Belated Happy Halloween!

 I'm very behind but I want to record this Halloween so here goes.  We did all our normal things: carving pumpkins, making cookies, and dressing up.

 

 Aubrey's is the little one, mine has the fangs, and Sage tried the scraping technique this year.  We think it looked better outside with the candles in it but we didn't take a picture of that.

These are Aubrey original cookies.  

 Aubrey was our little bunny.  Here she is before we went out.

Brynn was our little ghost.  This is them at our Ward Trunk or Treat.  Its fun to have kids for these holidays. :)

Month Pictures

 I bet you all think that because I haven't been the best at keeping up with this blog that I haven't been taking month pictures of my beautiful new baby.  Well jokes on you!  Here they are!

 

She's growing up so fast!  She actually just turned 8 months so I still am a little behind but better than I was.

Summer Outings

Now that winter is here I'd like to share some pictures of some of the outings we went on this summer.  When Brynn was about 2 months old I think, Sage got a long weekend off and we decided to make the most of it.  Sage wanted to go to California, I voted for Billings.  Expense and expediency won out and to Billings we went.  Aubrey was just happy we were in a hotel.  This is a picture of her after we went to the vending machine down the hall.

This is what we spent some of our time doing.  Swaddling Brynn until she fell asleep and watching TV.  We also went to a little water park.  

 

 Here we are at the rodeo.  It was $18 a person so I don't think we'll be going again any time soon, but it was fun and Aubrey liked it.  It was a long rodeo but Brynn managed alright.

This is Aubrey with some of my cousins at the Cowley's Day Parade.  Its a wonderful parade: not too long, lots of interesting floats and animals, and lots of candy!  It was a fun day and Aubrey had a lot of fun with her cousins (second cousins I think is the correct term).  She hadn't seen them since the summer before but she remembered pretty quickly.

 

This was Brynn's reaction to the Medicine Wheel.  We went up to see it while Dawn and Bryan were up for Cowley's Day.  We packed the kids so maybe this was her commentary are being hauled around so roughly at so tender an age.

 

This was the best family picture we got which wasn't that great because Aubrey was upset about something and we couldn't get her to smile.  She perked up later though.

 

We had a picnic afterward and this is Aubrey's reaction to the little half-size pops that her Grandma brought for her. 

Brynny Bear just relaxed in the shade while we ate.  What a good tempered baby. Usually. :)

 

This was Aubrey at the fair.  She was so excited to be on a ride by herself!  

Hiking with young Brynn

So while Brynn was very young (think 2 weeks old) we tried very hard to prove that our life hadn't really changed much with the addition of a new baby.  So in that spirit we went out hiking in Oregon Basin one warm summer day.  Sage had Aubrey in the backpack and I had little Brynn in the front pack.  It was actually pretty fun!

This is Sage and Aubrey showing how strong they are while in front of a picturesque scene.  Picturesque for Wyoming that is. :)

Brynn spent the hike sleeping and covered with a blanket against the sun and wind.  She was pretty good as long as we kept moving.  This is not my best picture but it was the only shot we got of Brynn so I'm going to sacrifice and let it in.

Just as we were starting off Sage slipped down a little hill and he leaned back and landed on his hands because he was worried about Aubrey falling out or getting her feet crushed.  His act of heroism earned him some pretty good scrapes.  They bled and stung the whole time but he didn't want to go back just as we got started so we hiked the whole time before we dealt with them.  He's a good daddy!

This was as close to a family picture as we could get with Aubrey as tired and distracted as she was and Sage taking the picture.  So all in all it was a fun trip even though it originated in denial.  Our lives HAVE changed a lot with little Brynn's arrival but I think in some respects babies are only as limiting as you let them be.  They are resilient little people and you can do a lot more than you think with them, as Sage tells me all the time. :)

Brynn, the early days

I'm going to picture dump all the pictures we took of Brynn in those first few days.  She's changed so much!

These next three pictures were taken the day we left the hospital.  Since we had to go over to my parents and pick up Aubrey we decided to make a photo op out of it.

 This is my sister Kelli with all her nieces, Aubrey, Brynn, and Camilla.  I'm not sure what Aubrey is looking at but it sure isn't the camera.

 This is my parents with all their grandchildren.

We took a picture of Aubrey when she was little with an x-box controller so we had to do it again with this little lady.

This is Brynn sitting by her daddy.  She just looks so tiny and small and cute.

This is her sleeping on her daddy's chest.  They can sleep anywhere those first days and that constant heartbeat noise is probably helps.

I call this her lady liberty pose.  She slept like this a lot at first.

She our little Brynny Bear and we love her!

Pre-Brynn Doings

While we were waiting for Brynn to get here we did a few things with Aubrey, like going fishing.  We first went to the store to get a fishing pole.  We left with a bright pink Barbie pole, which I was a little dubious about, but it worked fine.

 

Here is a video of her first fish.  That random gasp in the middle in me.  It was a lot bigger fish than I thought it was going to be.

This is another of the fish she caught that day.  Sage and I caught some as well, but I don't think we look as cute as she does posing with them. :)

Since Brynn took so long to get here we actually went fishing another time before she came and caught some perch that time.

We also got some geocaching in before Brynn got here.  My aunt wrote on her blog about her family's geocaching adventures and it sounded fun so Sage downloaded an app on his phone and away we went.  It's been our hobby when we need to get out of the house for a little bit and there are a lot in this area so it's been fun.  Anyway, this one is on top of Cedar Mountain.  Aubrey is posing with the yo-yo she decided to take.  I think we left a half dollar.

This is some Aubrey photography.  She's pretty good although some of her other material is more abstract (meaning it is so close to the object you can't tell what it is, but is looks artsy). I'll have to do a post of her work sometime.  This was on top of Cedar Mountain as well and as you can see Brynn was imminent. 

Birth Story

So here is the birth story for those of you that are interested.  It's pretty long but I want to remember the story so I'll have something to refer to for the other kids' labors so just skim it if you get bored. 

So I'd been having Braxston-Hicks contractions for months before Brynn was born.  The result was that I was already at 4 cm by my last appointment a couple of days before my due date.  So I was thinking, "Cool, I'm almost halfway there without any major pain.  This will probably not take very long at all!"  Little did I know.

My due date came. . . and went.  I wasn't really worried though because I had gone two days over with Aubrey and that was fine.  Well I waited and waited and waited and waited.  Finally I was almost a week over due and getting frustrated.  Still more Braxston-Hicks but nothing really helpful.  Then on 1:45 in the morning on May 17, I woke up with a pretty good contraction and some back pain.  The contractions left and I didn't have any more but the back pain stayed.  It was a throbbing sensation that occurred every couple of seconds on my left side.  I couldn't fall back asleep because it hurt and it hurt more every time I moved.  I was pretty miserable.  I wasn't sure if it was back labor or something else so I called my doctors office at 7 when they opened.  They said the only way to find out was to the hospital and get hooked up to a machine so we started to get ready to go to the hospital.  We had decided to have Brynn in the Powell hospital, about 1/2 hour away.  My mom lives in Powell so she could watch Aubrey for all my doctors appointments and we had heard good things about the Powell hospital and the Powell doctors. 

So we dropped Aubrey off at my parents house, went to the hospital and got checked in.  They did an ultrasound to check for a kidney stone but nothing showed up so they figured it was back labor.  Since I was contracting they let me stay.  I laid in bed for a long time dealing with contractions.  My sister had used the Bradley method with her baby and had lent me her book so I was using that for my contractions.  Basically it advocates relaxing your whole body through contractions so your body can get the work done unimpeded by tension.  So I was doing that pretty well but it did nothing for the back labor which was a constant thing that wouldn't go away.  So I eventually got something for the back pain in my IV.  It was pretty strong stuff and made me feel dizzy with only a half dose.  After that stuff wore off I still wasn't very far along in the dialation department.  So after a while they had me walk around and around and around and when that didn't do much they broke my water.  And after that didn't do anything, they started me on pitocin.  I'd always heard pitocin what an intense thing so they gave me another half dose of the pain stuff and again the back labor went away but I still felt the contractions.  So that finally got things going so I felt like I needed to push.  So they got the doctor and stopped the pitocin but then nothing happened.  So they started it up again and I started pushing.

I pushed for like 10 minutes, and they were not fun minutes.  I had an epidural with Aubrey so I hadn't felt anything last time, but I'd heard that pushing was a relief after waiting through contractions so I hadn't really worried about that part of having Brynn without an epidural.  Yeah, pushing was the worst part. That might have had to do with having a 8 lb 12 oz baby though. But those 10 minutes passed, and she finally arrived! She was very unhappy.  She screamed for almost half an hour but we eventually got her calmed down and nursing and then she slept.

Everything went pretty well after that except for a little scare when she started throwing up amniotic fluid and refusing to nurse.  But she got all the fluid out without us having to pump her stomach and got back to eating.  She's a good eater and had regained her birth weight within 5 days and she hasn't looked back.

She's a wonderful little girl and hasn't had too many uncontrollably hysterical crying jags or all nighters.  She has started to sleep 8 hours at night and smiling and talking a ton.  We are still working on getting a laugh out of her but it will come.  Here are some pictures of her around her birth.

Daddy holding his new little girl

Aubrey holding her little sister

Our first family picture!