Clint's Birthday etc.

Well, so for Valentines Day we went to Hale Center Theater and watched Les Miserables. That was fun.  My birthday this year fell on Easter Sunday (I think for only the second time in my life).  Clint did a cute Easter egg hunt that ended with me finding pearl earrings. :)  We went out to Sushi the night before and had cake with friends, but somehow none of this was documented. We did take a few Easter photos with Max, but none of them turned out very well.

Clint's birthday fell the day after Father's Day.  For Father's Day I printed some photos and put them in a big frame we had been given for Christmas. You can see it on the couch in the background of the second pic here.  For his birthday I used the Buick clock idea--I've been sitting on that one for a while.  It's a bit hard to come up with gifts for Clint!

We also, of course, had our annual May-June birthday barbeque.  I did not document this with pictures, but Clint documented me afterwards eating leftovers of Ameri's delicious cake.  Mmmm.

Ice Castle!

So last January before I had Max, Megan came out for a little trip to Utah.  One of the fun things we did was go to a cool ice castle in Midway. :)   Megan and I were going to take some cute pregnant sisters pictures, but she came down with Bell's Palsy and her face didn't want to cooperate.  So instead I will post this cool silhouette picture of us.  (Hint: I'm the short one.)

It was so romantic, I couldn't resist a smoochy photo too...

I thought I had already posted these pic, but I cannot find the evidence.  So, here you go!

Some (not all ) professional photos..

A capital fellow

Whoa! It's different out here!

Meeting Mom

Max was born with dark hair. He weighed 7 lbs 15 oz  and was 20.5 inches.

It’s difficult to describe how I felt when they brought Max over to me.  Imagine you are having a really heavy, sweaty sleep, and someone suddenly wakes you up, and says, “Hey this is the man you are going to marry” and shoves your future husband into your arms.  It was an overwhelming and somewhat awkward introduction to someone who would come to mean everything to me—but previously had been someone I just imagined.  It was surreal.

I don’t think it all really hit me until we were about to leave the hospital.  I was praying about our name choice, and I become overwhelmed with the feeling of responsibility and love for this little person that Heavenly Father had entrusted to my care.  I really didn’t (and don’t) know much about kids.  I was never a kid-person so to speak, and honestly I was pretty afraid to have one of my own.  And those first few weeks with him were terrifying and exhausting.  But honestly, Max is quite a capital fellow.  I’m not quite sure what I ever did to deserve having him in my life, but I’m sure happy he’s here to stay. 

Meet Max! 

She had a baby!

For those interested parties, here is the birth story.  I was a week late and scheduled to go into the hospital Sunday night to be induced Monday morning. I didn’t really want to have to be induced, but at this point it felt like the baby was never going to come (probably because I had engaged in the usual delusion that my baby was going to come early.  But to be fair, I had been having cramps and other signs for a few weeks.)  Clint and I had planned to go to a movie or dinner that Saturday evening as a final hoorah since Sunday I was going in to the hospital and life thenceforth would be forever different (and difficult to see movies together for at least the next ten years).  But no movies seemed appealing. I ended up going to the grocery store, and eventually it was 9:30.  I put up something of a fit, and we went to the Bombay House.  However, at the Bombay House, I started feeling dreadful.  As I wrote in an email to my mom later that evening:

. . .

I would just like to say that there is NO WAY I am going to tell the hospital that I don't want to be induced Monday night.  I am so sick of this.  I keep having these horrible mini labors and I've been having random contractions for FOREVER it seems like.  We went to Bombay House for dinner and the baby started moving all around like he was trying to rip out of my belly like in Aliens.  It hurt so bad!  He was punching my kidneys and who knows what else in there.  And I started having these hideous contractions and my back was killing me.  It was horrible.  But am I in the hospital? NO.  Because then after suffering for like an hour, after going the bathroom and laying still on my side for a while it petered out.    Then Clint came in and wanted to show me the recliner sofa we got from his grandpa. And I couldn’t lay in that position because then the baby started going crazy again and punching my guts out, and I cramped up.

This is dreadful.  I am going to eat some of the Indian food I couldn't eat at dinner, and then go to bed.

So around midnight I ate some Indian food and went to bed.  However, I couldn’t really sleep—I kept getting up to go to the bathroom and still felt kinda crampy and had back pain.  I took some Tylenol somewhere around 6 am.  When Clint tried to wake me up for church at 8 am , I said, “I’m not going! I feel horrible!  I hardly slept at all!”  But of course, at the last minute I decided to go anyway and threw on a dress and headed out the door (with no breakfast or make-up). 

However, things didn’t go so well at church.  They announced in sacrament meeting that someone who was due AFTER me (in FEBRURARY!) had already had her baby.  I was accordingly demoralized.  And I still felt terrible!  I was having back pains and spent the whole hour of sacrament meeting with my legs spread completely apart while I leaned forward with my hands on my knees. 

At this point Clint convinced me that maybe we should go home—but I managed to speak to a friend first that Clint had invited over for dessert after church.  Yeah…we didn’t end up getting to eat that peach cobbler though our friends enjoyed it!  After sacrament meeting, Clint convinced me to lie down and try timing the back pains I was having.  I didn’t think they were contractions because I’d had contractions in my abdomen before.  But after 45 minutes of timing, I’d been having these pains every three or four minutes regularly.

Clint thought we should head to the hospital but I kept stalling….said we should wait an hour…called my mom etc.  I was terrified of getting my hopes up and going to the hospital only to be sent home.  This happened to my mom (and my sister I think too).  Apparently in my family we have very slow early labor, but once things get going, they go!  I was consistent with the trend.

We checked into the hospital around three, and they admitted me since I was dilated to a two.  From that point on I progressed quite regularly and continued to have contraction pain mostly in my back.  At six pm I was five centimeters.  At this point, I boarded the crazy train.  (Yes, this is a reference to Ozzie.)  That’s really what it was like—my body was this runaway train that I was trapped inside of for a wild ride of a lifetime.  I could hardly breathe, my hands were tingling…oh, and the pain was DEFINITELY not just in my back anymore.  I went from a five to a ten in forty-five minutes. 

I may insert here, that I had said that I would like to have a natural childbirth, but that I wasn’t going to hang all my hopes on it since I knew one can never really plan a birth.   Clint, of course, said that meant I wasn’t going to go natural.  He thought if I wasn’t 100% committed, I wouldn’t do it.  Well, I did do it! Hah!  Of course, the fact that my labor (well from 2 cm on anyway) was really short certainly helped.  At the end of the forty-five minutes I was certainly in the “I can’t do this give me anything you’ve got” phase, but according to the Bradley Method, this is one of the “emotional signposts” that a woman is almost to the pushing stage, which I was.

The pushing stage was really painful and awful in its own way, but at least during this stage I felt more in control of my body.  I became aware of the fact that the on-call doctor delivering my baby and my husband were watching the pro-bowl while all this was going down.  (Humph.  Fortunately, I had the best delivery nurse ever.  To Clint’s credit, he did to a great job at applying counter pressure to my back during contractions.)  Anyway, I pushed for about another 45 minutes which was fairly discouraging since my mom didn’t have to do much pushing.  She said once her babies’ eyebrows were  out, the rest of ‘em just slid right out.  Well, I wouldn’t say there was any sliding out, but out he came after some hard effort on my part.

His cord was around his neck once, so unfortunately, the doctor did not just plop him on my belly all gooey and fresh.  He was whisked off, and weighed, and cleaned up a bit.  But perhaps that is okay because I’m fairly certain I was in something of a dazed shock.  I was relieved to be done and incredulous that I had just pushed an entire living human being out of my body.  And wow—it was weird to immediately be able to look down and see my toes….and the disturbing bowl of jelly that was once a big beach ball.  

She (and he) grew!

This next one is my due date, January 19th.  When is this baby gonna get here?

This is January 23rd, three days before the baby came.

So do I look pregnant from the back? This is one week before I was due.

I do look preggo from the front! (Though this is clear back in October..)

You can't deny the cheesy heart/belly shot...

And one of the happy expectant couple...

New Years Eve

Our first event of the evening was eating out at Carver's with friends.  Delish!  We then made an appearance at a stake family dance.  Dancing after gorging on steak is difficult enough, but even more so when you are almost nine months pregnant.  Fortunately, we soon moved to our house to play Bezer Wizzer, the greatest triva game of all time.  Afterwards, we had apple cider toasts and watched the ball drop!

Christmas

So, I was something of a Grinch this Christmas.  I told Clint that Christmas was cancelled (and I basically didn't buy any gifts).  So he bought some gifts for himself, wrapped them, opened them at his parents house and made a big show about how I am such a great wife for finding him such gifts.  Hah.  Typical Clint.  I did give him a coupon book with such gems as "a whole day of being able to answer questions with yes or no, no further explanation required."  If you know Clint, you'll know that he's very neurotic about being "questioned."  But apparently this is a man thing, not just a Clint thing because I found the idea online! I also included a bunch of other useful coupons that were more boring such as doing the dishes or making him some "macho nachos" while he watches sports.  You know, man stuff.

Clint did a great job at being Christmasy when I wasn't much in the mood.  (I think it's because I'm stressed about work and the baby coming etc.)  He got me some baby monitors, a bunch of cute maternity shirts, tickets to see Les Mis at the Hale theater, some gloves with special fingers so you can use a touch screen phone, and some other doodads. He also tricked me and got the Cajun Night Before Christmas even though he pretended he didn't. :)  I read it last year on Christmas Eve with his family but just from finding the text online.  This year we had the book--and the pictures make everything better. :)   We had a bigger group for Christmas Eve this year, but sadly Clint's brother Greg and fam aren't in the picture though they came back a bit later in the evening. 

On Christmas Eve we had a feast of ham, "heavenly" potatoes, fresh rolls, cranberry dip, salad, pumpkin roll etc.  We chatted, I read the story, and in the evening we played a rousing game of Taboo.  My team won, of course. :)  

On Christmas Day we had a nice brunch, opened presents, then visited Grandpa in the rehab center where he is recovering from a surgery.  Clint and I briefly tried video chatting with my family, but a three way video chat doesn't work very well with six kids involved. Furthermore, apparently gchat won't do split screen, so we just watched the screen schizophrenically flash back and forth for a while before we had to quit.  We then watched half of Forrest Gump on TV while waiting to talk more to my family (which didn't happen). So we played more games with Clint's family (Battle of the Sexes, Imagine If) and watched Elf all whilst eating a lot of random Christmas garbage.  A fine holiday, I say. 

Clint and I actually stayed in Idaho to Saturday.  I played games with the fam one other night (Farkle and Taboo again) though Clint scammed out to watch sports.  I'm glad his family likes games because I love games! We also watched Baby Mama which I have only seen once before, but both times I was surprised at how funny that movie is.  Siigh.  I had a lot of fun relaxing with the fam and being a bum.  Clint was pretty much as big of a bum as I was, so this is my weak justification for not helping out more.  Oops.  Maybe I am not the best guest, but I am lucky enough to have the best in-laws!

Baby Shower Bombay

I was fortunate enough to also have a baby shower with the wives of "the crew"--Clints' group of friends that I married into so to speak.  The lovely Erika and Lindsay (who only just had a babies themselves) hosted along with Ameri.  Basically we stuffed ourselves with delicious Indian food and talked.  Mmm.  Peshwari naan....mango lassi....sigh.  I submit to you that Bombay House cannot be beat for the best Indian food around.  I am lucky to have such great women in my life.