Long time no blog!

Wow! EIGHT comments on my last post - I think that is an all-time record!
It's been a busy week! First we had Brynn's birthday party:

Where we did all kinds of things backwards, from wearing clothes backwards:

To drinking out of bowls and eating out of cups:

to playing goose, goose, duck!

We even made the guests decorte their own cupcakes!

The backwards party was lots of nuf!
Monday was Darrin's birthday! We celebrated Sunday night with angel food cake, whipped cream, and strawberries.

Also Monday, we started redoing the 2 upstairs bathrooms. First up is new tile in both bathrooms. I took before pictures but will wait to post them until I have after pictures to post. In the meanwhile, it is kind of a pain to only have 1 working bathroom -- all the way downstairs!
And I spent all day yesterday at a birth and ended up getting home at about 2 am, so I am really TIRED today!

Happy Birthday Brynn!

We started out the morning with Brynn opening her presents. She was thrilled with the Diego Submarine (yes, it is yellow...), Dora sandbox toys, the Dora video with fire hydrants on the cover, a ball that can get bigger or smaller, and best of all MOON SAND! This is sand that is covered in something that makes it always wet - perfect for building sandcastles indoors. She played with it much of the day.
Brynn has this wierd obsession lately with her "favorite time":

Every day when her favorite time comes, she has to run all around the house and look at all the clocks showing her faborite time. If she misses it, she gets mad and cries.

She's been telling me for a week that she "CAN NOT miss" her favorite time on her birthday. Well guess what I realized at about 5:15 today? Yup, she missed it! I won't tell if you don't.

(If she ever remembers, I'm going to show her these pictures I took yesterday and tell her it is a reenactment)
Tonight we went to Chik-Fil-A for dinner, Brynn's choice. Conveniently, it was "Kid's Night" when kids eat free! AND, as a special bonus, there was a cow there!

So all in all, Brynn had a nice day on her birthday. She's playing with her submarine in the tub and then it will be bedtime.

Busy week!

Want to see how busy I was last week? Here's my weekly to-do list at the beginning of the week:

And here it is at the end of the week:

This notebook is what keeps me organized. On the right I have columns where I write the things that are specific to the days of the week, on the left is everything else I need to do but it doesn't matter when. I keep a running shopping list at the bottom, one for Costco and one for everything else.
This week should be every bit as busy!

Better busy than bored!

Busy week (and then some) since I last posted. Went to another birth - this one was a close friend of mine having her 8th baby! Only one more birth to go for April! I'm hoping it doesn't come on Brynn's birthday or the day of her party!
Darrin's started softball practices for this year. That's always a sure sign of spring!
Well, last week we got a call at 9:45 pm - I thought for sure it was someone in labor calling at that hour, but no - it was someone calling about church stuff! And then the NEXT night we got a call at 10:30 at night - again, I expected someone in labor, but NO it was someone calling about the Sandy City Elementary Art Show! They were calling to tell us Brynn had won an award and we should come to the award ceremony the next day. Gee, thanks for the advance notice and the late night phone call! So when my friend called at 11:30 the third night to tell me her water broke, I was half expecting it to be some other lame reason for a late night call!
But anyway, back to the art show! Brynn won the honorable mention in the kindergarten age group for a piece she did as part of the school's great artists' program Here she is with the other winners:

And picking out some art supplies for a prize:

And with the T-shirt she got for being a winner:

And this morning, Kyra ran her first 5K race! Just just up and decided out of the blue that she wanted to run, so she did! Here she is before the race:

On the course:

And crossing the finish line:

She finished 10th in her age bracket with a time of 49:52! Not bad for someone who just decided a few days before that she wanted to run the race and did NO training.
And Callie? Well, she's been cooking again:

This time she was making chocolate cookies and rolling the dough into balls before dunking it into powdered sugar.

Catching up.....

Once again life has been too full to spend any time blogging about it! So here's a giant catch-up post!
First, we are starting a remodel of the 2 upstairs bathrooms! The master bathroom will be getting more work, with a new vanity, countertop, sink and new tile on the floor. We'll be painting, too. Here's a sampling of the new stuff for that bathroom:

The hall bathroom upstairs will be getting new tile flooring, the cabinets will be resurfaced and the walls painted. Possibly a new sink & faucet as well. We've been busy trying to figure out what we want and getting estimates and placing orders. The actual work probably won't be started for a few weeks as we wait for the materials to arrive.
Next, I'd like you to meet our family's newest buffalo, Barnes A. Noble. (Yes, the A stands for "and" - she named him after the store where she bought him!) Brynn has been saving her money for a Dora video that has lots of fire hydrants on the cover, but when she saw Barnes (or Barney as we sometimes call him to make Brynn mad) she decided she HAD to have him. Barnes is on the right. You'll remember Buffy on the left.

Callie has now won the "Worst eyesight in the family" award hands-down. She once again needed stronger lenses in her glasses and we went to get that taken care of. Kyra & Brynn had fun with the men's sunglasses section. Kyra was doing a little air guitar and asked for her picture to be taken. So Brynn just HAD to get into the act, but clearly has NO idea how to play an air guitar!


Callie has been cooking again:

And I put in several hours at the Baby Day Expo last Friday & Saturday, doing lots of free hand massages and talking to people about doulas.

Kyra and I had quite the adventure trying to go to the Young Women General meeting last Saturday. One would think that if you had a ticket and arrived 40 minutes early one could get into the conference center. One would be wrong. Or should I say, about TWO THOUSAND people were wrong!

They seriously turned away about 2000 ticket holders because the building was full. Here's a tip, church folks: Don't give away more tickets than you have seats. Because disappointing that many young women doesn't exactly create trust in the church - I saw many of the younger YW crying outside the conference center. We ended up missing the first half hour and sitting in obstructed view seats in the tabernacle. Phooey - should have waited for the rebroadcast at home!
At least the flowers were pretty:

But getting home was a nightmare! We stopped at a restaurant for hot cocoa & french fries and to let the traffic disperse. But sadly, when we got back to the parking garage, it was still backed all the way up to the roof (which, naturally, was where we had to park...) Apparently someone had broken down and until the owners of the cars parked on either side came, there was no way around it. So we had to wait and wait and wait anyway. Kyra took this picture of the Capitol from the car while we waited. It helped relieve the boredom.

We finally arrived home more than 2 hours after the meeting ended.
Hmmmmmm.... what else? Oh yes, my birthday! The actual day itself was kind of a bummer, since I woke up to SNOW and between school, estimators and measurers coming, and the fact that I had to work, we did nothing special that day. I had to wait until Friday night to open my gifts! Darrin & I went out to dinner at Market Street and to a party for a friend of mine that night. The wait at the restaurant was so long we actually put our names on the list, drove down to Alpine, spent 1/2 hour at the party, and drove back up here to the restuarant and made it in time for our table!
And finally, I did really have a birth yesterday! Only 2 more to go this month. (What was I thinking!?!)
And I think that pretty much catches you up on what's going on around here.

My first catch!

So I had a birth earlier today - the mom was a few days past her due date and had scheduled this a few weeks ago in case she hadn't had the baby by now.
They checked in to the hospital and asked me to come about 8:30 - it seemed like I was there way too early! She was barely having any contractions for most of the morning. We chatted, watched Rachel Ray's talk show and pretty much just hung out. The nurse kept increasing the pitocin every half hour or so. At 12:15 she checked the mom and mom was 4 cm - a whopping 1 cm more than she'd been when they admitted her! I braced for the long haul (as inductions often are). Contractions picked up and became fairly regular not long after that.
Nurse came back at 1:10 to take vital signs and said she would return at 2 to check mom's cervix. She increased the pitocin again. Just two contractions later, the mom said "I think I have to push!" and a few seconds later, "I think the baby is right there!" So we had the nurse come back - she checked the mom at 1:20 and said mom was dilated to a 6 now.
Mom was still feeling lots and lots of pressure and that she HAD to push, so I helped mom get on hands & knees to try & relieve some of that pressure while the cervix finished dilating. The nurse turned the pitocin down and started setting up the sterile stuff for delivery.
On the very next contraction mom gave a HUGE push and the nurse checked again: 9 cm! So the nurse ran out to the nurses station to call the doctor to come. (His office is in the building right next door) Mom gave another great big push and said "Here he comes!" and I stepped over and looked and saw about 3 inches of the baby's head!
I grabbed some gloves (I always wear them during pushing) and when I turned back around as I put them on, the head was OUT! The dad, mom & I were the only ones there!
Since mom was still on her hands & knees, I didn't want the baby to fall, so I put out my hands and I CAUGHT THE BABY!
It was 1:35 - only 5 minutes from 6 cm to birth. Truly amazing how fast that happened.
Nurse came back in with a CNM who happened to be on the floor and they took care of cutting the cord, making sure baby was fine, the placenta, etc. We saw the doctor running full speed across the parking lot just moments later. He arrived breathless just after the placenta. I think he took the stairs.
HOLY COW! It was amazing to have this little boy just come into my hands so quickly.
(Updates on lots of other stuff coming tomorrow, I'm too tired right now.)