Life's Big Moments

It's been awhile since my last post. With so much going on I really just didn't have time to sit down and type. For starters, we put an offer on a house . . .

It was a low offer. A full 25,000 below their original asking price. We expected a counter offer. What we didn't expect was 3 other offers coming in within a day of ours. What a coincidence huh? In the market today with over 3500 homes on the market in our city alone, the one house we really want gets multiple offers the day that we put ours in. We we're probably the lowest offer and the sellers agent gave us a chance to come in a little higher. We did, we came up to almost the most we would pay for the house. And . . . They choose us. They countered our offer asking for a mere $1500 more than we offered, which was still within our range of reasonable prices.

We signed the papers last night and are now undercontract to buy our first home! How exciting is that?

It's a cute 3 bed, 2.5 bath house. 1500 finished square feet, and a 500 square foot unfinished basement. They have just had all the carpets replaced, the entire interior of the house was painted, and they just put in a new fridge, dishwasher and microwave. It has wood floors in the kitchen and a nice deck out back with views of the mountains.

Can I tell you again how excited I am??!!!

We are set to close May 15th, and while I know there is a lot to get done, it can't come soon enough!

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Sleep Training

It officially begins tonight. Dot had her four month doctor's appointment today. She's really four and a half months, but with the move and all we got a little bit behind schedule. We've got the doctor's go ahead to slowly cut out the nightly feedings, and hopefully begin the full nights of rest.

We'll see if it works.

I've been trying (with out eliminating feedings) to get her to sleep through the night for the past two months. When I go in her room she nurses, and that's it. I don't make eye contact, I don't rock her, I don't speak. I literally stand over her crib and wait for her to finish. When she's done she gets a binky and I lay her back down. This has helped with getting her back to sleep after she eats. She used to try and stay up to play after the 3 am feeding. So we're definetly headed the right direction.

Now, taking the next step, we're going to start slowly moving back the feedings. Instead of 12:00-2:00-4:00-6:00, we'll push back 12:00 and hopefully just have 1:00-3:00-5:00 for the first week. Then push back the 3:00 leaving us with 1:00-4:00. and continuing until we're making it through the night. The idea is just to condition her stomach to go for longer periods without food at night. We'll still be doing the every two hour thing during the day.

The pediatrician said that if we stick to it she should be sleeping all night in a month, right around the time of my birthday. That would be the best present Dot could give me.

Hopefully it will work. I need it to work. Wish us luck!

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Don't Worry About Me, I Can Handle It

The moving truck is coming on Tuesday. We're halfway done packing. We have everything by the kitchen ready to go. After that we are in transit for the next week and a half. The girls and I will be at my moms house for 11 days, while my husband drives, and our stuff is shipped. Hopefully by the time I arrive the house will be all unpacked, and the boxes gone! Hopefully. But for the next two weeks, we get to live out of suitcases, without most of our own toys, at grandma's house, without Daddy. And then as a grand finale to this grand adventure, I get to fly with two little girls 1,300 miles away from my family, to our new home in a city I haven't been to since I was 9. The next two weeks will just be loads of fun.

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I've Got Pizza! Do YOU want some?

I just looked at the calendar. We're moving in 8 days. 8 days. And I've got nothing done. Do you want to come pack for me? Or clean my apartment? Please???!!!!

I hate, hate, hate, moving. It's got to be the worst thing in the entire world. And yet in the last 3.75 years that we've been married we've moved 5 times. Now by the time it's been four years, it will be 6 times. Every single time we move I convince myself it's not going to be that bad, not going to take that long. I can pack up a two bedroom apartment while taking care of two kids under two, in a couple hours, maybe a day. I can clean said apartment in 2 hours if everything is moved out. Right.

That's what I convinced myself of when we moved here. That was just a cross-city move, like 7 miles, and our lease overlapped. So we moved everything to the new apartment, and then I was going to go back and just clean one night. It took 9 hours. For 3 or 4 nights either my husband or I went back and cleaned for a couple hours. It's ridiculous how much of a mess gets hidden behind things. So now were moving cross states, and not going to have the luxury of going back and forth.

I don't know how I'm going to do it. And in 8 days! What am I doing writing on the blog??!! Well basically I'm procrastinating like I have been for the past two months. I really don't want to do it. I know I need to, but it's just so much more fun to write, and read all the blogs. Maybe play a couple of games while I'm on the internet.

Don't you want to come pack for me, so I can sit here with my feet up, chocolate bar in hand, and type away? I'll buy you pizza . . . and some pop. Puh-lease???

Fine, I'll go do it myself. I'm an adult now, I have to do things for myself, blah, blah, blah . . . whatever.

I hate moving.

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Halloween Costumes 101

I am going to be boastful and proud in this post. So if those are things that bother you than you should leave. Now.

I like to sew. I can sew pretty well. I'm not as good as my mom (she made my gorgeous wedding dress!!!) but I can make things look pretty darn good.

That said, I also like to make Halloween costumes. I've never made a boy's costume or an action hero, but basically I don't think costumes are hard at all. It's all in the attention to detail.

Sack Costumes:

When Googie was born we lived in Idaho. She was four weeks old on halloween, and we dressed her up as a potato. I went down to the local fabric store, found some patterned brown fabric, sewed one seem down the side, and put elastic in the top and bottom. It took one hour start to finish and cost $5. I bought Googie a brown long sleeved shirt to wear underneath it and the opening on the top went right under her armpits. You could do the same sort of thing with a pumpkin/jack-o-lantern, a tomato, a basketball/baseball/football, or a rock. Just change the color of the fabric and add the details with permanent markers. The sack costumes are perfect for infants. I think the baby will be a strawberry this year, now I just have to find some red fabric.

Dress Costumes:

This is the only other type of costume that I have made for my girls. Last year Googie was a witch. She was the cutest 1 year old witch there ever was. The best way to do these costumes is to take a little help from the store. We head out to the local thrift shops and find a pre-made dress. For the little witch costume we used a size 6x velvet/vulor, dark purple stretchy dress. It worked out perfect! It was a little loose on Googie, and way to long, but length is easily fixed. So then I went about adding details too it. I found some great spider-web fabric in purple on sale at the fabric store. Made some cute little sleeves and a cape from that. We got some orange netting to put around the bottom edge (so it looks like she has an underskirt) and created an empire wasit line with it. I had an old black boa laying around and used that as a finish for the bottom of the skirt. Then for finishing touches we added a witches hat and black and grey striped socks. This one required a little more sewing and took me 3-4 hours to finish and cost $12. Still not bad for an adorable witch.
This year Googie is going to be a princess. The princess costume is all about the details. A princess needs a crown and some extravagent jewlry. She also needs a pretty, long dress with a full skirt. This is the dress I found at Goodwill. I would have prefered it to be pink, or some other jewel color (like ruby red), but it will make a pretty princess dress. It is also a 6x size, but I will have to take the bodice in a little (really just a straight seem, super easy to do). But it is the perfect length-- hits at her ankles. All I really need to add to it is some trim. I'm thinking silver/sparkly ribbon or lace around the bottom of the skirt, the sleeves, the neckline and some along the dropped waist line. I'm betting it will end up taking me 3 hours and costing around $10-15.

The thing about making costumes is, they don't have to be perfect. It's going to be dark (or at least dusky) when they go out trick or treating. It's more about giving the illusion of being something. Googie would be a gorgeous princess just in any pretty dress with a crown and some jewelry, but it's fun for me to jazz them up a bit. They're worn once or twice so you really don't want to put too much effort or money into them. But I like my kids to stand out from the crowd of mass produced costumes. Besides, I look forward to halloween again because I get to show off my kids in the cutest costumes.

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The Story

The Day Of:

I was scheduled to be induced Tuesday, September 5th at 7:30 AM. My doctor told me to call in at 6:00 AM to make sure they weren't too busy, and if they said to come in, to go right away. We did, and they were. I was told to call back at 8:00 and see. Same thing at 8:00, still to busy, call back at 10:00. Still busy at 10:00, call back at 12:00. Less busy at 12:00, but the shift manager lady who approves people being brought in for inductions was at lunch. Call back at 2:00. By this point, I'm mad, I'm frustrated, I'm ready to not be pregnant anymore, and I feel like they just keep putting me off. I hadn't been able to sleep since 4:00 AM because of the anticipation. And being my emotional self I'd broken down around 10:00 AM and had been crying off and on ever since. So my husband calls my doctors office, explains the situation, and makes me sound like a psycho-hormonal-pregnant lady (which I was, but it was kind of offensive at the moment). So my doctors nurse calls the hospital (where my doctor happens to be) and then calls us back. They had been really busy that morning and we were first on the list to be brought in as soon as they could. That made me feel a little better. A little. Then I got a call at 12:45 PM, from the hospital saying we could come down at 2:00. So I called my pre-set-up baby sitter, who'd been waiting just like us all day to see if she'd be needed, and arranged to drop googie off. Then I got nervous. Why was I so excited to go in today? Did I really want to go through labor?

At the Hospital, Before Birth:

They get me all set up with the registration forms, put an IV in, get the heart monitor on my belly and it's registering around 130/140. So that's a good thing. Maybe the monitor will be able to monitor her and we'll be fine. No special needs and a normal delivery, yeah! Then my doctor comes in. Says he would really be more comfortable with the head monitor. So he breaks my water (by the way, after feeling that, I was so dumb for thinking my water had broken! Wow, I didn't know there was that much fluid in there!) and attaches the little head electrode. Now her heart beat is just off the charts. The sheet that it is printing out looks more like an earth quake seismograph than a heart beat. So my doctor looks at it and gives us our choices again. He says we can go through with the induction, "drive blind," and hope nothing goes seriously wrong, or do the c-section. I mean what choice did we really have? Risk the life of your unborn child, or deal with recovery for 6 weeks. I mean seriously. Is it even a choice? We did a c-section.

In the Delivery Room:

They gave me a Spinal (like an epidural but it numbs all the way up to your chest) and then strapped my legs to the table and put up a screen so I can't see the hole they cut into my stomach. My husband got to be in the room with us. She was born 6 minutes after they started. It was a really interesting sensation. I could feel them pulling at my stomach, and I could feel them pushing on things, but I couldn't feel any pain (well duh, it'd be a pretty bad hospital if I could). They pulled her out and took her over to the heated bed. She took a while turning pink and was on extra oxygen for awhile, but she had a healthy cry so that was reassuring to me. Once they got her pink, they weighed and measured her. Then they took her to the "special care nursery" (that's what they called it, according to my MIL that's the same as the NICU, but whatever) and ran some tests on her heart, including an EKG. I was finished with surgery and back in my room about 4:45 PM. My husband kept running back and forth from the nursery to my room and around 6:30 PM I got to hold my baby for the first time. All the tests checked out and she's going to be okay.

The Recovery

Well so far it hasn't been that bad. She was born on Tuesday and we didn't come home until Friday. But honestly not that bad. They had me on Morphine for awhile at the hospital, and sent me home with some heavy duty drugs, but by Monday night all I needed was a couple of Tylenol. So here we are. 8 days after major abdominal surgery, and I'm walking around, up and down stairs. Completely taking care of myself and our little baby. So the C-section has overall not been that bad. It took me 3 weeks to recover fully from Googie's "normal" birth, and I'm betting it takes about the same with this one. Maybe longer for the incision to heal, but as far as pain and ability to function, in a couple more weeks I'll be 100%!

My Baby Girl

She is a gorgeous baby just like her sister. Sorry, no pictures, or names, I'm still kind of freaked out about the whole internet stalker thing. And we choose fairly unusual names for our girls. I'm still working on a code name for her, for now, she'll just be baby, or my baby, or the baby . . . etc. But I can tell you she is a little angel. She loves to cuddle and she loves to eat. She's up every two hours around the clock. Googie loves her little sister too. She's always wanting to hold her, and give her kisses. I'm always tired these days. But I have my mom here helping for the rest of this week, so I've been taking advantage of that and squeezing in a couple extra naps. Everyone is doing really well and trying to adjust to all the changes that come with a newborn.

Next weeks topic: Sibling rivalry. Why my oldest loves her new sister, but seems to hate me.

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Newest Addition

Our little girl finally arrived!

She was born September 5th, 2006 at 4:01 PM. She weighed a whooping 7 lbs 7 oz and was 19 and 3/4 inches long.

More details to come when I have a spare second away from all our family and friends stopping by to see her.

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Finally Finished!

I started working on this project way back when and it is finally finished.

The outer cover:Sample Pages:So it was really fun to do, but took way more time than I remembered. I finally just had to sit myself down and finish it. So now I have two quiet books for my soon to be two girls. It feels so good when you finally finish a project. Now if I could just finish baby girl two's quilt I would be in good shape!

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Busy Busy Busy

Okay, so lets see. So much has been happening.

I finally found a skirt and shirt I liked for Les Mis. It did take most of the day, but I found one I really liked, and could where to church to, so it wasn't a one time dress.

Les Mis was amazing. I love the story, and the music, but put them both together and it was amazing. The actors had amazing voices, the costumes were awesome. It was just a great experience. I'm sad that it's over now, I feel like I have nothing left to look forward to until the baby comes.

One of my good friends went into pre-term labor last saturday. She was 31 weeks along. 4 weeks farther than me. She has been in the hospital ever since. They had a hard time getting her labor to stop, and she is going to be gone for awhile. I feel so bad for her and her family. They have a little girl about googies age, and I just can't imagine having to go through something like that. Not being able to take care of your own child and just feeling useless laying around. I wish I knew what to do to help her out. I volunteered to take care of their little girl while he was at work, and we did a couple of days. But what else can you do?

We took googie to the zoo for memorial day. She loved it until she got tired. She was pointing at all the animals and saying 'dere ee is' over and over again. So cute! And a ton of fun.

Then I got sick. Tuesday morning I woke up, and started throwing up. I didn't have the flu though. I ate something bad. Anyways. Now I have little purple freckle like spots all over my face from broken capillaries. My husband thinks it looks like a huge bruise from getting slapped around. You know I actually might have prefered that to throwing up all day. And I have to throw out all the leftovers in my fridge since I have no idea what made me sick. My lovely husband, who ate everything I did, dealt with it a lot better. He only felt like he was going to puke. He didn't actually puke. Lucky. I am very glad it wasn't the flu, and for once glad that googie didn't eat hardly anything that day. So she didn't get sick, thankfully. I hate it when she's sick. She doesn't understand what's wrong and is just mostly miserable.

So that's where we've been. It's been a busy week.

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Gone Shopping

We're going to Les Mis tonight. I am so excited!

Now I have to go find an outfit that will look good on my fat pregnant body.

I'll be gone all day. I'm sure of it.

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Quiet Books

I am currently working on a new quietbook for my little girl in church. I made her one before, but she gets tired of the same on every week so I decided to make another one to alternate. I have only been working for a little while, but so far I have 12 pages outlined, but far from finished. I want to know if there is a market for this sort of thing out there. Would people be willing to buy the quietbooks ready made, or even just the patterns. How much would be a reasonable price? Any thoughts/suggestions would be helpful!

Finished pages from the previous quietbook . . .

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