Family, 4th of July and 3 Months Old!

Well, we've had a very busy past week!

We've found a new sitter who keeps infants away from all the other kids and she only has one infant with Mallory and just 2 other kids and can never have more than 6 at any time. She is a licensed KY home care provider. I feel pretty good about this one. She's a little further out of the way, but still not bad. The only down side is I have to pick Mallory up by 5, but she's only about 10 minutes or so from the office, so hopefully it shouldn't be any big deal.

Scott, Amy, Blake and Eli all came Wednesday evening to stay through the Holiday. It was great to see them and although we didn't do anything too terribly exciting, but we had a nice relaxing visit. We spent some time in the local park, did a little shopping, shot some fireworks, went down to Mom and Dads to go swimming at the Country Club and showed Eli dad's tractors. It was a good visit. Bud and Susan came back over on Saturday, so we all had some good time to visit.

We celebrated Bean's first 4th of July in Elkton. We all treked down there so Blake could go swimming, the boys did some shooting, Eli got to see the tractors and Bean got to wear her swimsuit and basically dip her toes in the pool. Mom came with us to the pool so after Mallory's 5 minutes in the pool she could take her back to the house while the rest of us swam. The water was pretty chilly, so she didn't seem to like it much and we really just got her feet wet, but it was a photo opp never the less. We then cooked out at Mom and Dads and enjoyed the evening before heading back to Utica so Ben and Blake could shoot off the rest of the fireworks.

Today Bean is 3 months old! Seems crazy that she is already 3 months old. I went through her milestone check list and she has successfully hit every milestone that should be met by the end of 2 months. She's just started some of the cooing and making the ah and ooh sounds, but she did start right before the end of 2 months. So far she seems fairly on target.

Amy brought Bean a bumbo seat and she's such a cutie pie sitting in it. I've got some pictures of her sitting in it and she looks just like Ben in those pictures. Who knows, she looks a little like all of us at times! I guess she's just a good mix!

This week is also the week I start my Couch 2 5K plan again. I spent the month of June working out 3-4 times a week for 40 minutes each to help build endurance back. Granted the past 2 weeks haven't involved much if any exercise, but I'm pretty confident I'm ready to start the C25K. I will have to go slow, but I'm starting it and that's all that matters. It's a 9 week program working your way up to running a 5K (3.1 miles) by the end of that period. I'm ready to get running again and in another couple of months Bean will be big enough to go in the jogging stroller and it will be cool enough for her to go out with me.

Here's some more pictures from the weekend and there's more that I've uploaded to her shutterfly site for you to see.

Happy Fathers Day and Hospital Update

As some of you know, we ended up back in the hospital with Mallory yesterday. As hard as I tried to make sure her cold didn't develop any further by having the Dr check on her Friday morning, it didn't help.

She was crying around 4:30 am Sat morning to be feed and after changing her diaper and getting her bottle ready, once I sat her up I could tell she wasn't acting right and when she didn't snap out of it I got Ben up and we went quickly to the er. I think what was happening is that she was so congested that she couldn't really breathe deep enough and her blood oxygen SATs were dropping and her color was off and just basically couldn't catch her breath. But because she was breathing, which is good, her apnea monitor was of no help or alert because it doesn't test O2 sats, it was just me knowing something was amiss.

I really think the Owensboro hospital is good for little more than stabilizing and sending you elsewhere, at least as it pertains to kids, but with them transfering us back to Kosairs in Louisville, at least I know we are in good hands.

So, dejaveu once again, we are strapped into to ambulance and are heading to Louisville. I give Ben a list of things we need and he goes home to pack and then meets us back at the hospital. Thankfully once they got some O2 on her in Owensboro she was looking some better. They did a chest xray and didn't see pnumonia and tested for rsv which came back negative.

She is all settled into the picu and is looking much better this am. She's had some Brady/dsat episodes, but overall is doing good. She's had a couple more xrays and there's a little cloudiness in part of one of her lungs, it's still not pnumonia yet either but they are treating her with antibiotics to help it from going into full blown pnumonia. They have the good sucking mechanisims here to clean out her mucus and no wonder the bulb was of little help, it's really thick and deep.

If she continues to do well this morning we will be moved to a regular room and out of the picu.

She looks so much better today and is moving around a bit so I'm sure she is feeling better.

We slept on the pullouts in the room with her last night, I was so tired from no sleep Friday night that I coulda slept anywhere and from all that nicu time I have basically trained my brain to know when to ignore the alarms that don't matter and only wake when the true alarms that mean something go off, so I slept fairly well. Ben on the otherhand I'm sure will be finding alternate sleeping arrangements tonight!

So keep the prayers coming, she's doing better but I want my happy baby back!

Here's the picture the nurses did for Ben for fathers day and of bean in her bed.







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Happy Memorial Day Weekend and Happy Birthday Memaw!

Sorry for not doing a good job posting this past week, I've been busy spending lotsa time with Bean before I have to go back to work on Tuesday.

I met with a lady on Tuesday who keeps her 1 year old and an 18 month old in her house who was looking to add one more, she used to be an EMT and is a couple years older than me, I like her and she seems to be good with the kids so we are going to do a trial next week and see how it goes. Fingers crossed this works out well! Thankfully her house is only about 3 miles from the office, so I can be there quickly if need be.

Ben left Wednesday and got back Friday afternoon for a work trip, he was down at Lake Cumberland, so Bean and I had our first couple days being home alone...no big deal, everything went just fine!

Ben got back Friday afternoon and the Mike from work was in town, so we had him come by for supper before he headed back to Louisville so he could catch a plane early Saturday morning.

Saturday is Memaw's 81st Birthday, so Happy Birthday Memaw! Mom, Sue, Memaw and Aunt Sharon all went shopping in Nashville to celebrate, I just wasn't quite ready to tackle a day out in Nashville with Mallory yet. In another few months!

Ben needed more pants so we made a trip down to Greenville to go to Uncle Lee's to get this camo diaper bag for Ben that we saw way back when and then headed to Madisonville to go to the Carhart outlet to get more pants, so we had an eventful day with Bean and she did great!

She also slept all night long (from 10 pm to 5 am) Friday night and I thought maybe it was just a fluke, but she slept all night Saturday night too...maybe we are on to something here! If it continues it will be good timing since I go back to work on Tuesday and an entire nights sleep would be nice!

The rest of the weekend we just plan on resting and relaxing and continuing to enjoy just being HOME!!!

Here's a few more pictures from the last week!

Snot what I wanted for Easter.....

We had our Easter planned out for a while, prior to Feb 13 when everything changed, so being stuck in the hospital with Ben wanting BBQ for Easter Dinner wasn't exaclty how we had planned it. A baby shower on Saturday in Sikeston and then Easter Sunday with Ben's family in MO was the plan. Oh well, I am looking forward to Easter next year when we actually have a reason to hide eggs and have a 1 year old running around entertaining everyone.

My allergies have been bugging me since this past Tuesday and they really aren't much better yet. They gave me some claritin which worked for a couple days, but this is now more congestion and snot so yesterday afternoon they switched me to a sudafed. Mallory must be sensitive to that stuff, more so than normal babies because on the monitoring last night her little heart rate was going crazy. So after 3 hours on the monitor wating for her to calm down I decided no more sudafed, at least not at that dose, so now I feel like crap, but hopefully it will pass soon!

Dr How said there's a childrens dose that is half of what I took, but it's a liquid, I'm sure it's yummy, so we may try that to see if I can get some relief without sending her into a crazy child. I'm going to send Ben out later for some good old fashioned vapor rub! Haven't used that stuff since I was a kid probably.

We have reached 33 weeks today! Yipee! Just one more week to go and then we get to meet little Miss Mallory! I went online yesterday and ordered a few more things that I thought I needed prior to waiting on a shower for them since the others are delayed until after she is born.

Here's the baby health kit, it had good reviews and seemed to have about everything you could think of:



And then these that I've been wanting since I first saw them....they are sleep sheep and have the heartbeat sound for the crib and travel:



I think Ben and I will get out and wheel around the block today, that will be our Easter excitement.

So, happy Easter everyone and the countdown is on, just a few more days of hanging out here in the Hospital!

Happy 2010!!

Hope you all got to ring in 2010 however you pleased. We went out with Susan, Nick, their good friends Heather and Jason and then my good friend Greg Lyon, who we haven't gotten to go out with for almost 10 years. I won't get into why, but he's in the middle of a divorce, so it's fun to get to go back out and spend some time with him.

Clarksville is not really the hopping spot for New Year's Eve, but we had a good time and took in a couple games at the bowling alley to ring in the new year.

Looking forward to a great 2010!!

We also think we may have come up with a middle name. We are pretty sold on Mallory as a first name but thinking perhaps Addison for the middle name. That would make her initials MAW which I'm not sure what to think about that, but we will see! Sue came up with Addison, so perhaps since I named her at 7, she can pick a middle name at 25!

New "Life 2009" in Video

Ok, so since I figured out iMovie I'm all about making these little videos! So, this is updated from the one I posted below with just picasa slideshow.

Enjoy, I'm sure next year I will have tons of these with new baby!!

Christmas 2009

Christmas 2009 is over and behind us, the travel is done, stuff is unloaded, and we are back settled at home!

Overall this Christmas was good, typical, but good. Everyone is ready for next year when there will be 6 month old entertainment to make things more exciting!!

Ben and I had our Christmas at home Wednesday night. Deer nuggets, fried potatoes, beer for him and then presents with each other and Tucker. Tucker seems to hit the mother load every year, and this year did not disappoint. He's quite fond of his new bed, and got lots of toys and treats!!

Of course, this was our first Christmas without Grandaddy, and that was a big difference without him, but we had so many great Christmas' before with him, so we could just remember all the good things about him.....and still harass the dog Sadie!

We had Christmas Eve at Memaw's, which always involves eating way too much food, presents and dressing up Sadie in leftover gift wrap!!

Not sure what the bond is with Matt and Sadie, but it's caught on video on the post below and then we have the "posed" picture, here....so funny!!

We then got to spend Christmas morning at Mom and Dad's along with Memaw and had a relaxing breakfast and then grazed over all of mom's goodies for a quick lunch before we hit the road to Missouri.

We headed up to the nursing home in Perryville, MO where Grandma Lilly is at. We got to spend about 45 minutes with her before it was their 4:30 pm dinner time. She seemed to be better to me than when I saw her last this summer.

We made a brief stop in at Ben's Aunt Donna's house in Frohna to see that crew and then on to Lucy's house for Dinner. Got to see Uncle Terry and all of Lucy's family, great bunch of people! Someone else even makes Ham Ball like mom, so I got my ham ball this year even though it wasn't moms!

Finally headed back to Sikeston to open presents there with Bud, Susan and Micah. We also got to skype in to Ben's Aunt Janie's in Lost Springs, KS so we got to see all of her side of the family as well. It was nice to see everyone on Christmas night even if it wasn't in person.

The rest of the weekend consisted of being lazy. Ben went up in the woods in Frohna muzzle load hunting both Saturday and Sunday morning. I even got up at 4am on Sunday to go with him....I didn't hunt....to cold for me, but me and Tucker stayed in the cabin in the woods with the heat on high and slept and then played games on my ipod until Ben gave up on deer for the year. Got to see some other friends Saturday night, the Lorenz's and got to see Parker!!! He's such a cutie pie and looks just like his daddy Nathan.

Finally headed back to Utica Sunday evening and was very very happy to be sleeping in our own bed, and that includes Tucker! He was so hard up for a bed Saturday night at Ben's parents that he slept on Ben's coat in my suitcase! He's a creative dog!

So hope everyone else had a great Christmas!!

My first attempts at video editing....Matt & Sadie @ Memaw's

My first attempts at making a video with my new camera and editing it, adding music, etc on my mac. Not great, not bad, and I'm sure Matt will be thrilled that he is my first project!

Here's Matt and Sadie (Memaw's dog) at Christmas Eve at her house, 2009!

Welcome to our Blog!

I figured since our family will have a nice little addition soon and we are always traveling around all over the place, it would be a good time to start a blog so friends and family can keep up with us better. Facebook is fine, but there's stuff that I will not post on Facebook that I will put on here for family!

In baby tracking news, we are on week 18, the week of the sweet potato, or at least that's what thebump.com tells me our baby is the size of. Sweet potato has a nice sound to it!

Next Monday the 28th we find out if it's a girl or a boy. I feel like it will be a boy and Ben thinks its a girl, so we've both got a 50/50 chance of being right!

This week will be busy since it's Christmas week. I have a Junior League Christmas party that we are putting on for underprivilidged and foster kids tonight at the local skating rink, so that should be rewarding. Neither Ben or I will be working Thursday, so we will be off to Mom and Dad's sometime mid moring on Christmas Eve for Christmas at Memaw's that evening. We will then have breakfast at Mom and Dad's Christmas morning and then off to Sikeston via Frohna first for Christmas with Ben's Dad side of the family in the little town that he is from. Probably stop in and see Grandma Lilly in the nursing home and then back down to Sikeston for the rest of the weekend.

Merry Christmas Everyone!!