Family of Four!? The First Two Weeks

WOW--This is a post FULL of pictures!

As posted previously, our little Cooper Jay was born on May 21, 2010 at 7:33 am. She weighed 8 pounds 7.8 ounces and was 20 1/2 inches long.

While in the hospital, Daddy would get Cooper to sleep for the first stretch of the night and hold her. I cannot, for the life of me, sleep with a baby, it makes me extremely nervous, so this gave me a little rest to start off the night. :)With Axl, I didn't bring in my own blanket and regretted it when looking at those drab, ugly, uncomfortable hospital blankets. A couple days before going into labor I made this blanket to take with me to the hospital to match a pillowcase my mother-in-law, Bonnie, made me for my birthday last year. The room was quite bright...and very...pink. :)Axl came in on the 21st to meet his new sister. We didn't get many good pictures, but we did catch a really great video of him meeting her. He wore his BIG BROTHER shirt and brought in a pink bunny bear and placed it right on her ear like he does with his- adorable. The second picture makes me laugh as he was completely enamored with her the first couple days and his expression foreshadows the little bit of trouble we would have in the future... :)

By Sunday we were ready so ready to bring Cooper home and be with our little man.

We met my parents at the house and they brought Axl. He walked the entire way into the house refusing to let go of the car seat. He helped me get her out and hasn't stopped giving her her yummy since...which is quite unfortunate since she won't really take it, ha.Axl has never been all that into blankets...he has his "bunny bear" which kind of serves as his "blankie". But since we brought Cooper home and she is always covered in a blanket, he has been obsessed with having a blanket. We brought out the blanket Tyler's Aunt Naomi made for Axl before she passed and there has been no turning back--he LOVES it!For the first few days, Axl went on a pretty serious fast. :/ I was really worried about him until Grandma brought over some leftovers and he cleaned his plate! I have never seen him eat this much...those were some really good pork chops! :) I just think this is adorable. I got out of the shower one morning and found them like this.

This is our first Family (of four) Home Evening. We took a walk around the block. Cooper had her first sponge bath on May 25th. She hated it until we started rinsing her hair and then she went comatose...

Her hair gets REALLY curly when it's wet.She had her first appointment with Doctor Boarman when she was four days old. She weighed in at 8 pounds 5 ounces- 75th percentile(which was good since we went home in the high sevens). Her length, 20.5 inches was in the 90th percentile and her head circumference was 34 cm- 25th percentile.Axl doing some coloring...this lasted about 4 seconds...long enough to capture a picture. Tyler found the exact double stroller I wanted on Craig's list. This was our first walk!Axl, watching Shrek, slowly turning into his daddy...And the day o' the fence! Boy was I excited to have a fence in the backyard...it just so happened that Axl has pretty much refused to go outside since it's been up...quite a change from the perpetual "asiiiiiiiiide, asiiiiiiiiiiide, asiiiiiiiiide" we had been hearing...Axl asked to lie beside her...he loves to give her hugs and kisses...sometimes.On Memorial Day we went to spend the day at the Hamilton's. Axl carried his own swim stuff in this backpack; it was adorable. The day was great--Axl had so much fun in the water and Coop pretty much napped all day with Uncle Lyman. (I even snuck in a trip to Gymboree for an awesome sale with Liz and Brooke!)We tried giving Cooper her first pumped bottle on May 31st. It was an epic failure.Cooper had her first real bath on June 3rd. She had it so early because her cord ended up getting pulled almost off prematurely. We had to go to the Twilight Clinic, after a TERRIBLE smell ensued, where they went ahead and took it all the way off and cauterized an umbilical granuloma. All is well with the little button now. :)

I will be the first to admit that Axl is a pretty terrible eater. He loves to snack and you never know what he will eat on any given day. He has especially had an aversion to certain textures which makes it hard for us to get healthy things in him. I think it's because his teeth came in so late he doesn't really quite know how to use them. Anyway...the only fruit he will eat (sometimes) is grapes, so I was so excited when he asked for a "biiiie" of my banana that I surrendered the entire thing. He has eaten one every day since!

We tried another bottle on the 4th and it was a success-we will be able to get a babysitter at some point in time! ...something tells me it will be a while though...
Cooper's two week check-up was on the 7th and it was definitely a success. Tyler and I have pretty much been on the brink of insanity because of constant screaming, inconsolable crying, projectile vomiting, and obvious stomach trouble our little girl is having. I got out about half of my schpeel before the doctor cut me off and said he was prescribing Zantac. I was extremely relieved considering it took me about 2 months to convince Axl's doctor that there was something wrong and he was pretty much diagnosed with reflux on accident. Anyway...we have high hopes that things will calm down a bit.

Weight: 9 pounds 4 ounces- 75th percentile
Length: 21 3/4 inches- 90th percentile
Head circumference: 36 cm- 50th percentile

Even though the first two weeks have been rough, there have been countless moments of realization that we already love her to death!

Axl's EXPLODING Vocabulary!

I knew when Axl came home from my brother's house after Baby Cooper arrived with like 3 new words that we were going to be hearing a lot from him in the near future! He has all of a sudden realized that he needs to communicate with us to get what he wants. :)

I decided to try and write down all of the words he said yesterday from the time we got up to the time he went to bed, though I'm sure I missed a few.

help
snap (used when I snap his onesie)
bye bye (always said as "bye byes")
flower
yummy "mummy"
baby
hug "hu"
more (has always sounded like mu-mu-moe...not sure why)
Hey!
door "doe"
outside "asiiiiiiiiide"
fishies (goldfish) "she-shes"
please
thank you "take you"
color
yogurt "yo yo"
stuck "tu"
cracker "cacka"
book
puppy
Shrek
chair
juice "doose"
two, three, four (never says one...)
bubbles (never used without blow in front of it...and also uses this to refer to filling up the pool, swimming, etc.) "bo bubbles"
bath "ba"

Keep going, little guy--Everything new word you learn helps us get to know you a little more!

She's here!

After 39 weeks of anticipation, Cooper Jay made her debut into our lives on May 21st, 2010 at 7:33 am. She weighed 8 pounds 7.8 ounces and was 20 1/2 inches long (more than a pound and more than an inch bigger than her older brother at birth!)

So this will be my first "birth story" post. There may be more information than you care to know about me, but like many I have opted for the blog for journaling purposes and these are just some of the things I'd like to remember about this event in our lives. Because I wasn't blogging when Axl was born I plan to insert some things I remember about his birth...mostly things that stand out now because they were different than the more recent birth of Cooper. So, read at your own risk--it really was an extremely special day for our family.

So everything started early on Thursday morning, about 3:30 am when I was awoken by a painful contraction. Throughout both pregnancies I experienced many, many Braxton Hicks, but mine have NEVER been painful, just a tightening that I noticed because it was a little difficult to draw a breath. In fact, the only painful contractions I had EVER experienced were induced by Pitocin (Axl) after my water broke but I didn't naturally really go into labor. So, of course, this surprised me...enough to stay awake and time the subsequent contractions, lasting until about 5:30 or 6. Most were about 8-10 minutes apart. I had a doctor's appointment scheduled for Friday morning, my 39 weeker. I got up, a little excited I must admit, and got ready for the day, only to find that once I got moving, they slowed and sometimes I didn't even notice them. This didn't keep me, though, from tying up some loose ends (including braiding my hair--I liked having it braided and out of the way during labor and delivery with Axl) in case something was happening. The doctor's appointment proved to be a disappointment when she checked me and I had remained 1-2 cm and 75% effaced from the week before.

I went home and continued about my day. Tyler went in to work at 1:30, Axl napped and when he woke we got ready to go Wal-Mart and family night at Tyler's parents' house at 6. All throughout the day I had those contractions...some more painful than others, periods of consistency and periods of randomness. I started writing them down at one point and was timing them at about 6-10 minutes apart, but when we got out and going that evening I didn't pay much attention to them except that I was still feeling them every once in a while. By the time I got to the Hamilton's I was feeling no less than CRAPPY. Not necessarily because of the contractions when they were happening but I was just tired and sore, etc. I chased Axl around the yard for a while and at one point had to RUN to the swingset because he was approaching the swings...which were occupied and it would not have been pretty had they taken him out! At that point I just couldn't chase him around anymore so I made him, crying, sit up on the porch with me while I rested for a bit. If I was holding Axl I essentially couldn't walk because my crotch pain was so bad. I attributed it to just contracting all day and eventually just decided I needed to go home. Bonnie helped me get Axl to the car and I called Tyler on the way home. He told me I should time the contractions when I got there and to let him know what I found out.

Thankfully De was coming over that night for girl's night and she was able to meet me at the house—but not before I made my way slowly into the house with the little man and didn't realize I set an open box of cereal on the counter. He promptly found it and dumped it all over the floor. I just sat down and cried until De got there. We got him into the bed and continued on with girl’s night; watching the most intense episode of Grey’s Anatomy EVER as I slowly realized I was, in fact, in labor. I started writing the contractions down; consistently 5 minutes apart for almost 2 hours. I sent Tyler a text with the times in it and when he called back we were in the middle of a serious part of the show so I told him I’d have to call him back. (He loves telling this story…him trying to get me to decide whether or not we needed to go to the hospital and me saying, “I’m going to have to call you back; the show is getting really intense”. We ended up deciding that Tyler should come home at the end of his shift (10pm) instead of working late, we’d drop Axl off at Tom and Bonnie’s to sleep and we’d head into the hospital. It took us a little longer than expected to get things together and by the time we left the house the contractions were about 2 minutes apart. (by the way—De was freaking out more than anyone at this point, ha)

We made it into the hospital at about midnight where they hooked me up to the monitors in this extremely uncomfortable chair/bed in about an 8X8 foot room. A resident came in to check me (it has NEVER hurt me to be checked and this woman DID NOT know what she was doing! …thus a very painful experience.) and determined that I was contracting about every 2-3 minutes and had progressed from the morning to 3 cm. She then said that because we thought my contractions were lasting about 30 seconds that they were most likely not real contractions and that it probably wasn’t true labor. She would check me again in TWO HOURS and decide whether or not to admit me. I came dangerously close to hitting her in the face because by now my contractions were EXTREMELY PAINFUL and I couldn’t imagine sitting in that chair for 2 hours, much less being sent home. After she left the room and I almost shed a couple tears, a doctor came in and told me, “You’re in labor and we’ll be admitting you now.” Wow, I’m glad people can learn in a teaching hospital, but sometimes it’s not fun to be the guinea pig!

We moved over to the labor and delivery hall and got settled. I was ready for the epidural pretty quickly but that would prove to be another frustrating experience. The anesthesiologist came in in a pretty timely manner and went over all the details with us and we got set up. He began his work and shortly after the attending came in—just as the resident was having some trouble. Apparently he kept hitting bone in my back and couldn’t get the catheter thing in far enough, then ended up hitting a vein, then, after running a bunch of test doses determined that they had a “good” epi. I knew right away that it was definitely different than the epidural I had with Axl (which they did have a little trouble with, something about hitting vascular tissue), and spoke of my concerns, but they left me with instructions to let them know if I had any problems. I kept waiting for things to feel numb and it never happened. All of the test doses they had given me slowed my labor so the contractions were farther apart, shorter, and less intense…thus easier to handle which made me think it might be slowly working. WRONG. After a while everything picked back up and there was absolutely NOTHING numb about anything that was going on! We called them back in and the resident said he would do another, moving into another “space”. (I’m freaking out at this point) I try to remain calm as I politely request he wait to begin until the attending got there; which he did. Though as I sit there, exposed, hunched over, in indescribable pain, I hear the attending say, “Where is the space you entered before?” , to which the resident says, “Right here, where the blood is.”. The attending replies, “You’re going in the same space.” I, aloud, say “You’re kidding me!?” I have never really been so frustrated in my life. Though within about 2 minutes he had moved to the above space, smoothly placed the epidural and given me a combination epi and spinal—I think because they knew I was so mad and in pain. The feeling that followed was euphoric and I was just full of relief. This working epidural was placed after 4 am. While getting the second epidural my water broke and I was ready to get things going!

At about 5:30, I think, I was checked again and she determined I had another bag of water to break, which they did and my parents made their way from Paris.

I was checked again at 6:30 and was at 9. Shortly after 7am I was at 10 and began pushing. (One small detail I should mention is that at this point I told my dad I didn’t mind if he stayed in the room as long as he didn’t look, ha. I NEVER would have thought I would do this, but it was nice to know he was there. He just sat in the back corner of the room with his head facing the wall J) I pushed the same length of time, about 20 or 25 minutes, as I did with Axl, and little Cooper entered the world at 7:33 am! The pushing experience was definitely different than Axl and more painful than with Axl but I will spare most of the details. Surprisingly I didn’t tear near as badly with Cooper, which proved to be wonderful for recuperation. Also—a side note for me to remember is that the epidural does not make a lick of difference by the time it is time to push. It still hurts extremely bad…especially the stitching part…

All in all I’m glad it’s over and Cooper is worth every miserable moment experienced during pregnancy, labor, and delivery. We love our little girl so much already and can’t wait to share her life!

Just for the record.

I consumed my last Reese's Egg today from my after Easter clearance stash. Cooper better decide to show up soon.

Also- Last week's appointment was on Friday...still 1 and 50.

Loving some cousins.

Melting

When we put Axl down for his nap today he, in recent typical fashion, yelled "Hey!" at me when I started to walk out the door. This is his way of stalling a little bit and it's pretty cute, but today after he yelled "hey", which is usually followed by some jibberish when you say, "Yes?", he took out his yummy, outstretched his arm and said, "Hu" (translation: hug). He melts me. :)