Pictures

We took a walk down our crazy bumpy driveway this morning and Delight slept the whole way. Check out that cool Nike hat (garage sale of course).


Little ham

Posing for Grandma


Delight and her dolly.

Perfect little feet.

I've tried to post pictures on here 4 times from our extremely slow internet and after about 30 minutes of them trying to upload, an error comes up each time. So I thought I would just write a bit about what's going on, even though it's not too exciting. Delight is happily laying under her play gym right now, so I've got some time. She's finally starting to like it. I laid her under it when she was about a week old to see what she thought of it and I think all the bright colors freaked her out a bit. Her eyes were wide and she was breathing hard and flailing her arms around the whole time. She's a lot more calm this time and seems to like looking around at the toys. We haven't been able to go to my parent's house or church for the last 2 weeks because a boy at church came down with chickenpox and Hope and Sonel were exposed (Sonel of course hasn't been vaccinated). No one else came down with the chickenpox, so we were able to go to church for the first time and to my parent's for lunch afterwards. Delight had a busy weekend. We went to a high school football game Friday night. She happily slept in her Hotsling the entire time, even through all the screaming and clapping. I didn't realize how loud everyone would be, but it was the first game of the season. I just covered her ears after every play. Saturday we went to a Heritage Days festival at our fairgrounds and a fish fry that evening with Sam's family. Big surprise, she slept pretty much the hole time both places, which was nice for me. I try to time it out to where she eats right before we leave to go anywhere, so she's usually pretty happy. I'm not to keen on nursing in public yet, even though I have a really nice cover that a friend made for me (thanks Rhonda!). Delight got to go on her first girls shopping trip yesterday. My mom went with us. It was nice, I haven't been shopping since she's been born. Everything's amazingly complicated now . It's hard to know everything you could possibly need while you're gone. There's no running in the store real quick either. I knew that would happen, but it still feels weird to not have that freedom. And then there's trying to plan around her feeding schedule. I wouldn't change breast feeding for anything, but I can see how using formula would be a bit more handy when it comes to going places. I'm sure I'll get better at all this in the future. I've got some cute pictures to post on here that my Mom took a week ago. I've never seen Delight smile so much. I think she must know what a camera is! ;) She has been smiling a lot more lately. I know they're not supposed to smile on purpose at this point, but I swear she does. She smiles a lot when Sam or I talk to her. She also smiles after a good poop, so maybe it's just wishful thinking. I'll try to make it over to my mom's tomorrow to post some pictures, now that we're no longer banned from their house.
Nikki

Delight is doing so wonderful. We are so blessed to have such a good baby. The last 4 nights she's had her own night time routine and I'm hoping it sticks. I feed her late, about 10 or 10:30pm. The next time she nurses is at 3-3:30 am, and then again at 7-7:30 am (when Sam leaves for work). She certainly is making it easy on us! I can usually just swaddle her and lay her in her bassinet and she'll fall asleep on her own and sometimes she wants to be held or rocked.
Wednesday we went up to the hospital where Delight was born to visit the nurses in OB and to drop off cookies for them and Dr. Murphy. One of our favorite nurses, Cindy, was there and she wanted to weigh Delight. She stripped her down and weighed her. She was about to put a diaper back on and she made a comment (jokingly) about how mommy and daddy are still uncoordinated. That's when Delight let her have it and peed all over her! (see the picture below) It was really funny! We went out to eat afterwards and she did really good. She was 7#10 oz. That's up 5 oz from her birth weight and almost a whole pound from her discharge weight 10 days earlier. They said that was really good. She had a doctors appointment yesterday and she did great. The doctor couldn't believe how laid back and good she was being during the exam.


Good shot Delight! :)


Here's a picture of Delight with her teddy so you can see how she's growing. I'll take one of her with it every now and then.


This is Delight's hospital picture. The one below is me when I was 13 days old. I think our eyes look a lot alike. What do you think?

Delight is 10 days old now. Sam goes back to work tomorrow. I'm a little nervous, but I think everything will be fine. I think I'll just miss spending time with him. He's been so great and we've really enjoyed spending this past week that he's had off together. We made made a trip to the grocery store today and came to my mom's for dinner. Exciting stuff :) Its just been nice to get out of the house a little. Here's a few pictures from the last couple days





Our first trip to East End so mommy can get her ice cream fix :) Delight's hanging out in her Hotsling. Very handy.


Excited to get her picture taken, or maybe she just wants to nurse.


Posing for the camera.





Daddy and Delight taking a nap. They both like to sleep with their mouth open.

More Pictures

Here are the rest of the pictures I wanted to post. Delight is doing great. We had a weight check today and she only lost 4oz, which was really good. She's a good nurser. I have to brag on Sam. He has been so awesome since she's been born. He's taken such good care of the both of us. He had to wait on me hand and foot in the hospital and for the first couple days at home. Things are getting better for me now, but he's still so helpful. He's so good with Delight. He can get her to sleep better than I can. We're both enjoying our little blessing. Today is our 4 year anniversary and it seems like the sweetest one we've had, since we have our baby with us.
Nikki


The first time Daddy held her.


Brandnew

This was taken soon after the first time I got to see her. The nurses put a bow in her hair.




Still feeling pretty rough in this picture.

Here our some pictures of our beautiful baby! Delight Nicole was born 8/1/08 at 10:04pm. She is 21 ½ inches long and weighed 7 pounds 5 ounces. We are so blessed to have her! I’ll share a short version of all that transpired during her birth. It was rough and scary, but praise God that she’s healthy and I’m healthy.
I wanted to have a natural, non medicated birth. I did a lot of research and even hired a doula (birth coach). I knew things could change and things more than likely wouldn’t go just like I planned. It certainly was a lot different than I expected!
My water broke at 1 am Friday morning. We waited around the house for a couple of hours till my contractions were 4 minutes apart for an hour and then headed to the hospital. When I got there, I was only dilated to 1-2 cm. That wasn’t good news since you only get 24 hours from the time your water breaks. I set out to get things going and walked the halls for a really long time. I must say that I couldn’t be happier with the doctor and nurses. They were wonderful and did everything they could to help me achieve a natural birth. I wasn’t progressing very well, so the doctor suggested inducing me. I really didn’t want that to happen because I know the contractions get very hard with induction and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I finally made it to 4cm and labor was getting harder. I stayed at 4cm for 3 hours. Not fun. The doctor strongly suggested I take the pitocin because a lot of time had gone by since my water broke. I didn’t get my doctor by the way. I had Dr. Murphy, who was one of the older doctors. I wasn’t real happy at first, but he was awesome and I really think God had him be on call that weekend for a reason. So they started me on the Pitocin and the contractions became unbearable. There was no break between them and they were so strong so quickly. I would have contractions that would last 10-15 minutes without stopping. I couldn’t handle it anymore and opted for an epidural. Once that kicked in, I fully dilated in no time. The nurse had me wait a little while to push to give the baby a chance to move further down the birth canal. I started pushing and pushed for an hour and a half and wasn’t making much progress at all. The doctor was concerned because of the “molding” (cone head) the baby's head was doing even before pushing. Also, after I’d push, the baby’s heart rate would drop. And the first time they checked me at 3 am she had went poop inside me. There was concern about the baby swallowing it and getting an infection. As you can see, there was a lot working against us! The doctor decided to give it one last shot and use forceps, but she wasn’t far enough down and he couldn’t get a good hold on her. It was decided then that we had to do a C-section. By this point, that was fine with me. I was worried about her and just wanted her out. Plus I was so exhausted from laboring for 20 hours and pushing for so long that I could barely keep my eyes open. They began to prep me for a c-section right away. There was a scary point then that they couldn’t find the baby’s heart beat and I just laid there and prayed as hard as I could. They finally picked it back up after a couple minutes. Everyone was moving very fast and it all seemed like such a blur. Dr. Murphy said we could have who ever we wanted in the OR. I thought that was great because most of the time you can only have 1 person in there. Sam, my Mom, and my doula, Paula all came in. Sam stood up by my head and my mom and Paula were down towards my feet. They upped my epidural as soon as they decided to do the section. Before Sam got in there I could feel sharp pains in my stomach like they were jabbing me with something. I told the anesthesiologist that I could feel it. She was surprised and told them I might need a few more minutes for the medicine to kick in. Well, they were in a hurry to get the baby out and didn’t give me that minute. Sam came in and they were already cutting me open and I was in terrible pain. I can remember the anesthesiologist telling Sam that we had 2 options; they could knock me completely out and tube me, or they could give me some medicine that would make me loopy, but I’d be awake. Sam told her to do the latter and that’s the last thing I remember. Thank God it did end up knocking me completely out. All I can tell you now is what I’ve been told by my mom and Sam. The doctor tried delivering her from my abdomen, but from pushing so long, that her head was very wedged in my birth canal. The doctor had to go in vaginally and push her head to try and free her. Sam said he was pushing on me so hard that my body was moving all around the table. My uteis tore during the delivery and I lost a lot of blood. When he finally got Delight out, her body was limp. They made everyone who was in there leave right away. That was horrible for Sam. I can’t imagine what Sam was going through. He said he thought the baby was dead and I looked like I was bleeding to death. He said he broke down crying when they left. I think I’d rather be the one having the surgery than to have seen that and gone through all he did emotionally. It took a few minutes, but they were able to resuscitate the baby. My Mom said that when the doctor took his scrub top off, he was soaked in sweat. The doctor is a big guy too! Thank God we got this doctor because one of the nurses said that one of the other doctors who weren't as big and strong might not have been able to get her out. I talked to the doctor later and he said that he’s done around 1500 C-sections and this was one of the scariest and most challenging ones he’s done. I ended up spending the night in the ICU and they had to give me three units of blood. From there I can remember the trip up to the ICU being in a lot of pain until they got me started on pain meds. Some family came in to see me, but I was so drugged I can barely remember it. The staff at the hospital were so wonderful. They couldn’t bring her up to me, so they took a bunch of Polaroid’s of her and taped them to my bed rail. The doctor released me from the ICU the next morning and I finally got to see my little girl 12 hours after she was born. It certainly wasn’t what I envisioned for our baby’s birth, but we got the end result we wanted, a healthy baby. Nursing in the hospital was a challenge. I had three IV lines and she had one, plus a bunch of other monitors hooked to her. We got tangled up a lot. We got to come home Monday. I was glad that Delight wouldn’t be getting poked all the time, but nervous to be on our own. The first night was rough. My milk hadn’t come in yet and she was up almost every hour. It didn’t help that we were having a whopper of a thunder storm. Last night was sooooo much better. My milk had come in and she only woke up twice! I’m doing pretty good. The healing process has been painful, but it gets better every day. Thank you to everyone who has been lifting us up in prayer. It makes me cry to think how close we came to losing her. Sam and I feel so blessed to have her.
Nikki

I had trouble uploading the first 5 pictures I wanted to post. I’m going to try and post them separately, so they’ll be out of order.






Proud Daddy

Car ride home





Finally home





Little angel