A couple of cuties

I'm convinced that David (or Davie as we are calling him) is a little clone of Ben. If we were going to have a repeat performance, Ben's not a bad kid to copy. Take a look at these two and tell me if you can figure out who's who.








Safe to say, Cam and I know how to make a cute kid.

Little man

Short story: David Steven made his appearance at 11:50 a.m. He weighs 6 lbs 6 oz, is 18 in. long, and has TONS of black hair. Ben is clearly thrilled.


Longer story: We went in this morning for our scheduled induction. Good thing too, since apparently I'm not very good about being able to tell when I'm in labor. I was almost dilated to a 5 and mostly effaced. Apparently, I was uncomfortable for a reason. Go figure. We only needed a little prompting from some pitocin and some help breaking my water and we were well on our way to having a baby. Start to finish the whole thing took less than 4 hours. It was such a different experience from Ben.

We walked in the hospital this morning without a name and after looking at that dark head of hair, Cam thought it appropriate to name this little guy after his grandpas--so David Steven it is.

He's been a great eater and a good little guy during the first few hours of his life. We're totally smitten with him.

*Eviction Notice*

So, baby. . . the doctor and I had a little convo and turns out you have less than a week of this cozy uterus dwelling in your future. Don't get me wrong--you're free to come earlier if you'd like. But consider yourself served.


Yes, I am actually THAT large. And, yes, we are still rockin' paper shades months after having moved into our house. It's on the list.

I'm not nesting

I'm pretty sure that the concept of "nesting" is one of those pregnancy myths. Kind of like morning sickness is limited to the mornings. I don't think I've really felt any particular nesting urges as this pregnancy nears its end. That's pretty evident the second you walk in my house. What I have felt is a healthy dose of panic as I've been forced to comes to grips with the reality that this baby is likely going to be here in less than 4 weeks. Yikes!

With that in mind, we spent last weekend getting Ben's big boy room pulled together so the nursery would be vacated in time for little brother. The whole process of moving into a big boy room has actually been an amazing success (knock on wood). Ben has been really excited about his big boy bed and has been sleeping through the night in his new room. Well, except for one night last week when he woke up at 3:00 in the morning and came in our room, which totally freaked us out. But generally, a success.

We found awesome bunk beds at Costco, which were too cute to pass up for the price--especially given that the only other bunks I'd found that I liked much were at potterybarn and they were several times more expensive. We only set up one bed for starters. Grandpa Steve came over to help put the bed together. Ben is quite the little helper and stood by to hand over screws as needed.


Unfortunately we didn't have a mattress for the bed at first. Ben was seriously bummed and was anxious to sleep there. He kept asking to go night-night with the choo-choos.


When we finally got the mattress Ben was totally ready to sleep there. He's not really an under-the-covers kind of guy though.


Generally speaking, I'm really pleased with how the room turned out. Painting the striped walls required some additional effort (that Cam was not happy about), but in my mind, they were totally worth the effort.

After hunting high and low for perfect big boy bedding I came across this lovely train set at TJ Maxx. I'm still pleased with my budget-friendly find.


And I think Ben's pretty happy about it too.

Merry Christmas!

Well, December got away from us before I had much of a chance to blog about it. We had a busy month, but unfortunately we have little to show for it by way of pictures.

The week before Christmas we got TONS of snow. In fact, I think we probably got a good foot of snow on Christmas day. We had planned on celebrating at my parents' house in Daybreak, which is literally only a few blocks from us, but we'd gotten so much snow by the time we went to leave we couldn't get out of our driveway. Our neighbor had to help Cam push the car back into the garage and we called my dad to come pick us up in the the 4-wheel drive.

Ben is a huge fan of the snow (he didn't inherit his love from me), and his daddy took him out to run around in it for a while. This was before the big Christmas storm hit and we still only had a couple of inches. We only got one lousy picture of him with his eyes closed before the camera battery died. Oh well.


We only got a couple of Christmas day pictures too. We really are crappy photographers. Our poor children will have no documentation of their young lives. Sigh. Anyway, two big hits for Ben were his cheap stuffed Elmo (I wasn't about to shell out $60 for the fancy one) and his big boy chair from my mom and dad.


You can now find Ben on any given morning enjoying some cold cereal and viewing some Playhouse Disney from the comfort of his chair. He is his father's child.


We totally failed to get any pictures of our Christmas celebration with the Cam's family. Suffice it to say Ben got totally spoiled by Cam's parents and has plenty of new toys to show for it.

Time to update

I realize that I haven't blogged much recently. Really, I haven't felt like there was anything going on in our lives that was blog worthy. Mostly, our camera hasn't been getting much use lately and I hate posting without pictures.

Ben has been doing really well recently. We think we are out of the woods when it comes the possibility of a recurring infection and/or surgery. However, we are still making frequent doctor visits. He's fine though and his scar and surgical site keep looking better.

Cam is wrapping up the final weeks of his MBA. He will finally be done after this semester. We have spent almost our entire married life with one or both of us in grad school, so it will be a welcome relief to both be done with school. Now we just have to start paying off student loans. Ugh.

As for me, I am officially in the third trimester of this pregnancy. Part of me feels a sense of relief knowing that this pregnancy is ending in a few weeks. Part of me is horrified that this pregnancy is ending in a few weeks. I feel so unprepared. Also, My doctor's office called today to inform me that my thyroid is still low and I'm anemic. I guess that explains the overwhelming fatigue I've been feeling. Baby is healthy though, which is what we really care about.

Anyway, we'll have to do a better job of taking our camera along with us as we frolic during the holiday season. Our next post will have pictures. I promise.

The Manzier

It's been a long week. I was really hopeful that after Ben's surgery we could get things back to normal and quit making frequent doctor's visits. Unfortunately, that has not been the case.

Ben seems to be feeling pretty good, but when we went back to have his stitches removed the doctor noticed that part of the surgical site was swelling. The lymph node by Ben's left ear was quite large and when the doctor removed the infected tissue it left a fairly large cavity. That cavity has been filling with fluid. We've been keeping Ben on antibiotics to prevent infection, and so far that's been working, but we've had to go to the doctor to aspirate the fluid twice this week since the swelling has been pretty severe.

In an effort to minimize future swelling, Ben now has to wear a pressure bandage around his face so (hopefully) the fluid will not settle in the cavity and it can fill with healthy fat and tissue. The doctors affectionately refer to this device as the "jaw bra." It is seriously complicated to take on and off, so it's just as well that we have to leave it on pretty much 24/7. Poor Benny is not a big fan of the jaw bra, and it definitely draws attention. Poor Boo.


Oh, but the good news doesn't stop there. The skin by Ben's ear isn't healing as it should either. The doctor said he opted not to remove the skin during the surgery since it would have left a scar and he hoped that it would get better after the underlying infection was removed. Well now he's concerned that the skin itself was infected and they may have to remove the infected skin to prevent a recurrence of the infection. Great. He wants us to consult with infection disease before he makes the call, so we'll be trying to get in to see infection disease docs here soon.

In other news, baby number 2 is doing well. The doctor didn't bump back my due date even though he was measuring a little behind on dates. Yeah! So at least there's some good news this week.