Welcome to Maryland

This is what we got the first day in good ol' MD.  Our car was dropped off at the hotel at 4pm and the blizzard started in full at 4:05. It didn't stop until we had at least a foot. So did we see any of our new city other than our hotel and the nearby Cracker Barrel restaurant? Nope. I guess we have "indefinitely" to look around.

So next is the Peanut update. Who takes a new born on three plane flights, spends each new week in a new time zone and decides to move across the country before our little tyke has even had his two month check up? Oh yeah, we do. Well the traveling has finally come to a halt for a few months.  At this point, Peanut has been in four different states in four weeks.  Congratulations little man! Oh and he is currently sleeping in the drawer in our hotel room. It's so cute.

-First Hotel Stay-

 -First Bath-

 -Perfect Photo Op-

- Blessing Day-

 -Five Generation Photo-

This would have been that much cooler if he had actually been a girl with myself as the oldest girl in my family, my Mom as the oldest girl in hers, my Grandma as the oldest girl in hers, and I have no idea what number my Great Grandma is in her family but she is 96 years old which is just amazing all by itself! Do we look alike, or what?Oh and BTW we used an American Furniture Warehouse as our photo studio. Ha ha!

{ Welcome Back Feet }

This is a picture of my favorite overnight body transformation. It went from one, to the other, the minute the kid was out of me. How incredible our bodies are. Oh, and that top picture does not even show the swelling at it's peak. I love the sock lines that were permanently embedded in my feet.

My body is coming back bit by bit. The goal is to lose 20lbs from the weight I was at yesterday. I went for a short ride on the stationary bike this morning while the little guy was napping. It felt so good to sweat and move again. I am looking forward to being able to put him in the Iron Man stroller for a jog as soon as his neck is strong enough. Yay!

More Baby AND a Look What I Made!

Well Peanut is of course the star of any show these days so here are a few pictures of the first week of his life...I am another super excited first time parent. Can you tell?

This was my favorite time in the hospital. We just took a nap all snuggled together for hours.

 

He came home with Jaundice so we had to keep him in this personal tanning bed for a couple days. This made for two horrible all nighters to make sure he didn't pull the eye patches off and the screen down and blind himself. 

I caught him doing this after I fed him one day. I put him in the boppy and ran for my camera. I like to think he was having a nice serious conversation with God about how we were doing so far as parents. I hope we passed the test. He looks like such a wise little man already.

COMING THIS WEEK...Family pictures!!

All right, now for the "Look What I Made". These are a couple projects I finished over Christmas break while we waited for the baby and the movers to come. First off I made a head board. I was very pleased with everything, especially the price of the pleather and the fact that Rob had access to a staple gun. The only thing that didn't work out were the buttons I tried to make to cover the staples. My home kit isn't heavy duty enough. The material was too thick. I am currently trying to work out a remedy. You can get the picture though.

Secondly, I made these photo holders for our Christmas presents to our parents. This was a fantastic project.  I cut out the letters with a scroll saw (imagine very pregnant woman in a shop drilling, sawing, etc), drilled holes for dowels on the top, then covered them with scrapbook paper and mod podge, and added some mini clothes pins to hold the photos. Wa-la! Time to get some good photos to send their way.

Welcome baby BOY!

So we had a bit of shocker the other morning...Peanut came out a BOY!  Please welcome...

Desmond James

Born 1/4/2011 @ 6:42am

6 lbs 15 oz

19.5 inches

 

We'll get a shot of him smiling one day but this was our favorite brand newborn photo. We'll be sure to post many more in the next few days as we get a little more settled in the midst of our homelessness. The movers officially took all of our house to Maryland and we are at the mercy of aunts, uncles, grandmas and grandpas for lodging. THANKS EVERYONE! 

And if you're interested in the birth story read on. If not stop here and check back for more pictures later...We had our due date check up on the morning of January 3rd. The doctor told me we could induce on Wednesday the 5th if I hadn't gone into labor by then.  So we ran some errands, ate some lunch, and came home and played Dance Dance Revolution one more time to get this baby here. It finally worked and around 5pm I started having some genuine contractions. By 7pm they were fairly strong and regular. By 9:30pm I was doubling over with pain so we decided to head to the hospital. Rob, Mom and myself eagerly grabbed our bags and headed out the door.  We got to the hospital around 10pm and decided to watch a movie to wait for the busy anesthesiologist. I was not enjoying the movie very much and am glad I had two hours to cement my resolution to never have a baby without an epidural. There was only one good thing about those two hours, the ice they give you is flavored with snow cone flavoring, so I ate basically five tigersblood snow cones until the epidural arrived. Around midnight I finally got my meds, and was a very happy and pleasant Anna once again. I dozed my way through the next four hours and another movie, until my water broke at 4am. That is an exceptionally strange sensation when you are more or less numb from the waist down. After that I was ready to have the baby by 4:30am. The nurse wanted me to wait another hour for the baby to slide down farther. So she called the doc who happened to already be busy at 5:30am, just like the anesthesiologist, so I sat for another hour waiting to meet our little one.  Doc finally showed up about an hour later and delivered our little...BOY. As he's coming out she says, "Oh good your baby has all of it's parts." I go, "Excuse me? What parts?". She holds up the little tyke and says, "It's a boy!," then looks at the shock on the nurses faces and says, "Was it supposed to be a girl?", and the whole room erupts in laughter.  God sure does have a sense of humor. It was an amazing experience. One I think I just may want to do again. We are so excited and happy to have a healthy little kid with "parts" finally at home with us. He is wonderful!