Evie is Eight!

A short four days after the birth of Heidi, we celebrated the birth of Evie!  She turned eight years old!

Birthday Buddies! In matching knitwear!

We celebrated Evie's birthday with cake and ice cream, of course, and presents (of course)!

Mark picked the cake out at Costco the other day.  When I asked what was on the cake he said, "A pumpkin.  Or maybe it's a basketball.  I couldn't really tell.  But it does say Happy Birthday."  Oh, that man loves to tease me! I about had a panic attack thinking it was a basketball cake!

Evie's gifts were her very own ball of yarn and knitting needles, a giant coloring book and new colored pencils, and, best of all... her first Breyer horses AND a trip to horse camp next summer!  It is hard to get a birthday present that is so far in the future, but we know that a week of horseback riding this summer is what she wanted most in the world! 

I would like to say that our gifts to her pale in comparison to her gift to us.  Every day, this beautiful little girl blesses us with her love.  She has spent these last difficult weeks taking good care of her younger siblings.  She plays school with them, reads them stories, teaches them simple math concepts, takes them outside to play, and is always willing to run little errands all over the house.  She is patient, kind, and understanding.  She is loyal to her older brothers, even though they tease her.  She really is a gem of a girl and I was supremely blessed eight years ago the day she was born.

Birth Story

Early in the morning on Sunday, November 24th, I started waking frequently needing to use the bathroom.  This is not unusual for a pregnant lady four days past her due date, but for some reason, it was really bothering me.  By 6:00 AM I realized that I was actually having light contractions.  Finally, the baby was coming!

Mark and I started hustling around the house, getting last minutes things straightened and supplies gathered.  We knew we had awhile to wait...but we didn't know HOW long it would be.  My contractions stayed light and infrequent all morning, but I called my doula-friend and midwives, just to give them a heads up that today was the day!

My doula-friend came over after church, but the midwives were at another birth.  Our two due dates were two weeks apart, but she started labor early and I was late.  We both were experiencing light, slow mornings, so I was not worried at all about when the midwives would come out.  Their back up plan was to have one come out here and the other stay with the other mom with another back up midwife.

All afternoon, we puttered around, doing nothing really.  I continued to have irregular contractions that weren't even painful.  I could talk through them, so I knew the actual labor and delivery were far in my future.  I was chilly all day, which was the opposite of how I normally feel, but I knew I was shivering because of the excitement and anticipation of real labor.  By dinner time there was still nothing going on.  Mark made spaghetti for dinner (I wasn't very hungry so Daniel ate all my noodles and left the sauce) and we started thinking about our next steps.  My doula-friend's girls were at home with their grandma, but grandma needed to work the next morning.  We decided that my doula-friend should go home, get her girls ready for bed, and be on call for when things really picked up. 

At 8:00 PM, I went to bed.  I fell asleep immediately, but woke up ten minutes later. Contraction.  I went back to sleep.  Ten minutes later, I had another contraction.  I went back to sleep.  This pattern repeated a few times, so I got out of bed to see if the ten minute pattern would stay.  It did!  By this time, the younger kids were settling into bed and the older kids were getting ready for bed.  I called my doula-friend to come back; her kids were settling into bed too, but she was going to wake them up and bring them over with her.  I called the midwives and left a message for them that things had finally settled into a pattern.

Between 10:00 and 11:00, my contractions were between 4 and 7 minutes apart.  They were slightly painful, but not enough that I had to stop what I was doing.  And it's a good thing too!  Mark had set up the birth tub and had started to fill it.  He sunk the hose deep into the pool and walked away.  Somehow, the hose worked itself loose and our precious hot water was sinking into the carpet and running all over the bathroom floor!  "Anna! I need your help!" I heard Mark shout from the bedroom.  He came running out of the back of the house.  "I need a shovel or something!" he shouted.  I assumed correctly what happened and grabbed a stack of towels on my way.  But the mess was too big for towels.  Lucky for us, we have a steam cleaner that worked perfectly for this situation.  It was like getting the carpet cleaned when we weren't even planning it! As I was busy sucking the water up, I had another contraction.  This was when Mark said, "What do you think you are doing? Give me that steam cleaner! Go rest!"  Yeah, I guess a laboring mom shouldn't have to suck up gallons and gallons of water of the bathroom floor.

My midwife, her birth assistant, and my doula-friend (and daughters) all showed up by midnight.  I'm not sure exactly when, but I do know that the last contraction I recorded happened at 11:48 PM.  The girls went straight downstairs to sleep on the couches.  After we chatted with everyone and got supplies set up, I went back to bed to sleep as much as I could.  Because, still, my contractions were several minutes apart and not at all unbearably painful-just uncomfortable.

By 2:00 AM, I had had enough.  I knew this baby was still posterior (her back was against my back instead of against my front) and I knew I still had another 24 hours of labor ahead of me.  I knew that I had only interrupted rest for almost 24 hours and I was tired!  I was so tired and so cold and so tired of being cold that I just knew I didn't have what it took to get to the end of this birth.  I talked to Mark and told him that I needed to be transported to the hospital to finish this birth.  I was willing to receive pitocin and an epidural because I just could not survive another 24 hours without rest.  It wasn't the pain sending me in, it was the lack of sleep.  He had my midwife come back and talk to me and she offered to check baby's position and my dilation.  Guess what?  Baby was anterior and in a great position!  And guess what else? I was seven centimeters dilated!  And as soon as my water broke, my cervix would open right up and it would be time to have the baby!  Wow! I thought for sure I would only be a 3 or 4 and here I was, just hours away from being DONE!  That was all I needed to hear.  I was ready to have this baby at home.

I crawled into the birth tub at this point and labored for only two hours.  I was able to sleep between contractions.  My doula-friend brought me drinks and wrapped my shoulders in warm towels.  Mark was on Lula duty; she woke up twice during the labor and Mark was able to get her back to sleep without bringing her into our room (she still joins us each night).  In fact, he was with Lula when my water broke.  I shouted, "Go get Mark! My water broke and this baby is coming NOW!" or something like that.

And then Heidi was born!  It was such a wonderful moment to look into her sweet little face and marvel at how pretty she was.  She is now five days old and is getting even more beautiful.  She is sweet and precious and just a peachy keen addition to our family.

Heidi at Two Days

Heidi is the opposite of Lula.  She likes to be awake.  She likes to suck and prefers my finger to anything else.  This means that I don't get anything done-like eating or other necessary tasks.  She also likes to move her hands a lot.  One of these days I'll be back to blogging...

Heidi Cecelia

I'll just post a few pictures before I head back to bed.... of Heidi Cecelia, born 11/25 at 4:05 AM.  She was 9lbs 5oz and 22 1/4 inches long.

Just born!

Weighing the baby

My four girls

I'm resting as much as possible.  Any time I feel like leaving my room, I regret it and go right back.  So I'll probably wait until tomorrow evening for another update and more pictures.

Hot Potato!

Last night, Mark made the tastiest dinner ever!

This is a twice-baked potato with ham, bacon, onion, and serrano peppers, topped with melted cheese, avocado, and sour cream.  Oh my! It was worth waiting for!  So spicy and creamy! Mark has learned the hard way (several times now) to wear something on his hands when he chops hot peppers.  But his hand protection was too cumbersome last night, so he ended up accidentally rubbing spice oil into his eyes...  I told him if the baby was born last night, there was no way I was going to let him hold her!

She wasn't born.  However, things are starting to move in that direction.  Moving sloooowly, but moving nonetheless.  Mark and I were up by 6:00 AM getting loose ends tied up and by 8:30 we were starting to get bored.  Now it is 1:15 PM and we are wondering if this little girl is holding out to share a birthday with her grandpa!  Contractions are short and spaced far apart, so we have quite a while to go!

My Precious!

For the last six nights, we have watched the extended version of the Lord of the Rings movies.  One part per night, six nights.  Watching movies with small children takes a lot of patience.  But it also makes for some good conversation.

The first thing one might think is, "Those movies are SCARY! How can your little ones watch them?"  Well, either my kids have a higher tolerance for scary characters or they just learn early on that the Orks are just regular people playing dress up-from me.  Mark says I ruin the magic of the story when I tell them about people pretending to be characters in the story and I might as well tell them all there is no such thing as Santa while I'm at it.  But he sleeps with earplugs and I'm the one that gets up with them at night.  The first time they see Gollum as a 2 or 3 year old, they usually say something cute like, "Is that a monkey?"  And most of the time, the youngest of the crew (Daniel and Lula) fall asleep as soon as the movie starts.

The middle kids, like Fiona and Evie, will giggle when Gollum talks to himself or when Gimli says something funny and they will love the elves' outfits.  They will ask questions that have easy answers.  Or questions like, "If Sam is just a regular person pretending to be a hobbit, is he really married to that girl he kisses at the end? No? Then why is he kissing someone he isn't married to?  How much did they pay him to do that?" 

Ian and Shane can (hopefully) appreciate the story on a deeper level.  If they ever stop talking about non-movie related things during the movie.  Last night, Shane lost a tooth right at the end.  He got so worked up about it we had to threaten to send everyone to bed early.  We sneaked a peek at him later and he was petting his tooth and calling it his precious...

...I dug into the annals of Downen history and discovered that Fiona was six days late.  This whole time I thought she was only three days late.  So it looks like I'm in for a longer haul than I thought...

The Video Game Solution

Since I'm feeling a bit like a "watched pot" and the baby is overdue, I guess I'll blog every single day about something. Anything. Just so no one thinks I'm off in labor somewhere.
I've blogged so many times about our attempts to get Daniel to sleep in his own bed.  But this time, we finally have a solution!  Daniel is FINALLY sleeping alone in his bed in his room.  Just in time too!  There was no way we could have fit three co-sleepers with us!

I told him if he stayed in his bed all night and didn't wake me up, he could play video games in the morning after Shane wakes up to help him.  The funny thing is, he can't even play.  Shane does the playing, Daniel's character just walks around and gets killed by the computer player.  But it works, and works really well.  Daniel even took himself potty in the middle of the night without waking anyone up and stayed completely dry (I woke up because I'm a mom and the sounds of little feet padding around the house automatically wakes me up).  He got extra game time for the potty trip!

The flip side is that Daniel throws a temper tantrum when I say his time is over and we need to turn off the TV.  He throws the controller and screams, so I send him to his bed until he can stop screaming and crying.  The last two mornings, before he even starts playing, I gently remind him that he only gets to play for a little while.  "What happens when I say your turn is over?" 

"I get sent to bed?"