Family Reunion

We had a family reunion for the Sandberg side. It was great! We spent one day at Lagoon. Annie was really brave going on all the rides. We started her off easy on Bulgy the Whale, but she kept saying "faster! higher!" while on that ride. She went on all the rides she could go on and loved it--the Space Scrambler, Dino Drop, Chinese Dragon, even Bambora. I became a human seat belt a few times because I was nervous, but Annie basically showed no fear. What a woman! I didn't take any pictures because it was just too hard, but this is how the kiddos felt at the end of the day.

So I was really horrible at taking pictures, sadly, but here's one of Annie and cousin Klara.

I have a really wonderful family. And it was good to see them.

2 months, 3 months...

Scotty cruised by the 2 month and 3 month mark. This kid really feels like part of the family now. I've almost forgotten what life was like before he arrived. And I must say, he is one adorable baby. He smiles and coos and looks chubby all day long. He cries and barfs and poops, too, but he's generally pretty happy. We like having him around. The other day Annie was engaging in what looked to me like "rough" behavior with Scotty. I told her to stop, but was interrupted by Scotty laughing at Annie's treatment of him. Back off, Mom. Let them bond. 

Visting Our Own Backyard

And the catch-up posts continue....While William and Heather were in town we decided to take a trip to the rooftop of the Conference Center at Temple Square. I'd seen it once in the winter while I was a teenager, but no one else had ever been there. My parents were also in town after Scotty's blessing, so we went to Salt Lake on the same day they needed to be dropped off at the airport to go see my brother, Joe. Our little touristy adventure was lovely. We learned about how the conference center roof is made to mimic a mountainside. We also saw that there are sunroofs up there. They shine down into the general conference room itself. The maintenance people usually keep them covered because otherwise the speakers can't see the teleprompter. These and other interesting facts could be yours if you visit the Conference Center rooftop.

 The Mother Duck had crossed over the wall, but her ducklings couldn't make it. So these men herded them up and gently tossed them over. 

 I have a picture from my sister Liz's wedding (when I was 5) wearing her veil and holding onto the temple doorknob. I was trying to recreate the moment with Annie, but her hair wasn't cooperating. Plus, she was really, truly trying to turn the doorknob and get in. (See below)

 Blurry brothers with babies

She really does love to see the temple.

Our adventures also took us across the street to see the new and somewhat controversial City Creek Mall. I have no comments to make about the mall itself, but these water things were super cool. The picture doesn't do them justice.

A Baby Blessing

We blessed our little boy Scotty on Father's Day. Here are the wonderful men who participated (minus my wonderful brother Andrew).

Before the blessing, I told Scotty there was to be no crying and no pooping. He was very obedient. As I was sitting up on the stand doing my ward chorister duties and sitting behind the organ and grand piano, I thought I heard Scotty crying in the congregation. Turns out it was another baby who is a few weeks older than Scotty. I still go into mother hyper-drive every time I hear that baby cry at church. They sound a lot alike to me. But then again, I've also been known to go into mother hyper-drive when my in-laws' cat meows. Maybe I'm a bad mother...or maybe I'm too motherly. I'll go with that one. 

We don't have church until 1:00, so Aaron and I spent the morning making 58 chicken enchiladas. I was feeling pretty good about that and my hosting skills until I got outside after church and realized there were no paper plates or cups or forks. Cousin Heather pulled through for us on the plates, but we asked our parents to share cups with their spouse. So much for my good hosting skills. Here are the guests mingling.

This Cheez-It box is placed very appropriately. Jack, our in-guy at Kellogg's, brought them all the way from his factory back east.

Jack and Natalie's son, Jackson, played quite a bit with Annie. At one point, we heard Annie tell Jackson, "It's time to come home," and Jackson said, "Not yet." This could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship. 

In 14 years it will be a motorcycle.

Annie kept hearing people say "Happy Father's Day," and I heard her refer to Jackson several times as father. I guess she was a little confused.

It was a lovely day. Thanks to all of our great family who came. And thanks to Scotty for being the best male-under-30 part of the Aaron and Maren Dennis family.

Dennis Clan
(Thanks for the picture, Natalie)

McCombs grandparents

A Visit

We've had many events happen in our lives lately, so I'll post about each of them over the next few days (or weeks...or months). The first event was that Aaron's brother William, our sister-in-law Heather, and their daughter Lucy came for a visit. We went up to Aaron's parents' house to see them. Annie was great at playing with Lucy. They were so cute together, and they played together more than I thought they would. I tried to get a picture of these two crazy kiddos the last time they were together. It didn't work very well on either occasion. But here they are anyway.

The adorable weed/flower crowns were designed and crafted by Heather. Coolest mom ever! While the whole Dennis clan was together, we had a family recital. This was inspired one day when I told Aaron that I really learned piano pieces when I had to get them ready for a recital. So Aaron found a piece he really wanted to learn and asked the rest of the fam to get something together as well. The coolest performance, in my opinion, was the Cake song performed by Russell on the guitar and Alan on the trumpet. "Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps." Bravo, gentlemen.

Everyone did great. What a talented family! We had more fun with William and Heather, but I will write about that in the next post. To end, here's a pic of Annie and Aunt Shauna together. While we were visiting, Shauna hosted a delicious waffle breakfast at her beautiful new abode. I didn't take any pictures of that, but it was very fancy.

One month! No way!

 I can't believe this second kid of ours has already been around for one month. Time flies when you're having...complete and utter chaos. Actually, I feel like we're adjusting pretty well. Scotty is a good baby, and so far he has avoided a traumatic brain injury inflicted by a 30 pound two year old wearing high heels (aka "princess shoes"). If there is another definition of motherly success, I don't know what it is.

Isn't he handsome? Especially the drool.

Oh, we love them!

Scotty has been a smiler since day one. I was so excited to get this picture until I realized that it's blurry and there's a  giant booger in his nose. Oh well. He still looks cute.

Scotty has definitely gotten fatter since this picture was taken on his 4th day of life. 

We spent Mother's Day up in Idaho. We had a lovely, relaxing time, and the weather was great...sometimes that's unusual for Idaho in May.

Mother's Day photo.

Scotty in his fancy church duds.

 Of course Annie got some quality playing time in with her cousin Klara. And she loved the sprinkler/trampoline combination. She managed to have a fabulous time, even though her too small Dora swimsuit was giving her a wedgie.

Why wear one dress when you can wear two?
Pink Dora guitar=instant coolness

Now here's a short story to illustrate the craziness that often accompanies having a newborn in the house. Last night Scotty slept for four hours--from 11:30-3:30. That was awesome, and he's usually a gem of a sleeper at the beginning of the night. But when I laid him back down at 4:00, he started up his grunting routine. It goes a little like this--"Grunt," shuffle, "grunt," kick legs, "grunt"...and so on. He went into grunt mode about every 20 minutes. I tried to pick him up and burp him or get him to poo, but all to no avail. This went on until 7:30 in the morning. In all this time, he only actually cried 2 times. So he didn't need anything that we could give him. Sometimes babies just need to grunt. It's some weird primal instinct.

Anyway...this morning I was explaining to Aaron that in the wee hours of the morning, my brain does not function too well. For instance, why didn't I move Scotty into the living room so his baby grunts stopped disturbing us? The thought didn't even occur to me. I just kept being woken out of a semi-deep sleep at which point my thought process went something like this--"Baby!" comfort, pacifier, lay down. Aaron confessed to me this morning that he did think of moving the baby to the other room. Why didn't he mention this during one of the times I was awake at 4:20 and 4:40 and 5:00 and 5:20? Because he felt too tired to move Scotty himself and too guilty to tell me to move Scotty into the other room. So I agreed with Aaron that I will happily provide the physical capacity if he will provide the mental capacity. This could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

A Baby was Born

Scott Hans Dennis made his entrance into the world. We are so happy to have him, although it didn't take long to realize that having two kids is definitely an adjustment from having one kid. And remember that newborns are really small? Annie always looks like a giant to me now. Having two kids also makes me appreciate different qualities of their different ages. I can say to myself, "Well at least Scott can't whine or talk back to me." And later in the day I'll find myself saying, "I'm so glad I don't have to change Annie's diaper."

So here's a brief version of our birth story. I was trying for a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean) because Annie was a C-section for breech presentation. I really wanted to have the baby on a day when midwife Claudia was on call because her VBAC success rate was about 97%. I did end up at the hospital on her call day, so that was pretty great. However, she didn't actually end up catching my baby because he came after the shift had changed. Jen caught our baby, and she was great, too. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I really wanted to "go natural" with this birth, so I'd been doing a Hypnobabies home study course. It basically teaches you how to relax and helps you to think positively about childbirth. They claim the 70% of their moms have painless childbirth. I DID NOT have a painless childbirth, but I'm really glad I used hypnobabies. I don't think I would have succeeded in a natural birth without it. So our labor started on a Monday morning. Around 4:30 I woke up having contractions or "pressure waves" as hypnobabies calls them. They weren't too intense, but they were definitely different from the Braxton Hicks I'd been having for a long time. I had an appointment with the midwife that morning at 9:30 and the pressure waves were going from 4:30 all through my appointment. The midwife let Annie help check the baby's heartbeat. It was really cute. Anyway, we came home and the pressure waves started to die off. That afternoon I took a really long nap and had no pressure waves. After Annie and I woke up,we walked to the park in hopes of getting things going again. It worked, and I had stronger pressure waves all evening. I was using my hypnobabies and even needed Aaron to push on my back with some of them. But by the time we went to bed, everything had stopped again. Tuesday morning the pressure waves started again, this time around 3:30. By 7:00 or 8:00 the pressure waves were hurting in my back a lot. Aaron's mom texted to ask how things were going, and we told her she could come down. I wanted her to be here to entertain Annie so Aaron could be free to help me. So by now the pressure waves were pretty consistent but not really getting closer together. My visiting teacher came over for her visit, and then Aaron, Julie, Annie, and I just hung out and dealt with pressure waves for the rest of the day. Again, they stopped a little in the afternoon, so we took the stairs up to campus to get things going again. On our walk the pressure waves were 3-5 minutes apart and pretty intense, but they slowed down to 10 minutes apart again once we got home. We put Annie to bed and then sent Julie home thinking we'd have another uneventful night. But things really started to pick up as soon as Aaron and I laid down to go to bed. By 1 am we had decided it was time to go to the hospital. We called Julie and told her to meet us at the hospital. In triage, we found out I was dilated to a 4+ and was 100% effaced with the baby at 0 station. I was a little depressed by this because I'd had a mini nervous breakdown before coming to the hospital and had been hoping that meant I was further along. Plus I'd been in labor for two days! But my hypnobabies training reminded me that the 4+ was just a number and it didn't have any meaning for how long the rest of my labor would be. We got settled into the hospital, and I was a lot more comfortable laboring at the hospital than I had been at home. It was really nice to be able to adjust the bed to any position, and Claudia had some great counter pressure things that helped my back out. It was hurting a lot! We were at the hospital laboring from about 3 am to 1 pm before the baby was born, but my whole concept of time was really fuzzy. Time sped up a lot for me. I was extremely grateful for that. At one point (it felt like 20 minutes after we got to the hospital, but I know it must have been longer) Claudia checked me and I was at a 6. That was encouraging. But shortly after that, I started hyperventilating. It made my hands go stiff, and my speech got slurred. For some reason, there was no midwife in the room at this point. I think it was during the shift change. I freaked out because I felt like I had lost control of my body. After this, my pressure waves slowed down, and I was really discouraged. Jen, the new midwife suggested we break my water to get things going again. She didn't pressure us at all, and she left so Aaron and I could decide. Aaron and I had a heart to heart and he really helped me to feel like I could keep going with my goal of natural childbirth. I took some time to just listen to hypnobabies while I went through a more pressure waves in order to get back on track, and then I had Jen break my water. It worked to get things going again. The pressure waves were lasting longer and were more intense. I was working so hard to relax my body, and I was moaning really loudly. That helped me to stay on top of the intense pressure that some people would refer to as PAIN. Aaron would press on my back, and Julie would encourage me and say some phrases from Hypnobabies. This helped immensely. I would definitely have needed an epidural if I hadn't had this physical and emotional support. Jen was also great and very encouraging. I'm so grateful I was surrounded by all these people who believed in me. Before breaking my water, my cervix hadn't really been dilating. I didn't know this because I asked the midwife not to tell me about my cervix. Everyone else was a bit worried about the lack of change, but I didn't know and so I couldn't worry. I'm really grateful for that. And once they broke my water, I was at 9 cm in less than 2 hours. Which just goes to show, once again, that a woman's cervix is not a crystal ball. So after we broke my water, I think I probably was in "transition" but it didn't really feel much different than the rest of my labor except that it was more intense. Finally I was dilated to a 10, and Jen said I could push or bear down if I felt like it. I never felt like it, but when I pushed really hard, then I could feel that it was doing some good towards getting the baby out. So I think I pushed for about 45 minutes. Time didn't slow down during this part. And I just want to say that pushing that baby out was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life...ever. Instead of relaxing with a pressure wave I was adding to the pressure by pushing on it. I was ready to be done, but I knew the only way to "be done" was to get this thing OUT! So I did it, because what else could I do? I was so grateful for everyone's support and encouragement during this stage. Again, that was essential to my success. Jen was a great coach. She really helped me to push in the most effective way. In this case effective=painful, but I really think she helped me to get through it as quickly as possible. Hypnobabies tells you to "breathe your baby down." Jen knew that, but she said that doesn't usually work for first time moms. I agreed that something more was needed. I'm glad she was there to help. So then the baby came out. Can you believe it! The whole concept of childbirth is CRAZY! It was awesome! I was so happy and relieved. Labor was really hard, but really everything happened just like I wanted it to. And recovering from a vaginal delivery is much better than recovering from a C-section. I'm really grateful I was able to experience this. Aren't you glad I gave you the "brief" version. And here's the end result of all our labors.