A real photo shoot!

Our friend, David Pe, always takes amazing pictures so he agreed to take some for our birth announcements. Here are a few of my favs:

Phone pics

So when you take pics with your phone, you almost never remember to do anything with them... at least we haven't! Here are a few that I just downloaded from Nathan's phone.

Stickers (July 2011):

Our first ice cream with Uncle T'Errance (August 2011):

Sleeping in their car seats. Keep in mind that we did not have a car at the time so we took them out of the rental car in their giant car seats, carried them to our building and put them on the luggage cart to wheel them up! Oh, the adventures of life in NYC! (January 2012)

My grandma loved lions - particularly these ones in front of the NY Library in Bryant Park. (December 2010)

Kid say the darndest things!

They really do! I've tried to keep track of some of the funnier ones.

Ava: "Croutons are dirty"
Mommy: "No, croutons aren't dirty"
Ava: "Croutons have crumbs. Crumbs are dirty."
Mommy: "My bad, Ava, my bad."
(April)

Ava: "We saw a quirrel (squirrel) today."
What was he doing?
"He was putting away groceries." [He was, in fact, looking for nuts]
(April)

Mommy: "Noah, let me see your eyeballs."
Noah (while mommy is looking at his eyeballs): "Mommy, those aren't my eyeballs. Eyeballs are by my penis."
(June)

Mommy to Eli: "Why are you so cute???"
Noah: "because he looks like me" (matter of factly)
(June)

Mommy: "Where are all the burp cloths? Why do I keep loosing them? This is a silly problem to have."
Ava: "It's like they (the burpcloths) have legs."
(June)

Also, Noah's artistic skills have grown leaps and bounds in the last few months. In April, he was scribbling all over the coloring book pages with no real "focus." Last month he started coloring with focus. Last week he was drawing ovals and calling them "fishies" and random circles all over the page for eyes or nipples (yup, nipples). Today he showed me his drawing of two robots and Spiderman. Maybe it's just my own, biased, opinion but I think it's amazing!!!

Eli's photoshoots

As per Lee tradition, we have had several photoshoots since Eli has been born.  Here are a few of our favorites.  The rest are at: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjzwv25h

Eli's Arrival Story

I will preface this post with this - I know that not everyone is interested in Eli's birth story, and I don't take offense to that, but I wanted to share anyways because it was a big deal for me.  :)

My water broker at 6:30 am on Friday morning.  At that point, my contractions were pretty mild and 11-12 minutes apart.  I went about my business all day and they stayed about the same.  I tried some at home exercises to get things moving and nothing.  We went to the hospital to get checked at 11 pm.  The midwife said I was maybe at 1 cm so she sent us home.  We went home, had some lasagna and tried to get some sleep.  

I woke up around 2 am and my contractions were 7 minutes apart.  Not wanting to lose momentum, I woke Nathan up to go for a walk.  We got back and they were about every 5 minutes and still tolerable.  When we got home, the doula suggested some different tactics and the contractions picked up to every 3 minutes and were lasting about 2 minutes.  Eli was posteriur (sunny-side up) so I was having horrible back labor.  Naively, when people had told me they had back labor in the past, I assumed that they just had really bad back pain and not the cramp/contractions.  Boy was I wrong!  By the time my back finally relaxed a little, the "regular" contraction hit and I wanted to give up.  

Around 7 am Noah & Ava woke up and I just wasn't feeling right so I told Nathan and Hana, the doula, that I didn't want to be there anymore and I wanted to go to the hospital.  I don't know what it was but I wanted to go.  The car ride wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, in large part because of the doula.  We got to the hospital around 8 am and the midwife checked me.  She said I was at 4 cm and there was some bleeding that had just started in the car or in the hospital so she wanted the OB to check me.  The anesthesiologist said that I should get an epidural so that if/when I needed a c-section then I wouldn't have to have general anesthesia.  I told him not to say that because those were about the max number of words I could get out!  I told Nathan that I wanted the epidural either way!  Women who do it naturally, especially with back labor, deserve a medal of honor or something!  :)  It really didn't matter though because the OB came in a few minutes later and checked me and found a lot of bleeding so we were off to the OR.

Apparently my heart rate was elevatated so they were concerned about infection since it had been over 24 hours since my water broke, Eli's heart rate was somewhat elevatated, there was a lot of bleeding, and I was no where near delivering (4 cm, 80% effaced, and -1 station).  But the bleeding was the big one because it could have meant the placenta could have detached or that there was a rupture. All that led to the c-section. She said when they got in there, everything was fine, except the cord was around his neck twice and apparently my uterus was "paper thin" around the incision so she wasn't sure that it would have been safe to continue anyways.  It was still a much better experience than with the twins because I knew my OB, Nathan got to hold him for almost the entire time during the surgery and we got to do skin to skin in the recovery room.  It was still disappointing to not be able to have a vbac and the recovery from the c-section has been smooth but still not pleasant.  

But Eli was worth all 27 hours of labor & the recovery afterwards!

The day before Eli was born (at 40 weeks): 

The day the twins were born (at 36 weeks):

The days before Eli

We had a busy couple of weeks before Eli's arrival, including a trip to the Bronx Zoo with Auntie Laura the day before my water broke!

Easter

I'm trying catch up on the past two months and wanted to share these pics from Easter. The kids and I went to NJ to spend time with family friends who helped us die eggs, set up an Easter egg hunt and even got them Easter baskets! It was a really nice time and I'm so glad we were there.

Noah loved the chocolate bunny - not eating it, just melting and investigating it's changing form in his hands. He spent at least 10 minutes analyzing it before Ava ran up, grabbed it and took a bite out of it's ear. It was all downhill from there! :)