Just like daddy

Note to the reader, this post may be slightly inappropriate for younger readers...proceed with caution :)

For those of you who do not have little girls, you may not be aware that the genitalia are swollen when little girls are first born. In fact, it takes quite awhile for this area to shrink to normal size. Sheinah was helping her daddy change Amaris' diaper today. She pointed to Amaris' private area and said "Daddy, she looks like you!" This taught us two things: (1) it might be time for Sheinah to stop taking showers with daddy (2) she is very observant because of the swelling it DID look kind of like male genitals. We tried to explain to Sheinah that Amaris would look like her soon, but we're not sure if she understood.

Pictures of Baby Bum

baby bum

Amaris Laela (ah-ma-ris lay-la) came into the world at 10:12 October 27, 2008. She weighs 6 pounds 1 ounce, 17.6 inches long, head 12 inches, chest 12 inches and beautiful. Her mom is sleeping and her dad is typing with one hand as she sleeps-cries in his arms.

37 Week Excitement

We went in for our 37 week check on Wednesday. Melissa's blood pressure was up a little bit (140/86 for you health professionals out there), but it wasn't enough for the doc to do anything yet. She was still dilated 2.5 cm but the cervix had thinned out more 70%. Thus, it was back to the waiting game for another week...until Friday.

On Friday night, Melissa started having contractions that were stronger than they had been and they were coming pretty close together (about 5 to 10 minutes apart) for about a 2 hours. We decided to do the lay on the left side and drink a bunch of water thing and the contractions stopped after 30 minutes. We figured we better check her blood pressure and it turned out to be high (150/100) so we gave the doc a call. They wanted Melissa to come in so they could run lab tests and make sure she wasn't heading into HELLP syndrome again. Well, our planned babysitter wasn't available and Sheinah was already in bed so we had to call around to find someone to come stay with Sheinah. At the last minute, we remembered that we needed to do something with Samson also. Luckily, we have enough friends with dogs and found someone to take him.

We got to the hospital about 10:30pm and got set up on the monitors. The contractions had slowed down but Melissa's blood pressure was still high. After about an hour, they had Melissa lay on her side to see what happened. It was amazing actually. The contractions stopped (which we kind of expected) but her blood pressure also dropped to normal within 15 minutes. They watched her for another hour until her labs came back (all normal) and decided that since her blood pressure went normal when she was laying down, that we could go home. The deal, for this weekend anyway, is that we are to call them if her blood pressure goes back up. We aren't exactly sure what they will do if it goes up but goes back down if she lays on her side but we'll keep everyone posted. For now...her blood pressure was good all day on Saturday :)

P.S. Travis took a bunch of pictures trying to get the settings right on his camera just in case they decided to induce labor. If you click on the picture of Melissa and the nurse to enlarge it and look at the tracing on the right, you can see that Melissa just came off a contraction.

Who needs a table?

Melissa's belly is big enough to serve as a table for her drinks and even a small plate. All is well as long as she doesn't laugh...

Reading a story

Sheinah has been very interested in "reading" to us lately. Kids have an amazing memory, especially for books that they've heard many times. Tonight, Sheinah wanted to read us an old book that we bought awhile ago called "I can go potty" (it's from the Muppet series of books). The best part of this was when she turned the book around (like they do during story time at preschool) and started pointed to the words as she "read." Unfortunately, Travis didn't grab the video camera until she was halfway through the book. Since you all out there don't know the story, you'll have to take our word for it that she was saying the right information for each page except the one where she mentions kindergarten. If you look closely on the last page, you can actually see the words "Hip, hip hooray."

Baby Car Seat

Sheinah was pretending that she was a baby and could not talk. She asked to be in the car seat and be rocked. Travis keep asking questions to trick her into talking (because he is stinky like that).

Hopscotch

Tonight, Sheinah found sidewalk chalk in her basket of craft supplies and asked to go outside to use it. It was a little windy and chilly and we don't actually have sidewalk on our dirt road, but we figured she could use it on our walkway (which is badly in need of repair). She told Travis she wanted to draw hopscotch. She then drew some squares on the ground and proceeded to hop on them. We've never played hopscotch with her so we are assuming she learned it at preschool.

36 Weeks

We went in for our 36 week checkup yesterday. At this visit, the doc likes to check to make sure the baby is in the head-down position. Our baby was not. Melissa has been saying for months that the baby was kicking her in the cervix...turns out she was right. The doctor checked to see if Melissa was dilated, which she is (2.5cm), and then made a little exclamation when she said she felt "a small appendage." That prompted a quick ultrasound to confirm that the baby's head was up by Melissa's ribs, the bottom was on her left side, and the feet were down in the cervix.

This left us with three options: (1) wait and see what happens (2) perform a procedure called breech version in which the doc pushes on the uterus to get the baby to flip over (3) schedule a C-section. We, of course, opted for trying to get the baby to flip since we really don't want surgery. Our doc doesn't attempt breech births...if the baby is not head down, mommy gets a c-section...that's it. Thus, our best bet was to give this breech version procedure a try. You can read about the procedure at this website: http://www.webmd.com/baby/external-cephalic-version-version-for-breech-position


We spent three hours at the hospital going through all the steps described above, but it took only 3 minutes for the doc to get Baby Bum to flip over. The procedure could be described as "uncomfortable" for mommy, but much preferred to surgery! Melissa immediately felt a whole lot better not having that little tiny foot kicking her unmentionables :) Even her belly looks a little bit different now that the baby is head down. Anyway, there is no guarantee that Baby Bum will stay in the proper position until it's time for her to make her entrance into the world so we would appreciate your prayers that she stays where she is supposed to be.

Dancing Princess

Sheinah has been facinated with all-things-princess for about a month or two. Her Nama, being the great bargain hunter that she is, found her all sorts of princess things for her birthday: jewelry, shoes, a crown, etc. Nama sent money to buy a special princess dress for her birthday. Luckily, it is halloween time, so we had many options to choose from. Sheinah picked out this lovely pink one that even has fiberoptics in the skirt. Today, she told us that she needed to dance because she was a princess. Check out the video:

35 weeks

After many months of not looking all that pregnant, baby Bum number two has finally made an appearance...in Melissa's belly. Travis has decided that we need to start taking pictures every week because Melissa's belly is growing so fast and so dramatically. Thus, here is week 35 placed side-by-side with week 32 just so you can see the amazing growth. The white pants picture is 35 weeks, the black pants is 32 weeks.

Sheinah turns three

We celebrated Sheinah's third birthday at the Children's Museum again. Sheinah got to sit in the special birthday chair and be the birthday princess (with a special hat and wand). She picked out her dress that she wanted to wear and was adamant that she get to wear her hair down. She had tons of fun and we learned several important lessons:



1. Eight kids aged three to five are much louder and full of energy compared to three two-year-olds



2. The parenting styles of Sheinah's classmates at pre-school are different from our's in many ways which makes partytime a little more interesting.



3. It's hard to take pictures and chase kids at the same time :)



Sheinah really enjoyed herself with so many of her friends from preschool. Scott and Brandee Davis caught a flight up to Duluth for the day so that Avery could attend the party also. It was such a blessing to see them for a few hours. Seriously though, when Sheinah turns four, there will be fewer kids at her party!



Check out this video of her blowing out the candles.

Spokane WA

While visting Spokane Washington to build a business relationship with http://www.tourfactory.com/ , I took an evening to watch the sunset over the Spokane river.