He's Here!

Bennett made his debut at 7:50 this morning.

He weighed in at a whopping 9 lb 9 oz.

 At 21 3/4 inches long, he's following in his Grandpa E's footsteps!

More narration to come!

I wanted to get some pics up quick for our anxious family members.

We are so happy to have this little man in our family!

Her Last Day as an Only Child

One way or another, our little boy will be joining our family tomorrow!

That means that today was Addie's last day as an only child.

Weird.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to go downtown for playgroup at the fountains, but decided that a distraction from this baby not coming would be a good thing.

We had a great time!

It was especially nice to have Scott's mom, Sue, with me.  She did a whole lot of chasing, so I could take it easy and chat with my friends.

 There was some live music and Addie and her friends were so cute dancing around while they threw the ball back and forth.

She started off very timid.
No surprise.

Surprise!
She started to go for it!

Before long, she was having a great time!

I decided to drown my overdue sorrows in buying some cute fabric to make Addie a dress!

I took advantage of having Sue in town.  She's an AMAZING seamstress and she helped me refine my sewing skills.  Addie was so excited to wake up from her nap to a new dress.

We ended our day with a family trip to the pool.  I swam a bunch of laps in an attempt to convince this baby to come.  We had a great last day as a family of 3 and are anxious to become 4.

Stay tuned for our new addition...

Getting Ready for the Little Man

This little guy's due date is quickly approaching (Thursday)!

Operation: Get Baby Out!  is in full force.

We have been going on some monstrous walks every night that have been sending me into fits of contractions, but nothing effective yet.

38ish weeks

 Addie's preparing herself to be a big sister.

She can't get enough of holding her best friend's little brother!

(Don't worry, Nicole, Scott's hovering very nearby just in case)

 Addie loves this little baby boy so much.

I worry that she's going to want to send our little boy back because he won't be her baby Carter.

Addie and I spent the entire day getting bathrooms scrubbed, floors mopped and vacuumed, laundry done.  He can come anytime now.  If I have to scrub my bathrooms again before he gets here, I'm gonna be one unhappy Mama:)

Just Cute

At playgroup the other day, my great friend Nicole snapped a couple pics of my beautiful girl!  

Thanks Nicole!!!

She's very good at loving baby brother.

Garbage Man

Some kids are afraid of the Boogie Man, or monsters under their bed.  Not our little girl.  Her biggest fear in life is the "barjig man" (garbage man).

This is not a joke.  She is 100% terrrified to the bone of the barjig man.

A couple weeks ago we were going up the stairs and she said to me, "Barjig man not in my room!"  And I looked at her confused, thinking, "Of course, he's not in your room.  Why would you be thinking that?!"  Ever since then, the barjig man comments keep on coming.

She'll randomly say, "Barjig man not under your bed!"  How scary to think of the garbage man under our bed!  Or I'll ask her to go upstairs to get something and she'll refuse to do it because she thinks the garbage man is in her room.

The funniest time was last week.  I was looking for the scrub top Scott wore for Addie's birth.  The nurses inked Addie's tiny feet and made footprints on the shirt.  We thought it'd be fun to have it for all of our kids' births and have lot's of little tiny footprints all on that top.  Anyway, I was trying to find it and I told Addie all about it thinking she'd love to see her little footprints.  I went from closet to closet all over our house looking for the box that I knew it was in and I couldn't find it anywhere.  Addie was starting to get concerned and kept saying, "You don't can't find it!" (Sidenote: she says "don't can't" together all the time and I really love it!)  Finally, she let out a gasp and yelled, "THE BARJIG MAN TOOK IT!!!"  Needless to say, we found it, and, no, it was not in the garbage man's possession.

Up until today, it's kind of been a cute, little, irrational fear that she's had.  Then today when we were walking up stairs I heard the garbage truck right out her window.  Usually she really likes peeking out her window to see the giant truck drive by, so I said, "Addie, hurry, the garbage truck's outside!  Let's go look at it!"  She screamed bloody murder and started climbing up my leg, pleading for me to carry her.  Oops.

Addie spent the entire day safely perched on the couch, our bed, her bed or the dining room chair.  When moving from one of those things to the other, she would run, with a panic stricken face, as fast as she could and beg for me to hold her hand the whole way.  I'm really not exaggerating.

Here's to hoping this fear doesn't get worse before it gets better, because she was exhausting today!

Mommy's Day

I just wanted to say Happy Mother's Day to my amazing Mom and wonderful Mother-in-Law!

I saw this quote and knew it was perfect for these two awesome women in our lives.

My goodness, Scott and I are two lucky kids.

I'm also a very lucky Mama. 

I was just treated to a chick flick, lounging on the couch while Scott brought me chocolate.  I proceeded to take a Sunday nap while he slaved away in the kitchen.

Glorious:)

Welcome Baby!

Nope, not our baby.

Sorry to get your hopes up if that's where your brain went.  

Our baby is still quite comfortable in my belly.  

He'll be there a little while longer.  

But...

HIS COUSIN HAS ARRIVED!

That's right, Scott and I are finally an Aunt and an Uncle!

Addie has a cousin now!

We are so excited to welcome this new little girl into the Clark family and can't wait to meet her in June (hopefully).

Congrats Kenny and Kari!

My brother is a Daddy now!

The Clark Family

My beautiful niece

Our 1st ER Visit

As we drove home from our exciting Friday night adventure Scott said, "Now I feel like we're officially parents." That's right.  We spent our first night in the emergency room.  Thankfully we got to come home and sleep in our own beds!  Warning, this is long!

It started on Friday evening when Scott was setting the table and I was getting dinner out of the oven.  Addie was just playing in the living room and all of a sudden we both looked at her and she was hunched over, choking and trying to pull something out of her mouth.  She was completely panicked.

Scott got to her first and threw her over his leg and started pounding her back while I tried to coax her into coughing it out.  There was about 15 seconds where she stopped breathing completely and her lips started turning blue.  TERRIFYING!

The scene of her trying to get her breath and cough the object out and us trying to coax into coughing it out and breathing continued for about 10 minutes.  When she wasn't gagging and throwing/coughing up muccus she was screaming bloody murder.  After that we were able to kind of calm her down and she was starting to be able to get some decent air.  You could hear that her breathing had a rattle to it.  We knew something was lodged in her throat.

We called the pediatricians office to confirm that we needed to go to the ER and the nurse said that we absolutely needed to, so we made a mad dash out the door.  Thankfully, dinner was ready, so Scott wrapped it up in foil, threw it in the bag.  And the biggest lifesaver of all, he remembered to grab blankie!

The rest of the story is a little fuzzy to me because we were moved from room to room and there was a whole lot of screaming and chaos.  We rushed to the hospital and were seen immediately because they extremely concerned.  What a blessing.

I was so grateful that Scott was there too!  Being 9 months pregnant, I really can't carry Addie and there was a whole lot of carrying and cuddling that needed to be done.  He also knew exactly what to tell the nurses and doctors so that we didn't waste any time. They found out he was a med student and were really excited that he was almost one of them.  I think this helped us get a little special treatment.  They took such good care of us.  We were never ignored or left waiting for hours like you always hear about in the ER.  I guess there are perks to being a doctors wife!  I was also grateful to have him around because during the X-ray, I couldn't be in the room because of the risk to the baby in my belly, so I had to leave my baby (yes, I call Addie my baby) screaming bloody on the table while they tried to hold her down.  Luckily Scott was able to stay by her side.

After the x-ray we could clearly tell that she'd swallowed a coin.  The little stinker.  They placed an IV in her, not fun.  We were then taken to a different room to prep her for the operating room.  Then they took us into another room and talked to us about putting her under.  Again, thankfully Scott was there so I didn't freak out.  I'm grateful he's so comfortable in the world of hospitals.  They gave her a little bit of anesthesia in our arms, to subdue her, then they took our baby away.

I have never handed my child over to a complete stranger and let them walk away with her before.  At this point I was about in tears.  I mean, don't they have a window that I can watch the procedure from?!  After they went and retrieved the "government property," as quoted by the ENT we were taken to the PACU to wait for her to wake up.

Her tokens from the hospital

When they brought us back, we didn't even recognize her.  She looked so helpless!

Waiting for her to wake up

She was pretty excited about the popsicles!

We were so grateful that everything ended up so well.  The doctors and nurses were amazing and took such good care of our little girl.  We're also grateful for amazing friends who helped us out very last minute.  In the end, it wasn't a huge deal, but it was still a pretty scary ordeal.  She's doing fine now, but is still struggling coming off the anesthesia.  The doctors told us that she'd feel like we feel when we have a hangover... haha, little did they know we have no idea what that's like:)