It's a baby!

Benton Paul McNabb arrived this morning at 7:43-ish. He weighed 7 lbs 15 oz, 19 1/4" long, and was born in a minivan.

Here's some pictures:


Mom and Benton


Dad and Benton


Brita and Benton


The whole family (we usually have lovely family photos like this)

And now, if you want the whole story...

Peter and I went on a walk before bed, and I started having noticeable contractions around 11:00 last night. They got progessively worse, but not that bad. We woke Monica up at 4:00 to keep an ear out for Brita so we could go on another walk (thanks again, Monica).

Brita got up around 7:00, and it was then that we decided to go to the hospital. I had Peter pull a seat out of the van and I knelt on the floor for the long ride to the hospital. It takes about a half hour in good traffic, and I picked rush hour.

When we started driving, I told Peter I kind of felt like pushing, and he said, "Not the right time." About 15 minutes before we got there my water broke with a big splash (poor car). About 5 minutes later, there was another splash and I said, "The baby's here." He came out all at once. Peter pulled off to the side of the road and called for an ambulance and I used his shirt to sit on. I unwrapped the cord from the baby's neck, which had four wrappings, and made sure it was breathing. I used Peter's second shirt as a blanket for the baby. The dispatcher suggested different things to use for tying the cord, but since we wanted a delayed clamping, I just kept saying, "no."

Pretty soon the ambulance, fire truck, and police car arrived. They did a quick checkup on us and had some real blankets for the baby. Benton and I got on the stretcher and rode to the hospital in the ambulance, which took another 10 minutes. They didn't even turn on the lights for us. :)

I got to the hospital and my midwife came and delivered the placenta. Then she stiched me up, which was like 17 times worse than birth. Peter was stuck doing paperwork for forever.

When Peter got to the hospital about the same time, instead of a shirt he was wearing a towel over his shoulders and a backpack over that. I think he got some dirty looks on the elevator up to my room. They were nice and gave him a scrub top to wear.

When we went to get some pictures of Benton, we realized we'd forgotten the memory card for the camera. We called Monica and she came with Brita to bring it. They were there for the bath and all of the other fun "firsts."

Don't worry Peter has already gotten the van cleaned up. The permanent blood stains will remind us of Benton forever. It's totally worth giving birth in a van to get all the cheerios and crumbs cleaned up for you.

Welcome, Benton.

Brita's new room

Brita is now the proud owner of her own room. She even sleeps in there all by herself. If you ask her whose room it is she'll say, "It's Brita's bed." So far so good.

Her new dresser. She loves the little box on top that she can open and close. She was putting her little halo thing in there and taking it our for a good long while today.


Someday we'll get mattresses for her bed. For now she just sleeps on the metal springs. Just kidding--she's still on her mattress on the floor. But aren't they cool beds? Her Grandpa McNabb had them when he was little.


We changed the cubby into a play room for her. It'll be even cooler after Christmas. And when we get done mudding and painting it.


Isn't that a lovely light? Yeah--we put that in ourselves. Cute girl, too, huh? She's developing all sorts of crazy cheesy grins for when you ask her to smile.

Oy, what a week

This week has been crazy. We cleared all the furniture out of our house so that we could get carpet installed on Monday. We also painted all but one room of the house before they laid carpet. We also almost finished the cubbies.

Wow--that seemed like more when we were actually doing it.

My computer has been taken apart so I haven't had that in a while. I'm going through withdrawls. I must be turning into a McNabb.

Monica decided to move down to the basement today so that we could move upstairs like we were planning to after she left, so we've been trying to figure out what we want to do with the other rooms in our house. Brita is loving that there is no furniture anywhere. We run and dance a lot.

The baby has decided it's not coming. Oh well, agency is what we come to earth to use, right?

I"m pretty much tired all the time. I sleep as much as I can. Therefore Peter doesn't sleep because I snore so bad. I'm sure he's hoping the baby comes so he can get some sleep.

I burned my finger today. Note to everyone: do not touch a 425 degree oven rack--it'll hurt. My finger burned for a couple of hours. The pizza was good, though. I think we're keeping Papa Murphy's in business.

We have so many tomatoes in our garden. I can't keep up with them. There aren't actually that many, but I've got different priorities right now. I keep thinking I'll just offer to give them to whoever comes and picks them, but I somehow never get around to it. Like everything else. I love having a garden. Love it.

I'm thirsty. Just so you know.

I'm trying to decide what to do about moving Brita into her own room. Now that she's going to have one.

Doesn't orange juice sound good?

Hopefully we'll get our furniture moved back in soon. I was hoping to have the baby so that people who came to visit could help move it back in, but my evil plan didn't work. And I really wanted to get out of teaching my Sunbeams lesson this week. Oh well.

So I'm pretty sure that other stuff happened, but, lucky you, you don't have to read about it. Off for water.

So about this nesting thing

I'm sick of working on the house. Nothing gets done and there's way too much to do. If I had some sort of nesting instinct I'm sure this would all make me as happy as a clam, but I don't. Really I just want to sleep. All the time. The bad part is that it won't even all be over by Tuesday because we are having to hurry and do a really bad job on things. And then there will be a baby and I won't get to sleep some more. Poor me.
Now you know.

Why yes, yes it does.

Every once in a while I catch a glimpse of a reflection of me sideways and I have to stop and wonder: Does my belly really stick out that far?

Notice: Carpet Day Moved

Just in case carpet day influenced your guess on when the baby would come, I thought I'd update you with the plans. Carpet day has been moved to Monday the 21st. My brother-in-law couldn't make it down so we decided we would take a little more time to get things painted.

We finished sheet rocking the cubbies and Peter is mostly done taping one of them. We have about half the house painted. Special thanks to a couple of neighbor boys who came and held up sheet rock for us in a very hot cubby. Also to my Dad for coming to rescue us. Hopefully we'll finish in time.

Boogers and manners

Brita and I were just looking at pictures from the big packet of church pictures. We got to the one of Abraham being saved by the angel and started talking about it. Brita pointed out that there were a lot of hands in the picture. Then she identified the angel's nose. Then she asked if there was a booger in the angel's nose.
Angels don't have boogers, right?

Today was kind of a long day. Peter is going on a sixteen hour day at work and will probably be there at least a couple more hours. I didn't get enough sleep last night (stinking library books). Brita was tired and teething all day. Every time I thought I just couldn't be nice anymore or just couldn't do any more Brita would be really polite. I don't know where she got it, but it makes it so much easier to be her mom. She always says please and thank you and you're welcome and excuse me. Civility just makes everything better.

One great thing about kids...

is that you can take them out in crazy clothes and people just think that the kid insisted on wearing it.

Last week we accidentally left Brita's shoes in the car for a couple days. She has other shoes that are the right size, but they don't fit her. She has kind of pudgy feet, so even the shoes that are too long for her still are too tight. I don't know what we're going to do about that when summer ends. Anyways, I had to take Brita with me to my doctor's appointment and her shoes were at Peter's work, so I ended up putting her water shoes on her and taking her (luckily she stopped saying "tight, tight" by the time we got in the car). They're a full size too big and definitely water shoes, so I was a little nervous that people would think I was a really bad mom.

Nope. Nothing. Now I know.

Come to think of it, it was the same way when I took her to the store in clashing pants and shirt and dress. That one was her idea, though.

Berries

Peter's mom is way nice and has gotten us berries the last couple of years. We use them for jam and syrup and all kinds of things. This year we got some strawberries too. They're all so good. Thanks, Mom.

I didn't eat the whole bucket, by the way. I was just making sure none of it was wasted after we repackaged them.

It's not a nest, it's a den

Peter and I have been working on the house quite a bit lately. We are planning on having new carpet installed on the 17th, so we decided to sheet rock the cubbies in the two bedrooms upstairs so they could carpet them too. I learned that it has been way too long since I've sheet rocked anything. It's a very good thing we started on the small cubby. And it's a good thing no one will see those cubbies and point and laugh at us.

We also put in a outlet and a light with a switch in the big cubby. They actually work too. Yeah! It's a good thing my dad's a good teacher over the phone, because I've forgotten almost everything I used to know. We need to put in a window in the big cubby, too.

The big cubby will eventually be a little play room off the kids room and the small cubby I don't know what will be.

And there's our exciting news about cubbies.

We're also boxing stuff out so we can move it out of the house for painting and carpeting. And trying to keep/catch up on all our other projects, too.

Baby guesses

So I've been wondering when people think the baby will come. And what gender they think it is. So here's your chance to make me happy. Leave a comment as to the gender and date of arrival for my baby. Whoever's right or closest will have bragging rights. That's worth something, right?
If it helps my due date is either the 16th, 24th, 26th or 27th of September.