Time for some Pictures!!!

There's really not much time to organize this sort of thing with two kids, so posts will likely be even more sporatic than they were before.  But here are some pictures of Liam's first weeks with us!

This first installment is only hospital pics, because that's all the time Liam's giving me tonight.

With Dada in the delivery room

With Mama shortly after birth (do i look tired enough?)

Robin and Poppa watching while he gets cleaned up

This is a cute one of my three boys

Liam with Dada

Liam with Mama

Resting

Ama holding Liam while Robin investigates

Robin selected a birthday present for Liam a few weeks before his arrival, and here got to deliver it

Cuddled up with Grammy

It's a Boy!

Introducing Liam Reeve Rhoadarmer!
born Wednesday, June 1, 2011 at 11:17am
6 pounds, 7.2 ounces
19 inches

I thought I was going into labor on Monday night (only got about 2 hours of sleep, then contractions kept me awake) however it abruptly stopped at about 10:00am. So then last night it started up again, but more intense. Around 5:00am I considered calling the doctor but the contractions suddenly fell in intensity and I thought I might be able to sleep between them (quite a feat considering they were about 7 minutes apart--hey, I was tired) so I opted to do that instead. Then I wasn't sure whether labor would continue or stop again in the morning, so Dean took off for work as usual. I called the doc a little later, and she told me to go to the hospital, so Dean logged all of 10 minutes at work today (oops.) By the time we left the house (we had to take Robin with us since my parents are farther away and hadn't arrived yet) I was seriously concerned about whether we'd have time to get there as the contractions were starting to change again (not a good thing, considering I was attempting a vbac.) I seriously scared my poor son with my displays of pain. I tried to reassure him that it was just part of having a baby and having a baby hurts, and he promptly went around repeating "Mama baby owie" for the rest of the morning. At any rate, my parents arrived shortly after us to take him off our hands, and the new baby arrived within about 30 minutes as I was already fully dilated.

So it's been quite an eventful day and I'm quite tired, but I wanted to post and share!

Baby Comparison

I thought you all might enjoy a belly shot of the current pregnancy, along with a comparison to Robin's.  I'm at 31 weeks in each of these pictures.  The first is now, and the second is with Robin:

The scale might not be exact, but I think it's close.  The shape of this belly is definitely more of a shelf, whereas Robin was more rounded.  You can see I was a bit puffier last time too, perhaps from retaining more water (or gaining more weight?  or both--I actually haven't compared weight gain, so I don't know whether I'm ahead or behind last time.)

My belly is already getting in the way when I try to tie my shoes, and I'm noticing that getting up from the floor (something I'm doing a lot more with this pregnancy than the last) takes a lot more effort now.  The baby is quite strong and I'm a little afraid of it getting 9 weeks stronger.  Oof.

We're starting to freak out about how little time we have left before baby's arrival.  Mainly we need to finish Robin's bed so we can repurpose the crib, move what remains of my office downstairs in with Dean, and paint/put up a mural in the baby's room.  That's a lot to do with a bunch of birthday celebrations, Easter, a vacation, and Mother's Day all rolled into our remaining time too.  Yikes.  We're going to be pretty busy for the next few months!

On another note, Robin can now count to nine!  I had made him a bunch of car cutouts from his playdough, and that was how many we had.  I asked him to count them and I didn't count along with him like I usually do.  To my surprise and delight, he got to nine all by himself!  He only repeated it once, though, before he must've gotten tired of showing off and starting messing around with the order of the numbers.  But we have managed to get him to repeat the feat a few times so we know he knows it.  (I'll see if I can't get a video of this sometime soon.)

March Madness

Some March pictures for your enjoyment:

Robin playing the drums with his monkey and Grandpa

As part of our massive home reorganization, Dean purchased this toy organizer.  It holds a lot of Robin's toys and makes it so he can see what he has without having to dig to the bottom of his chest.  So far Robin's been more willing to clean up when putting things back in here, but we'll see how long that lasts for.  :)

Giving his donkey (suddenly a current favorite toy) a ride on the Fisher Price phone

We did a lot of work on our garage recently, and while Robin "helped" a bit, he usually wound up playing in my car before too long.  This particular time, he strapped himself into his car seat and wanted Monkey to drive.

Wearing Ama's gloves while making her play in the car with him.

Our Leprechaun from this year (my, how he's grown!)

We went back to the museum because Robin kept requesting it.  It was a very crowded day, though, so we didn't have as much access to the exhibits as I would have liked.  We still had fun though.  There's a Pirate exhibit going on right now, and while we didn't go to it, Robin examined the mannekin by the door.

Here he is with some walruses.  Did you know they could get this big?

This is from "Tykes Peak" in the Exhibition Health exhibit.  There were some pretty rambunctuous kids in there at first, and Robin learned how to do this from them:

On March 19 we were visitng my parents and took a walk to try and see the Moon while it was really big and near the horizon.  The clouds interfered with most of it, but at least we got to play in the park in the dark!

Jumping on some bubble wrap from when we unpacked a bunch of stuff we'd hidden while trying to sell the house.

We went to the museum (yet again!) with my parents during Mom's spring break.  Parking was horrendous as most of Denver was on spring break too, but we enjoyed ourselves once we got in.  We got to explore the Discovery Zone, an

area kind of like the Children's Museum with activities for little kids.

We also checked out the dinosaurs.

Being swung between Ama and Poppa.  (He almost tried to flip over the last time they did this.)

You can click here and here to see the posts I made about our March craft projects on Science Fiction Mommy.

And here to see my post about our garage and basement improvements.

Ciao!

Staycation

Dean took the last full week of February off from work, and we had a staycation.  We did a lot of home improvement projects (which I'll detail at a later time) that took up large chunks of time.  Since taking our home off the market, we've been reorganizing, unpacking all the stuff we got out of the way in order to stage the house, and building things that need to be built.  But we also made time for some fun stuff.

On Tuesday we went to the Zoo, which was nice since it's been a while.

Geese are scary.

On Wednesday, we went to the Museum.  We checked out Gems (Robin got bored,) Space, and the newer Health/Life exhibit--all ones we haven't been to in a while (or at all.)

Can you see Dean's and my faces in the giant pin board?

Robin age-progressed to 70.

Then on Friday we went to the Children's Museum.  It was a lot more crowded than the last few times we've gone--we had to wait a lont time for our turn to drive the fire engine.

Shopping in the kid-sized supermarket (it was stocked full of organic products, even!)

Bubbles!

We didn't get much chance to sleep in this week, what with making sure we left the house with enough time to enjoy these places before naptime, but we all had fun.  The only downside was that Robin picked up a cold from somewhere (Zoo or Museum, probably) and passed it on to Dean and I.  But we're all better now.