Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
Tall Baby
We took E to the pediatrician today and are pleased to announce that she is above average in length. Considering who her parents are, we have told her to celebrate this accomplishment, as this will be the only time she will ever get this honor in her life.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Please don't stop the cuteness.
Elizabeth was laying on her activity mat in her Pack 'n Play.
During her "awake time" she's really pretty content to just
lay there and look around. Since she had her head facing off
to one side, I put her toy monkey where he was eye level so she
could look at him.
I was sitting at the table eating lunch when she started screaming.
She had reached out and grabbed Mr. Monkey and pulled him
on top of herself. I think she just was startled by her own strength.
Or she was like, "THIS MONKEY IS ATTACKING ME! GET IT OFF!"
*sigh*
Sweet Baby Love
Love, love, and more love
Our sweet friends Allison & Caison stopped by to meet Miss E.
Uncle Mark practicing the bottle thing.
My best friend Tanya was in from Austin to say
"nice to meet you" & "see you soon"
since she's about to move to CHICAGO to
start her PhD.
EGC & EGC (yes, they have the exact same initials)
share some love. E is so lucky to have such sweet cousins.
The center of attention. We've ALL been waiting a long time for her!
Either Elijah or Sophia said to me today:
"Aunt Sarah, you finally have a baby!"
Yes, I do, darlin'. Yes, I do.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Abuelas y great-abuelas
What a gift for Elizabeth to be loved by so many wonderful
grandmothers AND great-grandmothers!
And this isn't all of them...we're still waiting on more visits
from some special ladies!
With Ryan's mom and her mother, Mamo.
Elizabeth is Mamo's Lucky Number 13th Great-Grandchild!
Grandma Craig (my father-in-law's mom) lives in Houston,
so she was able to meet her 11th great-grandchild while we
were still in the hospital.
E with her "Nana", Ryan's mom
E is my mom's first grandbaby.
And I think she's a little over the moon, no?
La Familia
More pics taken on Father's Day
Us with my Mom and brother, Mark
E's cousin, Chloe
Chloe is excited about the baby, but just a tiny bit more
excited about dogs.
E gets held by cousin Sophie for the 1st time
E gets held by cousin Elijah for the 1st time
The Crazy Craigs
Don't Stop Til You Get Enough
Sorry, I couldn't help the title of this post today.
A little homage to Michael.
But, seriously, you know you can't get enough of Miss E.
We are love, love, loving this dress that Jason & Janel Kates
gave Elizabeth! Word is- Jason even helped pick it out.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Happy Father's Day
Words cannot adequately express how beautiful it is to watch Ryan Craig be a daddy to our baby girl. There is a change I've witnessed in him that occurred in a split second at 8:59 on a Monday night, and it has made me fall even more in love with him. He is the biggest help in the world to me. He changes diapers, gets up in the middle of the night, gives bottles, lets me sleep a little longer, reads to Elizabeth, gives her cuddles, and a million other things that have gone from being so foreign to so natural for him. He is so encouraging to me- telling me numerous times a day what a good job I'm doing. If I could have dreamed up an ideal daddy for my little girl, and an ideal husband for me- he would not have come close to the amazing man that God had planned for me. I am unspeakably grateful for the gift of Ryan Craig.
Since E was less than a week old, we were unable to attend
the Father's Day service at our church. So Ryan watched it
online Sunday morning while he held Elizabeth.
They gave an award to the "newest father" there, and he SO
would have gotten it, because the guy they gave it to had
like a month old baby. Oh well.
He is very good about making her wear her hat.
But I always think she sorta looks like the pope in that thing.
Multi-tasking Daddy
Phoebe will not let him forget that SHE was his girl first!
Years ago our sister-in-law said to me,
"Ryan Craig was born to be the daddy of little girls".
I think she was right.
More First Week
Family of 4
TOUCHDOWN!
Daddy's girl
What we look like most mornings.
Phoebe is really not too sure about E.
Most of the time she ignores her.
First Week
Snuggling with Daddy
Getting buckled up for our first outing.
Dressed up for our first big outing...to the pediatrician's office.
A big SHOUT OUT to my sweet friend Cara Shroyer for making
us some super cute burp cloths, including this one.
Sometimes she sleeps straight through her feedings.
I love this little squishy face. I cannot tell you the number
of times a day she makes this expression.
First Bath
I think you don't normally have to get this serious about
hair washing at the first bath, but our baby has serious hair.
Not happy.
Happy.
She loves to suck my pinkie, but Ryan says unless I plan on
chopping it off and giving it to her, I've got to stop this.
A Tale of Two Epidurals
This is long. There, you’ve been warned. If you don’t feel like reading the whole thing, feel free to scroll down and look at the pretty pictures.
On the morning of Saturday the 13th I took my lovely 24-hour urine sample out of the fridge (gag) and drove up to the hospital to drop it off. We had a full day ahead of us. We spent the morning at our Sunday school’s baby shower/scavenger hunt/social event at Hermann Park. Since I was the most pregnant person there, I got to sit in the air conditioning at the natural science museum as one of the stops on the hunt. Sooooo nice. Meanwhile Ryan was running all over the park on Caison & Allison’s team. Good thing he was on THEIR team…C & A turned out to be scavenger hunt rock stars and won the thing! After the hunt we ate ice cream under the shade of Miller Outdoor Theater. I walked over by myself to this amphitheater from the museum. I had never been in Hermann Park before, so I just started walking in that general direction. I saw it…at the top of a very large, steep hill. I could see no other way to get to it but going straight up. Lord, have mercy. I wish I had a picture to show you of me on this hill. Can you just see me, 9 months pregnant, in a green dress and floppy white hat, trudging (aka waddling) straight up this big ass hill? I thought I was gonna die. Of course I get to the top and discover that there had been a way around it after all. That included a sidewalk. And a very gentle incline. Sigh.
I arrived back home just in time to change clothes and leave again. Had I known what was in store for me, I would have DEFINITELY made time for another shower. It was kinda, um…hot at the scavenger hunt. While I wasn’t outside for the whole thing, I was out there enough to get some serious sweating done. Eew.
We were in the car about 3 minutes away from Chris & Paige’s wedding shower when I got a phone call letting me know the results of my urine test. Apparently the amount of protein was 5 times the amount of what is acceptable, so the nurse requested I come up to the hospital for “more tests”. She said, “I’ll let the hospital know you’re coming.” Of course, I’m all like, “Well, actually, I’m on my way to a wedding shower, so do I have to come NOW or can I come in a little bit?” “I wouldn’t tarry more than 2 hours,” she replied. “And you might want to pack an overnight bag, just in case.”
And THAT, my friends, is how they tricked me. I was totally convinced I would just be there a few hours for some tests. But, nooooooooo. I had no idea that once they got me there, I wasn’t leaving til I birthed this baby!
So we went to the shower, saw all our friends, and of course had such a fabulous time that I didn’t want to leave.
We stayed an hour and a half, came home, and did a mad dash around the house packing our bags. I obsessed for MONTHS over what to pack in my hospital bag and had this nice, organized list. But of course, I procrastinated actually PACKING the bag, there was a bit of chaos, which my brother was nice enough to capture on film.
We get to the hospital and check in. I should’ve known this was going to be a much different experience than the one I wanted when they wouldn’t let me wear the hospital gown I brought. Yes. I caved and totally bought it. I didn’t tell Ryan til after it came in the mail. He was…not pleased.
Our nurse was lovely (ALL our nurses were lovely, and we were there long enough to go through A LOT of nurses). But Jan has a special place in our hearts because she was back 48 hours later in time to help me deliver Elizabeth. They took some more blood to test and hooked me up to a blood pressure cuff that took my bp every 15 minutes. The two major signs of preeclampsia is protein in the urine (which mine was ridiculously high) and elevated blood pressure (but my bp continued to be just beautiful). Well, while I’m there, I started to kind of go into labor on my own. My contractions were getting stronger and closer together, and I progressed to about 3 cm. The on-call doctor and my nurse were so excited because it looked like things would progress naturally and I wouldn’t have to be induced. We took a wait and see approach. The on-call doctor was fabulous, but really wanted to wait to talk to MY doctor in the morning. Because of the preeclampsia, I was hooked up to an IV with magnesium sulfate to prevent seizures.
We settled in for the night and tried to sleep. HAHAHAHA! Ahem. This is where things really start to run together for me. At some point we started pitocin to make my contractions stronger. None of us wanted to get to the point where we had to break my water and have a true induction, but I started to get more symptoms (elevated bp) of the preeclampsia and my labor was not progressing.
Sunday 5pm- I just lost it. Pitocin wasn’t helping. I was not allowed to eat, so hadn’t eaten anything since the little bit I nibbled on at the wedding shower. We still hadn’t seen my doctor. Nobody was telling us anything. I was hooked up to IV’s so they wouldn’t let me take a shower. Eew, remember? They had monitors on my belly, monitoring my contractions and E’s heartbeat, and those suckers were TIGHT. They would not let me take them off for anything. We were stuck in this windowless room and they wouldn’t let me walk the halls. All of this was blamed on the preeclampsia. I finally made the nurse contact the on-call doctor because I had just had had it. She really was so sweet. Her orders were: stop the pitocin, eat anything you want for dinner (hell, yeah!), take an Ambien, and get some sleep.
Ryan’s parents were there by this point, and they went out and got me Southwells. Halfway through my cheeseburger, fries, and LARGE chocolate shake, I got word my doctor was finally on her way. Once she got there, we made a plan. The pitocin had been stopped, my belly was full, and she let me take those damn monitors off my belly. Sweet heaven. That was the best part of all. I wanted to throw them across the room. We’d give my body a rest, start the pitocin back up at 2am, and if no progress had been made by 7am, she’d break my water.
Sooooooo, at 7am she broke my water. The magnesium sulfate made me feel pretty loopy and sleepy, so I managed to sleep off and on until early afternoon. I managed to sleep my way to 9cm. No lie. But by then the contractions were really painful. Duh. I’d had this dream that I’d go into labor naturally at home, have my doula there, work the different labor positions, and give birth with no epidural. HAHAHAHA. Look, it works for some women, and that’s fabulous. I’m not one of those women, and this was not destined to be an all-natural experience anyway. At some point in the process, I came to grips with that. I was like, “Who am I kidding?” I had back labor something fierce. Seriously. Worst pain of my life. I said to Ryan, “I’m ready for my epidural now.”
There’s a dirty little lie going around. “You can’t wait too long for your epidural or they won’t give it to you.” That’s what people kept telling me, but I was 9cm when they gave it to me the first time. Yes, that’s right. My FIRST epidural. I’d read about “hot spots”- how epidurals are not perfect and sometimes you’ll have a “hot spot” where the meds don’t reach and you just have to live with it. I had one, but it was nothing I couldn’t handle, I thought. But it started to spread. The pain got worse and worse, and pretty soon it felt like I hadn’t even had an epidural. I don’t think they believed me at first. “You’ll still feel pressure”, they said. Um…I think I can tell the difference between pressure and BLINDING WHITE HOT PAIN. I’m just saying.
We tried more pain meds. Didn’t really work. By this point I’m 10cm and ready to push. I figured if I could just push her out the pain would end. So I pushed. For an hour. And thought I was gonna DIE. I was in so much pain I just couldn’t push hard enough. So we took a break, and they called the anesthesiologist back in. He was just really perplexed as to why I was in so much pain. I was not amused. So, he tried something with the epidural, and said he’d be back in 5 minutes to see if it had worked. It had not. He kept saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong. This has never happened before.” Of COURSE it hadn’t. I WOULD be the ONE patient who was IMMUNE to a freaking epidural!
Thankfully, despite the fact that I was 10cm and had already pushed for an hour, he decided to take the epidural thingy completely out of my back and do a completely new one. And praise be to God- that one WORKED! I felt like a new woman. After the meds kicked in good and I got a chance to rest, it was time to push again. For another hour. Ugh. I would not have made it without that second epidural, no doubt. Monday night at 8:40, I looked at this gigantic digital clock looming above me and I was just so exhausted. I prayed, “Dear Jesus, PLEASE let this baby be here by 9. If I knew she’d be here by 9, I think I could make it.” And at 8:59pm this beautiful blue, squirmy little being was put on my chest. (They don’t come out pink. I’m not sure Ryan and I were fully aware of this.) It had been exactly 48 hours since we checked into the hospital for “tests” and our overnight bags, “just in case.”
Normally after you deliver, you stay in the delivery room for 3 hours and then they move you up to recovery. But I had preeclampsia, so had to stay hooked up to the magnesium sulfate for 24 hours, and continue to be monitored. We were so sick of this windowless room by this point, but Elizabeth was here and labor was over and have I mentioned how utterly lovely all our nurses were? For various reasons (I’m not even sure I know what those are) I was hooked up to a…um…catheter for that 24 hours. This meant no leaving the bed, aka- still no shower. Eew, eew, eew. On the flip side, Ryan got the privilege of changing every diaper while we were there.
Tuesday night at 9pm, after exactly 3 days in the delivery room (are you sensing how not fond we were of that room?) we were moved upstairs to recovery. It was awesome. That bed was so much more comfortable, and I wasn’t hooked up to IV’s, and the nurses actually let you sleep at night instead of checking on you every 30 minutes. Guess what my first question was? “No, you still can’t take a shower.” Which was fair I guess. I could barely stand up on my own, and had just been taken off of meds which made me pretty loopy. But eeeeeeeeewwwwwwwww. I had last showered BEFORE sweating through Hermann Park Saturday morning, and it’s now Tuesday night AND I’ve given birth for crying out loud. Oh well.
We were pretty sure they were going to keep us until Thursday, so Wednesday morning I finally took a shower, and put on my beautiful hospital gown that they wouldn’t let me wear. We were getting settled for the day when my doctor comes in and tells us we can go ahead and go home. I was shocked. I don’t know what my response was, but she was like “Do you want to stay one more day?” “No!” I said. “I’m just shocked you’re letting us leave.” She goes, “Yeah, I know we kinda kept you here a while and kept telling you no to everything you asked for.”
So we left the hospital Wednesday afternoon, and I was wheeled out…in my hospital gown I bought. I’d sorta forgotten to pack clothes to go home in, and figured I needed to get some use out of the thing.
It was so wonderful to go home!
On the morning of Saturday the 13th I took my lovely 24-hour urine sample out of the fridge (gag) and drove up to the hospital to drop it off. We had a full day ahead of us. We spent the morning at our Sunday school’s baby shower/scavenger hunt/social event at Hermann Park. Since I was the most pregnant person there, I got to sit in the air conditioning at the natural science museum as one of the stops on the hunt. Sooooo nice. Meanwhile Ryan was running all over the park on Caison & Allison’s team. Good thing he was on THEIR team…C & A turned out to be scavenger hunt rock stars and won the thing! After the hunt we ate ice cream under the shade of Miller Outdoor Theater. I walked over by myself to this amphitheater from the museum. I had never been in Hermann Park before, so I just started walking in that general direction. I saw it…at the top of a very large, steep hill. I could see no other way to get to it but going straight up. Lord, have mercy. I wish I had a picture to show you of me on this hill. Can you just see me, 9 months pregnant, in a green dress and floppy white hat, trudging (aka waddling) straight up this big ass hill? I thought I was gonna die. Of course I get to the top and discover that there had been a way around it after all. That included a sidewalk. And a very gentle incline. Sigh.
Jamie, me, & Allison
After ice cream, we decided maybe we’d better eat some lunch, so a bunch of us went to The Reggae Hut. Authentic Jamaican is quite spicy, so I was sort of hoping between that hill and the spiciness, labor would… you know, start happening! As soon as we got home from lunch, I got back in the car and headed out to get my haircut. It had been a while, and I figured it would BE a while. Then, genius that I am, I decided to stop by the Babies ‘R’ Us that is near Memorial City Mall. “Hmmm”…you may be wondering…”where is there a Babies ‘R’ Us near Memorial City Mall?” Exactly. There’s not one. I was totally convinced I had seen one and drove almost completely to Katy, turned around and headed back to the mall, finally figured out that I had completely made this store location up, and drove all the way back to the one in Katy. I was…annoyed. But at least my hair looked fabulous.
I arrived back home just in time to change clothes and leave again. Had I known what was in store for me, I would have DEFINITELY made time for another shower. It was kinda, um…hot at the scavenger hunt. While I wasn’t outside for the whole thing, I was out there enough to get some serious sweating done. Eew.
We were in the car about 3 minutes away from Chris & Paige’s wedding shower when I got a phone call letting me know the results of my urine test. Apparently the amount of protein was 5 times the amount of what is acceptable, so the nurse requested I come up to the hospital for “more tests”. She said, “I’ll let the hospital know you’re coming.” Of course, I’m all like, “Well, actually, I’m on my way to a wedding shower, so do I have to come NOW or can I come in a little bit?” “I wouldn’t tarry more than 2 hours,” she replied. “And you might want to pack an overnight bag, just in case.”
And THAT, my friends, is how they tricked me. I was totally convinced I would just be there a few hours for some tests. But, nooooooooo. I had no idea that once they got me there, I wasn’t leaving til I birthed this baby!
So we went to the shower, saw all our friends, and of course had such a fabulous time that I didn’t want to leave.
At Paige & Chris's shower
packing my bag in Elizabeth's room
Our nurse was lovely (ALL our nurses were lovely, and we were there long enough to go through A LOT of nurses). But Jan has a special place in our hearts because she was back 48 hours later in time to help me deliver Elizabeth. They took some more blood to test and hooked me up to a blood pressure cuff that took my bp every 15 minutes. The two major signs of preeclampsia is protein in the urine (which mine was ridiculously high) and elevated blood pressure (but my bp continued to be just beautiful). Well, while I’m there, I started to kind of go into labor on my own. My contractions were getting stronger and closer together, and I progressed to about 3 cm. The on-call doctor and my nurse were so excited because it looked like things would progress naturally and I wouldn’t have to be induced. We took a wait and see approach. The on-call doctor was fabulous, but really wanted to wait to talk to MY doctor in the morning. Because of the preeclampsia, I was hooked up to an IV with magnesium sulfate to prevent seizures.
We settled in for the night and tried to sleep. HAHAHAHA! Ahem. This is where things really start to run together for me. At some point we started pitocin to make my contractions stronger. None of us wanted to get to the point where we had to break my water and have a true induction, but I started to get more symptoms (elevated bp) of the preeclampsia and my labor was not progressing.
Sunday 5pm- I just lost it. Pitocin wasn’t helping. I was not allowed to eat, so hadn’t eaten anything since the little bit I nibbled on at the wedding shower. We still hadn’t seen my doctor. Nobody was telling us anything. I was hooked up to IV’s so they wouldn’t let me take a shower. Eew, remember? They had monitors on my belly, monitoring my contractions and E’s heartbeat, and those suckers were TIGHT. They would not let me take them off for anything. We were stuck in this windowless room and they wouldn’t let me walk the halls. All of this was blamed on the preeclampsia. I finally made the nurse contact the on-call doctor because I had just had had it. She really was so sweet. Her orders were: stop the pitocin, eat anything you want for dinner (hell, yeah!), take an Ambien, and get some sleep.
Ryan’s parents were there by this point, and they went out and got me Southwells. Halfway through my cheeseburger, fries, and LARGE chocolate shake, I got word my doctor was finally on her way. Once she got there, we made a plan. The pitocin had been stopped, my belly was full, and she let me take those damn monitors off my belly. Sweet heaven. That was the best part of all. I wanted to throw them across the room. We’d give my body a rest, start the pitocin back up at 2am, and if no progress had been made by 7am, she’d break my water.
Sooooooo, at 7am she broke my water. The magnesium sulfate made me feel pretty loopy and sleepy, so I managed to sleep off and on until early afternoon. I managed to sleep my way to 9cm. No lie. But by then the contractions were really painful. Duh. I’d had this dream that I’d go into labor naturally at home, have my doula there, work the different labor positions, and give birth with no epidural. HAHAHAHA. Look, it works for some women, and that’s fabulous. I’m not one of those women, and this was not destined to be an all-natural experience anyway. At some point in the process, I came to grips with that. I was like, “Who am I kidding?” I had back labor something fierce. Seriously. Worst pain of my life. I said to Ryan, “I’m ready for my epidural now.”
There’s a dirty little lie going around. “You can’t wait too long for your epidural or they won’t give it to you.” That’s what people kept telling me, but I was 9cm when they gave it to me the first time. Yes, that’s right. My FIRST epidural. I’d read about “hot spots”- how epidurals are not perfect and sometimes you’ll have a “hot spot” where the meds don’t reach and you just have to live with it. I had one, but it was nothing I couldn’t handle, I thought. But it started to spread. The pain got worse and worse, and pretty soon it felt like I hadn’t even had an epidural. I don’t think they believed me at first. “You’ll still feel pressure”, they said. Um…I think I can tell the difference between pressure and BLINDING WHITE HOT PAIN. I’m just saying.
We tried more pain meds. Didn’t really work. By this point I’m 10cm and ready to push. I figured if I could just push her out the pain would end. So I pushed. For an hour. And thought I was gonna DIE. I was in so much pain I just couldn’t push hard enough. So we took a break, and they called the anesthesiologist back in. He was just really perplexed as to why I was in so much pain. I was not amused. So, he tried something with the epidural, and said he’d be back in 5 minutes to see if it had worked. It had not. He kept saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong. This has never happened before.” Of COURSE it hadn’t. I WOULD be the ONE patient who was IMMUNE to a freaking epidural!
Thankfully, despite the fact that I was 10cm and had already pushed for an hour, he decided to take the epidural thingy completely out of my back and do a completely new one. And praise be to God- that one WORKED! I felt like a new woman. After the meds kicked in good and I got a chance to rest, it was time to push again. For another hour. Ugh. I would not have made it without that second epidural, no doubt. Monday night at 8:40, I looked at this gigantic digital clock looming above me and I was just so exhausted. I prayed, “Dear Jesus, PLEASE let this baby be here by 9. If I knew she’d be here by 9, I think I could make it.” And at 8:59pm this beautiful blue, squirmy little being was put on my chest. (They don’t come out pink. I’m not sure Ryan and I were fully aware of this.) It had been exactly 48 hours since we checked into the hospital for “tests” and our overnight bags, “just in case.”
in the delivery room with the Craig family, an hour after E's birth
Tuesday night at 9pm, after exactly 3 days in the delivery room (are you sensing how not fond we were of that room?) we were moved upstairs to recovery. It was awesome. That bed was so much more comfortable, and I wasn’t hooked up to IV’s, and the nurses actually let you sleep at night instead of checking on you every 30 minutes. Guess what my first question was? “No, you still can’t take a shower.” Which was fair I guess. I could barely stand up on my own, and had just been taken off of meds which made me pretty loopy. But eeeeeeeeewwwwwwwww. I had last showered BEFORE sweating through Hermann Park Saturday morning, and it’s now Tuesday night AND I’ve given birth for crying out loud. Oh well.
We were pretty sure they were going to keep us until Thursday, so Wednesday morning I finally took a shower, and put on my beautiful hospital gown that they wouldn’t let me wear. We were getting settled for the day when my doctor comes in and tells us we can go ahead and go home. I was shocked. I don’t know what my response was, but she was like “Do you want to stay one more day?” “No!” I said. “I’m just shocked you’re letting us leave.” She goes, “Yeah, I know we kinda kept you here a while and kept telling you no to everything you asked for.”
So we left the hospital Wednesday afternoon, and I was wheeled out…in my hospital gown I bought. I’d sorta forgotten to pack clothes to go home in, and figured I needed to get some use out of the thing.
pretty hospital gown
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Nicknames
Completely UNacceptable nicknames for Elizabeth:
Liz
Lizzie
Liza
Beth
Betty
Betsy
Libby
Completely acceptable nicknames for Elizabeth:
Monkey
Monkey-doodle
Doodle-bug
E
Houdini
Sweet Angel
Squeaky
Monday, June 22, 2009
On the Night You Were Born
"On the night you were born, the moon shone with
such wonder that the stars peeked in to
see you and the night wind whispered,
'Life will never be the same.'
Because there had never been anyone like you...
ever in the world."
"Heaven blew every trumpet
and played every horn
on the wonderful, marvelous
night you were born."
*The book On the Night You Were Born is by Nancy Tillman
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