by Heather | 0 comments
These are SO blurry, but still fun. The hour before bedtime is playtime with daddy and one of Ben’s favorite games is to be a pig with Andy. Big pig and little pig crawl around on all fours and sniff and grunt at each other. And then sometimes Ben rides the daddy pig. Cassidy got in on the action last night too.
by Heather | 0 comments
Ok, worst post title ever. The book wasn’t even about grapes…anyway…we went grape picking last weekend! A vineyard about 30 minutes south of us had juice and upick grapes for sale so we bought some Aurora, Niagara and Moores Diamond juice along with Niagara grapes. I had no idea there were so many varieties or that wine is named after the type of grape it’s mostly made from. So a Riesling wine is made of mostly Riesling grapes. That one is actually way out of our budget at $17.95/gallon. The juice we got runs about $4-6 a gallon. Upick grapes were super cheap though, our Niagara grapes were .35/lb.
Ben had a ton of fun eating and picking. We strolled around the vineyard for a bit too and just enjoyed the little family outing. Next week we’ll return and pick up some Concord grape juice and Concord grapes.
by Heather | 0 comments
We heat our house with a woodburning insert in our upstairs fireplace. It’s worked great for us the past few years but there are a few problems with our little system. For one, upstairs is always 10 degrees warmer than downstairs in the winter. Secondly we have a series of fans set up around the house to try and direct hot air down to the kids’ bedrooms. And we have to leave their doors open in winter if we don’t want kidsicles. Another downside is that Andy has to haul firewood from the back of our property, through the downstairs and then all the way upstairs. Not so much fun. We had half the livingroom gated off so Ben didn’t get near the woodstove. He was really good about not touching (we even had the rule during the summer) but it’s just something you block off when you have kids anyway. Finally, wood stoves are dirty! Everything in the livingroom would get a layer of dust every single time we burned.
So we decided we’d look into moving the insert downstairs. We could tie it directly into the furnace that’s behind the fireplace, providing even heat in the house because the furnace would now pump the hot air around. No frozen children! Andy would only have to bring firewood in through the back door instead of up two flights of stairs. No gates everywhere because the kids don’t travel downstairs unsupervised. And I don’t care if it gets dirty because it’s not really a living space (yet).
Andy looked into it more and found out the size of the firebox was right and the flue was a straight shot down the chimney, it’d work out perfectly. Why we didn’t have the insert put down there in the first place, who knows. You live and learn. So Andy started to disassemble the old stuff downstairs and move the woodstove down there. We’re not all finished yet, Andy still needs a friend to come over and help him shove the new liner down the chimney and hook up a few other things (technical term)…but I’m excited! I have to think of something cute to do with the soon to be decorative fireplace upstairs. Old books, candles, mirrors? Who am I kidding, anything I put in there will be ransacked by Cassidy in a few months when she starts moving…
by Heather | 0 comments
We headed to my mom and Paul’s cottage this weekend.
Ben was SO helpful with setting up the tent.
There was a lot of Cassidy loving.
She smiles now :)
My mom saved our old Little People and Ben was so excited to play with “the peoples.”
Andy discovered some blackberry bushes growing under the deck.
The coolest piece of driftwood had washed up to the cottage.
He still needs a name though.
We also had the maiden flight of Andy’s quadcopter.
Always tinkering with something!
Andy also got a jet ski lesson from Paul.
That night we enjoyed s’mores around the fire. If you were Andy, you enjoyed leftover chicken wings.
The boys had the great idea to hang a sparkler from the chinese lanterns they were sending off.
They did look pretty cool, and nothing caught on fire :)
It was a beautiful evening.
by Heather | 0 comments
She’s here! Born on her due date of July 13th too! 7lbs 7oz and 20 inches long.
We were busy busy busy the week leading up to her birth. We’re always doing house stuff, but in order for her to have a nursery we needed to rearrange a few rooms. Andy’s lair moved to the second bedroom downstairs and we decided to move our bedroom downstairs too and have a master suite/adult area. That left one of the bedrooms upstairs open for Miss Cassidy. Admittedly she has the most ghetto nursery ever (she’s in the pack n play, we didn’t paint and there are boxes and boxes of baby clothes everywhere). But she’s here and she’s healthy :)
So we’d been working on rearranging rooms all week. We painted Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. The carpet for the two downstairs bedrooms and hallway was installed Friday. The installation guy asked when I was due and I said “Tomorrow” with a smile. He looked at me wide eyed and joked that he’d better hit the road before something happened. I was going to work this baby out though, no sitting around waiting for things to happen. Friday afternoon I was painting during Ben’s nap and I had a few contractions. I hadn’t really felt any before then. I figured something might happen by the end of the weekend or Monday, but really just went about my day.
Friday night I went to bed around 11, only having had a few more contractions. I woke up around midnight and they were starting to get rather painful and closer together (but still like 20 minutes apart). Finally around 1am I went into the living room where Andy was working on a project and said “Well, this might be happening tonight.” He looked at me and said “Seriously?” I was just as surprised as he was :) I called my neighbor across the street and she came over to be with Benjamin while we grabbed our bags and the carseat and headed to the hospital.
We arrived at the hospital around 2am and headed to triage where they checked me over. Amazingly I was 7cm dilated already! I won’t say I wasn’t in pain, but it was definitely still manageable at that point. The doctor looked at me quizzically and said “I can’t even feel your cervix it’s so thin. How are you so calm?” We were officially admitted at that point and headed to our hospital room.
The use of pain meds was brought up and I told the doctor I’d had a really bad experience with the epidural with my first baby, an awful spinal headache that took two blood patches to fix. I was totally out of it for the first week or two of Ben’s life and it sucked! I decided to try and do it this time without any pain meds…I had progressed so quickly that I figured why not just suck it up and go for broke?
The nurse put an IV in my hand but didn’t hook me up to anything so I was allowed to walk around the room. I would walk for a few minutes then a contraction would hit and I’d lean on a chair or Andy until it passed. I sat on a birthing ball (giant exercise ball) for a bit too. Rocking back and forth on that helped tremendously. I had to sit in bed a few times so they could strap the fetal monitor to my belly and just check that baby was doing alright. This was followed by more and more walking. With Ben’s labor I would tense up into a ball on the bed and fight the pain of each contraction. This time I allowed the pain to come over me and tried to take deep breaths through it, knowing it was only temporary. Obviously, we all try to avoid pain but I kept it in the back of my mind that this kind had a purpose and if I fought it things would be much worse. I think being in my head and mentally working through it helped more than anything else.
At one point I headed to the bathroom and knew afterwards that it was time to push. I pushed for 20 minutes and she was born at 3:59am (just two hours after we’d gotten to the hospital!) It was insanely painful but insanely quick! I am glad that what happens in the birth room, stays in the birth room though :) I know I sounded so primitive with groaning, grunting and moaning, haha, but hey, whatever gets the baby out! Believe me, no one is more surprised than me that I did this whole thing “naturally.”
They put her on my chest for a few minutes then took her across the room to check her over. She got a 9/10 Apgar score and was perfectly healthy. The doctor jokingly requested an Apgar score for dad and asked “What’s his color? Is he still standing?” Andy did great though, he stayed up by my head and held my hand and one of my legs while the nurse held the other.
Cassidy took to nursing great and would wake up every 2-3 hours asking for food, then fall asleep again. We did end up staying in the hospital two extra days because my blood pressure spiked after delivery. Crazy scary numbers like 160s/100s. Cassidy developed a little bit of jaundice too, so it was just better for everyone to stay put and be monitored (even though the only thing I wanted to do was go home.) I was put on meds and the jaundice started clearing up so we were released Tuesday afternoon.
Since then my blood pressure has dropped and they halved my medicine. I go to the doctor’s again in a few days for another check. Cassidy is still sleeping and eating great, and she doesn’t even seem to mind her ghetto bedroom.
What does Ben think? How has the transition to two been? Pictures???
I have a ton more to share, but I wanted to get this written and up before I forgot any details. More coming soon! Thank you to everyone who prayed for us, watched Ben, visited at the hospital and those who are showing us love with meals and helping out. Our little family of four is so thankful :)
ps – If you’re wondering why we didn’t just paint her room (and instead put all the effort into the two downstairs bedrooms) it’s because the two rooms upstairs need a TON of work themselves. New windows, insulation, new drywall in the one and better closet solutions. So, those are some day projects…but for now, we’re a little busy :)
