With a month passing by since my last post, everyone is wondering where have we been? I wish I could tell you all that we’ve been some place interesting, but truthfully we’ve been absolutely no where! I’ve been stuck in the house with a sick Husband, sick baby, and then I was lucky enough to not only get sick, but to get Very Very Very sick. We went through a 3 week period of just trying to fight off a cold. Andrew came home sick one day from work and I tried so hard not to catch it. But long behold he got myself and the baby sick. I was so mad that he got my little boy sick, I’m sure I overreacted about it. I couldn’t help but be worried because Brendon is still so young and little. Here I am doing everything I can to not get him sick by keeping him in our home and away from everyone, and Andrew brings home a really bad cold for both me and Brendon. I told Andrew the next time he gets sick he gets to sleep in the other room and use the other Bathroom and stay FAR AWAY FROM US! That may sound mean, but I can’t even explain how sick myself and the baby got. Andrew really didn’t get that sick, but I suffered with a head cold, sore throat, really bad runny nose, fever, chills and all the worst symptoms of a cold. Luckily my mom came out for a few days to help us out. Andrew went out of town while the baby and I were sick so my mom was nice enough to help me out. I don’t know what I would have done. I couldn’t do anything except nurse. I just laid in bed most of the day and all night and my mom would come in every now and then so the baby could nurse. Good thing she was there to help take care of us, the two babies! Well, after a few weeks of fighting off the cold, we are all better now and so happy to be feeling better.

Andrew went out of town again this week and I’m just here taking care of the little guy. I went in this week to see the General Surgeon and finally set up my appointment to get my gallbladder taken out. I’m not looking forward to surgery, but it will be nice knowing that it can’t get infected anymore and if I do get pregnant again that pregnancy won’t be so difficult. I’m hoping pregnancy will be a lot easier next time around since I won’t be having nausea and pain every day of the pregnancy. So, if you were wondering what happened to us, now you know, nothing too exciting, just a lot of rest and tlc. One thing that I have done a lot of lately is just watch tv.

Has anyone else seen the show? Could that be the stupidest show ever created? Yes, it probably is! If you have seen this show then you probably understand what I am saying, and if you haven’t let me just say, the show is pretty much about tearing apart families one family at a time. It says on their website that the show is a celebration of motherhood. How is it a celebration to take away mothers from their kids and put them back in full time careers while their children get to have strangers watch them day after day, year after year. What has happened to the world? Now they purposely try to tear families apart. It wasn’t enough to let people ruin their own children, now a tv show’s sole purpose is to help ruin children and the family by taking away mothers and giving them the opportunity to go back into a full time career. This show made me feel sad and depressed for the little babies and kids that are losing their moms.

How selfish those women are to have a bunch of children and then leave them to someone else’s care while they “go after their dreams.” The big dummy’s shouldn’t have had any kids if they didn’t want to take care of them but wanted to go after their dreams. I guess its really true that the biggest cause of divorce as stated by our latter day prophet is Selfishness. It’s not just a selfless thing to go through pregnancy and labor to have a child, that’s just the tiny tip of the iceberg, the main part under the water, that most people don’t recognize, appreciate, or even acknowledge, is the complete selfless characteristic of staying home and taking care of your own children. Hopefully tlc will come to their senses’ and stop trying to rip families apart one at a time. If anyone else feels the same way that I do, I hope you all speak out to tlc and email them at soccermomcasting9@gmail.com and make sure they know and understand that their show is disgusting and should be thrown off the air!

Everyone has been asking me about my new job, so I figured that I would write a post. My new job with Grant Thornton is going very well and I enjoy it so far. Due to the busy season I’m actually helping out the auditors so I’m learning a lot about audit and accounting related things. My actual job that I was hired for is classified as Business Advisory Services (BAS) which is more along the lines of technical auditing and other advisory services. Limited travel is involved with the job, and when Brendon gets bigger it will be great to have my family with me when I travel. I look forward to getting more established at my job so that I won’t be the “new guy” forever. Of course I always enjoy my hobby of website development to make a little $ on the side.

We finally got around to taking some pictures of our house. As you can see, a lot of the rooms are empty, and we still have more to go. We love our stainless steel appliances, but we still have a huge bill to pay off. We still have to paint and put pictures on the walls, and hopefully find some curtains that match everything. Our pantry is packed with tons of food, thanks to Roni (my mom). I don’t ever know how we’ll eat all the food in the pantry because it seems like the food never ends. I love having a loft because we can have our treadmill in it, but it’s still so large we can’t fill it with furniture. The best part about our house is having 2 sinks in the master bathroom. That way Andrew’s spit doesn’t get on my faucet! But I think the best part of our house is all the baby toys all over the place…swing, play yard, bath tub, and an endless supply of burp cloths. It’s great having our own home, and there’s nothing like having a family to fill it.

Little Brendon is now one month old and in such a tiny body, he has the biggest personality. You can never really imagine how much you can love someone or something until you have a child. I am in love with my little boy and I have never felt so much happiness in my entire life. I no longer wonder what it is like to stay home and be a full time mommy! It’s great! And no, I don’t knit and sit around in a rocking chair all day like a granny. The first question my best friend Jolene had for me once she knew I was a mommy was, do you sit around and knit? Well, I do have a leather rocking recliner that I really love. So I guess I am a little like a granny now. I know she was just joking with me, but it made me realize how so many people must think of me as crazy. I’ve had so many people see me with a baby and say..wow, you are so young to have a baby. It’s as if the world doesn’t understand why we have children anymore. People become far too selfish and forget the greatest joy in life in raising little ones. I’m glad I have the gospel to constantly remind me what is most important. It’s not strange to want to have children, to me its strange to not want to have children.

Well at around a month old Brendon now coos like crazy, smiles a ton, and now has started to interact with us. It’s so much fun playing with him and his toys. When I say playing I mean, showing him a toy, getting him to grab it, and he tries to stick it straight in his mouth. Any interaction with him is absolutely precious. It’s crazy cause he went from hating his bath and changing table to loving both of them. Now instead of screams of bloody murder, I get smiles and coos of interaction. The funniest thing happened today. As he was cooing in my arms I was getting ready to feed him and I swear he gave his first word. Of course it was on accident and he didn’t know he was saying anything. But I swear that he said Mommy. It was so wierd cause it was as clear as day in the middle of his cooing. It was the funniest and cutest thing ever! He must be smart like his daddy! The days are definitely flying by and Brendon is getting big and chubby! It’s hard to believe that just a little over a month ago I came home from the hospital with a little baby boy. Brendon and I are so set with our routine that it feels like he’s always been with me and its never been any different. And that is definitely a GOOD thing!

My little king is now 3 weeks old. Time is flying by and each day he gets bigger and bigger. One of Andrew’s friends recently said that he didn’t miss the days of his son being a newborn. Maybe it’s different for everyone, but I feel like I miss each day as it goes by because he is getting bigger. It’s so much fun to watch him change each day. My little nuni monster has quite the personality. He has a favorite toy (his swing), a favorite room in our house (the master bathroom) and his favorite thing to do is EAT! Who doesn’t love to eat, we all do! He nurses probably every 2 hours, sometimes he even roots every hour and screams until he gets his way and gets some Nuni! If you are wondering why the master bathroom is his favorite room I can’t really tell you why. Every day when I go in to get ready I bring him with me and put him on his blanket on the ground and he happily lays there cooing and looking around at everything. If I try to put him on the ground in other rooms he flips out and whats to be held. I’m not sure why he loves the bathroom, but he does. Night time is still me waking up every 2 hours to change and feed him. He has no problem letting me know he wants me awake. But he’s still the cutest thing to wake up to even when I’m exhausted and living off of a few hours of sleep each night. Last weekend we got the chance to finally take some professional newborn pictures. I was so afraid he would flip out and scream the whole time, especially considering that he hates to be naked. But he was great! He was wide awake taking it all in and giving some great poses. He was a little angel, which I couldn’t have been happier about since we were paying for the photographers time. If you want to see the pictures we took click here.

Every day he makes new sounds and gives new faces. His little looks of anger, happiness, and curiousity are just adorable! The funniest thing about him is his cry. When he gets to the point of wanting food and wanting it NOW he gives out this funny scream that sounds like a hyena. Any time he gives his hyena cry I just have to laugh because its such a hilarious sound. The only other funny thing that he likes to do is NOT take a pacifier. When my mom was staying with us she would give him a pacifier to calm him down and he would gladly take it. When she left I figured I’d give it a try and use a pacifier if I needed to. There was only one problem. Why should he take a plastic pacifier when he knows he can get Nuni from the person trying to give him a plastic pacifier. Any time I’d try to give him the pacifier he’d lift up one eye brow and shake his head not wanting to take it. I’d get it in his mouth and he’d open his mouth up really wide and start crying. If he did take it within a second he’d spit it right out. If I tried to hold it in his mouth he’d get really angry and just start screaming. HE’S JUST TOO SMART! I tried over and over and he still won’t take a pacifier from me because he’d rather nurse. Silly little boy! So, the bad thing is this leads to sore nipples, but the good thing is this leads to more nursing and losing weight faster. I still have plenty of weight I want to drop. I can’t wait for the go ahead to work again from the OB. I even had my mom drive all the way from Cali to Colorado so I could have my treadmill. I need to lose my rolls while Brendon needs to gain some! I’m still loving every moment of being a mommy. It’s the best feeling in the whole world. I don’t live day to day anymore, I live for the baby kisses, coos, and smiles. Life couldn’t be any more perfect then having the two men I love in my life, Andrew and Brendon.

It’s great being a daddy! To be honest, I really didn’t know what to expect since this is my first time being a father. I thought that during my five days of paternal leave from work would be kind of like a “vacation” that I could spend with my wife and baby. However, losing sleep didn’t make it much of a vacation, but it was definitely worth it. It was quite an experience to be in the labor and delivery room, and seeing Brendon for the first time. We’ve been taking a bunch of pictures to capture all the moments because everyone tells us that they grow so fast, and we want to make sure we have plenty of photos and video footage. So far he sprayed Jen and my mother-in-law, but I wasn’t quick enough with the camera. One week ago, I had never changed a diaper, even with 9 nieces and nephews, but now I’ve had a lot of experience. Jen is a pro at everything so she has walked me along.

I can’t believe how strong Brendon is. He can give quite a fight when he wants to have his hands in front of his face. Also, he is almost able to flip himself completely to the side, so we need to keep a close eye on him. I just take it as a good sign that he will be a great athlete. In just a few years I’ll be taking him to the ice rink teaching him how to ice skate!

We were very happy to be all settled in and not have to worry about unpacking after the baby came. We were able to unpack and get everything cleaned up before Brendon came home. If you want to check out photos of Brendon’s room, you can see them by clicking HERE. Under the supervision of Jen, I painted the walls, hung everything up, and put the furniture together. It’s so nice to finally live in a house and not an apartment. We love where we live, and we are glad that we made the decision to move out here.

Now that I am finally starting to feel better I can give everyone an update on how life is with our little boy. This first post is going to be dedicated to explaining how fun labor is. I’ve had a lot of friends ask me how it went and this will answer all your questions that I haven’t gotten a chance to answer. If you are like my mom and don’t want to hear another labor story then skip this post and go on to the next to read all about Brendon, but if you are a little curious to know how it went for us, then read on. When the idea of being induced was given as an option to me, I wasn’t too sure I liked the idea. But boy am I glad I went with it. If the baby hadn’t come in another week he could have been another pound bigger, and that would have made things a lot worse!

We went in on January 15th at night to get things going. The first dose of internal medicine they gave me was supposed to kick things off until the morning. Well, instead of working to dilate me, all it did was give me incredibly painful cramps and contractions that didn’t dilate me at all. So, in the morning they decided to give me the next step of treatment which would hopefully dilate me and put me in labor. I got the oxytoxin and luckily it did dilate me. The only problem was with both doses of medicine my contractions came on too fast and I wasn’t dilated enough to give birth.

So by the early afternoon on January 16th I was in pain and was no where near close to delivery. At this time they decided to break my water because that would make things move faster. Well, it definitely made things move faster, and it made my contractions go up to the intensity of delivery. That would have been a great thing if I was dilated to 10, but I was only dilated to 2cm. By this time I was in more then enough pain for the epidural. I used to worry because people told me the needle was big, but guess what, when you are in that much pain, who cares! The last thing you are worried about is a needle, even a big one at that. After the epidural things were looking better, I was able to smile a little bit, I had a lot less pain and I could rest up until I had to push. Things progressed quickly from here until I was ready to push around 8pm. The only thing in the way now was the catheter. Well, here was my first scare. They couldn’t get it out. The baby’s head had descended so quickly it was in the way and the catheter was not coming out. They tried a few tricks that they had done before on other patients, and nothing was working. This had never happened before in the entire hospital and the doctor was getting ready to call a urologist. With the catheter in the way my doctor wasn’t sure if vaginal delivery was going to be possible. Of course this started to scare the heck out of me cause the last thing after going through 10 hours of labor was wanting to go into a C-section. Of course in my mind I was praying fervently that things would work out. Thankfully they did and the catheter did come out with maybe a little more bruising to the bladder then they wanted to cause.

So, everything was set and with a few counts I started pushing. After a little over an hour of hard labor and pushing, I was exhausted and I was wondering how I could keep going. My contractions were erractic and spreading out because this wasn’t natural labor, I was being induced. The doctor was starting to worry that if I didn’t push the baby out with the hard contractions on the baby we would have to deliver through a C-section. Andrew says that when I heard those words that he thinks I pushed about 10 times harder then I was originally pushing. Is that true? Probably! That definitely gave me a little more motivation to push harder and breath less. Within 10 minutes of her comment and a lot of major pushing the baby was out. It was hard to feel excited at first because I felt really sick all of a sudden and something didn’t feel right. Well, as they cleaned the baby up the doctor took a look to see what had happened. After a few minutes there was a count of 3 internal 2nd degree lacerations and 1 external 2nd degree laceration. And here I was worried about an episiotomy. I didn’t get one, but instead I came out of labor with 4 major tears, some being internal.

If you looked at my pictures and wondered why I looked like heck, now you know. After a long labor, a lot of pain, and having to lay there for another additional hour after labor to be stiched up with A LOT of stiches I looked like a truck had run me over. I am definitely not one of those mothers that has makeup on, my hair done and I look all picture perfect. I mean, how would I feel well considering that the worst part of the labor, the pushing stage was more then an hour long and the epidural didn’t help at all and you definitely feel that pain. After all was said and done and the doctors took the baby to the nursery to be cleaned off with Andrew and my mom stayed with me as I layed there near tears. I told her I didn’t know how in the world I was ever going to go through all of it again. She just kept saying, you forget what it’s like. Well, by this time I really hadn’t spent much time with the baby, they had whisked him away and I was just laying there in pain waiting to be moved to another room. I finally got to my room around 1:30am. We decided we wanted the baby to stay with us and not in the nursery regardless of how tired we were, I wanted him in our room. I decided to feed him right away since he was rooting and ready to go. As I fed him and held him I couldn’t get over the fact how adorable he was. After he ate and had a quick diaper change by Andrew I held him as he fell alseep. It was now about 4:00am in the morning and I told Andrew he could go to sleep I would let the baby lay on me for a little while longer before I had him put the baby in his little bed. Well, the baby never made it to his bed. I spent the next 4 hours cuddling him, nursing him and just adoring him. Every time I looked at him I could not believe he came from us. I could not believe that this is how life worked. Emotionally, mentally and physically I was in the most pain and exhaustion I had ever felt. But at the exact same time mentally, emotionally, and spiritually I felt the most joy and gratitude for being able to bring life to this earth. It was the best moment of my life. Not being in labor, but laying there with him in my arms was the best thing that has ever happened to me. Looking down at him as he looked up at me was as close to Heavenly Father I had ever felt. And he is by far the greatest accomplishment of my life, and nothing compares to him.

So what I know now is, you don’t forget the pain of labor, you overcome it. You overcome the pain and realize that no matter what you have to go through it was not only worth it for the little one in your arms, but it will be worth it again for the other little ones that will be in my arms in the future. Pregnancy and labor was not easy and never will be for any woman, but the end result brings you the best thing in all eternities, a family.

Every day is definitely a different page to our story. Each day you wake up and learn something new about taking care of your little one. And then after you learn something you think, great, now I’ll know this for tomorrow. But then tomorrow comes and you end up not using what you learned but learning something else completely different. Each day I wake up completely exhausted but so happy to have him here with us. Even at night when he wakes us up various times, usually every 2 hours, I could care less, I’m woken up knowing I get to see his adorable little face that according to the majority of people, looks like mommy. No matter how tired I feel or what time of the day or night it is, I just can’t wait to see him and spend every second I can with him. My parents are visiting and it is so hard for me to give him up for them to hold cause I just want to hold him all day and night. Even when his little lungs give out the loudest scream ever, I am still reaching out to try and comfort him and cuddle him. It was hard for me to even put him down to type these up. People kept telling me life with a baby is a hard lifestyle change. To me its the best change I’ve ever had to make cause I always feel so excited to see him, hold him, play with him or just stare at him with awe as long as time permits me. My mom is being such a sweetheart offering to take him at any time of the night if he cries and we can’t sleep, but I can’t even give him up when he’s screaming at the top of his lungs non stop in the middle of the night and I’m living off of little sleep. Every time I wake up I feel so excited just to see him. He is just too cute! Well, long story short, life with a baby is much is much more wonderful, exciting, and just awesome then I ever thought it would be. He’s absolutely perfect and he is definitely the little love of my life.

With only 8 days left until my due date I can already tell something very important. This little boy is just as stubborn as his Daddy! No matter what I seem to do, no matter how hard I unpack and work on our new home, the baby doesn’t budge! I am way overdoing it! I am constantly on my feet, carrying boxes up and down stairs, and nothing! This little boy likes it way too much inside of me! I am still not dialated and things seem to be progressing way slower then they should be. It’s not hard to tell that at almost 40 weeks I am very large and uncomfortable now. When he gives me a kick or a punch it definitely is more painful then fun to feel. When I went to the OB a few days ago, she measured me once again and was thrilled to tell me that this little boy is not going to be a small baby. When I explained that my mom gave birth to babies all larger then 8lbs, one that was pretty much 10lbs, she said, well, it looks like he’s going to be a big one! I cannot explain how ready I am to have him. Everyone keeps telling me I say that until he’s here, but bologna, I want him out! This pregnancy was rough for various reasons, but I am so tired of my gallbladder constantly making me feel sick. I will feel so relived and happy once he is out, no matter how little sleep I get at night I will be happy. At least I’ll be able to sleep at night without a constant feeling of needing to pee. Well, Andrew predicted Jan. 4th as the due date, and it has come and gone. I’m guessing if he doesn’t come by Jan. 10th, he is going to be forced out on Jan. 16th by induction. Does anyone have any other predictions? Well, if this little boy has to be induced out of me then he is definitely as stubborn as his Daddy!