Grannie

Christmas this year was very rememberable but in a sad way.  My (Josh) grannie died at her home on Sunday morning.  She was 87.  She was the last of my grandparents still alive.
She was the classic grandmother.  She was very sweet, loved her family, cooked good food, gave good hugs, etc.  She lived in Little Rock so I did not see her super often but always loved my time with her.  She almost always made me chicken and dumplings when I went to visit because she knew it was my favorite.  Other family members would always show up also when I came because they knew Grannie would be making me chicken and dumplings and her's were the best. She also loved to play games and was always up for playing them with her grandchildren.  She was especially good at Boggle and I always loved playing Rack-o with her when I was younger. We will miss her.

Family

I know, I know, it has been too long since I posted some pictures of Clara. It seems that having two kids under 17 months makes things very busy. It seems like we don't have time to do hardly anything. We are very thankful for the days that Esther is at daycare during this time that we are off work. It helps us to rest and catch up.

Speaking of Esther, she is doing pretty good with Clara. She is overly helpful most of the time. She hands us the pacifier at least 100 times a day. Some of the stuff she does is very cute like helping us to burp the baby. And it is awesome when we go in to get her up in the morning and the first thing she does is say "baby?, baby?". She also gives her kisses and rubs her head. But there are also times when she is a little too rough because she does not realize just how careful she needs to be.
Clara is doing good. At her check up last Friday, everything looked good. She was within an ounce of being back to her birth weight. She is starting to be awake for longer stretches in the day which is good. She is a good crier for sure, she can really get going.

Here we are the day we brought Clara home

Margo's parents

Margo's dad with the girls

Josh's Parents

 Margo's grandmother

The cousins (Margo's side)

Sweet sleeping Clara

Silly Esther

One week? Seriously?

Clara is one week old today and today is her due date. She has actually been home for a couple days. It has been a little crazy around here so I am just now getting to blog about it. She got released on Sunday afternoon. She was able to spend the night Saturday night in the same room as Margo with only the heart monitor on. Everything still looked good on Sunday so they let us go. We will just have our normal pediatric clinic follow-ups and one follow-up in a couple months with a pediatric cardiologist to make sure her heart is still doing ok. It was nice to all be able to be home together.

Although the first night (as all first nights are) was really rough. Clara thought night was day and decided to be awake the whole night so we did not get any sleep. I had forgotten how hard it was to go without sleep. And because Esther does sleep in the night and not in the day, we are not able to nap during the day. Luckily she has daycare three days a week for us to catch up on chores and sleep. We started working on "training" Clara to the daytime/nighttime and working on her sleeping without us holding her. So, the second night was much better. I know we will still have many hard nights ahead but overall things hopefully will start getting better.

However, Esther's adjustment to a baby may take the longest. She says baby and points at Clara all the time. Most of what she wants to do is be close to her and touch her. But Esther's gentle is a long ways away from baby gentle, she is more cat and dog gentle. She wants to pat and rub on her very hard and poke at her eyes, pull at her arms, use her as a step to get closer to mommy and daddy. Her gentle is way to rough so we have to be on top of her all the time. I am not going to lie, we have missed her a few times and she has swatted/pulled/pushed on Clara pretty hard but I think Clara will survive. Luckily she is not old enough to be super jealous, at least that I can tell.

I wanted to thank everyone who has helped us this first week. Lots of people watched Esther for us while we were in the hospital and when we were taking trips to the hospital. And thanks to everyone who brought us food at the hospital and at home. We have really awesome friends and family that we are very thankful for. Now for some pics.

Mama and baby

Sweet Clara

She has eyes

This might be my favorite so far

First touch

First pat

More Pictures

Clara is still making progress. She got her oxygen taken off and her stomach tube taken out today. Most of her labs came back good also. As long as she keeps making progress and doing well, she might get to come home on Sunday or Monday. She is nursing over 20 minutes each time, just a few minutes ago she went 33 minutes. She is a big girl so she needs to eat a lot. They had an open mother/child room (for people who have a baby in the nursery so they can stay at the hospital) in the nursery so Margo is staying there tonight and tomorrow night so she can nurse Clara during the night. It is wearing us out going to the hospital every 3 hours so hopefully she comes home soon. Below are some new pics from tonight, she looks a lot better without the oxygen and stomach tube.

Clara Pete

In case you have not got an email from us or seen Margo's facebook updates, we are now a family of four. Clara Pete was born yesterday at 8:25pm yesterday. 9 pounds 3 ounces and 22.25 inches long. She is a big baby but a little less than we thought she would be. It was a stressful delivery. Margo pushed for 3 hours, which is super long. Everyone was impressed. Clara was not making progress and we were basically a contraction away from doing a c-section and she came out. It was very hard on Margo and she is going to be sore for a while. Clara had some issues right after birth and they wisked her to the nursery. She was having a hard time with getting enough oxygen and her heart rate was really high. They put all kind of tubes in her. Her lungs had some junk in them and they did not know what was causing her heart rate problems. By this morning her lungs had cleared which was good but her heart rate was still high. They spent a good part of the day trying to figure out was causing it and finally concluded she had an abnormal heart beat. The fix for this is to electrically shock her into a normal rhythm and hope it stays that way, otherwise we would have to go to Arkansas Childrens Hospital. They told us we could come see her before they shocked her. So we went down there to see her for only the second time. And right when we went in to see her, she coverted into a normal rhythm all on her own. This was the first time she had been in a normal rhythm. The nurses and doctors were all in awe because they were just about to shock her. They did a big EKG to verify she had converted and it came back that she was for sure in a normal rhythm. So they are just going to watch her and keep her here for 5 days or so to make sure she continues to do well. It has been very emotionally draining but we are so thankful everything is looking better. We go home tomorrow. It will be sad to have to leave her here without us. Here are some pics.

Right after being born






Here she is all hooked up in the nursery, the orange and white patch is the patch they were about to shock her with.

Measurement

Well, it seems most people did not want to guess Margo's girth because they were worried about guessing wrong and Margo being sensitive, blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, the big number is 44 inches.

Stay tuned for the baby reveal sometime soon.

Go Big or Go Home

Well, the day is almost here.....the day our family grows by one and as my brother-in-law says, we start playing man on man defense. Two girls under 17 months should be fun.

It seems that we grow big kids though. Clara has been measuring big, really big. We know her due date is correct but she is measuring 2+ weeks big. We are at 38 weeks currently and most of her measurements by ultrasound are measuring at 40-41 weeks, a couple of them the machine won't even compute the weeks because they are so big. We told the ultrasound tech that she had been measuring big and she told us she measures really conservatively so we would see. When she was done and computed it, Clara estimated weight was 9 pounds 8ounces. I think that is pretty big. Anyway, because of her size we are planning on inducing labor and the earliest we can do this is next Tuesday. They are going to try and let Margo try to have her naturally but there is a good possibility of a c-section (which we don't prefer). And if she is able to do it natural there is risk to Clara of breaking a clavicle or having nerve damage. It is a little nerve racking. And there is always a chance that we could go into labor before then, who knows. Anyway, seeing that Clara is ginourmous, I thought it would be fun to play guess Margo's diameter/girth/how big around Margo is. Leave your guesses in the comment section and if we don't have a baby I will post the official reading in the next day or so. Here is a picture from last weekend to help you out. Not that it helps a lot because it is kind of far away.

Blood

There are lots of things you learn about while pregnant, several are not appropriate for our blog. But one of them I want to pass along is about cord blood. Cord blood is blood collected from the umbilical cord and placenta after the baby is born. Normally, it is just discarded as waste with other birth leftovers. But, it contains stem cells that can be used to treat some cancers (leukemia) and hereditary disorders. And it is being used in research for use on many other diseases. There are a couple options for collecting and storing the cord blood for use: public and private. Private cord blood banks charge you a fee to store your child's blood in case that child or a family member needs it in the future. It costs several thousand dollars for the initial fees and a few hundred a year to store it. There are tons of private banks that try to get people to store their cord blood. A lot of medical organizations don't recommend doing it this way because the likelihood of a child needing their own cord blood is very low. This brings us to the other option...donating to a public bank. Donating to a public bank enables the blood to be used by anyone it is a match with for use in treating disease. It could go to another kid who needs it to be treated for leukemia. Or it can be used for research to find ways to use stem cells to treat other diseases. The best thing is that it is free to donate to a public bank. And unlike a private bank (where it most likely will never be used), the majority of blood in a public bank are used to help people.

Something else we recently discovered was that Arkansas now has it's first public cord blood bank at UAMS. You can find more info here.....http://www.cordbloodbankarkansas.org/

I realize it may be a hard decision for people to decide whether or not to donate their child's cord blood after birth but I wanted to put this info out there for people to at least know this option is available.

Dress Up

Much to our surprise, Esther kept her Halloween costume on for a long amount of time at the Halloween party we went to. She has always been one to not want to wear barrettes or headbands (or shoes, or socks) or anything so we were in total shock when she kept on a crown for a couple hours. It seems that she is starting to warm up to the idea of having stuff in her hair and to playing dress up. Here are a few pictures from the past couple weeks. She is not very easy to get a good picture of these days because she is always on the move and when she sees the camera she either stops what she is doing or comes right to the camera, trying to grab it. So, the pictures are not amazing but show her recent interest in dressing up.

We had a Halloween party with a bunch of friends. Esther is too young to understand dressing up for Halloween so we just decided to make her a part of our costume. We dressed her up to look like a toddler who's parents put them in those ridiculous beauty pageants (Toddlers and Tiaras). Our family costume was we went as a white trash family. Here she is sporting her costume: zebra print pants, fake fur vest, crown, and sash that said tiny miss USA.

The next day she was "helping" Margo do laundry and kept bringing me articles of clothing from the basket so I started putting them on her in funny ways. She enjoyed it and left them on for a while.

And then a few days ago she brought us all her barrettes, flowers and headbands one by one and we started putting them in her hair and she just kept bringing them until we got them all there. This was the first time she had ever shown interest in putting stuff in her hair and wanted to keep it there.

Hello Kitty

Everyone enjoyed the last video so much, I decided to post another one. These days it seems we take more videos than pictures because Esther is doing so much new stuff and is really fun to watch.

Esther really likes all our animals. She will stand inside at the glass door and watch the dogs and holler at Macy (our dog) over and over, which sounds more like Shacy when she says it. But I think her favorite animal right now is our cat, Hello. She loves to pet on it and follow it around. We got a good video of her the other day with Hello. You can hear me hammering in the background on the barn I am building.

What? A Video?

That's right, we are putting our first video of Esther up on the blog. Why has it taken so long? Good question. Here is the thing.....we have really slow high speed internet (the slowest they sell) because we are cheap, and our video camera shoots video in HD. This means it takes forever for us to upload a video. For the minute video below, it took like 2 hours to upload. I am going to try and start putting up more videos, no matter how long it takes. Sometimes videos are just better. Maybe one of my technologically/video savvy friends (Walt, John, Jason, etc) could give me some tips on how to upload video faster or how to downgrade my video to SD so it will upload faster.

Esther is growing by leaps and bounds right now. Not in size so much but in learning new things. New skills, new words, etc. It is really fun to see all the new things she does and understands. She is doing better at understanding us and what we are trying to get her to do. She helps pick up her toys and books before bed. One bad thing she has learned is how to unbuckle her car seat. But one of the funnest things she has learned recently is to spin. She will spin and spin in the kitchen until she gets dizzy and then she will fall down a bunch of times, the whole time laughing and giggling. In this video she had already been spinning for a little bit and was dizzy so she is falling down a lot. It is really fun to watch her.

Here's the first Esther video on the blog........

Niagara - Canada Side

For part two of our Niagara trip we were on the Canada side. Everyone always says that the Canadian side is better. I will say I have to agree. The reason is that the views are 100 times better on that side so more people go there which means the have more tourist stuff too. It is also very clean and nice looking over there. There are some negatives though. There is this one area that is the biggest tourist traps I have ever seen, it was like Branson, Las Vegas, and a theme park game area all rolled into 3-4 blocks. It was ridiculous and sad. But it was fun to experience the falls. And once again on this side it was not peak season so we never had to wait in line for anything. We did two main fun things while there, the Maid of the Mist and Journey Behind the Falls. One other amazing thing we did while there. Let me remind you that my sister was keeping Esther for us during our Niagara adventure. The amazing thing we did was TAKE A NAP in the middle of the day, at the same time. We both fell asleep in the hotel room and when we woke up we were really confused as to what just happened. So, it was a fun trip to Niagara Falls. It is definitely worth seeing but is not anything I would spend a lot of time at or want to go back too often.

First we went on the Maid of the Mist boat tour (as seen in Bruce Almighty and the Office wedding). I think it was the funnest thing we did. A couple hundred people pack on this boat and they take you really close to the falls. They have been doing this for a long time. We once again got to wear raincoats and got really wet.

Here is the boat like we were on going to the falls

Us having fun and getting wet

Rainbow bridge that connects USA and Canada

View of American Falls from the boat

The other thing we did was the Journey Behind the Falls. For some reason the Canadians built some tunnels behind the falls and you can go in them and see the falls from behind. It was pretty cool. The best part was they had a part that went outside and really close to the falls. Once again we got rain coats and got really wet.

Here is us in a tunnel with the falls behind us.

It was hard to get a good picture of the main Horseshoe Falls because there was a big cloud of water vapor. I think it depends on weather as to how bad it is. And you would randomly get rained on while walking along depending on the water coming up and the wind. The whole time we were there it was impossible to see the entire falls.

Niagara - American Side

As mentioned in the previous post, as part of our vacation we spent a couple days at Niagara Falls. I will break this into a couple posts so it is not too long. My sister was super awesome and kept Esther for us so it was just Margo and I (and Clara). It is something I have always wanted to see. First let me educate you that there are three different parts of the falls: American Falls (you guessed it, on the American side, Bridal Veil Falls (American side), and Horseshoe Falls (Canadian) We first stopped on the American side and checked out the Niagara Falls State Park which was pretty nice, and we went on the Cave of the Winds tour. This is basically a walk on a boardwalk that takes you close to Bridal Veil falls, really close. We were given special raincoats and shoes to wear. You go under part of the falls and it is crazy, it is supposed to be like hurricane forces. One thing that kind of freaked me out was the fact that they have to rebuild this boardwalk every year because it takes such a beating from the water and the fact that it is not permanently attached to anything, they just wedge the supports into the rocks. Anyway, this was a fun little tour to go on. We went at the perfect time of year because it was not crowded and we never had to wait in line to do anything.

This is America Falls with Rainbow Bridge in the background(view from American side). There is even a rainbow in the picture (you see a lot of those at the Falls(the cool people just call it the Falls)). We should play a game and see how many rainbows you can spot in all these pictures.

American Falls (view from the Canadian side). Bridal Veil Falls is the little one on the right that is kind of separate.

Proof that we were there.

Good shot of Margo and Clara

This is looking down at the boardwalk for the Cave of the Winds tour.

We took a waterproof disposable camera with us. I think we got some of our best shots with it. This is on the tour. I like how happy we look.

This is the craziest part on the boardwalk where it is hurricane like. Margo was too chicken to go under it. But you know me, I had to try it out.

I like this shot also just because of how happy Margo looks

Nice shot of me.

Last Vacation

Let me start by apologizing for the lack of posting on our blog. Life is definitely more busy as Esther gets older (I can't imagine what it will be like with two). And we have been extra busy the past month or so with hardly any extra time to do anything. But, I am hoping that I can start posting more often on here.

Back to the main point. Last week we took a little vacation. Margo was having to go to Pennsylvania to speak at the Mother Earth News Fair and her work was paying her way. So, we decided to pay for me a ticket and take Esther with us and stay for some extra days. We figured this would probably be our last vacation for while since Clara is coming soon and man on man defense is going to be much tougher than 2 on 1. We decided to fly to Cleveland and stay with my sister for most of the week. The conference was only 2-3 hours from her house and we only had to be there for a couple days. We also decided to tack on a trip to Niagara falls for a couple days with is 3-4 hours from my sisters house. And my sister was even nice enough to keep Esther while we were in Niagara.

For now, I will just post one picture. Esther and her first plane ride. I will post more pictures and description of our trip in the next few days, we still need to get some pictures developed from our waterproof camera we took to Niagara.

1 Year Anniversary

Today is a big day in our lives and will be for the rest of our lives. Today is our adoption anniversary day. One year ago today we went and got Esther and brought her home. You can read the story here, it is quite a story. Oh man, have our lives changed in a year. I can't even come close to telling you how blessed we are to have Esther. She is so amazing and we can't imagine life without her. She is the perfect example of how great God's plan is for our lives. I can not imagine any greater gift than Esther and I have learned so much about myself and about true love. I can't wait to see what the years to come will be like and what kind of person she will become.

Here is our first family picture the night we got home with her and surprised our church community group.

And here we are in the same location a year later.