"Poo Poo"

I had one opportunity to be a good mother this week, and by good mother and opportunity, I mean that Eli decided to sleep for an hour or so while Shiloh was awake (miracle of miracles) , thus giving me an opportunity to have some one on one time with my Shiloh (again, miracle of miracles).

I asked Shiloh what he wanted to do. He replied, "Poo! Poo!" Which translated means, "Pool! Pool!" So I stripped the kid down to nothing and took him in the backyard and threw him in the blow up pool. He loves the water. I put the deck umbrella over him and the pool so as not to burn that fair skin of his. He was splashing around a jibber jabbering for a few minutes. I was sitting in a deck chair with my feet in the pool.

Shiloh starts singing. This is nothing new. He has the cutest little sing song voice in the whole world, and he makes up his own songs all of the time. Th songs have become even cuter now that he knows so many words.

Then he started singing this little diddy very sweetly and loudly, "Poo poo poo poo poo poo poo poo." I was overwhelmed with his adorability at that very moment. Then the song turned into more of a scared whimper. I got a little confused, then the song turned into crying and screaming and pointing and yelling, "poo! poo! poo!"

Now I am sure that you can see where this is going. I should have listened more carefully to the words of his song. I should have paid attention to the slightly awkward stance that Shiloh was standing in. Most importantly, I should have never threw the kid in the pool with nothing on.

As I looked over to the place he was pointing at, I realized there were several "poo poos" floating around in the pool. This is where I was not so enchanted by his adorability. I scooped the kid up out of the pool so that he wouldn't be permanently traumatized by his own poo floating in the "poo". He cried on my shoulder for a few minutes. I dried him off and put some dry clothes on him. As I start to embark on getting the tools I needed ready for extraction of poo from the pool, Eli so kindly woke up and needed to be fed...

Kenny ended up having to clean it out that evening. I never got the chance to do it before he got home. There was never an opportunity for me to do it again that day.

I have learned my lesson: Even if you live in the middle of no where, with cows as your only neighbors, and no one will ever see you or your child, you should never let your kid swim naked. You just might have to scoop poo out of the "poo".

Eli's first bath...Still playing catch up.

SO I am still playing catch up on the blogging, but I figured that I better get my tushie in gear before I was really, REALLY behind. A couple of weeks ago we gave Eli his first bath. We had to swaddle him because the poor kid screams when you change his diaper and I didn't want to completely shock him with nakedness for more than 60 seconds. You can't tell in the pictures, but he cried about half of the time.

I remember how scared I was to give Shiloh his first bath. I was scared he was going to slip out of our hands and drown in the baby bath. I was afraid to lift him out of the water because he might cry, I was afraid to scrub too hard, I was afraid of the water getting into his eyes....

This time around I was just excited that the umbilical stump had fallen off and that we could finally make our cute little guy smell just as good as he looks. :) He did cry, but I wasn't really afraid of the crying anymore. There are just some things about having a second child that are easier, and the nerves subsiding a bit, is a huge perk. This bath time experience was quick and not nearly as monumental as Shiloh's first bath, but in a good way. It seemed normal. I could use a good dose of normalcy these days, so I welcomed the feeling. Eli is now getting to the point that I think he likes his baths up until the point where we get his hair wet, then he is cold and fussy. We are making great strides in the right direction though.

Eli is 3 weeks old.

It seems like forever since I have done an Eli update, and in a sense, it has been a really long time, almost his whole life. That last time I said much about him was his birth.

We had a midwife appt this week.

Eli has grown a whole pound and an ounce. His weight is in the 50th percentile and his head has grown a half an inch which puts him in the 85th percentile for head size. my kiddos and their cute large heads :) I am not sure if we forgot to measure his height or if I am so sleep deprived that I don't remember it, but I don't know the stats on that. I guess we will have to wait til next appt.

Eli is also starting to develop bits of his personality. He is actually alert for some of the day. He also has found his lungs. That might be one of the biggest understatements of the year. He loves to be held! LOVES. This means that if he is not being held he most likely is practicing his angry cry, including in the middle of the night. This is new territory for me. Shiloh didn't develop an angry cry until way later in life. I know I was spoiled with him.

He eats a lot. He has curly hair when its wet. He is learning to tolerate and maybe even like bath time, which is great. He rolls from side to side while getting his diaper changed. He is a "squeaky" eater/sleeper, and by squeaky I mean that he sounds like a teradactyl. It is quite comical and also annoying during the middle of the night. Don't let the pictures fool you, we are getting very little sleep around here. Pictures don't squirm or have sound.

We do love this little guy . He is pretty good as long as we hold him, and he is just so darn cute. We also can't wait for the baby fog to lift so we can get a little more sleep, but that comes with time.

There's the update!

Motherhood...A Metaphor

Motherhood just seems to look good on some women. They slide so comfortably through all of the transitions of motherhood that you would hardly ever know that anything had changed at all.

I am not one of those people. Currently motherhood is a pair of jeans that are 3 sizes too small and I am trying to stuff myself inside of them and then waddling around and hoping that no one can see how truly unfit the pair of motherhood jeans are on me.

I guess, so to speak, I need to work out A. FREAKING. LOT. That way, eventually, the mommy jeans will fit. This is going to be work. Hard Work. But worth it in the end.

P.S. If anyone has some great suggestions to keep a 16 month old busy while I nurse a 3 week old, the suggestions are more than welcome.

Trah-turrrs

I know that I have written many a post before chronicling Shiloh's love of tractors and all things vehicular, but I am going to do another one. You see, its been a hard few weeks for Shiloh adjusting to not being the center of attention 24/7. The first week of little Eli's life was especially hard on him. There was a lot of confusion and a lot of tantrum throwing, A LOT!

Luckily for Shiloh there were a few things that happened the first week of Eli's life that helped ease the fresh wound of sharing the spotlight.

The first thing that happened, was that we went to an automobile museum that is just in the next town up from us. This isn't something that I would have normally been into, especially since the price is a whopping $8 a person just to look at cars, and the museum only took a grand total of 20 minutes to walk through, but Shiloh loved it. Every. Minute. Of. It.

He was so excited to get to climb up on the cars. He kept walking around saying "trah-turr trah-turr" over and over again and pointing in every direction. For some reason he would not get up on the cars most of the time without Daddy to help him.

Except the Delorian... He played and played in that car. (Where's the flux capacitor?)

The next great tractor thing that happened was that our next door neighbors were cutting and bailing the grass in their pasture. It is a little more complex process than I imagined, but anyway, For the first whole day, Shiloh kept watching next door as the big tractor was cutting down the grass. Daddy kept taking Shiloh outside to see. The gentleman in the tractor then got out and said that Shiloh could go for a ride tomorrow if he wanted to.

That is exactly what happened. He and daddy got to hop over the barbed wire, climb into a tractor and enjoy the process. What good neighbors, and what a fun experience for Shiloh.

If you can't see it, Kenny and Shiloh are in the tractor in this one. You can just barely make out their silhouette.

Another "good" thing...Kenny had been putting off mowing the lawn for a few weeks. Shiloh was delighted that he an Daddy got to spend countless hours together on our small yard tractor just mowing and mowing away. It did keep Shiloh preoccupied and less grumpy.

The last tractor-esque thing that happened: My mom and dad, or Nanna and Pop pop, as we endearingly call them, bought Shiloh a little scoot along four wheeler. When the mowing was done and the bailing next door was done, and we had already gone to the museum, there was this cute little diddy for Shiloh to play around on.

I may not be in love tractors myself, but seriously, heaven bless tractors that first week of Eli's life.

Happy Father's Day!

My husband Kenny is a great daddy. He amazes me. The pictures kind of tell it all. I don't really have to say anything else, right? But I will, because I can.

He's handsome

He's smart

He plays hard with Shiloh

He's helpful

He lets Shiloh "help" with projects

He's patient

He's kind

He's funny

He's pretty much the whole Enchilada!

I love you Ken! Happy Daddy's Day!

Eli's Birth Story (this is long... Don't say I didn't warn ya.)

Well I am finally getting around to telling you all about the day Eli was born. I need to record this because if I don't do it now, I may never do it, and I just don't want to forget all of the special details.

On Wednesday night (May 30th) I went to bed feeling sick to my stomach. I woke up a few times in the night feeling achy in my abdomen. It never occurred to me that this could be early labor. The thought that went through my head was, "Oh great! I ate something wrong. This is going to be a long night." I woke up Thursday morning feeling much the same as I had the night before. I felt slightly more sick, but I still never really thought much about it. As Kenny was getting Shiloh changed I realized that the pains in my stomach were slightly more regular than most "sick stomach feelings". They kind of ebbed and flowed and had a rhythm. During breakfast, at around 6:45 a.m., I mentioned this to Kenny.

"So, uh... these could be contractions."

To which Kenny replied, "Are they?"

"I think so, but they could be just braxton hicks, or practice labor or something. I am not really sure."

You may be thinking to yourself, "This woman has already had a kid. She should KNOW what contractions are." Let me explain. With Shiloh, my water broke in the middle of the night. No warnings. No precursors. No labor. No pain. Just water gushing. I didn't even start having contractions for another 2 hours. So this was a very different scenario if I was starting labor.

Back to the story:

Kenny then asks, "Should I stay home from work?"

To which I reply, "No. If this is labor, it is the very beginning, and could take a while. Besides, this probably isn't even it. I am pretty sure I would know, right?"

Kenny leaves and I decide that maybe I should see if these are time-able contractions. To my surprise they were quite time-able. Every 10 minutes to be exact. At 8 o'clock I decided that I should probably text Kenny and my midwife to let them know what was going on. My midwife told me that I should let her know when they were 5 to 7 minutes apart for a half an hour and to try and take a hot shower. Sometimes it speeds things up and sometimes it slows them down. Just try and gauge what my body was up to. Kenny said he could come home or stay. I told him to stay at work until I was sure that this was the real thing. For some strange reason, I was in denial that anything was going on. I felt pain, not bad, but it was there. I felt contractions and pressure coming on regularly, but I was so afraid to get my hopes up that Eli was coming and then be let down when it was just false labor.

I put Shiloh down for his nap and then I hopped in the shower. I was timing my contractions. Almost immediately they changed. They went from every ten minutes to every 3 to 5 minutes. They weren't lasting terribly long.

I called my midwife Kelly. She said she would jump in the car. You see, she lives almost 2 hours away and she didn't want to miss anything. It seemed like my body was moving quickly. I called my friend Kaci after that. She said that she would be happy to take Shiloh for the day. What a saint! My mom wasn't flying in until Sunday, and I didn't want to birth my child at home with a 1 year old crying and trying to take daddy away. It just wouldn't have worked out for me.

I called Kenny and told him to come home and pump up my awesome birth pool. He was on his way home a short two hours after I had sent him to work. I guess it is good that he got some things done, but I should have just known that things were heading in the right direction and kept him home.

Kelly showed up at around 11 o'clock. My friend Kaci came at around noon to pick up Shiloh. By this point I was trying to concentrate really hard through my contractions. They were manageable, but needed some focus to get through. After Shiloh left, it seemed like things were slowing down. It was kind of frustrating to me. I was really hoping for a short labor this time around. I just wanted to finally meet my little guy. I was trying not get too discouraged.

At about 2 o'clock, I decided it was time to get into the birth pool. The water felt oh so nice. It helped me focus a little better too. This whole time, Kenny was by my side being my rock. He held my hand, pressed on my back, gave me water and snacks, and pretty much was the encouragement I needed. I most definitely couldn't have done it without him there. I noticed after a while of being in the pool, that my contractions were getting further apart again.

Although the water felt nice, I was getting into positions that were not progressing me as fast as I had been when I was up and around or bouncing on an exercise ball. I was starting to feel flustered. I knew that this baby would come whether I got up and sped things a long or not. I could wait in the pool and let it happen slowly, or I could alternate pool and walking and help get the process going a little faster. The problem with latter option was, that it felt a bit masochistic. I felt a little bit of trepidation at the thought of bringing on more pain anatd discomfort. At the same time I was getting very frustrated that Eli wasn't coming quicker. After asking Kenny for a Priesthood blessing, I decided to get up and get things moving a little quicker. I was in and out of the pool for the next 3 hours.

At around 5 o'clock, I was starting to feel a lot pain, so I decided to stay in the water until the boy came. I had to hum my way through every contraction. I also, for one reason or another, felt like crying and laughing at the same time. I started crying inevitably. Although in labor, I was still pregnant, so the tears usually win out. It wasn't so much out of pain, but just exhaustion and the desire to have this over with. I knew I was in for the hardest part next. I just wanted to be done and looking back on the whole labor. I wanted to be holding my baby and feeling empowered. I knew that I could do it, that is, after all, what my body was made for, but I wanted it to be over.

This about the time that I hit transition. The pushing sensations started coming on. Slowly at first. They helped ease some of the pain, but not much. I had to find some hidden place deep inside my mind to keep it together. I didn't want to lose it and become hysterical. I was lying on my back in the pool and then the pushing really started. I flipped over to a different position. I really really really didn't want to break my tailbone again. This is also when the pain hit. The true pains of birthing another human being. The one that make you realize that you are doing something so much bigger than yourself. The ones that make you act more primal than you ever thought imaginable, or maybe I just felt that way. I have to honest and say that these took my by surprise. They were way more intense than I could have ever imagined. The pushing was out of my control as well. I remember with the first big push that my water broke. With the next big push he was crowning. With the next, I almost had his head but he slipped back in. This was utter disappointment and discouragement. If I had been able to quit right then and there, I probably would have, but I didn't have a choice, and what a good thing, my body took over and I went with it. With the next push his head was out and then next, the rest of him was out.

My little Eli James. I scooped him out of the water, and he was beautiful and perfect and lovely and healthy. After goo-ing and ga-ing over him for the first minute or two, I remember looking over at Kenny and saying, "I don't know if I am ever going to do that again." I was serious for that moment. It was hard work. It was only 11 minutes of pushing, but it was exhausting. When they first told me that I had only pushed for 11 minutes, I thought they were joking. It felt so much longer than that. But now, as I look back at the experience, it doesn't seem that long. Time has an interesting way of distorting our views for the better.

After I birthed Eli, I went to get out of the birthing pool and almost fainted. If you know me very well at all, then you know that I get absolutely squeamish at the sight of blood or needles or anything like that. I literally fainted when I got my ears pierced at 6, just because something went into me. I guess the adrenaline was wearing off and I started to realize there was blood and such around. I also was having a hard time breathing. My abdominal muscle had slightly separated at the diaphragm during pregnancy, so I had to splint my stomach getting out of the pool. I got into the shower and then got into bed. Despite a little wooziness from my total wimpy-ness, I actually felt great. I felt alive and I felt like my body knew what it was doing.

The overall experience of having my little Eli was tremendous in numerous ways. I feel accomplished and empowered. I feel as though my faith in my body has grown. Also, as I look back at the whole experience, especially the end, it seems to be more and more sacred. It was a moment in which I sacrificed more than I ever had in order for my little Eli to make it here. I really wouldn't have done it any other way, and I will choose this way again, when, in the far off future, we decide to have another little person come join our family. It was such a special moment, and I got to share it with my husband. It was small and minimalist in the amount of people around. It felt personal. I felt comfortable. I knew where things were. I got to make the decisions. Most importantly, my little guy came into the world happy and healthy and he got to sleep in my arms in my bed for his first night in this world. It was very special.

Of course I woke up sore the next morning. My body, though, has healed so quickly. The point I am at right now, a week and a half later, feels like the way I felt several months down the road after I had Shiloh. It is one of the many reasons that I would choose to do things the same way again, because my body knows how to heal from this experience on its own. I know that the way I did things is not for everybody, but it was for me. That is the very long version of Eli's birth story. If you got to the end, you must be a mother and like to read about these sorts of things because it reminds you of your own experiences. Hhopefully one day Eli will be able to read the way I felt about him coming into our family and feel loved.

Shiloh the big brother...16 months old

It has been a long long time since I have done a Shiloh update. I feel myself falling further and further behind with a ll of the progress he is making. It seems like in the past 3 weeks his vocabulary has absolutely blown up! He copies every word you say. He makes up his own words. (To be described later) He is such a big boy. He is growing up and I have no idea how to keep up with his ever increasing curiosity. He is a DEFINITE boy. He loves the dirt, bugs, his sand box, swimming, food, and anything that has to do with tra-tors (tractors).

He is an amazing big brother! He loves little Eli with all of his heart. It is his "job" to check on the baby and give him kisses. He still gets a little sad when I am feeding the baby and I can't come with him right then. Hopefully he will gain a little understanding soon, so that he doesn't get his feelings so hurt. It must be tough to go from being the center of attention, to sharing the spotlight with another.

He is still tall and skinny. His pants never stay up, but he eats non stop. He wishes that I would just keep popping bites of food into his mouth as he played. I am pretty sure that half of the time he eats more than me. He loves corn, peas from the garden, enchiladas, chicken, watermelon, grapes, anything with BBQ sauce, and especially anything he can dip into something else (i.e. toast in soup, eggs in ketchup, chips in salsa). He is a very interactive eater. It never ceases to amaze me the places that his food ends up.

He loves to sing and loves to be sang to. He also does all of the hand actions to quite a few songs. His favorites include the itsy bitsy spider, the wheels on the bus, popcorn popping, I'm a nut, if you're happy and you know it, and book of mormon stories, just to name a few. He also loves birds, and all animals. But he could watch the birds out the windows for hours.

Some of my favorite things that he says his own way are, in no particular order:

ut-mo (open)

neh (milk)

meh-men (watermelon)

mummy chillalas (yummy enchiladas)

peace (please)

det-doo (thank you)

tra-tuh (tractor)

caw (car)

gaw-kuh (cracker)

nayneh (raisin)

wah-wuh (water)

Cah Coh (Cardinal)

pootey (Blue jay)

turtey (turkey)

He actually says quite a few words right, but I just love the ones that he has either made up for himself or that he translates into a way that only Shiloh can say. It is such a fun stage as he realizes that things have names and meanings and as he strings two or three of them together to get his point across. Sentence of the day today: Gawkuh peace ut-mo (cracker please open) It also seems to keep some of the tantrums at bay since we can understand each other a little better.

He is just a a joy to have in my house. I can't believe how quickly he is growing up! I better not blink too long, or I might miss some dang cute stuff.

38 weeks 3 days....Eli James is here!

I will have to do a longer "birth story" type post later, but who has time right now with a 1 year old and a 1 day old?

Eli James Williams came to our family last night at 6:07 p.m., and we couldn't be happier with the little guy. He weighed in at 7 lbs. 3 oz. and is 20 1/2 inches long. He is healthy and sweet, and I feel pretty good too!

Now for the photo deluge:

Me, hanging out in the fancy fandangled birth pool.

Having a contraction in the birth pool.

Eli, just seconds after birth.

Nursing Eli. Let me tell you, this kid knows how to eat! ( You know I'm lookin hot in this pic!)

The baby boy!

Daddy and Eli circa 2 o'clock this morning. Hello 2 a.m. I am sure we are going to be seeing a lot of each other in the coming months.

Eli and I hanging out on the couch.

The brothers! Shiloh is oh so sweet to his little bro. He always gives him kisses.

Shiloh also thinks that he should hold Eli and lay on him. We're working on that!

Giving Eli a hug.

A pic from the same group, but I am actually looking at the camera instead of being paranoid about what Shiloh is doing to Eli. Behold my future, haha.

Well there is the short version. Welcome to our little family Eli!