Updates on Life!

So we've had Brooklyn around now for about two weeks. Things have changed. :) Not that we didn't all know they would, it's just been interesting to see the changes that have happened and to roll with them.

Brooklyn started out waking up once a night to eat, which was fantastic - when I was breastfeeding... she still wakes up only once a night most nights, but it's not as convenient right now because she is bottle feeding.

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To keep you updated - Brooklyn was born with a tied tongue, we got it snipped a few days after she was born because it was preventing her from being able to latch onto my breast correctly to eat - and was basically tearing me apart. So. After some healing, we've been trying again, but Brooklyn basically got used to the bottle and still wouldn't latch correctly. We are trying to make sure that it works, but for now, I have the wonderful joy and convenience of pumping every time she takes a bottle, so that I can keep my supply up and so that I can give her breast milk.

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So, when she wakes up during the night, Adam gets to feed her while I pump. He really wants us to figure the breast feeding out too, so that he doesn't have to wake up anymore. :) But nonetheless, it has created a very tired mommy and a pretty tired daddy on occasion as well.

The baby blues have seemed to set in with me a little bit too, ugh, hormones are awful. Brooke is a very good baby, not much of a fusser, which is lucky because we think she might be colicky. She has a really gassy belly, and kind of grunts and whines a bit, but she's still not a crier.

Cayden LOVES being a big brother, and I can say that I can't be happier with how great he has been the last couple weeks. There have been absolutely no jealousy issues, when I thought there would be because he hears "you can't do that to the baby" or "mommy/dada will do this after we take care of the baby" etc type things several times a day. He has been very patient with the entire process, and with us. He loves his little sister to pieces and is always saying "I take" and "I keez (kiss)."

He is really talking up a storm. Adam and I are believing that his ability to talk more fluently has really helped with some of the behavior problems we have dealt with his past. He is all around a more pleasant child, and doesn't seem to get frustrated the way that he used to. It's been really fantastic.

One thing that he was doing a LOT of before the baby was born, and still doing quite frequently is swimming. Here are some pictures of Cayden swimming with my friend's daughter, Rilee.


He is such a little water hound, absolutely loves going in the pool "Go ouhside, go in poowh" and will spend hours in there if Adam will allow it :)

The day after Brooklyn's week old birthday (how many birthdays do baby's have that first year) we took her to church. I was feeling pretty good and I wanted to get out of the house, so we made it to sacrament meeting (the first hour of church). We weren't quite feeling up to it the next week but here is a great picture of Brooklyn in her church outfit!


And one more picture of Brooklyn in one of her new outfits that won't fit her for too much longer (We went to the doctor yesterday and she's already gained a pound and an inch!!!!)


We're gonna try and get some pro pictures done of Brooklyn and Cayden here pretty soon, so that we have some better photos. But we all know how good at that I am!!! Argh! Wish me luck!

Cayden and Brooklyn

So Cayden is absolutely infatuated with his new little sister. He is constantly getting just a little too close, pointing out her eyes and mouth and her ears and anything else that he can figure out.

He is so funny, he will talk baby talk to her where he gets a high pitched little voice and speaks in jibberish (as if his norm isn't a whole lot less than jibberish!) to her.

He would come and visit Brooklyn and I in the hospital and immediately walking in would say "I hold" would climb on my bed, and fully expect whomever was holding her to place her in his arms at that exact moment. My mother in law was holding Brooklyn when he made his entrance once, and when she was not given to him, he hopped off the bed and proceeded to collect her himself.

Here are some pictures at the hospital:



He is very curious about everything baby, trying to decipher what is hers and what it's used for. Likes to be in her face (hmmm that's a shocker!) and gives her lots of hugs and kisses at will.

He has actually been really nice to have around, and hasn't had too hard a time transitioning as of yet and hopefully that will last! It's been really nice to be at home with my mom and dad here because we still have adults outnumbering kids - I'm really spoiled!

General update on the little man - he is talking SO well. His vocabulary improves on what seems almost a daily basis. He is really getting great at expressing himself. He loves going to church because of nursery, where there are a lot of new toys and kids to play with arts and crafts projects to do. I know he will LOVE preschool once we get him potty trained and into it. I think we'll try and see if we can't get him into it in January when I head back to work.

A couple more weeks and we'll get serious with potty training. He doesn't care much right now about doing it, the way he did when Logan was around. He really misses his cousin - he loved having a playmate with him all the time and I know he is missing the kid to kid interaction he was getting all the time.

OK Guys, I really am going to try and be much better about updating, but I hope these new posts help curb the need for the work I haven't put into this for the last ::cough:: 6 months ::cough::

:D More soon!

Brooklyn's Birth Story

After being sent home on Friday morning after a night full of intense false labor, I started having regular contractions about 10 minutes apart around noon. Worried that I wasn't going to progress (like I had done all night) I tried going through my contractions in all sorts of different positions and in different settings. Went swimming, took several hot baths, leaned over my ottoman into a pillow, etc. At about 6 o'clock the contractions intensity increased and they started coming closer together.

I really didn't want to go into the hospital to be sent home again, so I waited at home as long as I felt I could. The intensity of the contractions were getting pretty strong, so instead of going on the walk I had intended on going on - at 10:15 pm DH, my mom and I decided to head over to the hospital - I had been having contractions that were about 4 minutes apart for a little over an hour at this point.

The hospital was BUSY when I got there, they sent me to the triage room, but I walked around for another 20 minutes or so waiting for the nurses to hook me up to the monitors to track my progress. When they got to me they hooked me up and baby sounded great - and my contractions were still consistently 3-4 minutes apart but getting pretty intense.

One of the labor nurses came in to check my progress - the baby's head was EXTREMELY low in my pelvis and shoving my cervix back making my cervix VERY difficult to get to. I had this same problem when I was in labor with my son and it was easily the most painful part of that entire labor, and it proved to be true for this labor as well. She got to me after having to get all the way around the baby's head and move further - I yelled and cried, but got through it (super embarrassing in a triage room though, ugh).

PROGRESS! The night before I never progressed passed a 1 - but now I was dilated to a 3, 95% effaced and she could feel a bulging bag of waters - which was plenty to FINALLY admit me. It was about 11:30 pm when they decided I could stay and about 11:50 pm when I got into the labor and delivery room.

At midnight, the anesthesiologist knocked on my door ready to give me my IV and my epidural (Hallelujah!!!!) I got all set up with that, and it took about 50 minutes for my epidural to travel up my legs and for me to get comfortable to the point where I couldn't really feel the contractions.

We were all pretty sleepy, so my DH took the floor, my mom took the couch and we all tried to catch some sleep. My DH and my mom were successful, but I couldn't sleep so I just rested for a little while. The nurse came into check me at this point ( 1:30 am or so) and I was dilated to a 6 or a 7 - the ball really got rolling once I was comfortable enough that I could let my body do it's job. :) Once she checked me and put my catheter in, we all laid down again to sleep a bit more.

At about 3:30 am, I was laying down, felt a pop - like someone flicked my tummy with their finger) and heard a GUSH of water - I called the nurse in, to let her know my water had broken. She came in and cleaned things up - I had a LOT of fluid come out, and then she checked my progress again. Her words were "oh, my, hello baby!" I was dilated to a 10 - no cervix whatsoever, and the baby was in perfect position.

She had me do a test push to see how long she needed to have me work before she got the doctor in the room - half a push into it she asked me to stop and called the doctor. At about 3:45 am everyone was in the room, and I started to push.

After about 10-15 minutes of pushing at 3:59 am on 8/9/08, baby Brooklyn was born. My umbilical cord was short, so DH had to cut it before they could lay her on me.

She is teeny - 6 pounds 1 ounce (still, 9 ounces bigger than her big brother was!) and is 19 inches long.

We have been doing great - having a little bit of problems with breastfeeding because she is tongue-tied (the thin piece of skin under the tongue connecting it to the floor of your mouth extends all the way to the front of her tongue instead of stopping some place in the middle, like normal). But other than that everything is GREAT.

Here is a picture of Adam and I minutes after she was born:


And a few more pictures of her:

And here is a picture of when we were coming home - Cayden looked just like this in his carseat - so itty bitty!!

My dreaded night from H-E-Double Hockey Sticks

Well I suppose I should start off by saying that it was my own dang fault that I had this night. I had made a decision earlier on in the day that I was gonna have that baby - and from now on I'll probably write in a horrible mix of past and present tense - so i decided to read up on good ol' castor oil. If you don't know what it is, it is basically a really pure form of some kind of oil. It comes out of the bottle looking like vegetable oil and smelling like something you would never put in your mouth... but, it supposedly induces labor.

So mom and I head to the store and pick up some castor oil - everything on the net said that I should take about 4 tablespoons of this icky crap. The way it works is this: It's a laxative. It causes the bowels to contract and make you go poop, but for a pregnant woman, it also makes your uterus contract and essentially "cleans" that out too.

So. I take this nasty oil stuff and mix it with chocolate milk - down it - and then chase it with more milk. It was DISGUSTING and everyone that I talked to about it recommended I didn't do it. But, good ol' Andi, me being who I am, and taking advice as well as I do - did what I wanted to.

So it just gave me like really bad gas for a while, like I dunno 5 our so hours, and then it made me need to go potty. A lot. I was excited because I was having contractions and it was seemingly doing EXACTLY what it was supposed to.

So my contractions are getting pretty flipping intense, so Adam and mom and I head to the hospital. By the time they are checking the baby and monitoring my contractions I'm feeling at about the same level of intensity that I felt when I was getting my EPIDURAL WITH CAYDEN. lol. (Easy to laugh about it now, I suppose)

So they check my cervix - and say that I am maybe dilated to a one. a ONE. I thought I was at at least a 3 or a 4 because of how painful it was. But no. So we went in there at like 11:30 pm, and I stay there until about 1:45 am with mom and Adam having CRAZY painful contractions that were sending me on the borderline of tears, while they check every once in a while to see if I'm progressing.

With Cayden, the most painful part of the entire laboring process is when they would check my cervix, because of the position of my cervix. I have a tilted uterus, and I guess when you add a baby into that mix it becomes this super long, you're never gonna get there, canal from hell. (Sorry, that's pretty graphic) So. Apparently this is something that happens with ALL of my babies, because this is the reason I wasn't dilating with these excruciating contractions. Brooklyn wasn't in the right position, or my cervix wasn't, or something - so basically I was in active labor with unreal ouchie contractions for NOTHING.

So they give me this pill to stop false labor and send me home, I'm to come back if things get much worse or if I bleed or if my water breaks, etc.

So I go back at like 2:45ish. Because I'm gonna die. Seriously, unreal painful contractions. Like I couldn't sleep. I'd BUCK awake with each contraction, and they weren't regular at all. So I'd get them whenever.

So I go back. And Nothing. Again. At all. Nothing. I was hating life, and SO angry because of the pain I was in and it was completely pointless. So I head back home again at like 7:00 am... with sympathetic nurses telling me there was nothing they could - they couldn't admit me without more labor signs.

So here is my theory on the entire thing - midwifes use castor oil to not only induce labor but as a natural alternative to pitocin. Like the same-ish type thing happened when I was on pitocin with Cayden, my contractions were irregular, but I had pain stuff pumping into me and my body was ready then because my water had broken - so it progressed me. But this stuff did it's job - but because my body wasn't quite ready for it, it couldn't work the way it should have. Well it was a big WHOOPS on my part. It sucked. Like really bad. BUT, I think it was the reason that my body was kicked started into real labor the next day.

I'll post my next blog about my actual labor. :)

No Promises - But here we go!

So we all know how horrible I am with blogging. Like, really bad. But I going to TRY to do better, because I enjoy reading your blogs so much, and it's so nice to keep updated on what's going on in your lives - I just have a hard time believing anyone would care about the mundane dribble me and mine do on an every day basis - but regardless, here is my attempt to do better.


I am going to start by posting an account of the night before I went into labor with Brooklyn and of her birth story - along with some pictures... And we'll go from there. New posts for each though, this is just the forewarning that you're gonna be getting a chapter book!!