2 Months

My baby girl is two months old today. The only recent pictures I have of her are a couple I took on Friday.

  My sweet friend Elizabeth bought Lia a cute pink sweat suit.  I have a similar outfit, so Rebecca put on my coat to match the baby. 

With Lia's coat

The day Lia turned a month old, we got a few smiles from her.  After that...no more smiles.  This past week she's been smiling at us again.  She especially loves to smile for Kevin.

When we first brought her home, she would only sleep in her bed if she was dead asleep.  Otherwise she wanted to sleep with me and Kevin.  Now she only sleeps in her bed, and I think she likes it that way.  

She's still a good baby.  She rarely cries.  It might be because I hold her ALL THE TIME.  I know how fast these babies grow up, so I'm trying to enjoy her as much as I can.  

Lia's Blessing

We blessed Lia last Sunday on February 3rd.  Since it was Super Bowl Sunday and we go to church at 2 pm, there weren't very many people there.

But most of my family and Kevin's were able to come.

Utah!

Kevin started his final undergrad semester on Wednesday, so we decided to take a last minute trip to New Harmony on Monday and Tuesday.

My parents fixed the little four-wheeler, and Rebecca drove it and my brother's buggy all by herself for the first time this trip.

William rode the four-wheeler by himself for the first time too.

I kept thinking he was too young to ride by himself until I remembered this video on You Tube of a five-year-old Ryder Ficklin driving the buggy with Rebecca riding shotgun and his siblings being pulled on a sled.

Braden rode with me in the buggy and held onto that bar the whole time.  We always called it the "oh crap" bar when I was a kid.

It was a super short trip, but it seemed longer by all the relaxing we did up there and by the short drive it takes to get there (2 1/2 hours up and 2 1/2 hours back).  We always have a blast in Utah.

Strike a Pose

There's the grumpy face we love so much.  Other than being a little stingy with her smiles, Lia is a good baby.  She's slept from 12:30 am to about 7:30 am for the past three nights.

At her 1 month appointment on January 15th, she weighed 7 pounds 13 ounces.  Just this week she started wearing size 1 diapers and her cute 0-3 month size clothes.  Up until now she only fit into newborn diapers and clothes.

We love this tiny little lady.

One Month Old

Lia is one month old today.  Two weeks ago at her well check she was 6 pounds exactly.  I'm guessing right now she's in the 7 pound range.

When she's awake, she's usually giving me the stink eye just like she is in this picture.
Kevin and I did get our first smiles from her this morning though.

She makes the funniest noises.  When she's waking up or stretching she grunts, and her grunt sounds like the cross between a dolphin and a baby elephant.  We made the mistake this week of taking her with us to see Les Miserables.  We had taken William and Braden to the movies as small babies, and they were both great.  She was so loud with her grunting that I got shushed.  She won't be going to the movies again until she can sit and enjoy the show like the rest of us. 

To me Lia looks almost identical to Rebecca as a baby.  She even has the same old man hair Rebecca had when she was one or two months old - lots of hair around the back and sides and not a lot of hair on top.  Her nose is a little different than Rebecca's was as a baby, but that's the only difference I see.

We are all loving this sweet girl - especially her siblings.  We're so happy to have her here.

Updates

I finally have the motivation to update the old blog.  It took having a new baby to get me there.  I know the only way I'll keep a good record of her first year is to put it on here, so I just spent the last few hours getting caught up to today.  I'm going to try to be better at keeping this thing updated.

9 Days Later...

Nine days after Rebecca was baptized, Lia Elizabeth was born.  She was one day shy of three weeks early.

I got a phone call from Dr. Groom on Friday the 7th.  He informed me that my recent tests showed that I was getting preeclampsia, which was what I had with Rebecca.  He did not want me to wait until the 27th to be induced, so he called Valley Hospital and scheduled me to be there at 3:00 am on Monday the 10th.  I was nervous that the baby was not ready and might need to stay at the hospital, but I was also a little relieved.  I had a seven day window from December 20 through December 26 when Dr. Groom was going to  be out of town.  If I went into labor on my own during that time, there was a good chance the on-call doctor would have taken me down for a c-section since I had one with Rebecca.  Most doctors won't attend VBACs (vaginal births after cesareans).  I'm lucky that Dr. Groom  will, but if he was gone when I went into labor, I didn't have a choice.  With this new induction date, I didn't have to worry about that window anymore.

***Warning: Birth story to follow.  Skip to the pictures if you don't want the details.

I was at Valley at 3:00 am, which is what the hospital requested due to limited space.  Dr. Groom got stuck at Summerlin Hospital with another patient and didn't get to me until about 10:30 am.  So Kevin and I got a good nap while we waited.  I was already significantly dilated when he got there so he broke my water and started me on a low dose of pitocin.  I had just a few complications.  My blood pressure was high, so I was given something to lower it.  Also, the baby's heart rate decreased with every contraction, so I had to wear an oxygen mask.  My doctor also put some fluid back into the placenta which kept the umbilical cord from getting squeezed with every contraction.  I thought that was interesting.

I did get an epidural when I wanted it this time instead of right at the end, which is what happened with Braden.  My anesthesiologist was Paul Reynolds who happened to go to high school with Kevin.  Since he knew Kevin, he took good care of me.

Lia was born at 4:08 pm.  She weighed 5 pounds 8 ounces, and she was 17 inches long.  She was a little peanut compared to her 8+ pound brothers.  But she still wasn't nearly as small as her 2 pound 11 ounce sister Rebecca.  Rebecca even asked if Lia was smaller than her as a baby.  I told her, "Rebecca, we'll never have a baby smaller than you."

Except for having low blood sugar and having to stay in the nursery for an extra few hours until the nurses could get it to a healthy level, Lia was perfectly fine at almost three weeks early.  We got to leave the hospital with her the very next night.  I'm so grateful everything worked out the way it did.