First day of Kindergarten!….and more baby pictures and stuff…

Today is Erik’s first day of Kindergarten!

While Grandma Beth was here she taught Erik how to knit a hat. He made a hat for his doll (with a little help from Grandma) but it turns out Tyler can fit in the hat too. So here is Tyler wearing the hat that Erik made :)

You always hear that the camera adds ten pounds. I don’t think they were talking about babies, but I have noticed that Tyler appears a lot chubbier in pictures than he seems in real life. Sure he’s a big nine pound baby…but he’s still a tiny newborn…he’s only big in comparison to other smaller newborns. So I like pictures that show he really is small – like these ones – when you see him in context next to an adult is seems to make him look smaller.

Adam loves to hold his little brother. He has been very sweet with the baby and he has not gotten upset that I am holding the baby a lot. (He gets upset about lots and lots of other things, but not specifically that :) Today he heard the baby cry and he said, “ Baby’s crying, oh goodness!”

I thought I’d give some more details about the day Tyler was born…

We had an appointment to be induced at 8 am on Friday August 7th. I was hoping that Tyler would be born within several hours, but it turned out to be a rather loong day that got started quite slowly. They didn’t even start inducing me with cytotec until 10 am. Supposedly I was only 1 cm despite being told I was 2 cm in the office the week before…apparently these things are rather subjective. I was having contractions but they were pretty much just the same as the Braxton Hicks I had been having forever – not very promising. At 2 pm I was 2 cm, and we started pitocin. I thought things would get going fairly fast after that, but no, not so much. The contractions did get stronger in the next hour, but they still were definitely not “active labor" material although they were 3 min apart. Around 5:30 maybe, I was 2.5 cm and thinking this was going quite ridiculously slow. They let me eat dinner as nothing was really happening yet ( I had also had lunch before starting pitocin), and then the evening proceeded with not much change. I was 3 cm at some point…maybe 10 pm.

By 11 pm the contractions felt more like “real” contractions and it was helpful to breath through them, but not absolutely necessary. Then at 11:35 pm my water broke…at first I wasn’t sure it had broken, but it soon became clear that it definitely had, and the contractions changed almost immediately and started getting much stronger very fast. I asked for the epidural as soon as my water broke…as from past experience once my water breaks there is very little time. But as I was only 3.5 cm at this point I still figured we had a little while to go. By 12:45 am I had the epidural and by 1 am I was feeling great, and thinking it was pretty neat to finally get an epidural with one of my births! I was 5 cm and glad things were going faster now, but I still thought we had more time left than we did…I started feeling pressure even at this point, and over the next few minutes it got stronger and stronger…until at 1:30 am I was 10 cm and ready to push. Once again I was surprised by how fast the end of labor went, especially after waiting and waiting all day. Tyler was born at 1:53 am so I pushed for less than 20 min, 17 or 18 minutes maybe. The epidural was great for 20 or 30 min there, but it really didn’t help much at all during the pushing. I think that was worse with Tyler than the other two kids…I’m sure that has nothing at all to do with the fact he was 9 lbs 1 oz!! My goodness I wasn’t expecting him to be that big! 8 lbs maybe, but 9 lbs…I didn’t see that coming!

So here he is! All 9 lbs of his cuteness :) I’m grateful everything turned out fine in the end, after some frustration with waiting all day, but then (rather like Erik…and Adam come to think of it….hummm I think I see a pattern) a very fast delivery after my water broke.

(Edited by Alex to fix typos and save everyone from the wall of text that was here before I showed up. ;) - What, you want paragraphs? Fine have your paragraphs if you must - Dawn :)