went. Our baby was a solid 8 pounds even. I had been really nervous about what her birth weight would be. If it was below 7 pounds, I would have felt horrible for having her early. But 8 pounds? No guilt there! That girl was ready. I was much more emotional after having her then I was with A. When A was born, I was mostly in shock and scared, I mean, I was a PARENT now! I had no idea what to expect or if I could handle it. I think with T, I wasn't so scared about raising another baby, so I could enjoy the moment more. I also worried if T would be healthy more then I did with my first pregnancy, because of the sleeping pills I had been taking during this pregnancy. So when she came out and was breathing and crying and looked perfect, I just blubbered. It was a really special moment for Zach, me, and our new baby.

I am madly in love with this little girl. Miss A, bless her heart, was not so easy the first 6 months. There was basically nothing you could do to calm her down. So I haven't been a big fan of newborns. When I hear them cry it brings back all the emotions and memories of hours of her crying. But little T? Has hardly made a peep! We are still in shock over how good she is. It's crazy how much easier these first 2 (almost 3) weeks have been. She is so so sweet, I love holding her and staring at her for hours. And now I get it! I get how people like newborns! Not that I didn't love A with all my heart, I just wouldn't choose to repeat that stage with her. I would love to keep Baby T like this for a long time. I am thrilled to have these 2 little children in my life. They both make me so happy and I feel so very grateful and blessed.

(and since I'm coming clean in this post, another confession, I edited my neck rolls out in this picture. The double chin I left, I can accept that. But not several neck rolls. When I saw this picture, I asked Zach "I have neck rolls!? Those rolls are new right? They haven't been there for a while have they?" He looked away and changed the subject....)

I am also so grateful to not be pregnant anymore!!!! Right after T was born, I just started taking huge deep breaths, enjoying the sensation of being able to take those huge deep breaths and not feeling winded and oxygen deprived! Oh it's a beautiful thing. I hesitate to post these pictures, because they are not very flattering, but I like the before and after. The first one was taken right before I left for the hospital to have T, I wasn't trying to, but I think I look pretty scared (I was!). And then the 2nd picture, same outfit, but what a difference 24 hours makes! I have my baby right where I want her, on the outside!

Showing off my little baby...

I have so many pictures I want to share of our new beautiful little girl, I don't even know where to begin! For now, here's a few I have finished. My favorite part of each of these pictures is her adorable little mouth! I love how perfectly pink her lips are in the first one, how they are lopsided in the second, how they are so cutely squished in the third, and in the fourth, how she often sleeps with her mouth open, just like her dad!

(another thing I love about this picture is that she is holding Zach's finger. I didn't notice it until I was editing it, and it makes the picture all the more special to me!)

On a side note, I know this is probably an unnecessary thing to do, but I'm thinking I'm not going to use this baby's name on my blog. I sometimes regret giving out Aubrey's name, but it's too late now, I'd have to modify 150 posts or so to erase it. So I'm thinking I'll just refer to the new baby as T, Baby T, etc, just because it makes me feel a little better with having a public blog and all. And I guess Aubrey as A, Miss A, from here on out....

What we did this weekend....

DONE!

Due to our baby not being born before 2010 like I'd hoped, I pretty much got my to do list for the baby done. Her room is done, I have all sorts of little cute flowers and props and such for some baby pictures, her closet is filled with diapers and warm clothes, I have diaper rash cream, baby wash clothes, pacifiers, freshly washed bottles, the diaper bag is set out, the car seat is set up.....and I'm not even to my due date yet! Somehow in my head, I'd reasoned and subtracted day after day after day off of her official due date (because Aubrey was born early, because the baby measured big on my ultrasound, because I've been having braxton hicks contractions forever and I didn't with Aubrey). So here I am, not to my due date yet, and feeling like the baby is weeks late! I have no one to blame but myself for allowing myself to set my hopes on anything but her due date. Oh well. I remember hearing from my mom all growing up how I was born 3 days late and I had always thought "So, just 3 days, what's the problem!?" But I'm starting to get the idea. Sorry about those 3 days Mom!
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So here's what I was able to get done with this extra time.
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Doily Banner - very easy, here's a tutorial
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Her name - I bought wooden letters from Hobby Lobby and covered them with leftover fabric and Mod Podge, again easy and very cheap
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Basket Liner - the basket had a purple liner and that was unacceptable for her room! I used this tutorial to make the liner, another easy project
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Ballerina pictures and frames - I've posted here about those frames already, but now they are hung and officially done!


I love how this little project turned out. I spray painted a frame I already had, then did a simple design of an Aubrey Hepburn quote that I loved, had it printed up for a couple dollars, and that was that! The quote says "I believe in pink. I believe that laughing is the best calorie burner. I believe in dancing*, dancing* a lot! I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles." So the asterisks, the real quote says, "I believe in kissing, kissing a lot!" But I changed it to dancing. I just couldn't have a proclamation on my little baby's wall about how she should believe in kissing a lot. And I didn't have room in the frame to fit "I believe in kissing, in a platonic, on the cheek kind of way and only to my family, kissing a lot again in a platonic, on the cheek kind of way and only to my family." It just didn't quote flow!

Photo Board - I had the wood, ribbon, buttons and everything already from past projects and I used leftover fabric from the bedding to cover the board and buttons. So I've reminded Zach how this was a free project over and over. In fact, that's been a theme with all of the room. I keep emphasising how cheap it's been when Zach looks at our credit card statement and it goes "Hobby lobby, Jo-Ann, Gas for car, Hobby Lobby, Jo-Ann, gas for car".....

But after all my scrimping, re-using, coupon clipping, etc, I blew it on this project, "gerber daisy balls to hang from ceiling". I had this incredibly cute vision of what it should look like, and in reality....not so much. I couldn't afford to spend the money on the hundreds of flowers it would take, so I went with 1 gerber daisy ball and 2 other material balls.

First, those Martha Stewart pom pom balls are supposed to be super easy! Why couldn't I do them? After I literally kicked my two attempts across the room, Zach intervened and actually made the pom pom ball pictured here. It was a VAST improvement over what I had done, but still, pretty lopsided and cheap looking. I'm not sure where we went wrong. Here's the tutorial though, maybe you'll have better luck!

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The fabric covered ball is actually really cute. I'm happy with it. It did take almost 2 yards of fabric circles to cover, so use cheap fabric! Here's a tutorial for that one.

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And then the daisy ball....the daisy ball that's going to be chucked in the garbage in a few days...I hope you can picture how it COULD have been cute. But I got impatient and ruined it. First of all, I used THIRTY flowers to cover it and still a good fourth of it is bare, I just couldn't spend any more money on it. Then I used several different colored daises on it because I couldn't find enough in the one color I wanted. So then I decided to spray paint the flowers the necessary color. I don't think fabric in general is meant to be spray painted. Anyways, it looks very tacky, it cost as much as basically all the projects in the room combined (excluding the bedding of course!) and I hate it. I'm not sure why I hung it up, out of stubbornness I suppose. It looks awful in person, believe me.

So there you have it! Which just leaves two questions in my mind....

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Little Girl, we are so ready, so...WHERE...ARE...YOU!?

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and secondly -

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What if this little girl, comes out a little boy!???? I only had one ultrasound....and I based all this work off of one ultrasound tech's opinion?

Christmas Outings

I've mentioned several times before how Zach and I are pretty lame about celebrating holidays. But since Christmas is a pretty major one, we did a couple things for Aubrey in an attempt to be "fun parents".

First we took her to ride a train that I'd seen an ad about. All I knew was the address and that it was $2 a person, which kind of clued me in that maybe this was no Heber Creeper. It ended up being a tiny kids train that just drove around a mall lot, but it was perfect for a 2 year old. Colorful, safe, and short enough of a ride to match her attention span. She had a great time.

I realized that the picture below of Zach and I and Aubrey is the only one of all 3 of us together from this entire past year! How did we go a year without getting one family picture? Not that the one taken by the skilled hands of Bob the train conductor isn't everything I'd want to frame for my wall and more...but we'll make an effort to get legit pictures in 2010.


We also spent way too long in the car trying to find a big Christmas tree for her to see, since we didn't have one for our house. We took her to a huge 40 footer, to which she said "Oh christmas tree. Brr it's cold. Go home." Oh well, she looked darn cute in her hat.
Christmas was interesting! Even up to the day of Christmas Eve, we intended to go spend Christmas with my family but finally decided not to make the drive. Mostly because of my upcoming due date. So Christmas Eve night we took Aubrey for a drive to show her Christmas trees, which really is kind of sad. "Here sweetie, we'll let you look at other people's trees, but you can't have your own." But then we saw some beautiful live trees on sale for $2! The store had just closed, so we pressured an employee that was leaving into taking our $2. Most likely they pocketed that money, but hey, our conscience is clear! So 8 pm on Christmas Eve, we set up a tree, decorated it with one whole strand of lights and some random ornaments and played Christmas music. It was very festive for us!
The picture on the left is how our present loot looked Christmas morning. All of Aubrey's presents were at my parents house, so Zach wrapped a couple Dollar Store items in tissue paper (and a baby shower gift bag) for Aubrey. The saddest part is that 2 of those presents contained just one balloon each, but they were different colors at least :) A few days later my parents and Lindsey came into town for a doctor's appointment for Lindsey and they brought Christmas, and Aubrey was very spoiled! So don't feel too bad for her! Even though we didn't go anywhere, we had a good Christmas, some good family time, and best of all, lots of relaxing! I hope yours was wonderful too!