BPA?????

I can't believe this whole Bisphenol A thing. I just bought a bunch of new bottles that I thought were BPA free and now find out that they are not BPA free. None of my Sippy cups are and neither is the tupperware. It seems like such a small thing. But is it really a risk worth taking. What is everyone else thinking about this issue?

Fun times

I was just looking through my most recent pictures and found some fun moments.

I was watching my friend Carolynn's to youngest for part of the day a couple of weeks ago. We spent some time outside weeding the garden and then playing in the backyard. Ian found the worms swimming in our kiddy pool. Unfortunately there is a small crack in the lid so the rainwater has gathered. Ian figured the worms needed to be in water since that is how he found them. He wanted to take them home to go fishing. I gave him a throwaway Tupperware to gather his little friends. He kindly offered to get the Tupperware back to me. I assured him he could keep it. He kept asking me to help him pick up the worms. I told him that if he wanted them he needed to pick them up himself. Gross!!! Samuel had so much fun having Ruby and Ian to play with.

Zach and I are forever having the disagreement about how to park the car. I like to drive into the driveway. Zach insists it is much easier to back in anywhere than to drive in. He says it is much easier to drive out than to back out. I think it is by far easier to back out into open space that to try and back into driveways or parking spots between other obstacles. But hey he is the professional driver not me, so I am sure he has a good point. So I had to laugh when I asked Samuel to go park his trucks in his room. The one on the left is the one I parked the others he meticulously drove, turned around and backed into their spots. We started Potty training last Thursday. The following is a picture of Samuel with his Potties? Hehe! So far so good. He is night and day trained with about one accident a day. Pretty good for one week.

In the 5 years since we have been married we have never completely organized our garage. Things were always haphazardly shoved on shelves. Since being back from Germany our stuff has been piled in boxes and literal piles of junk, garbage, and good items. This summer my mother and I tackled my side of the garage. (Camping gear, Strollers, household items...) I couldn't tackle the rest because I couldn't tell one wire or tool from another. For the last two weeks Zach has spent at least an hour every night out in the Garage with Samuel. They have made an amazing progress. I will peek in periodically and find things like Zach sawing a piece off of one of the shelves and Samuel below with his fisher price saw sawing away like mad. Or Zach is pounding in a nail and Samuel is running around pounding everything with his toy hammer. I would often find Zach and Samuel dancing or rather jumping around to the music.

Samuel and his nerd safety glasses.
Or to him walking around saying "Who turned the lights out.

These memories are so precious. They truly are little blessings from God.

Brea Bateman Photography

Well I have a small window in which Samuel is playing where I can see him and Ellie is napping. I thought I would take two minutes and add these pictures.

Day 2 of Potty Training

Yay, he is wearing the same pair of underware I put on him last night before bed. Gross?? I don't think so they are dry and I changed him about 10 times yesterday. We are dow for a nap now.

"3 Day Potty Training"?????

Ok so we got this E-book on 3 day potty training and we have started today. I am half way through the first day. aaaaaaah!!!!! 5 accidents later and 2 successful potty trips we are now attempting his first nap. Please pray

My baby is 2!!!

Wow I cannot believe it has been two years since we brought this little bundle home from the hospital. It has gone so fast.

Samuel I love you so much. You have brought so much joy and laughter into our home. Thank you so much for letting me love you and for loving me in return.

A glance at you this year:

January- Our new little walker

February - Eating Daddy's entire egg salad sandwich (no more sharing our food, we don't get to eat)
March - Doing lot's of Laundry with Mommy (You always "help" me with the laundry)
April - Eating a little dirt - I mean helping daddy in the garden May - Camping at Lake Connor

June - A new baby sister

July - Playing in the water

August - More camping - Food and Nap refusal gone bad

September - Loving his baby sisterOctober - His 2nd Birthday and his first request to shave.

Samuel's Birthday

I am planning Samuel's Party and am wondering if any of you have a cake pan I can use. Or know someone who dose. I am looking for a dumptruck cake pan or a traffic cone cake pan or something like that.

This is our party theme.

Celebrating the Flu!!

Ok I know this is weird but I got the flu last week Tuesday. I spent all night throwing up. I am not sick anymore only I can't seem to get my appetite back. I still feel nautious all the time, especially in the morning. It has already been a week. My body is just not bouncing back from this.

When I found out I was pregnant with Samuel, we thought I had the flu. Only it kept coming back every morning. So yesterday I really started panicking. How can I possibly add another baby right now. I made Zach go buy a pregnancy test.

Thank God the test was negative. So I took a picture and we are celebrating a not pregnant test with almost as much enthusiasm as we celebrated our pregnant tests with Ellie and Samuel.

Crazy Difference

My 6ft 9 brother and my 4 month daughter's shoes. Such a drastic difference I couldn't resist

Awsome Bibs

So is anyone else tired of washing so many bibs. My sister in-law found this great bib at Walmart. It washes off with a washcloth. It is vinyl. It has snaps to create a pocket and you can roll it up and snap in place to take with you. I was going through 3 bibs a day at times. I have been using this same bib all day every day for a month and a half now. I have had other pocket bibs but all of them were kind of stiff so they would not fit in highchair. Or the pocket wasn't stiff at all so it didn't catch anything.

Silver the Salmon

Once upon a time there was a beautiful Salmon named Silver. He lived in the ocean near Seku. On one early Saturday morning in September there were really big waves, some swells nearing 10 ft tall. Silver didn't think that he would be in any danger as the fishermen were all getting sea sick. But one particular fisherman named Zach, had not been fishing for almost 5 year. He was bound and determined to catch a fish. Even though he was not feeling well he persisted until Silver got a little to curious and took a nibble on his line. Silver and Zach struggled back and forth for a long time until the determined fisher won the fight.

Zach spent the next 5 days trying to calm his tummy from those 10 ft swells but he could proudly present his treasure to his family.

Zach the fisherman and his worthy opponent Silver.

Silver's shocked expression when he found out we intended to eat him.
Silver begged Samuel to changer our minds. Samuel begged Silver to changer our minds. Neither succeeded.
Samuel wanted to give Silver a farewell kiss. (this is as close as he got by the way). Samuel promised Silver that he would not eat him, and he kept that promise much to our dismay.

Our brave fisherman turned out to be a man of many talents. He manned that BBQ like a pro preparing us a savory meal.

Farewell our little fishy friend.

Need Prayer

Some of Samuel's new words/expressions: no nap, no bed, no cup, no eat, no belt, and the list goes on and on. If you can put "no" in front of it he has probably said it this week. The picture shown here is Samuel in on of many timeouts.

1sts: Samuel had his first corn on the Cob, also thanks to some great waterwings Samuel was able to swim without help in the big pool at lake connor, this resulted in many versions of "no hands, no help, no touch" and very large temper tantrums when it was time to get out of the pool.

We were camping at my in-laws trailer site at Lake Connor all of last week. We being the kids and I. For a portion of the time my brother and his family and my sister in law and her kids were there too. It rained for most of the week. So we spent a lot of soggy days thanking God that we were in a trailer and not a tent. Samuel amused himself for a long time walking up and down the trailer in my shoes while I fed Ellie.

The rain didn't stop my neices from wanting to swim, so we were down at the pool in the freezing cold rain while they swam in the heated pool. I was trying to feed Ellie while the umbrellas were blowing away, the stroller was soaking wet and all that I could keep under the umbrella was my knees and up. At least Ellie was dry. The next days I drove down to the pool. I was not going to get caught in a down pour again. Ellianna also got to go swimming for the first time. She had this adorable swim suit that I had searched and searched for. Why I thought I needed a swim suit for a 2.5 month old I do not know. So I really wanted her to use it at least once. She loved it. She was so comfortable in the water.

While camping Samuel decided that he would start boycotting all forms of sleep. No more naps and no more bed. He would start his high pitched screeching at the first sign of a bed time routine and would continue it up to two hours after being put in bed. And yet in defense of the fact that he still needs naps, he is so cranky without them. One of the days it was lunch time and he was throwing fits about being put in his booster at the same time screaming "no nap". We wanted to try and get him to eat anyway because I didn't want him to wake up early because he was hungry. He was so mad that he threw a cucumber on the ground then he was so sad that it was on the ground that he leaned over to try and reach it fully crying at the top of his lungs. Only as he was reaching down for it he passed out right there in his chair.

Ellianna slept in her big crib the night before last. I was pleasantly surprised that she didn't wake up screaming. She actually slept better than in her bassinett. She is changing so much so fast. She smiles and coos a lot these days. My dad was bouncing her the other day to get her to settle down because of gas. She was actually laughing at him.

As for me. I am having some real personal struggles right now. Since I really don't know who reads this I am not going to mention what they are, but I will just ask that you pray for me knowing that God knows what is going on in our family right now.

Samuels new expressions this week: All done now, cooh doo (cool dude), er we go (there we go), ank you (thank you)



Poor Samuel has two molars working there way through. He has been an angel when it comes to listening this week, but will just randomly start shoving his hand in his mouth and crying. It is so sad.


The other day at my moms house Samuel was saying hi to Ellianna and he was pointing out that she had a mouth. I was kind of out of it so I just said 'yes mouth' but didn't notice until a second later that he was showing me her mouth by shoving his finger down her throat. Once the finger was extracted it took Ellie a couple of minutes of coughing to recover. He loves his sister but I need to pay closer attention so she doesn't loose an eye.



As for Ellie she was sleeping 1 am until 7 but is now back to waking up at 530am. It has to be the heat but I am completly exhausted trying to keep up. Please can someone with multiple children tell me that it gets better. If you can't, don't tell me just let me believe that I will someday soon feel rested again.

The Kids This Week

Some of Samuel's newest words/expressions: Time Out, Sorry (what does that say about this week), Bye-Bye Tractor

Some of Samuel's antics this week:

A couple of days ago I told Samuel that I was going to change Ellie’s diaper but then it was going to be time for his nap, so he should pick out some books. He said no. I had my hands full with Ellie’s diaper already off so I delayed going to respond to his blatant refusal. When I was done with Ellie I realized how quiet it had gotten and got a little worried. I started looking for him room by room. I finally found him in our bathroom sitting on a bucket of blocks playing his harmonica. Not that much was coming out but I could just imagine that he would definitely be playing the blues if he could. Even though he had disobeyed he was so darn cute I couldn't help but scoop him up and love on him.

Another time Zach was showering and Samuel decided he should be too. Zach came out of the shower to find Samuel completely stripped down. He had even put his clothes away in on of Zach’s drawers.

On a more scary note, Samuel disappeared today. We found him outside on the sidewalk, he had let himself out because we weren't moving fast enough. This is very scary to me.

As for Ellianna. She is getting chunkier everyday. She weighed in today at 10lb10oz. Craziness. She is 7 weeks old. Samuel was 10lb4oz at 3months1week. She has all these adorable rolls on her thighs. Samuel never had rolls, he had chicken legs. Don't tell my kids I said this. They might not appreciate it. She is also pretty consistently sleeping from her 12am feed until her 6am feed. It is wonderful. So I get about 5 hours of consecutive sleep. Hallelujah.

This is totally funny. Ellianna pooped all over her clothes at my moms house. I had forgotten to bring a spare outfit. My sister in law put her in my neices hello kitty build a bear outfit. It fit her perfectly although she wouldn't be allowed to leave the house like this.

Still alive!!

Well things are going well. Ellie is working her way towards a 6 hour stretch at night for which I am very grateful. She is growing like a weed, I don't think the doctors will be hounding me about her lack of weight gain like they did for Samuel. She is now at 6 weeks what Samuel was at 3 months.

Samuel is testing the limits in every way he can come up with. We are now experiencing temper tantrums galore. Let's just say there are a lot of noisy timeouts in our house right now. On a brighter note. He is warming up to his little sister and wanting to help in any way he can. The other day at my moms house I mentioned that Ellie needed her diaper changed. Samuel went running into my moms room. I called him back worried he was getting into something. He came back with a clean diaper for Ellie. He also wants to share his toys although he is not always very gentle in the execution.

He is starting to say a lot. We are always surprised by the concepts he is picking up on. Today when Zach went into the garage and Samuel could no longer see him from his highchair, Samuel called for him to come back repeatedly "honey, honey, honey". (that is what I usually call him)

Details

Well, both kids are sleeping, Zach is tackling the garage for a couple of hours and I don't feel like I am going to fall over. Tired, yes, but I am not about to pass out. Life is good. So I thought I would take this opportunity to fill in some of the details for those of you who want to know about the delivery.

Contractions started on Wednesday the 4th. They were light enough that life just went on. They pretty much continued that way until Saturday night when we were able to time the contractions 5 minutes apart for about 30 seconds each. They were still easy and I was determined to get as much sleep as possible. So we went to bed and I was able to sleep until 6 am when the contractions were strong enough to wake me up. Before getting out of bed Zach timed the contractions at 2.5 minutes to 3 minutes apart. They were still only 30 seconds long though. We knew this was going to be the day. Zach called my mom and Carolyn, our doula (birthing coach) and they headed our way.

After taking a shower the contractions slowed down to about 4 or 5 minutes apart. Zach, Mom, Carolyn and I just hung out in our living room talking and laughing for the next couple of hours. By about 10am the contractions were getting hard enough that I couldn't talk through them and had to focus on what was happening. By 1050, the contractions were consistantly less than 3 minutes apart and longer than a minute long. I had wanted to stay home as long as possible to avoid any chance that they would push me towards interventions to speed things along. At that point Carolynn started encouraging me to think about going to the hospital.

We loaded everythinng into the car and headed towards Bellingham. Unfortunatly we took the Guide with its many construction bumps. Wrong choice. The bumps did nothing to ease contractions. At the hospital we got all the paper work out of the way and they checked me to see how much progress I had made. I was only dialated to a 4 and 90% efaced. This was rather discouraging as I was at 2cm the previous Thursday, at my doctors appointment. We got moved into our room and continued laboring there. When they checked me again at 2pm I was at 6cm, at 4pm I was at 8cm, at 455pm I was at 9cm and the doctor decided she wanted to break the water. I really didn't want her to, but by that point the contractions were so intense that I had to really focus in on what my body was doing and I couldn't find a good argument. She was concerned about merconeum in the water due to Ellie being 2 days overdue.

So she broke my water and the contractions intensified tenfold. The doctor told me to let them know when I felt the urge to push. I kept telling everyone "I don't want to push, I am not ready to push". They reassured me that I didn't have to. Before I knew it though my body started pushing on its own. I could hear everyone yelling at me from different sides but I had no idea what they were saying. Zach finally snapped me out of it enough to remind me just to get through this one contraction. I felt like yelling at him, you just don't understand, the baby is coming and I can't stop it. I am not sure if I actually vocolized it. I think I just stayed inside of myself.

Inside I was screaming I can't do this for 53 minutes, the length it took to get Samuel out. Just then someone told me to take my baby. I later found out that second stage labor was less than 5 minutes and pushing was less than 60 seconds, probably because I kept ignoring the thought of pushing until my body forced me to do it. My doctor didn't even have time to get her second glove on. She said it was the first time in a long time she had a one gloved delivery.

Ellianna had a bruised forhead and hadn't gotten all of the stuff out of her lungs due to the rushed exit. But other than that she was strong and healthy. 8lbs 1oz after feeding, 20.5 inches long. Her full name is Ellianna Grace.

I acheived my goal. A fully unmedicated, intervention free birth. The only thing that was not according to how I had planned was the breaking of the water. I never would have acheived this goal without my support team. My mom was there to encourage me when I needed it. Carolynn was amazing. She took all of the pressure off of Zach, she remembered the water, wet washclothes, icechips, back pressure, shoulder massage and much much more. This allowed Zach to stay where I needed him, in my face reassuring me, encouraging me and keeping me focused.

Now life is getting a little more settled. I have had help pretty consistantly since her birth, between Zach, our moms, and some wonderful friends we have had someone to help me with Samuel all the time. We also were blessed to have a number of meals delivered to make life easier. We should be covered for meals until at least next Wednesday.

Well that is all for now.