Friday, March 30, 2012

Phone issues

Most irritably, my phone is having trouble and refuses to charge the battery. I'm trying to put in a warranty claim (though we'll see how that goes) and in the meantime, if you need to get ahold of us urgently, give Seth a call. His number is the same as mine except the last four digiits are 8456. Otherwise send me an email and I can jump on skype or trillian or something. We are going out of town this weekend to visit Grandma and Grandpa Pease (yay!) and Seth won't have service to his phone anyways. Hopefuflly this will get resolved soon and I won't have to throw money at buying a new phone.

And just because I can't help showing off my little peanut...

Here's Wililam off to walk Seth to the metro for work one morning!

Monday, March 19, 2012

First Laugh!

William just laughed for the first time! Seth was bouncing with him and he gave a distinctly adorable giggle. :)

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Bed head, burps, and baby dreams

William is so adorable. Some of my favorite things about him today are:
1) His hair. It's exactly like Seth's and almost an inch long, actually. He gets the same incredibly cute bed head disarray that Daddy does.
2) He loves me best for most things he needs. I do have the nomnoms after all. He prefers when I change his diaper to Seth doing it too, but he absolutely loves getting burped by Dad way more than me. Not sure why, but it's cute.
3) We can tell when he's dreaming. Normally it's about food (he makes little sucky lips in his sleep) but he makes the cutest little coos and gives the biggest grins when he's dreaming too. Though on the flip side, he has had nightmares too. The other night he screamed in terror for a few seconds. Freaked us right out too but he didn't even wake himself up.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Buckling Down, In which life tries to find a new normal.

Thanks Caroline!



I just wanted to start off by saying just how grateful I am for Caroline and all she did coming out here. It was so much fun having her come out and being able to show off my beautiful little boy to her. ^^ Also, definitely need to get that Butter Brickle recipe. It's amazing. It was a huge help having her here to help us find our feet again after bringing William home and the freezer jam packed with enough food to feed an army has really helped me keep my sanity around here.

William definitely has a personality already. He's a very serious little guy, tends to be quiet, and loves to just sit there and stare around at all the new things. Looking out windows can entertain him for minutes at a time! Though going on wallks outside tends to knock him right out. His range of expressions are hilarious- mostly they trend towards these incredibly grumpy and serious looks, but he'll let the occassional Blue Steel or a little grin peek through. Though the last may just be gas.

He's sleeping pretty well. He's on a roughly three hour schedule now, which at least makes it somewhat predictable. But then he'll throw in days like today where he'll demand attention every single hour too. Unfortunately, he's not eating as cooperatively as he sleeps. He definitely prefers a bottle to breastfeeding and will only latch on if I trick him with a nippleshield. I honestly think he prefers it because of the plastic. Trying to ween him off it has been met with his first full blown tantrum and abject failure.

Seth's back to work this week, which means trying to find a new balance for how things work around the house. I'm still trying to find a way to get Seth home at a reasonable hour when he's got so many projects and things to do at work. It's frustrating how often he seems to get saddled with reports that have to be on his superiors' desks first thing the next morning, or how often he has to deal with this crisis or that crisis, or people on the west coast not taking his east coast schedule into account and calling him just as he goes out the door and they of course can't afford to wait until tomorrow to talk about it... You'd think people would plan ahead a bit better. Or at least give deadlines further away than 'tomorrow 8am' so he could come home before 9 or 10pm. It wasn't that big of a deal before William was born and the ridiculous amounts of OT he put it were nice , but now it'd be nicer to have him home with William and I a bit more. Otherwise I might go crazy being at home with William all day and only getting sleep in 2-3 hour slivers at a time.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Has it been a week already?

It really has. Seven days since my little angel fought his way into the world. Really, I should have expected the delivery to be rough considering how much of a wiggle worm William was even before he was born...

February 25 around 2-3 am I dragged Seth out of bed to go to the hospital. I have to admit, there is no better time to be rushing to the hospital in the DC area than the middle of the night. No traffic, we made all of our lights, and best of all Seth wasn't stuck downtown in rush hour traffic! We got there just when we were 'supposed' to and all the nurses were pretty impressed that we hadn't shown up six hours early or something like that. Things had moved along fairly quickly and I was sure that it would be a nice and easy textbook delivery.

Alas, the first little speed bump came when they called down for the anesthesiologist. Mind you, it was 3am and this was a small county hospital. They only had one present on the night shift and he was unfortunately dealing with a situation in the ER- and it was too late in the delivery process to give me the IV fed painkillers or else William would get too high of a dose. If there's one thing I firmly believe it's that painkillers and modern medicine are a gift from God and there are no points for going au natural! It took an eternity, and my OB was talking about just inducing me to speed things along without drugs when the on call anesthesiologist arrived literally just in time to drug me up.


And thank goodness he did! Stubborn as ever, William took his sweet time and a good seven hours later I went in for an emergency C section. Skull: 0, Pelvis: 1. We had been warned that William was big when we got the ultrasounds to check on his heart! I wasn't altogether there mentally at this point, but after a bit of touch and go William was born at 11:52am weighing in at 9lbs, 1 ounce, and 20.5 inches tall!

I got to see him briefly while I was still completely out of it, gave him a kiss, and then they whisked him off to the nursery. It wasn't quite the ICU since the county hospital didn't have the really equipment for specialized cases, but it was as close as it got there. Constant surveillance and hooked up to several monitors and machines and all that. Meanwhile, the doctors put me back together and Seth got to play photographer for the next day while I was tied up with IVs and couldn't leave my bed either! It was really hard not being able to see him, but Seth brought me pictures and little video clips every time he went to see him. You can see there that he has quite the goose egg and bruised head, poor guy. Thankfully it went down quickly and the bruises faded though. The doctors and nurses there were really top notch.


I finally got see and hold little William the next day and it just made everything absolutely worth it. No matter how much not-fun the entire process was and recovery is, I would do it again in a heartbeat just to hold him in my arms and feel that unconditional love between us.


Our First Family Photo



William and Daddy Bonding


It's interesting to see what features William inherited from who. To be honest, I can rarely see similarities between babies and their parents, but I think William actually has some distinct markers. He definitely gets his dark hair and eyes from Seth, though Seth's dad claims his eye shape is from me. His ears though are definitely from me. William and I have disconnected lobes while Seth doesn't. :) Most notably though, William shares my monkey toes! Seth was very impressed when William tried to grab his finger with his toes. All in all, he's ours and perfect! I can't wait to see how he grows up.


William, Meet Mr. Parrot!


On Wednesday we finally got to go home! The hospital staff were amazing and I wish I could have taken them home with me, but I was grateful to finally be going home even if it meant starting the big scary job of being 100% responsible for William at all hours of the day and night. And it IS all hours! I have no idea how people who have jobs to worry about do it. I'm lucky that Seth is able to take several days off and that Caroline is going to be coming when he has to start going back into work. I'm sure things will settle down into a routine soon enough, and it'll definitely be easier once I'm completely healed from the C-section, but it's still a big job. AnnaMarie, I don't envy you having twins as well as the girls!



Grandpa got to come down and visit too, which made me really happy. William's middle name, Kemp, comes from him and it was awesome to see all three generations of the Pease family together and know that William is going to carry on the family name and legacy.