Preggo Update

Today I am 37 1/2 weeks which makes me happy and 1 day away from my January goal! This weekend I had contractions and on Monday I woke up with contractions 2 minutes apart. After doing that all day I finally went to the Dr because they weren't all that strong but just very consistent and I was dilated to a 1. He said they are probably Braxton Hicks contractions and I know all you Moms out there are like DUH! But honestly that was the first time Ive ever had them. With Caleb all my contractions were the real deal and with Davis I never contracted until the day I delivered. Plus Ive been told that Braxton Hicks are not consistent and I had been having them for almost 24 hours 2-4 minutes apart.

It did make me realize how not ready I felt to have him come. So in the past few days Ive washed everything in our house and last night Super John mopped our whole floor for me. Everything is spotless now but will probably only remain such until 9:00 am this morning but that's what happens when your baby #3!

Yesterday I contacted in the afternoon and evening, today Ive woke up with them...It feels like its going to be like it was with Caleb tons and tons of contractions but no baby. I just want it to be like it was with Davis one day of contractions and a baby by 8:00 pm! Its hard and discouraging to always be contracting! Plus makes you feel silly that everyone has worried and prayed so that the baby wouldn't come and now the baby is not coming! Perhaps you all have a little to much faith!

Today I have an apt so I will post what the Dr says this afternoon. He has mentioned several times how big the baby is. For example, you don't have a 9 pound baby...YET! Or I really liked what he said on Monday, "I don't think you are going to have the baby today, although he is certainly big enough." I guess the injected progesterone can make babies much bigger (a side effect that probably should have been mentioned BEFORE I took it) so they are watching his size since he was measuring 40 weeks when I was only 36 weeks. We have a friend here that delivered a 10 lb 11 oz baby this last week and I hurt just thinking about it!

So anyway there is my morning ramble because I just want to feel good and enjoy these last few weeks or just go and have a baby but please NO MORE of this feeling like Im always in labor when Im really not!

Updated: well, at least the contractions are not totally useless...I'm now a 2 and still contracting hard about every 15-30 minutes and I can handle that. Plus we decided to play the day away in St George and so the house is still clean! We came home and in the mail was a Christmas present for me from Chris and Dianna...the LDS version of Pride and Prejudice so the kids and I cuddled and watched the movie! Thank you so much-PERFECT TIMING! Then tonight we get to go eat pizza with some friends and play games at their house so its looking better and better that I will go to bed with a still clean house (thank you Wheeler family for sacrificing your house)! I feel much better than I did this morning! Oh and the Dr estimates that right now the baby is 7 1/2 lbs so that's totally doable!

Growing up

Since Caleb turned 5 I thought it would be appropriate to have a more in depth talk with Caleb about which parts of our body are private, how we dont let people see them, good touching vs bad touching, good secrets vs bad secrets, and things we talk about with people and things we only talk about with Mommy and Daddy. It went really well and hes been trying to be better about things like running to the door to see who it is before pulling his pants up if hes in the bathroom. I just felt like it was time to give him some rules for if a situation ever did come up, he would be prepared.

I felt good about this talk and thats about as much info as I wanted to give him for right now, until he asked me "how is baby beckham going to come out Mommy? Through your mouth?" So... we had another little discussion and he handled that one well to. Im so grateful that he never asked how Beckham got into my tummy!

And last but not least last Sunday John went into the bathroom at church and Caleb was at a urinal with his pants at his ankles and his cute little buns showing so John told Caleb when he came home from church he would teach Caleb to pee "like a man." Johns words, not mine. So John taught him how to use his zipper and the flap on his undies. Well, the other day John and Caleb came home from riding in Daddys truck and John was getting a few things out of the truck and Caleb said "hey Dad look at me, IM A MAN!" and there he was peeing off our porch like a man...so much for my keeping our private parts private talk!

Calebs new favorite thing

Caleb got a lot of very cool presents for his birthday but I wanted to show off one that he got from Aunt Lisa and Uncle Mark. My sis-in-law Lisa is SO amazing and makes the cutest kids clothes. This is the transformer sweatshirt she made Caleb and I'm telling you I can hardly get it off of him to wash it. He has even gone as far as asking to sleep with it. Hes been asking me to take a picture of him in it for a while but since I couldn't hardly get it washed it took us a little bit.

Bumblebee on the frontOptimus Prime on the back!

Hes a very happy 5 year old! Thanks Auntie Lisa for all your hard work!

red light...green light

Today I am officially 36 weeks which means I'm officially full term! This was my goal and I'm so happy to be here (well because of the baby-NOT because of how I feel). Its amazing how fast things change at 36 weeks. Ive been pretty comfortable (for a preggo lady) until now. But the end is in sight and now my goal is to hit January. One December birthday is enough! But the reality is that if I went into labor now, they wont stop me.

Anyway, here are some pictures we took this morning before church all in our Christmas get up. It was a nice Sunday with Caleb singing in the Program to just sitting in church with the whole family. As much as we complain about not being able to listen in Sacrament because of kids we felt very lonely when they were gone.
How did I end up living in a house with the 3 best lookin' boys in the world!?!

If you could see me now...

You would see steam pouring from my ears!

I'm so angry! I have a friend and she linked up a cute idea from a friend so I followed the link and thought the idea was cute. In this girls header though the words "attached parenting" caught my attention. In the words off of a attachment parenting blog this is what they believe in "extended breast feeding, co-sleeping, non-violence towards children, and carrying or otherwise being with babies (especially newborns) every hour of the day." And I'm generalizing here but a lot of parents who believe in this model don't believe in circumcision or immunizations either.

Is this what I agree with, No, but to each his own right. I don't care what they believe in or how they want to raise their kids that's not what I'm fuming about. I think its fun to read some of the justifications that they have for things since I hold a very opposite opinion. For example John and I don't believe in co sleeping because we feel it interferes with the relationship of husband and wife. But I wanted to read her opinion and so in the co-sleeping section of this particular blog I read this....

Do you remember in the mid 1990s when everyone was talking about the babies in orphanages in Romania? That was the first time I became aware of some of the horrors going on around the world. These babies were going colorblind because they had no colors in their cribs to stimulate them. Infants, toddlers, and even older children sat in cribs (sometimes tied to them) all day and all night... there were not enough adults to care for them, so they were not cared for. Most of these children cried day and night when first placed in the orphanages. It broke the hearts of reporters and television viewers alike to see these children cry and cry and cry...

Eventually, the children would give up and stop crying.

That broke our hearts even more.

And yet, somehow, we don't accept that we are doing the same thing to our children. How many times have you heard that you need to let your baby 'cry it out' or 'learn to self-soothe'? Have you heard of the 'Ferber baby'? The baby that doesn't need adult attention, it just shuts up and goes to sleep by itself. That is SO SAD!!! The Ferber baby is a baby who has given up!!!

I'm sorry but I'm going to have to throw the I MAJORED in child development and I HAVE worked in a Romanian orphanage and I HAVE been a mother card on the table...

Are you kidding me? You want to compare the practice of having a child learn to sleep by themselves to children who get no physical touch for about 23.5 hours a day, who never get picked up, never get their diaper changed, are fed three times a day with a propped bottle, who do eventually not cry because of such severe attachment disorders that they learn to rely on no one but themselves! Now just to be sure I'm not misunderstood I'm not mad that shes comparing my children to that of Romania orphans. Its that she exploiting the orphans and comparing their struggles to that of my children.
Those children live in real life HELL!
Their eyes are empty and they live in circumstances that I'm sure brings our Heavenly Father to tears to see the suffering of such innocent ones. How can anyone with any real sense of reality think that this is a equal comparison. Kids who are allowed to cry it out don't usually stop crying altogether, they are asleep! Not sitting in their cribs staring into space with a blank look in their eyes. To actually believe that the two can be related makes me so mad I cant stand it!

That's what erks me the most is these people believe in "attachment parenting" have no clue what it means to have a securely attached child! Here is what a securely attached child is suppose to look like:

Children who are securely attached do not experience significant distress when separated from caregivers. When frightened, these children will seek comfort from the parent or caregiver. Contact initiated by a parent is readily accepted by securely attached children and they greet the return of a parent with positive behavior. While these children do not become exceptionally distressed by a parent's absence, they clearly prefer parents to strangers.

I remember learning about this is school and being surprised when they said the kids with the best attachments were the ones who didn't cry when they left their parents and they didn't cry when they returned. For example a child who is happy to be dropped of at nursery but is excited to see his parents come back.

Somehow I don't see kids who never sleep alone, are breastfed until they go to preschool, and are parented by people who believe they should be with them virtually all of the time are raising kids that are ready and willing to leave their side.

I guess the question is who is the "attachment parenting" for....I think its for the parents, not the kids. I want my kids to be independent from me. I want them to love me and want to be with me but I want them to be able to do things like go away for a month if the situation is needed and be able to be happy in another environment. I don't think its healthy to have your kids so attached to you that they cant be without you. That's why I think its really for the parents trying to establish a connection that the parents themselves need to feel good. I believe the parents are insecurely attached to their children and the parents need to be with them 100% of the time for their own needs, not the needs of the child. As a disclaimer I know there are differences in personalities and I do not believe that any child who cries when his parents leave is insecurely attached. My point is that attachment parenting is practically to never give the kids an opportunity to learn to be away from them. The difference is in the attitude of the parents not wanting their kids to be able to be without them.

Okay, so I am going off on it a little bit, or a lot, but the reality still is that the things they use to justify their parenting style really make me mad. REAL research debunks a lot of their theories and to see my poor helpless kids in Romania have their struggle reduced to what it must be like for my kids to cry for 10 minutes before they go to sleep is just the stupidest thing Ive ever heard of!

Basically what I'm saying is BACK off the orphans! They live a life than NONE of us over here could ever imagine and minimizing their real life struggle for personal preference is reprehensible!

The perfect morning....

• warm homemade cinnamon swirl bread with cold milk
• cuddling to "Rudolf the red nosed reindeer" movie
• a dark house with a lit Christmas tree
• a perfect layer of pure white snow

only drawback was daddy leaving for work...

I have been debated about putting up and decorating the Christmas tree since we will be having a baby so soon and its a lot of work. John was right though, its really important for the kids and making those memories and traditions that make the holidays special. I was still a little hesitant because Johns not an ornament man. Lucky for me though Caleb loves it and hes awesome! He and I had so much fun putting all the ornaments up and after we were done I took a picture of the him with the final product and Davis really wanted in so it turned into a little photo shoot. These kids love to be in the spotlight.

In fact as a funny side note, today in Costco I put Davis in the big part of the cart and he stood up at the end of it with Caleb walking next to him. These guys were acting like the Costco aisles were their personal parade. Davis had the perfect wave down and they were saying "hi" to everyone we walked by and waving to the crowds. They got the reaction they were looking for too, the whole store was eating them up!

Updated: I'm SO glad we put the tree up. Last night I had to get up with Caleb to do a breathing treatment so we turned the tree lights on in our all dark house. For ten minutes he got to point to ornaments and I would tell him where they came from and it was such a tender moment with him. My grandma and mom were very into giving us ornaments growing up and at the time I didn't really appreciate it but last night I was moved by all of the thoughtful ornaments I had been given, our first year of marriage, moving into the home we built, ornaments for the years the kids were born, the talking ornament that is pushed about 100 times a day. All of the ornaments that my grandma Irene (who passed away) gave me too are now priceless and she gave me one a year until I was 18. I started collecting ornaments from the places I have traveled and so you have ornaments from our honeymoon and Romania and then the ornaments John and I bought our first year of marriage to match the star we bought. Plus my sister in laws Lisa, Kate, and I have an ornament exchange every year at Christmas and I love the special, fun, and crazy ornaments that I have collected through that exchange (ex: Last year Lisa gave me a violin ornament that didn't even fit in the gift bag, when Caleb got it out from the box of ornaments he exclaimed, "you have got to be kidding me!". The cool part is that it looks good on the tree!)

You can trace a lot of my life through the ornaments I have been given or purchased over the years and I thought about how if there was ever a fire in our house I would never have thought to grab our ornaments but they really mean a lot to me. I'm glad Caleb loves them too and hope to carry on the same ornament tradition so that when our kids are grown they will have a beautiful collection that means a lot to them too.

I forgot how funny kids are...

Caleb and Davis both have tunnel vision about who to talk to and are always pestering Mom, even when Dad is around. Ive been trying to let them know that Dad is just as available to answer their questions when we are all together. So tonight as we are driving and after answering about 10 "Mom did you know...." or "Mom, what does...." questions this following conversation ensued when he started asking me another question...

Mom: "Why don't you talk to Daddy?"
Caleb: "Why?"
Mom: "Because mommy and daddy are both here and you can talk to both of us."
Caleb after a few seconds of thought: "Dad can you tell Mom....."

A few more memorable words from Caleb...

• Today in the car as we were driving by the hill that overlooks our house Caleb let out a big sigh and said, "I sure am glad to be home." This melted my heart and brought tears to my eyes. I hope my kiddos always feel that, I know that I still feel that about my parents house.
  
• To further show how much my kiddos are turning into desert boys we have had snow (not light snow-huge flakes; all of Hurricane was white last night but its melted today-thank goodness). Yesterday Caleb asked where the sun went to and I told him it was behind the clouds and he responded with "poor sun." Then last night when the snow was really starting to come down I said, "go check out the snow" to which he replied with , "I just wish it would stop already!"
  

Seriously...what else could possibly go weird!

Today I woke up, got up and moving and I was hurting! It only took about an hour before I told John that I needed to get to the hospital because the pain was that bad and there were no breaks in the contractions, it was all one huge contraction. They hooked me up to the contraction monitor and there were some small contractions but not enough to say it was "labor" but I'm telling you I was in LABOR! I mean I was ready to ask for my epidural.

I could tell the nurses were trying to be sweet while at the same time rolling their eyes in the hallway at the wimp in the triage room. They weren't going to check me because they really didn't believe me so I had them move the monitor to try a different spot because what I was feeling and what was on the monitor did not match. It was so intense that it was like one big contraction. They were just waiting to send me home, since there was nothing going on when my urine sample came back and low and behold when it did there was blood in it!

This meant nothing to me but all of a sudden there was so sincerity in the nurse as she told me that I am passing a kidney stone! So they offered to give me an oral pain killer to send me home with but I cant take pain meds orally because they make me so sick. Ive had to many bad experiences to even risk taking one since they make me vomit violently which would do nothing but put me into real labor, while passing a kidney stone. They wouldn't give me a shot of pain meds because that's not their normal procedure so I got sent home with a water bottle and told to take two Tylenol and drowned myself in water (the same hard water that is probably what caused a kidney stone in the first place).

What really made me want to punch the nurse though was when she tried to tell me what a "real" contraction felt like! I just wanted to yell at her that this may only be my third baby to deliver but I have contracted more than most women who have birthed 12 children. I KNOW what a contraction feels like! All I could do in my pain and frustrated state was just cry though as she gave me my lecture and tried to "comfort" me!

Needless to say I'm more than a little frustrated! I feel like I finally got my life back and now here I am benched again told to just "wait." I'm so tired of feeling like the drama queen where if its not one thing, its another. So here I am typing away trying to discern the difference between labor and kidney stone pain, drinking my water, and just plain feeling sorry for myself!

This has been one LONG pregnancy! And please for happier reading look at the last post where we had the most rockin' Transformer party ever! Im sure I will feel better tomorrow!

We had a blast today with Caleb's party! I think there were 12 five to seven year olds and it was BUSY! We set up the party with all the kids working together as the Autobots and they had to defeat "Decepticon John". First they had 3 training missions before they could go on the final quest to find the Allspark.

Mission #1
Pop Decepticon Johns balloons before he popped the Autobot balloonsMission #2
Match the transformer with what it transforms intoMission #3
Get Decepticon John!!!

John ran out of silly string a little to fast so he took a prisoner and used his (although Ive never seen such a happy and willing captive!)

After training they got to Roll out and go on a scavenger hunt to find the Allspark...After finding the Allspark and opening it (the party favors were in it) we opened presents and had cake and ice creamThen the boys went out on the trampoline with John who played all sorts of games and he kept the attention of all of the boys for about 40 minutes!Check out the cake, its SO AWESOME....and I take no credit for it. All the artistic work was done by John! Many thanks to my mom who baked and frosted it too. Today was one of those days where I think I realized just how great John is! Seriously I love this man...plus I'm pretty sure Caleb knows his Daddy is the coolest Dad in the world and I think hes right!Happy Birthday big guy...We sure love you!

Happy Birthday Caleb!!!

Oh, how sweet it is to have the kids home! Last night seeing them and hugging them was so unbelievable that I wont even try to describe it in words because I know that I would never do it justice! Needless to say that today has been wonderful...I knew we had cute kiddos but today I really appreciated just how darling they are!To start out birthday celebrations I got to sneak in and wake him up and he and I ate sugary cereal for breakfast all alone! He got to go to preschool where he was swarmed by his teachers and friends who missed him. Davis and I got to hang out one on one for a couple of hours and when I picked Caleb up from Preschool we went and met John for lunch. As I was in line Caleb said he was going to get us a booth and took off before I had a chance to argue with him and he found an empty table across In n Out and jumped up and down yelling about the "great" table he had snagged. By the time I ordered and paid Caleb had made friends with everyone around him. One couple when I walked up said, "you must be Lisa, Caleb's Mom." I looking surprised and speechless because I didn't recognise these people but they quickly explained that Caleb had told them all about me and how we were waiting for "John who drives a truck." (this is why Caleb has not been taught our phone number yet...he doesn't understand that there is a limit to info you should tell people).

One thing I love about kids is their total lack of holding back and embarrassment. Caleb was talking to 2 kids at a table nearby and told them it was his birthday and the boys said, "well, we will sing you the birthday song." They then proceeded to sing to him in In n Out Happy Birthday on the top of their lungs and their sweet parents and a few other kids joined in.

Toys, trampoline, a new movie, yummy dinner, presents, and the rest of the day was a success!Lots of transformers....A very cool helmet and racing toy...