Happy Birthday to Me!!!

Since we were up after midnight last night (this morning) Keith was the first to tell me Happy Birthday today. Then when I woke Elena up for school, the first thing she said to me was Happy Birthday. She's normally a little grumpy in the mornings and I hadn't thought she'd remember, so I said "Elena, you remembered!!" And she said "Of course I remembered your birthday, Mom. I would be bad if I didn't remember your birthday". (Of course I assured her she wouldn't be, and then thanked her for remembering!) Then when Mari, Téa, and Amya woke up, they all came into our room and sang Happy Birthday to me with Keith. Then Keith took them to the kitchen to make me some breakfast - yellow cupcakes with chocolate frosting. Probably not the most nutritious breakfast, but very yummy. Mari keeps walking up to me and singing Happy Birthday - it's very cute.

And the mail just came and it was ALL for me! A birthday card from Memmie (to which Amya said "She always sends pretty cards"), one from Sally&Ben (to which Amya said "They always send cute cards...usually with dogs" (and this one was no exception)) and one from my mom (to which Amya said "Is my money in there?" (long story, but it was)). Oh and I got a card from Ceci on Monday...the first one to arrive. After I opened the card from my mom and pulled out the 3 gift cards to Target, Bath&Body Works and Old Navy, plus a little cash (THANKS Mom), Keith had something to say - "Hey, is she trying to outdo me or what?" :) Thanks for the cards guys!! Love ya!

So far this is shaping up to be a pretty good birthday. And since it's my last one (I don't plan on getting older than 29), that's a very good thing.

Here's Mari singing to me....


And this is totally unrelated, but we think it's hilarious so I'm including it. We like to play a game we call "Who Says? Who Says?" (Amya made up the name when she was 2). We say a quote from a movie and the first person to correctly name the movie it's from or the character who says it, gets the next turn. Last night Téa came up to me with this gem....

I didn't think to have her say it again and tape it last night, but we got it this morning. I think it's SO funny how she changes her voice for the different parts. In case you can't figure it out, she's singing a line from the "A Whole New World" song in the movie Aladdin. She says "Don't you dare close your eyes (Aladdin's part) and then "A whole new world" (Jasmine's part). Oh and that's chocolate frosting from the cupcakes all over their mouths.

silly boy

Keith made these delicious and wonderful cinnamon rolls for the second time last night. He started around 9 and I think the first batch came out of the oven around 11:30 pm. They looked so light and golden. I was looking at them and wondering why they didn't look exactly the same as last time. Then it hit me. "Keith, did you put cinnamon in these?" I asked him. "No...why?" was his reply. I waited. A few seconds later, "Aw, man!" Yes, he forgot to put the cinnamon in the cinnamon rolls. I think we'll forgive him though - they still tasted wonderful. Here's a pic of the ones that he made the first time...before baking. I never got around to taking a picture of them after they came out of the oven because we were too excited to eat them.

7 weeks

Ack!! I keep meaning to get on here and post, and then I get too busy with everything else and forget. But our cute little boy is now 7 weeks old! We can't believe how much he's already growing. He is getting quite good at holding his head up and is SO alert. He loves to be up on our shoulder so that he can look around at everything. When someone is talking, he's trying to find where they are. He's turned into quite the expert pooper, gracing us with blowouts almost every day now. And he's starting to make little noises. I LOVE it when babies are first starting to "talk"- I think their little coos are the sweetest things ever. We are loving our time with our little Noah boy (that's what Mari likes to call him). Here are some pictures of what he's looking like at 7 weeks.

I think we all know where he gets that double chin from. :)





And here are two scrapbook pages I made for him...

weeks 17&18

weeks 15&16

4 weeks?!?!?

How can it have already been 4 weeks? It seems like we JUST came home from the hospital and now he's 4 weeks old today and will be a month on Sunday. I just can't believe how fast time goes by....especially when we haven't been doing much of anything these last 4 weeks. I knew a newborn didn't do much but sleep, eat, and poo, but I forgot how much time those things actually take. I am on the couch almost all day long...I'm either pumping, changing him, feeding him his bottle, burping him, holding him while he sleeps (I know it spoils him, but sometimes I just can't help it), holding him while he's awake, or helping the girls hold him. He is a really good baby....he only cries if we don't get him his bottle in time. :P

On the bottle subject...I'm pumping and then he gets the breast milk in the bottle. We started doing this to monitor how much he was eating to make sure he didn't get too jaundiced (as he was falling asleep almost right after he started to nurse and then didn't eat enough) and have continued to do this as I'm pumping out twice the amount he eats and would DIE (after I exploded) if I was only nursing. Keith and I figured it out the other night. I have over 100 6 oz bags of milk, frozen in our deep freezer. That means over 600 oz I've frozen, which is over 1200 total pumped out. Do you know how much 1200 oz is? Over 10 gallons. 10 gallons. In 4 weeks. I feel like a freaking cow.

On to other news.... :) Noah is super sweet. He smiles a lot, sleeping and awake. And not when he's tooting. He's just happy. He holds his head up really well already and is really alert. He's always looking around and has recently starting really looking at things. He will hear me talking and start looking around till he finds me and then stare at me for awhile. I LOVE it. Today was the first rough day we had with him. I don't know if it was something I ate or he wasn't burped enough or what, but he had bad gas pains. He was crying and fussing and couldn't lay down. I had to hold him up on my shoulder to get him to stop crying and he was tooting like there was no tomorrow. He would fuss, toot, calm down, and then fuss again right before he tooted again. I felt so bad for him. I let him sleep on me all day today so he wouldn't be in pain. I've never had a baby have gas problems before...it was so sad. I think he's finally feeling better, as he's asleep in his bed and not crying. I sure hope this doesn't happen again. I know I wouldn't be able to hold him all day long, all the time, like I did today (Keith was here and able to help out), and it would be sad to have him crying and not be able to give him all of my time and attention (as I have four other kids who do need me every now and then).

And now it's time to pump again. The cycle goes on. :P Here's a sweet pic I took of our little Noah today.

weeks 13 & 14

So now that I'll be posting my 365 layouts here, I can stay more up to date and not bore you with an extremely long post. Here are the layouts for the last two weeks....

Noah video

I thought I'd try to take a video of Noah with the webcam on my laptop....this is what we got. Hopefully this will work and you'll be able to see it.

boy update #3

Man, it's already been more than a week!! I can't believe my little boy is already over a week old. I just realized I never came back on here to let you guys know his name and all that (I put it on my facebook, but forgot about the blog). We named him Noah Keith. We think it fits him very well...we filled out the birth certificate JUST before leaving the hospital. I think the nurse was about to have a cow about us not having it filled out. Seriously, what law says that your baby has to be named before you leave the hospital? And that you can't turn in your own birth certificate form - that someone at the hospital has to do it? I think it's so funny how they freak out about it....every time the nurse would come into the room, she'd look over at the empty birth certificate form and make some comment about how I hadn't gotten around to filling it out yet. Very annoying.

Noah is SUCH a good baby. He hardly ever cries - only if we're making him wait too long before we feed him. He wasn't eating very well at first...he'd suck for about 5 minutes and then fall asleep and I could not get him to wake back up. I was afraid he was going to get jaundice like Maricela and need the bili bed. And I was dying because my milk had come in and he was not doing much to relieve me. So I started pumping and we are feeding him the milk in a bottle so we can monitor how much he's eating. He went from barely eating an ounce to eating about 3 oz every 3-4 hours. All the yellowness is gone and he's looking good. He's already back up to birth weight and I've got a stockpile of milk in the freezer. I think we'll keep up the pumping, as I'm getting out at least 8 oz every 3-4 hours...yep, I'm a cow.

He had his circumcision on Tue and did awesome. He fussed right at first when the doctor was cleaning him off - he doesn't like us to clean him off when we change his diaper either (I think it's the cold wipie) - and then didn't even make a peep after that. The nurse was giving him sugar water in a syringe and that's all he cared about. Didn't cry for the numbing shots or anything. The nurse and the doctor kept saying what a good baby he was. It's been healing really well (except it started bleeding a little today when I was changing him) and everything seems to be going fine.

He wakes up about twice during the night to be fed, usually around 11/12 and then 3/4. I get up at those times to pump and Keith gets up to feed him. I am so grateful Keith is SO willing to help out - he changes diapers, gives baths, and gets up to help with feedings. I have a couple friends who have told me their husbands don't help out at all. One friend has four boys (and is pregnant again) and said her husband has never once changed a diaper. I think I would freak out if Keith was like that. I'm really lucky that he is so willing to be such an active participant in the care of our children. He doesn't just say it's my job.

Well, it's about time to pump again, so I better get going. I'll leave you with a cute picture of our little Noah that I just took yesterday. He's already been smiling quite often and we've seen dimples! One for sure on the right side and Kara said she saw the left side one also. He gets those from Keith.

project 365 update

I don't know if you guys have been checking my 365 blog or not and if you haven't, don't worry - I haven't updated it since February. I have, however, stayed up-to-date on my pictures and layouts. I've just found that it's too much to try to upload the photos to a separate blog and don't really see the point...So I'll be deleting that blog and just posting the weekly layouts here, for those of you interested and so that I can keep it documented for myself. So, without further ado, here are the pages I have done so far....(watch out, there's a ton!)