You Must be Married to a Canadian

We recently got several inches of new snow. What should we do for dinner? Why not barbecue? No problem! Just brush off the grill and fire it up. Hey, don't even worry about a coat! I'm not going to complain, it was a delicious meal, and I didn't even have too cook. I love you Jason!

Madeline's Blessing, and other fun things

We blessed Madeline this past Sunday. Our ward has had a real baby boom this fall—there were three baby blessings that day. A lot of my extended family came. It is always inspiring to see so many of the men in your family participating in the priesthood. Jason did a beautiful job. He talked about Madeline’s personality and how she can help others, about how she was saved to be here at the time of the restoration, and about the importance of temples for her and her family.

The dress she was blessed in has quite a history. I was blessed in it, along with all the girl cousins on my mom's side. Now all the daughters of my cousins but one has been blessed in it too.

We also got some more professional looking pics of her in her blessing dress. I'll post those later.

Here are some pictures of the big day. Our growing family of 4...

My family, I think Matt must be standing on something. He only wishes he was taller than Michael...

And here is the whole crew.

Since she wasn't in too smiley of a mood when we got those other pictures, I thought I'd include a few more recent pictures of her too. She really is such a happy, smiley baby. She is starting to carry on tons of "conversations" too. I think I'm in love.

The zoo and cute smiles

We have had a lot of fun the last few weeks. We took Ethan and Madeline to the Zoo a couple weeks ago and had a great time. Ethan loved the Zebras, Elephants (including the baby elephant) and giraffes. But his greatest love was the carousel. He chose to ride the Zebra, and that is about all he has talked about since. He is still young enough that just looking at animals through glass isn't as exciting as he anticipates. At nearly every exhibit, he would say "I want to go in there!" But they do have the carousel and a fun train ride that he thought were pretty cool.


When we stopped for lunch, this peacock was just wandering around the tables. We weren't sure if he escaped from his cage or what, but that was also pretty exciting.

This has nothing to do with the zoo, but I realized the other day that I must refer to things as being cool quite a bit, because in just the last week, Ethan has started saying "Mommy, come here! I want to show you what's cool!" or "Come see what's cool!" It sounds so funny coming from a two year old.

Here are some pictures we took of Madeline last night as well. She is really becoming a social bug. She smiles and coos back at you when you talk to her. Sometimes she is just sitting in her bouncer chair while I'm cooking or something and I look down and she is just smiling at me. I love it! She will be two months next week. Crazy how time flies.

Happy Halloween

Here is our great trick-or-treating duo. None other than Curious George and the Man with the Yellow Hat. Ethan loved it--as did everyone in our neighborhood.

Our Past Month

We have had so much going on the past month we thought we'd share a few pictures. Mom and Dad Mendes stayed with us for a couple of weeks in October (much to Ethan's delight) so he got tons of undivided attention. It was perfect to ease the transition. Anyway, here are some pictures of what we've been up to.

This is the Living Planet Aquarium that is just about 10 minutes from our house. Ethan loves the tank where you can touch the rays, as well as the jelly fish.





Ethan and Papa feeding the ducks at Wheeler Farm.


While we were at the farm, we had a picnic lunch by the pond. After about 10 minutes the sprinklers came on right under our table. We scrambled to get everyone out of the spray, then 30 seconds later they turned off. We decided it must have been a candid camera stunt or something. We are currently watching for ourselves on TV. It would have been a lot funnier to watch it happen to someone else.




Here is Madeline at 1 month. It's hard to believe she is that old--yet I can hardly imagine not having her either.

Photoshoot

We thought we would share some of the pictures we had taken of the family last week on October 14th. It was a great chance to get some family pictures while Mom and Dad (a.k.a. Granny and Papa) were here visiting. Madeline was almost 3 weeks old.

Welcome Madeline!

So our new addition finally arrived almost 2 weeks ago. Madeline Gail was born on Thursday, September 24th at 7:25 am. (Yes, that means I had an overnight labor again :) She weighed 7 lbs. 12 oz. and was 20 1/2 inches long.

So, for those who are interested in more details about labor delivery, and time in the hospital, here goes... For several weeks before she came, we started wondering if I would ever go into labor. Every doctor's appointment was the same story--no progress. Finally, the day after my due date (Tuesday, Sept 22) I was dilated to a 1. Yay! At least that was something. Still, we weren't too hopeful that anything would happen soon. But that night I started having more regular contractions. They weren't very painful at all, but they started coming every 5 minutes or so. So we called my parents and my mom picked Ethan up. We thought it was safer to have him go down to their house that night, to avoid a potential middle of the night phone call. As the night went on, the contractions kept coming, but more sporadically. They were bad enough that I couldn't sleep very well through them, but definitely not progressing very fast. Wednesday we just hung around waiting and hoping they would get more serious. It was so strange to not have Ethan around. I didn't know what to do with myself. We finally went to bed again that night around 11:00. I figured I would have a night similar to the previous one, but around midnight things really picked up and by 3:00 am we were headed to the hospital. I had already dilated to a 4 (thankfully) and the anesthesiologist was in a C-section (which had happened with Ethan as well) so I waited it out for another hour or so. by the time I got an epidural--which I am a huge fan of by the way :)--I was already a 7 and a couple hours later we were ready to push. My nurse and my doctor were due to go home about 7:00 but they both said they had to stick around to see if the baby would be a red head. I pushed for about 40 minutes. As she was crowning they said "she's got dark hair...woa! That's a lot of dark hair. I haven't seen that much hair on a newborn in a long time." We fell in love with her immediately of course. She did great and even nursed really well right after birth.



They took her up to the nursery for more tests about an hour or so after she was born. They said it would take about 30 minutes, but at an hour I started to wonder what had happened to my husband and baby. It turned out that her oxygen levels were a little low. They would put her on a little oxygen and they would come right back up, but whenever they took her off she would go down again. They finally decided she had to go to the NICU. She ended up spending 4 days there, but tests kept coming back showing nothing to be too concerned about. She was eating well and doing great, so it wasn't a very scary thing. We missed being able to have her right with us, but we could spend as much time as we wanted by her bed in the NICU. The hospital even let us do a hotel stay after my discharge on Saturday morning, so we could stay in our same room and still be with Madeline until she was released Monday morning. She was a little jaundiced, so she was under lights for a couple of days, but when she was taken off the lights she continued to improve. They also gave her some antibiotics mostly as a precaution, but in the end they think she probably either had just a little more maturing to do in her lungs, or she had aspirated a little amniotic fluid at birth. At any rate, everything went well, and we all came home on Monday, September 28th.




I would say the hardest part about being in the hospital so long, was that we weren't with Ethan for almost a week. It was so fun to have him come home Monday night as well--and he finally got to see his little sister! The age limit for the NICU was 3. When he came with my family, he would say "I need see Madeline!" Here is the proud big brother holding his little sister.


Madeline with Aunt Emy

And with Uncle Matt...
And Grandma...



Her first bath at home.

I'm sure we will be posting more pictures soon.