More videos. I hope to find time to write something for you too but not right now. We’ve enjoyed our holiday time with family. Here are some videos of Paul swimming and Caroline doing was she does best, eating bananas.
And sorry, apparently I always try to get her to sing “If you’re happy and you know it!”
All pictures were taken Sunday, October 7, 2012, on Paul’s fifth birthday! Thanks, Grandma and Grandpa, for joining us for General Conference and cake!
Happy birthday, my dear five-year-old boy!
Here are the cousins (aged 6 and younger; Daniel was at a class at this time)!
When a family has five children under the age of 5, another four between ages 4 and 6 (plus an 11 year old), the best possible place to have a family dinner is obviously the Train Restaurant!
Paul loves watching his food come out on a train.
Who knows when these four siblings will be together again?!
A great time was had by all! (Caroline slept through it in her carseat…)
Maybe this is still unintentional on Caroline’s part. But she is getting pretty consistent: I know if I put her on her tummy she probably won’t stay there! As much as I’m not looking forward to Caroline becoming mobile (I like her to stay put, thank you very much), I am so excited to watch her blossoming and developing into her own personality.
And what a personality she has! She seems to be a social bug: she loves to see a smiling face and will almost always return a happy smile. She wants to be near other people, even when they are not smiling at her. I’ve already pulled out her high chair so she can be table level when we’re eating — not down in her rocker or crib! She wants to be where the action is! She knows what she wants, be it food, a smile, or a clean diaper, and she will scream herself red in the face to make herself heard. If she simply wants a smile, she’ll stop crying as soon as someone approaches. Daddy says he will not give in to this “drama queen” behavior and I’ve overheard a lecture or two about it.
Paul usually wants to tell me what she needs as much as he can guess: “She’s still hungry” or “She has a messy diaper, Mommy.” But on occasion he’s informed me that he’s “tired of all that crying.”
Here are some pictures from our trip to Grandma’s house May 18, 2012.
Paul has one more day of preschool and then we’re off for a whirlwind weekend in Kirtland and Palmyra. And then summer officially begins, as well as my homeschooling years. I’m really looking forward to not having so much on my schedule: we’re going to take each day and each week as it comes, making fun plans to keep us interested and leaving plenty of open time on the schedule for imaginary play and running around outside.
We have decided to not send Paul to another year of preschool. There is a year before he’s officially kindergarten age, but we’ve started already. I’m really looking forward to learning and growing with him in the coming years. While I can’t say for certain we’ll home school forever, I’m planning on staying with it for the long haul. I believe that although it will be a lot of work, we are certainly going to have a lot of fun also!
Grandma Peggy and Papa Paul joined us last weekend! Then, my brother and his family and my mother and father came up on Sunday for Caroline’s blessing in church. None of these picture are very great (and I’m sad I didn’t get any pictures of my brother or his wife or Grandpa S with Caroline either!) but we were too busy enjoying each others’ company and holding that cute baby to take pictures, I suppose.
Paul was very excited to host a “party” for our Friday Fun Night with Grandma and Papa. It was full of made-up games that he enjoyed inventing for us. Here is one of them.
This picture is very out of focus but I love Paul’s ear to ear smile, so I had to include it!
(I promise, we will get real family pictures in the next few months.)
Paul saw me warming the bottle and asked, “But how are you going to get that back in to you to feed her?” So I had to let him give her her first bottle.
Reading bedtime stories with Grandma Peggy and Papa Paul.
Caroline didn’t cry when she was born. She went from swimming in amniotic fluid to completely born in twenty minutes, apparently gulping lots of fluid in the process.
They gave her to me immediately. My only thought was that she was pink and looked well. But she didn’t cry. Paul didn’t cry either, but this was a bit different. Something seemed odd.
After just a few moments, the nurses took her back from me. They wanted her to cry, so they gave her a shot she needed, gave her a bath, and proceeded to give her a vigorous rubdown. She had her eyes wide open, but she did not make a sound. I was stuck on the delivery table getting stitched up and I couldn’t see her, but Ryan stood by her. I remember starting to get a bit concerned after about ten minutes or so of this.
Shortly, Ryan and the nurses left with her “for a little while” to take her to the special care nursery where she could get further attention.
I can’t recall thinking much other than “a little while” isn’t very long.
I was still running on adrenaline. When I was discharged from Labor and Delivery we went straight to the special care nursery. Because she was born so quickly, Caroline had developed TTN (Transient Tachynea of the Newborn) which meant that she had liquid in her lungs and as a result was breathing quick shallow breaths.
Because I’d been up more than 24 hours at this point (well, except for the brief, contraction-filled two hours I’d had at home), I was incredibly the first day. The three days Caroline spent in the Special Care Nursery were rather draining on me; I like to know what is happening and I felt pretty out of control for my little girl’s sake. Anyway, let’s not dwell on those days. You’ll notice I didn’t take many pictures. The nurses were great and Caroline is fine: there are no long-term issues from TTN.
Caroline came home on her third morning.
Paul came with Grandma and Grandpa (where he stayed Friday night to Saturday) and he was so excited to finally meet her. He’d seen her through the nursery window. “That’s my sister!” he said with pride. When she and he were finally together, he was so excited to read her a story.
Paul is a great big brother. He’s feeling the stress of new rules and less attention, but overall, he seems quite pleased to be a big brother now!
This post is evidence that I must update my blog more often! But since I’m now 2.5 weeks away from my due date (!!) I really just feel this urge to get up to date…so I can hopefully soon move on to newborn pictures.
Our family Christmas present this year was a new patio door for our kitchen. We ordered it the first week of November. After more than a few hiccups, it was finally installed the last week or so of January! Here it is!
It does not stick when we try to open it! It’s not rotten on the outside! It doesn’t leak when it rains! It’s a sliding door instead of a swing open door, so there is more room in the kitchen! In general, I think we’ll like it very much. Ryan applied primer to the trim: we still need to paint the trim and figure out curtains at some point before the Western setting sun gets too irritating come this summer.
And then it was my birthday. Birthdays are very much NOT a big deal for me. My friends treated me to a baby shower a few days before, and it was so fun to get excited for a newborn baby GIRL!
Here are some pictures of Paul making a birthday cake for me with his grandma!
And then we ordered a rocking/recliner chair for the baby’s room. We got it the week after my birthday (after a bit of an issue: why did we have so many issues with delivery people in January?!).
That brings us to February. The Young Women of my ward put on a very well done New Beginnings program. If you’re interested, here’s a link to the YouTube video of their skit and a few photos of the Young Women pirates!
And then we come to the fact that I’m now 37.5 weeks pregnant. The count down is on! As of two weekends ago, we had a disaster area in the room formerly known as my “office.” I was in tears bawling because I was less than a month from having a baby but WE DIDN’T HAVE A NURSERY READY! Ryan talked me down off the edge of break down and we got busy painting. I did the walls; Ryan did the trim. I think it turned out very nice! We intended to have a grayish blue, but it turned out far more blue than we anticipated. With the dark brown and light pink accents we’re anticipating for the curtains (Ryan says he has an idea what we should do; good, because I am not a curtain person), it should look just right for our baby girl.
Now that the nursery is set up and I’ve officially reached “full term,” I personally am feeling rather emotional. I am incredibly excited to meet my girl. And I am so bored with being pregnant: feeling miserable, feeling exhausted and in pain, waddling when I try to walk, grimacing when I stand up, having to pee every 60 minutes, and waking up to pain as I try to move in the bed at night. Not to mention not sleeping well at night overall.
That said, I feel panic whenever I realize that I could give birth tonight or tomorrow. I dread spending time in the hospital. I dread the pain of childbirth, while at the same time I dread the fact that I may end up with medication like an epidural or a Cesarean against my wishes. I panic at the thought of having a newborn to bring home this weekend. I dread the lack of privacy in my own home. (Don’t get me wrong: while I”m glad to be near close friends and family and I’m excited to share my baby, I’m still a bit in a panic about how life will go on with visitors. I am a private person!). Paul will lose the one-on-one time we’ve been enjoying so much lately. I’ll be so exhausted from never sleeping. I’ll have 10 or more diapers to change a day. I’ll have a human being depending on my body to provide nourishment every hour or two (for an hour!). I’ll have two children to get ready to go out to whatever we have to go to — even the drop off for preschool is going to be quite the bother, since I’ll have to take Caroline in with me each time! I can’t handle another child yet! I should be so happy to have the time to clean my house right now.
Except I can’t bring myself to do the basics: clean my house (it needs it!), go to the gym to exercise (my last chance!), cook a fantastic creative dinner (I have time!).
So I’m torn between feeling exhausted and bored and overwhelmed and guilty and excited and delighted and just plain tired.
Photo at 37.5 weeks.
Incidentally, I’ve been collecting a few things others should NOT say to a nine-months pregnant woman. Any others you can think of that really got on your nerves?
Something I love to hear:
One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to update this page with family pictures in the same month in which the activities took place, starting with Christmas 2011. I especially want to be better since I posted 50+ pictures a month of newborn Paul and I want Caroline to feel she’s just as special a newborn.
I intended to post these pictures the last week of December. And yet, here I am well in to the new year, waiting for Paul to go to preschool to do so.
At any rate, Christmas was wonderful this year. I baked cookies and fudge to enjoy for a month and to give away to neighbors. Paul was incredibly excited to countdown until Christmas and he enjoyed the activities we did.
Before Christmas, I was able to attend Paul’s preschool holiday party. I haven’t attended any of his parties before so it was fun to be there to help and take pictures, etc. This was a rather chaotic party; I wonder if preschool is always like this? At any rate, they had some carnival games, a few craft projects, and then a gym floor covered in bath sponges that were called “snowballs.” They were encouraged to have a snowball fight. Put 20 kids aged 3 and 4 in a room and tell them to have a snowball fight? Um… Paul reacted much as I would have. He threw a “snowball,” then watched people for a while. Then threw another. It was a bit intense.
Here are some of the best pictures of my little guy. The full album of the preschool is on flickr with a guest pass.
Reindeer bowling
He's proud he knocked some bowling pins down.
We are low-key about presents (I do not want to raise a spoiled or greedy child who says “I want that!” for every toy he sees). I gave him a (plastic) kids microscope, books (which is what he asked for), and an inflatable globe, among some other smaller things. Grandpa Sorenson gave us a book of silly stories that he wrote and Grandma gave him a Thomas the Tank Engine puzzle. Grandma Peggy sent Trio blocks, which along with our Legos, have given me lots of time as Paul slips downstairs to create yet something else. (YES!)
We enjoyed the true spirit of Christmas. At the beginning of the month, he loved selecting some clothes for a “poor boy” from the library’s giving tree and talked for days about the boy who was too poor to get his own clothes. (He was particularly excited because the boy was FOUR just like he is so he knew just what the boy would like.) He loved selecting gifts for his cousins (we do a family gift rotation among my siblings). He loved the excitement of wrapped presents and waiting for them. I don’t think he was tempted to open them, he just loved shaking them and counting them and wondering. He was fascinated by the mystery of magical Santa (although *cough* the reindeer forgot to eat the reindeer food that Paul left on the front step. How’d I know he’d check that FIRST?! even before looking under the tree?).
And most importantly, Christmas was, for our family, about the true meaning of the season, the birth of our Savior. I love having Christmas on Sunday, because then church reinforced the real meaning of the season. I wish we had services every Christmas morning, but of course, that’s not how it works.
The not-so-materialistic goals we have worked well this year: we got to church at 10:30 and someone asked him what he got for Christmas.
“Ugh….I forgot.” he responded. (But he did remember to say that the reindeer forgot to eat the reindeer food he left for them…). So, at any rate, I know Christmas for Paul was not about the presents. Mission accomplished!
We also got to spend the afternoon with Grandma and Grandpa and Paul’s Sorenson cousins. It was lots of fun to watch the kids playing, and it was great to gather with family on a special day.
After Church Christmas Day
31 weeks pregnant
Cousins
Grandpa Reading The Grinch
Merry Christmas!