Vacation!

So, we haven't been on any trips or vacations for a while, and we were feeling the itch/need for one! I think we were desperate for one despite the consequences of taking three young children on a trip. So we used some of Nate's free hotel points, and drove to San Diego! We left on Friday after Nate worked for part of the day, and the drive was actually fine. The kiddos did great on the drive. We arrived at our hotel at about 9:30pm, and the boys were so hyped up about the hotel, it took them until 11pm to go to sleep because of their excitement :) Not to mention we practically packed a house because of all the stuff we had to bring for them, which took a few trips to the car and back! Then they woke up at 6am :)  So here's how it started..

On Saturday we played at the beach all morning, Isaac and Luke's favorite part was building a sand castle. They were both terrified of the ocean and would even touch the water! I made them both go in the water up to their ankles and they were very upset. I think maybe we talk about sharks too much when we talk about the ocean, and maybe that had something to do with their fear of the water :) whoops.

Wildcat pride!

Nate decided he would show the boys how to not be wimps (since they were so scared of the water), so he went and jumped in. 

In the afternoon we went to mission beach, but we quickly realized that it was too hot, so we went to eat an early dinner instead. It was the worst dinner experience of my life - in terms of my children's behavior, so I am going to skip that part, thank goodness I have no pictures to remember! It is super funny now looking back on it, and it was even kind of funny (just because of how ridiculous everything was) at the time too!! Let's just say I'm glad I'll never see anyone at that restaurant again. 

After dinner, we went to sunset cliffs, which was beautiful!

This part scared me a little bit though. 

I thought they were all going to fall into the ocean. Sunday morning we checked out La Jolla cove, where we got this awesome picture of a wave crashing into the pier and getting us wet! We went to church at a beautiful building, and then went to the Mormon Battalion Center, which has a cool interactive presentation that is super family friendly, and the boys loved digging for gold. 

Later on, we went and visited the San Diego temple, which is always amazing and makes me feel so grateful for everything I've been blessed with, especially my family. 

And that's how we roll with three kids in a double stroller. 

Then Monday morning, we went to this street fair thing where we toured some ships and submarines before heading home. We had some tired kids by the end of this trip (and tired adults too) but it was super fun and I'm glad we were able to go! We are pooped though, so our next vacation won't be for a while :)

June's Blessing and Other Happenings.

June's blessing was early last month. I love baby blessings, especially ones that are within our family! We were lucky enough to have a lot of family attend. June squealed for a part of it, but otherwise did fine :) I am so blessed to be her mom, she is such a sweet little angel baby (did I mention she has been sleeping through the night for like a month now?!).

Isaac started preschool! I cannot believe how fast he is growing up. He was excited for preschool, and never looked back when I dropped him off :) 

June has the wackiest hair on the planet. She is balding, as you can see, but her swirl cowlick in the back makes her hair stick straight up. So basically she has a permanent mohawk. Some people go for this look on purpose, but what do I do with crazy hair like this? Stick a bow on it I guess? Right in the middle!

We had an exciting storm a couple weeks ago - we had no power for about an hour, and the wind blew our little playground all around the backyard. Luke was very worried about it. 

We went to a Tucson Padres baseball game with our friends the Hatch's. It was super fun, mostly because it was a pretty nice night and we left early (baseball games are too long for me). Isaac and Luke didn't really pay any attention to the game, but they had fun dancing to the music in-between :)

July Fun

What a CUTE bunch, I have to say :) 

I'm a lucky mom. 

For the 4th - we hung out with friends, went swimming, BBQ'd, ate too much, and stayed up late for the fireworks!

Luke was terrified of the fireworks when they started, it was hilarious.

We look tired, we were very tired after a long day of fun.

We dressed up like cows for the chick-fil-a cow appreciation day (free food). Isaac wore his cow costume, made out of paper, for like 3 hours before we left to go get dinner. Chick-fil-a has this event once a year in July, and it was super fun, we're definitely going again next year!

Here is an updated picture of June, since she changes so quickly! She has crazy hair, and now she is balding but Nate won't let me buzz her! She has been such an awesome baby - she only wakes up to eat at night, and she is pretty much never fussy. Before I had June, I heard a lot from other moms that having three young children is the hardest, and after that you can have any amount of kids and its not a big difference. However, so far having three kiddos has been great. The boys mostly love her, too much sometimes :) but they are already used to the noise and distraction of a sibling, so having June here really was not a huge adjustment for them. At least not yet! Going from one to two kiddos was much more of an adjustment (and that's a nice word for it) for me than this time around. I love that she finally has awake time during the day now, and I can't get enough of her smiles. 

Luke's Birthday

I can't believe my little Luke is 2! We tried to do things he loves all day - we went on a train ride, and we played games and won some prizes at funtasticks, we went to the park to swing, and Grandma made him an awesome firetruck cake! He tried to grab it when he first saw it, lol, because he thought it was a real truck :)

Luke has a very strong personality, he is stubborn and knows how he wants things to be. He is also super kind and shares well, and loves when people are nice to him. He is a little shy sometimes, but he loved being the center of attention on his birthday - he especially loved being sung to! He loves to have fun and be silly! His two year old stats from his doctor appointment are - 10% for height, 20% for weight, and 70% for head 

He's got a big noggin I guess :)

June's Birth

Here it goes -

So, when I was pregnant with Isaac, I had an appointment with the doctor two days before my due date - she said I wasn't dilated. Mild contractions started on my due date,  and after going through an entire day of painful contractions, we had him two days after his due date. Such a long labor.

Fast forward to Luke - I decided, with the help of Nate and my Doctor, to get induced on my due date. I got to the hospital at 7am, and didn't have Luke until 9pm! Another long labor. And I really did not enjoy being induced.

This time around, I knew I didn't want to be induced again, I wanted things to happen on their own, even if I was late again. My due date was June 15th, and I had an appointment with my doctor a week and a half before my due date, and she told me I was dilated to a 1! I was pretty excited about that, since I really hadn't been dilated much before either of the boys were born. Then I had another appointment three days before my due date - she checked me again and I was dilated to a 4! No wonder I was so uncomfortable :) She asked if I wanted my membranes stripped. I didn't know what she was talking about, but since it might put me into labor, SURE! So I picked up the boys, went to the grocery store and got home the same time as Nate that evening. I had a feeling I should get a few things done around the house, so I mopped and did some other cleaning. Around 7:30pm I got my first painful contraction. I had been having braxton hicks a lot for weeks previous to this, but they were not painful. Five minutes after that first painful contraction, I got another one! I kept getting contractions about five minutes apart, so Nate started writing them down. By 8pm we knew we were in labor, since I'd been having them consistently for half an hour. We called Nate's parents, who live close by, after putting the boys to bed. We were frantically packing a bag for the hospital, so we didn't leave the house till about 9pm. All the way to the hospital, which is a 20 minute drive, I didn't get a contraction! I was starting to think maybe I was crazy, and somehow not in labor. But we got into triage, they checked me and told me I was dilated to a 7! And my contractions were consistent and very strong again. After an hour in triage, they wheeled my bed to the birthing room, around 10:30pm. They asked me if I wanted an epidural, I said YES! But I asked them to check me again to see how much I'd progressed, so they did and I was at 8.5 cm. I loved the nurse I had in triage, and she was still my nurse, so I asked her how fast she thought I would be, and she thought 45 minutes or less if my doctor broke my water. So they asked if they could break my water - I said yes, and then I would get the epidural. Until this point, my pain was pretty manageable. My contractions were very painful, but it wasn't out of control. As soon as my doctor broke my water, which was around 10:40pm, the pain was out of control. I'm embarrassed to say that I actually started screaming in pain. She told me to start pushing to get the rest of the cervix out of the way, so I tried, but I thought I was going. to. die. The contractions were much worse and I only had a 20 second breather in between them! But after about 5 contractions, June was out! No epidural. The cord was wrapped twice around her neck, but luckily it wasn't tight. She was born on June 12th at 10:50pm, 6lbs 13oz, 18 inches long.

It was crazy fast! I was not prepared for a fast baby, but it was the best experience yet, faster is better.


There's more, but here's your warning, it gets gross. Hours later, I kept bleeding and bleeding, so one of the nurses had to come and push hard on my stomach to get all the blood out, and there was a lot. Too much I guess, because I almost passed out and they started putting medicine in my IV and gave me a shot to stop the bleeding. It finally stopped and everything was fine, but I had a postpartum hemorrhage. I guess this happens with about 6% of births. Recovery has been great, I didn't tear at all and so I felt better in a few days time after having June. My milk coming in is a different story - It's what I dread the most after having a baby. But she is a good little nurser and we are done with the rough part.

Anyway, I feel like the adjustment as a family has been a little bit easier this time around. With Isaac, I went from being in school and working, super busy, to being a stay at home mom and I had to adjust a lot to the change. Then when Luke came, I felt super guilty because it was a big change to go from one to two kids, and having to split my attention between the two of them. This time, it really has not been crazy, and we've enjoyed spending time together as a family while Nate was off work. I know the storm is still coming, and she will wake up from her slumber, but I'm trying to just relax and let the little things go. It has made all the difference!

Here she is after they got her stats 

My four favorite people :)

Some gas smiles

My REALLY nice friend took some newborn photos for us, there are more to come!

Projects

I have had some projects that I wanted to get done around the house, and June 15th being my deadline, I have been pretty productive. I could easily come up with more, but I prioritized and got done what I really wanted to get done before the baby arrives. These last two weeks are going to be spent doing fun stuff like swim lessons, movies, and fun stuff with my boys! But here are some projects we've worked on forever and are finally done with:

We built bunk beds for the boys using the Side Street Bunk Beds Plan off Ana White's website. They were so much work, but it was really fun to work with Nate on a project. And don't worry, Isaac is not sleeping on top yet, we will wait another year and a half or so before he moves up to the top! I love the color we picked to paint the bunk beds, but it makes me want to paint their room a light gray - but that is not going to happen soon, so we'll settle for blue. We just picked up some orange pillows from Ikea for the bed too, the bed turned out better than we thought it would considering we've never built anything before!

Of course I could not get him to sit still for one second for a picture. 

I have also wanted to make the boys quiet books for a while, so I finally got to work on them this spring before the baby arrives! These were more work than any other project I've done, but they are done and the boys play with and like them - so that's good! I made two identical books, so this one is Luke's. And there are 8 pages total, but I'm only putting a few on here:

These last few are two of their favorites:

We also needed a dresser for the baby, so we found this one at a garage sale, I don't have a before picture - but it was a terrible paint job, and red! So we painted it white, I bought some hardware at Ikea that we still need to put on, but our baby girl's clothes are finally organized so I was glad to finish this project.

Lastly, Luke's quilt! I bought the pattern from Cluck Cluck Sew, and using a pattern was so nice - and I love this one! It looks so boy to me. 

I cant help but post a few of the boys too: