4 Weeks Old!

Many apologies my faithful followers for my lack of blogging! My sweet, precious baby girl is 4 weeks old today, and I say 4 weeks because it sounds better than one month old! I can't believe how fast the time has flown. These past weeks have been filled with sleeping, cuddling, eating, sweet baby kisses, and a plethora of diaper changes.

Dearest Macy, You already have a budding personality, and you are quite the talker. You are constantly grunting and cooing. You talk in your sleep, sometimes so loud that you set off the monitor. Most of the time you sleep in your bed. However, mommy is quite bad at putting you to bed and the fact that you have spent about half of your life away from home, means a lot of times you sleep in my arms in your rocker/recliner chair (worth every penny), or we pull your giraffe pillow (another lifesaver) and put it next to mommy in our bed. I know that a lot of people will give me grief for that, but oh well! You are my little piglet! I've struggled to keep up with you but we make it work! You pretty much set your own schedule, but you've been eating every three and a half to four hours. Sometimes we get lucky and you go about five hours. You do pretty well at night. Last night you ate at 11, woke up at 1, but cuddled up with mommy and slept until 4, ate and went back to sleep until about 8. We slept in your chair together, and then daddy took you to church. You do really well at church, the past two weeks you have been wide awake during the whole service, but you haven't been fussy. The fact is you aren't really fussy at all unless you are hungry, need a diaper change, or want to be held. Luckily, there are many hands that want to hold you and never put you down. You are quite the cuddler, and can literally squeeze yourself into the smallest spaces ever. I call you and your daddy my heaters. You are both so warm, and if y'all cuddle for too long you make each other sweat. Regardless, you are a daddy's girl through and through. He has a way of calming you and getting you to relax even when you are most upset with us for not getting your bottle in your mouth fast enough. The past four weeks have flown by, but we are just trying to soak up every moment. We enjoy our afternoons just laying around together, as we are right now... All three of us laying in our big bed and watching White Collar. Your dad and I keep looking at you and looking at each other and saying that we wouldn't trade this for anything. We've had our more difficult moments but again, we wouldn't trade you for anything. You have turned our lives upside down, but it has already been one of the best adventures we've ever experienced and we are excited to continue watching you grow and experience it all with you. And of course no blog post would be complete without pictures, so here are a few favorites from the past few weeks...

One of my favorites from our afternoons together...

Our little family at the Rangers game on July 4th

I just love your face in this photo

Aunt Ginger caught you grinning before we enjoyed some pizza at Mellow Mushroom! Yum!

You also thoroughly enjoyed your first In-N-Out experience.

You and your Uncle Noah, he is just over the moon about you and wants to hold you all the time.

Me and you after your first bath

Me and your dad laughed for about 10 minutes after we took this photo. You were so content until you figured out that we were laughing so hard at you.

Giving me and your Donut the crazy eyes one morning

Overall, you are just the best baby and by far the best thing that has happened to me and your dad. We could not be more grateful for the most amazing blessing ever.

Thunder Cats Are GOOO!!

This post may be a little too much for some people, so take this as a warning before you begin...

So the last post that I wrote was all about Macy's nursery and at the bottom I talked about how I could be writing about our little Macy's arrival early the next week. Well, it's not early the next week, but she arrived very quickly after I wrote that last post! I talked about my false alarm when I thought I was having contractions on Thursday, and I guess Macy was just testing our response time. If you don't know, we live in Athens and it is about 40 minutes to Tyler, and it has been something that Cliff was worried about from the start, but on Thursday he made it there in 28 minutes (extremely quick since you have to slow down in 3 different towns on the way). However, Thursday was just a false alarm and we made it back home with no baby in hand. On Friday, we went back to Tyler had some lunch, went to see a movie, had some dinner, and then finally decided that it wasn't going to be the day and headed home. We made it home around 8 PM and we were just hanging out until we were ready to go to bed around 11. We started winding down and I got up to go to our bathroom for something and was in mid-sentence when I felt something running down my leg, and I screamed, "THAT'S NOT PEE!" Cliff immediately jumped up, but it wasn't the big gush like you see in the movies. So I called the on-call service at my OB's office and they had the on-call doctor call me. She said that you can get a little bit of fluid but that doesn't normally lead to the "big gush," as she called it. I got off the phone with the doctor and headed back to bed, and I hadn't been sitting for two minutes when I jumped up and ran back to the bathroom to just barely make it to the bath mat as the "big gush" happened. So another call to the OB's office and another call back from the on-call doctor, she told us to start making our way to the hospital in a "safe and calm" manner. We started making our way to the hospital and I was pretty nauseous so we even stopped at Sonic for a cherry coke! Cliff looked at me like I was crazy when I asked to stop at Sonic, but I thought it was a very calm move. Anyway, we made it to the hospital around midnight, and they started to get me admitted. One thing that you never want to hear when you are gushing amniotic fluid is, "Wow, this is a busy night, I hope they have room on the maternity floor." Luckily, they got me into a room and around 12:45 AM, I was getting hooked up to my epidural. Ladies, forget diamonds-epidurals are a girl's best friend. Since my false alarm the day before, I had already progressed a full centimeter in dilation, so they knew that Macy was on the move. The on-call doctor apparently had already delivered 4 babies in the past few hours and they were trying to slow me down so that she would have time to deliver another baby before me. So we tried to sleep just a little bit, but around 4:30 AM they put in a catheter and in the next hour I dilated from a 5 to a 10. I started to feel a little bit more pain around 5:30 AM, and so I called the nurse's station afraid that I had knocked my epidural out or something, but our wonderful night nurse, London, came in and said, "Oh no your epidural is good to go, but your ready to deliver..." Instead of starting right then, they had me "labor down" which basically means that you just wait for baby to move down a little bit more to cut down on the pushing. Also, it gave the on-call doctor some time to get back to the hospital after she had gone home to rest. So, my parents had been there since about 4 AM, and they came in and we sat and talked for about an hour and a half, which really helped me with the more painful contractions that I was starting to feel. About 6:50 AM, London came back in and said, "Well Dr. Klouda isn't back yet but we are going to start pushing because she is almost here." So my parents left to go find a donut shop, and said they would just be waiting in the lobby when we were ready. So I started pushing and luckily the doctor got there just in the nick of time, because I didn't push but about 3 more times without Macy coming out. So our sweet Macy entered the world at 7:31 AM. We took a little time for doctor and nurses to finish up, and a few minutes to just spend as a family, then we got my parents and brothers to come in and meet her! They had gotten donuts so that we could celebrate Macy's birthday like we normally do, by spelling out your birth year in donuts....

We loved just getting to cuddle with our little lady. Here she is in Daddy's arms...

We had just a host of family show up, and it was so wonderful! Here she is staring up at my cousin, Duncan...

One of the first family photos

Cliff's parents made it from Midland around 11 AM, after driving through the night, and this is a picture with the rest of the family too.

Overall, it was such a wonderful and eventful day filled with blessings beyond what we ever thought we were capable of receiving.

One person that is not in the picture above is my dear friend, Megan Tucker. She drove all the way from Lubbock to come meet Macy and spend some time with us. It was beyond a wonderful surprise, and she stayed with us until Tuesday with my mom just helping out. I just love her so much!!! We are so blessed with so many people that love us and that reached out to us on the day she was born as well as all the people that prayed for us and continue to pray for us. We just ask for continual prayers as our little one continues to grow and we get into our groove as a family. All of this is quite a lot to adjust to, but she is worth every bit of it.