3 Months

Time is passing fast even though it may not seem like it day to day.  Clara is now 3 months old yesterday.  Time flies when you are having fun or when every part of your time is taken up with caring for 2 kids under 2 years.  Clara has definitely been more challenging than Esther as a baby.  She likes to be held a lot and does not like being put down very much although she is much better than she used to be. She does not like her baby swing and cries when we put her in it.  She struggles big time going to sleep,  it requires us walking around with her and bouncing her for at least 15 minutes.  But things are definitely getting better with time.  She is now most nights only waking up 1 time which is very manageable.  She is also starting to smile and make lots of sweet faces.  She loves having her sister close to her talking to her and messing with her.  It seems like the harder Esther bounces her or pats her, the more she likes it.  I hope they grow to love each other a lot and get along really well. Clara started daycare last week at the same place Esther goes to.  It was hard for Margo to leave her but it is going well,  they have not kicked her out yet for crying too much so that is good. This past Sunday we did baby dedication at our church which was nice.  Clara is still really really big.  At the doctor yesterday she weighed in at 16 lbs 11 oz.  Speaking of the doctor,  that is what we did for her 3 month birthday,  took her to the doctor because she is sick.  She has bronchiolitis and is now on an inhaler for a week or so.  She is very congested and having difficulty sleeping. Esther is also sick with a virus and runs a high fever off and on for the past few days.  It has been real fun around our house the past few days.  Let me tell you raising two kids under the age of two is no walk in the park.  

Here are some pics of Clara the other day and all her faces. 

Esther Playing With Clara Video

Here is a little video of Esther and Clara. Turn the volume up. Esther is playing with and giggling at Clara.  And at the end Esther says her name for Margo.  

Something in the Water

It seems like there is something in the water at our church and with our friends.  I don't know the official numbers but there have been approximately fifteen babies born since June at our church.  Even before that there were tons of kids being born.  I think there are like nine kids at church that will be in Esther's grade in school.  There were four babies born in ten days when Clara was born.  It is crazy.  We are going to have an awesome youth group in a few years.  Specifically we had several really close friends pregnant.  We had five girls in our community group all pregnant at the same time. Have I mentioned how crazy it is.  Back in June we got a picture of four of the girls in our group together.  Here they are back in June in order of due date...

And here they are last week with the kiddos.....

Big Update

It has been a long time since I have posted on the ol' blog. It seems like we have had lots going on but I am not sure what.  People have been rioting in the streets for me to give an update on our girls so here it is.

Clara is growing like kudzu.  She will be two months old in a couple days.  I am not going to lie,  the first 4-6 weeks were tough. Esther was a really easy baby, hardly ever cried, ate good,  was happy being put down anywhere, etc.  We thought we were just really good parents.  Turns out that is not the case.  Clara likes to cry, a lot.  She wants to be held all the time,  and is not a fan of taking a bottle most of the time.  There were several times I wondered what have we done,  and I threatened Margo that I was going to take Esther and get out of Dodge for a few months.  But luckily she has been doing better the past couple weeks.   She is sleeping 3-4+ hours at a time at night.  She is starting to let us put her down in her bouncy seat for 20 or so minutes without throwing a fit,  and she is just overall a lot happier.  She is smiling and cooing a lot. And she is getting big. At the doctor visit last week she weighed over 14 pounds which puts her in the 50th percentile for a 5 month old (she is not 2 months yet).  She does not even register on the 2 month percentile.  She does not look fat because she is really tall.  She just looks like a normal 5 month old.  We had a follow-up with a cardiologist to check out her heart again last week and everything looked perfectly normal so we are happy about that.  They don't think she will have any more problems.  We may have some problems with our pocketbook though, we got her bill for being in the NICU for 5 days.  It is not cheap.  

Esther is doing really good.  She is awesome and difficult.  She is learning all kinds of things like crazy.  She is very independent and pushes the boundaries like crazy.  She says tons of new words and learns new ones everyday,  last night I taught her the word clavicle just for the heck of it.  She will say her numbers (1-9) and knows them by sight,  she knows some colors,  and some letters.  She knows her name and lots of other peoples names.  We think she is so smart.  She loves to play outside and play with all the animals.  But she also likes to whine a lot and do things we tell her not to so it is not all roses with her.  She can really get on your nerves at times.  She is a typical toddler. 

Now for some pics. I will try to put up some videos later in the week.  

Crazy

Everyone has been asking for more pictures.  Sorry for the slow updates,  things are a little crazy around here. We have found having two kids under 18 months makes life really busy and does not leave a lot of time for extra things like blogging. Last week was ridiculous, besides having my grannie's funeral,  Esther had an ear infection, sinus infection, and pinkeye.  And I had a viral infection of some sort and got pinkeye from Esther. Needless to say it was not a fun week.  

Clara is still doing good,  she is a month old which is crazy. She weighed 11 pounds and 5 ounces at her checkup on Tuesday. She is still a big one. She is a typical baby,  has good days and bad days.  Cries a lot at times,  sleeps good sometimes and bad sometimes, etc. I will say again that things are crazy with two kids,  but we are surviving. 

Here are the first cousins on Josh's side right before Christmas.

Here they are with the grandparents.

Here she is today.

Here is Esther letting Clara talk on her play cell phone.

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.