The story of Sam...

It was about 11:30 pm, I was laying in bed and super uncomfortable. Mark and I started timing contractions about 1am and realized they were close so we decided to go to the hospital. We called Grandma and told her we were on our way. We woke up a sleeping little Joshua and headed to Grandma's house. We got to the hospital at about 2:30 am. My baby had been breech the entire pregnancy but miraculously had changed to the head down position just days before....or so we thought. When we got to the hospital the nurse checked to see how far along I was and said....I'm just going to get the ultrasound machine to see how this baby is positioned. I just don't think that's a head I'm feeling. The ultrasound machine confirmed my WORST fear. He was still breech and because I was in labor there was nothing they could do to turn him. They tried to stop my labor twice to no avail so at 7am we delivered our baby boy via cesarean. I was SO not happy about this. I'd been watching "A Baby Story" religiously every day and they always seemed to cry and have a really hard time when the doctors said they needed to do a c-section. It was my worst fear, though I really wasn't sure why...I just knew it must not be a good thing if it made everyone so unhappy. I was SO excited when the doctor told me he had turned and SOOOO upset when they said he either turned back, or never turned at all. Grr. Add to that the fact that we had been up since about 6am the day before (Mark and I had awoke early the day before and couldn't go back to sleep so we spent the day getting things done) and I was not in good shape. Either was Mark. I remember looking at him at one point and he looked green, really truly green and now I completely understand that expression whereas I hadn't before. We had an AMAZING anesthesiologist that was the saving grace of this whole experience. I remember bawling my eyes out and him wheeling me into the operating room and telling me how brave I was being. Although I wanted to SCREAM at him that this ISN'T WHAT BRAVERY LOOKS LIKE it did make me feel so much better. Also, as they strapped my arms down to the bars on the table I was crying that Mark could only hold one of my hands and the anesthesiologist happily said, "I'll hold your other hand for you!" and he did...through the WHOLE thing. Mark and I were so pleased with him, and we were lucky enough to get him again when we had Will, he was so funny and had a little photo shoot with Mark, the baby and I while they were stitching me up. ....sorry, I got carried away... ANYWAY, it was a really really yucky morning but the best part about the experience was the birth of this amazing little man that we call Sam. He was 7 pounds 1 ounce and 18 1/2 inches long. We noticed the little dimple in his chin before we noticed anything else! We also thought he had a TON of hair...until we had Gabriel and realized what a ton of hair really looks like. :) He made it all worth it and I'd do it all again right this very second if I needed to. I just LOVE this boy. Love love LOVE him. He is without doubt the smartest and wittiest little 6 year old I've ever met. We've been able to see his mind at work from the minute he was born. He's ALWAYS been such a thinker, he really has such a brilliant little mind. He's also VERY competitive...and absolutely COMMANDS fairness in every sense of the word around this house. He has always been a favorite with his teachers, I remember asking his preschool teacher how he was one day and she said "Oh...OH, he is so good... he is JUST SO good!" and I said "Really?, because he can be a challenge at home sometimes" and she didn't believe me AT ALL. Then, during Sam's first official parent teacher conference for Kindergarten at the beginning of the year his teacher said "I just wish I had 30 Samuel's" it was so funny. He is always so good about following the rules and trying to be a good boy. He is also absolutely strikingly beautiful, people stop us all the time at the places we go to tell us how beautiful he is. We love him SO much and don't know what we'd do without him in our family. We love you Mr. SIX!!!


When I was One,
I had just begun.

When I was Two,
I was nearly new.

When I was Three,
I was hardly Me.

When I was Four,
I was not much more.

When I was Five,
I was just alive.

But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever.
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.

-- A.A. Milne

This poem is perfectly Sam. He IS clever as ever, and he says he already "feels bigger" now that he is six"

Sorry about the billions of pictures...when I pulled out the CD for 2002 I couldn't decide which pictures to post so I posted them all....and now I'm going to go cry for a bit. Seriously, how can they grow up SO STINKING FAST!!!!
Everytime Mark would see this picture he'd say "there's my crooked head boys!" That's all I think about when I look at this picture now. :)



For all my family out there reading this, this is a picture of our cousin Shanel giving Sam his first haircut. I LOVE the expression on his face here!!

Oh! He also lost his FIRST TOOTH today!! What a day of milestones for this wonderful little man. He was SO excited and had to call daddy at work and call and wake up Grandma (she's an hour behind us so it was like 7am..YIKES) So fun!!

Happy Birthday, Mr. Three!

3 years ago today I was on my way to a routine Dr.'s appointment. It was a Wednesday and the previous weekend had been a little hairy.... Friday morning I went to the hospital after having contractions right on top of each other all night long. I wouldn't let Mark go with me because I insisted that I would be coming back home WITHOUT a baby so there would really be no point to him coming along. I got there and they hooked me up to some machines to monitor the contractions. I remember the nurse coming in at one point to look at the paper spitting out of the machine and having a conversation with her that went something like this:

me: they seem to be a lot more mild now, I knew as soon as I came in things would stop.

Nurse: Well, it's always good to come in if your contractions are between 5-10 minutes apart and are at least a minute long and it looks like you are still contracting at least every 3-5 minutes.

me: Oh...but they're not even CLOSE to a minute long, right?...

Nurse: actually, your last one was 90 seconds.

me: oh. er. so what do we do now?

Nurse: Well, I'm just going to go and call Dr. Nichols and see if he wants you to deliver your baby or try to stop the labor.

me: WHAT?!!! I'm 5 weeks early, isn't that TOO early, isn't it automatic that you would at least TRY to stop my labor?

Nurse: Well, sometimes it's better at this stage to let nature take it's course, but I won't know anything until I see what he wants us to do.

me: Urgh. Okay, but if you think it would help could you please tell him that I really really CAN'T have this baby today!

Nurse: I will let him know.

I really said that, and I really meant it. I was absolutely NOT ready or prepared for this baby to come. We had no car seat for one thing. I'm not quite sure why, as we did have two other children and obviously had a car seat for them, but I think it may have gotten misplaced in our move. Also, it was coming up on Sam's birthday in less than a week and I had not bought a THING for him or made any other birthday-ish preperations. And, let's not forget the fact that my due date was OVER a month away!!! The thought that I could actually be having this baby right away absolutely overwhelmed me. Lucky for me, my wonderful doctor. sided with me and had the nurses give me a shot to try to stop the labor, and it WORKED! Happy HAPPY DAY! They sent me home with strict instructions to go straight home and take it easy. Yeah, right. I rushed home, picked up Sam from the neighbors house and took off to find a car seat, get a hospital bag ready, pick up some birthday presents and help Sam pick out a cake. Then had a yucky weekend of more contractions and a general feeling of total discomfort.

Okay, back to my routine Dr. Appointment on Wednesday - as I said before, it had been a rough week. I was ready to go in and have my doctor announce that all was well and to keep on keeping on. Not so. For starters I had lost weight, which apparently isn't a good thing when you're in your last stage of pregnancy. Then, when he measured me around the belly I was exactly the same as what I had measured two weeks before. I guess this isn't good. He sent me down for an ultrasound, just to make sure the baby was growing okay. It was really great to see him moving and sloshing around on the ultrasound and I was convinced everything was fine. I went back up to the office where Dr. Nichols looked at the baby's measurements and became more concerned. He said his head was measuring at 39 weeks and his little belly was only measuring at 33. This was FAR too big a difference for my doctor to handle and he said he thought I should come in the next day to deliver the baby. His main concern was that my placenta had given up and the baby wasn't getting the proper nutrients to sustain him and what he WAS getting was going to his brain so the rest of his little body was compensating. He said he was a little worried that this could have caused some damage to his brain. His other option was that I may have contracted some sort of virus along the way that didn't affect me but went straight to the baby and this could have caused some potential damage to his brain. "OR, we might deliver him and everything will be just fine, but no matter what I think he's better off out than in at this point", he said. This translated to me like this:

Option 1: Brain Damage
Option 2: Brain Damage
Option 3: Just fine

Those weren't good odds and I was TOTALLY freaked out. The doctor again said that he felt it would be best to deliver the baby the next day. I explained to him that tomorrow was my other child's birthday and is there ANY way we could do it before or after tomorrow. He immediately consented to deliver him that evening. I called Mark in tears and he tried to console me by saying "well, I have a big head...did you tell the doctor that?" I told him I did, but that it didn't matter. He said he'd leave right away. I met him at home to grab the hospital bag and head back. Mark had arranged for a friend of ours to meet us at the house to assist in a priesthood blessing after which I felt MUCH better, but still so, so scared. We called Lisa and asked if the boys could stay there until the next day when we could figure something out (thank you Lisa!) and off we went. My amazing doctor stayed there all day/evening for us and did such a wonderful job. We ended up delivering our little Gabriel via c-section at 10:01 pm and he was 5 pounds 12 oz and 18 1/2 inches long. He was absolutely perfect and so so beautiful. I remember Mark going back and forth between me and the baby and saying to me over and over "he has SO much hair, you should see his hair, he just has SOOOO much hair". He had a little trouble breathing and had to be in the level 2 nursery for a few days. I didn't even get to hold him until about 2pm the next day and they wouldn't let him come into our room until he was eating on his own and breathing without any help from the oxygen. We finally got him in our room 2 days later where we had a big (as big as it could be in a hospital room) birthday bash for little Sam and enjoyed our brand-new baby. As it turns out...he really did just have a big head like his daddy, and boy is it BIG. It's actually the same size if not a teensy bit bigger at three years old than Joshua's and Joshua is 9.

We just LOVE this kid. I can't believe it's been 3 years already. He has been such a joy to raise. I remember when he was about a month old telling Mark almost every day how "good" he had been that day, and then we finally realized that he was just a GOOD good baby. He really was angelic. He hardly ever cried, always smiled and was SO SO smart. He found ways to communicate with us SO early. I remember taking him to the Dr. when he was 10 months old and sitting in the waiting room playing with him and he kept saying "Doctor" over and over. It was surprisingly clear and I was convinced I had a genius on my hands. :) He became two almost overnight and brought all the fun "terrible two" stuff with it, but has always been just so cute and funny and wonderful. We are so lucky to have him in our family. Yesterday when I was frosting the cake for Sam's birthday party he kept saying "wow! Zyou (yes, that z is there on purpose. All his Y's have a z sound in front of them for some reason, he says the y sound...just not until after the z sound)Anyway, he kept saying "zyou do-een a DOOD job MOM!! (you're doing a good job, mom) and then last night as he was getting ready for bed he said "mom, zyou did such a dood job on Sammy's cake today". What a sweetheart. He really owns my heart, he says nearly every day "zyou my best friend mom!" I am so so lucky. And I really can't believe he's 3! We LOVE you Mr. Three!!



And sorry once again, for the novel. I thought I should document the experience since other than in Gabriel's journal, I don't think it's written down. Stay tuned tomorrow for "the story of Sam". :)

15 minutes later....

Quick - isn't he?!!!

Oh why do I bother....why do I EVEN BOTHER!!! It's a good thing he's so CUTE...I find myself saying this a LOT lately....hmmmm!!

Aaaaaahhhhh.....Mission accomplished...

I'd like to give a shout out to the folks that made this transformation possible. I'd personally like to thank (in order of appearance) Curious George, Clifford, Super Why, Dragon Tales, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Dora the Explorer, and Go Diego Go. Without these guys this day would not have been possible. I am NOT about to admit how much t.v. was watched by the two-year old of this household today....suffice it to say, EVERY one of these shows was watched AT LEAST once, and are AT LEAST 1/2 hour long. Mother of the year I tell you...MOTHER of THE YEAR!

Well, I'm off to salvage part of my day and attempt to do something at least somewhat meaningful with the people in this house that are wondering if Dora just might actually be their mommy. :)

Oh...and I would also like to thank Becky and Jason for letting me borrow Brayden for the afternoon to help keep Gabriel happy and even more out of the way - they played SOOO well!! We just LOVE this kid!!

Home can be a Heaven on Earth....

...Unless of course, it looks like this:



Sigh. Double, triple and quadruple sigh, and a great big UUUUUUUGGGGGHHHHH!

Oh well....I'm off to go strap on my "lace-up" shoes, set my timer and shine my sink, wish me luck! ....One last looooong sigh.

Ice Cream!!

It is the 8th of April and the Ice Cream Truck just took a drive around our neighborhood. Sam started running after him before I could tell him he needed to go get his dollar, so then I had to SHOUT it and he ran back to me, with strict instructions that I was to "Stay HERE and watch for the truck" until he came back outside (which I didn't do because I had to grab my camera!) When we made it back to our driveway he was coming back up in the opposite direction so it worked out great! Ice Cream trucks on the 8th of April....this is going to be an expensive summer!

All gone!

On the way back to the house Sam said "Wow, this is the BEST DAY EVER!" Isn't it fun when a dollar can turn a totally normal day into the BEST DAY EVER! While eating his popsicle he was thinking....this is what Sam does - he THINKS. He is the best 5 year old thinker I know. He was thinking about Ice Cream Trucks apparently and why they play music. This is what he came up with (word for word, I happened to be typing an e-mail and just started typing his words as he spoke them):

"Mom?"

*What?*

"I think I know why the Ice Cream Truck plays music so loud."

*oh yeah? Why?*

"Because if he didn't then none kids would be able to hear him and because then his ice cream would never ever get delivered, and HE would have to eat it all. Because children can't DRIVE to chase after the car and then they wouldn't even have a dollar, but if it plays music then the kids in the HOUSES will hear it and be able to get their money and run outside. "

*Yep Sam, I think you're right!*

This is what baby Will thought about us leaving him playing on the floor while we went to get ice cream....not happy...not happy ONE bit! Oh, but don't those eyes just KILL you!!