Happy Holidays!

Just wanted to wish everyone Happy Holidays, whichever ones you may be celebrating!

Here are a couple more pics of our little linebacker to hopefully put a smile on your face!

The Greatest Gift

Sorry for the long wait everyone. Surgery went ok, but our little guy turned out to be a linebacker so it was rough getting him out. Caused quite a bit of trauma inside and my recovery has been slow and painful. Not to mention that my spinal wore off during surgery and I ended up having a huge panic attack, resulting in something being put in my IV that basically knocked me out. I was seriously in a stupor when he finally made his arrival. But I was alert enough to hear the nurse say "It's definitely a boy and he has a full head of black hair!"
Possibly more details later, if anyone wants them, but for now I'll leave you with these pictures and some stats. Our little linebacker was born at 8:46AM Monday December 10, weighing in at 9pounds 6.6 ounces and measuring 21 inches long. He is truly everything we've hoped and prayed for and we couldn't be happier!

Game Plan for Baby Boy

Had my pre-op appointment Thursday and got my labs drawn today. If everything goes according to plan, baby boy will make his arrival sometime between 8 and 9am. Here's how it should go down...
Call hospital at 4:30am to check we are still on schedule (meaning they haven't been bombarded with women in labor). We better still be on schedule!
Leave house around 4:45am.
Arrive at hospital at 5:30am, begin all the preparations. They'll check on the baby (non-stress test), shave and prep me, iv me, give me a spinal, and whatever else they need to do.
Hopefully we'll be in the OR by 8am. Since this is my second c-section it will take around an hour and be slightly more complicated than the first.
Once baby boy is stabilized, hubby should get to hold him so I can get a good look at him before they whisk him away.
Hubby will go with baby boy while they do all the things they need to do to him back in my room. I'll be stitched up and sent to recovery for 1-2 hours.
Once the spinal wears off I'll be taken to my room where I will hopefully get to hold my son in my arms for the first time! At that point, hubby will leave to pick our daughter up and bring her to the hospital to meet her baby brother!
I'll be in the hospital until Wednesday or Thursday, depending on how things go.

So, unless you hear from me sometime Monday you can safely assume our son is being born! I can't say for sure when I'll be able to update here.... not until I get home for sure. Sorry to leave ya'll hanging, I promise to post as soon as I have access!

Unless the plan changes, my next post will be a birth announcement!

It's a scary world we're living in

I just read this news story and it scared the crap out of me. 2+ years ago we were living in Nebraska. We lived in the same town as the shooter in this story. We shopped at that mall. Some friends of ours just moved from there a few weeks ago. We have other friends who still live there. Hopefully, they were all at work and not shopping. Hopefully none of their family or friends were there either.

My thoughts and prayers are with the people affected by this tragedy in Omaha. Please lend yours as well. I really don't know what else to say right now, I'm a little bit in shock.

Big and small

Just for fun, here are some pictures of our biggest cat laying on top of our smallest cat. These two adore each other and lay together a lot. I just happened to catch this photo-op the other day...




See that bit of black sticking out from under his stomach? That's her tail! He's literally laying on top of the entire lower half of her tiny body!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

We (finally) finished putting up our Christmas decorations this weekend. Here's how the house turned out this year:



It was a lot of work, but we're pretty happy with the results!

We also went this weekend and cut down our own Christmas tree. It was my first time ever doing that, though my husband said his family did it all the time growing up. We had a lot of fun choosing our tree, then my husband (with our daughter's 'help' of course) cut it down, they shook it for us and wrapped it, then we loaded it on the van and brought it home!
We had a hard time getting it to stand up in the tree stand, even going so far as to buy a different stand with no more luck. Finally, I looked it up on the web and discovered you should pound the stand into the base of the tree with a hammer (there are little spikes in the base) before tightening the screws and standing it all up. That finally did the trick!
Put the lights on it and decided to wait until the next day for ornaments because it was pretty late by then. Good thing, because we got up Sunday morning to find the cats had gotten into the tree, pulling 1/3 of the lights off and leaving some flattened spots where they were laying on the branches. I suspect it was our biggest cat laying in the tree because the flatted area was pretty big! So, we've decided we won't put any ornaments up. Hopefully the lights will stay on the tree from now on... we've been spraying them with water every time they go by it. I've tried some other 'remedies' to keep them away and it hasn't worked, so we're just going to have to rely on prayer to keep our tree standing!