Life as we know it

For Kaelyn's Christmas present this year I finally got around to putting the first two years of her blog into books. I've been wanting to do this for a long time, but never took the time to get it done. Well it's done and the books are on their way. I just think it will be fun to have our story sitting on the shelf where we can read it together as a family. I'm not a scrap-booker, so this will have to do. So seeing that our posts are dwindling less and less each year, I have a new resolution to do at least one post a month, so that we will have something to put in our books at the end of the year.

Things are going really well as we are now a family of four. Those first few weeks were a little rough for Kaelyn. I didn't think she would really notice that we had a new addition to the family, but boy was I wrong. She was not happy about the loss of attention she was experiencing. As much as we tried to give her attention and loves and time, it just wasn't cutting it. It was like a flip was switched and our sweet little girl, that rarely had reason to cry, was just sad. She was really whiney and picked up a few habits from her little sister. She realized that when you cry, you get what you want. Whenever Bryn would cry, Kaelyn would join right in, and at times I couldn't help but cry too. She also started grinding her teeth way bad and hitting herself pretty dang hard with toys, so it would hurt, and she could cry. (Really sad I know)

It was then that I realized that we really did spoil her, not like we had an option...what else could we have done with our time and attention :) I also realized that Kaelyn really didn't cry for like that first year of her life. She never had a reason. We were so worried about getting her weight up for heart surgery that we never let her get hungry and she was just so easy going and chill, she just didn't cry. We knew that crying would burn more calories than anything, so we did everything we could to keep her content. I'm learning that there are times when one of my girls (or both) with have to cry, cause I am only one person and can't do it all and the same time. Last night I did manage to feed Kaelyn her bottle while holding Bryn and keeping the pacifier in her mouth so she would stop crying. Not an easy task, but I wished I had another hand to take a picture of it to show Wayne when he got home.

Well 2 months later we are all doing great and are much more adjusted, even Kaelyn. She is acting more like her happy self, which makes us all happy. She still isn't quite sure about little sister, but she gives her goodnight kisses every night, something that she won't even give Wayne and I anymore :( . She is very patient when Bryn cries now, which is such a good big sister.

Bryn is being such a good little sister. She is starting to have more awake time and gives us lots of big smiles and sounds. She is growing like a champ, at her 2 month appt. today she weighed in at a whopping 9 1/2 pounds. She was however EXTREMELY upset when they gave her the immunizations. I seriously have never heard a baby cry like she did, wow. I'm a little nervous that she has discovered she can reach such a high decible, I hope she doesn't pull it out too often.

See those cheeks, she wasn't born with those.

Smile for the camera little sis

Can I help you?

All decked out for her daddy-daughter date to the first Utah Basketball game

She was a hula girl for Halloween

Fake Smile

Real smile. Its kinda weird, Kaelyn gets "gold eye" instead of red eye in her pictures.

Hmm, wonder what that means?

Working on standing with Sally her EI lady.

We started the holiday season out with a band at the Rasmussen Christmas party. Here's Grandma Ruth with a bunch of her great-grandkids and a few grandkids and aunt Sherri.

This years line up of Great-grandbabies. Baby Cousin Quin was just a few days late for the picture.

Bryn and her cousin Evalyn with Santa. Evalyn was born on Bryn's due date.

Kaelyn on Santa's lap, I wonder what she said she wants for Christmas?

Bryn, Grandma Ruth and cousin Ava. Ava wanted Bryn to hold her finger,

something she is really good at :)

Bryn's First Photoshoot

My Aunt Becky came over this morning and we did a little photo shoot of the girls. Kaelyn's appointment didn't last too long, due to a much needed nap and a little bit of a bad attitude. See below...

To be quite honest Bryn wasn't too thrilled about the whole thing either, but luckily we were able to get a few cute ones.

Don't worry, that is not real wood. They are these cool mats my Aunt has.

She was NOT letting us take that binky away, but I think its still cute.

Original

Edited Antique Style

Edited Fade Color Style

I used iphoto to edit the pictures. It was pretty easy, thank you Steve Jobs for making the Bonner's life a little bit easier :)

Home at Last

We all finally made it home from the hospital yesterday afternoon, and boy is it nice. Bryn had to stay in the nursery the whole time we were there while they got her low blood sugar under control. She was also in the isolette for temperature regulation and under the lights for a little bit of jaundice. Like her sister she got through all that in no time by being feisty when she needed to. She is quite the little squeaker, making all sorts of squeaking noises throughout the night.

Our nurse let us sneak Bryn out of the nursery to my room so she could meet her big sister. Kaelyn's still not quite sure what to think about all this :)

Daddy and his girls.

First family picture. Nice, I'm the only one looking at the camera.

Awake and ready to play...I mean eat.

Jeana's Baby picture

What do you think? Does she look like her mom?

"This place is way nicer than the hospital"

Her coming home outfit, the Utah Beanie is a tradition.

Kaelyn has been so spoiled this week. She has got to spend every morning with Daddy all to herself and a few days with Grandma Amy. Yesterday Grandma even got her all dolled up and took some glamour shots.

Little Sister Has Arrived

Bryn Lois Bonner was born yesterday at 8:07 a.m. via scheduled C-section. Its a good thing because the little lady was breech, so even if I hadn't had a classical c-section with Kaelyn, and required a c-section from here on out, it is quite likely we would have needed to do one with her anyway. So once again all works out just the way it was suppose to :)

She came out at 5 lbs 14 oz, 19 inches long. My guess was that she would be 5 lbs 11 oz, 19 inches long and Wayne guessed 5 lbs 4 0z, 17 inches long...so I won on both accounts :)

Proud father of two!

I got to be the first one to hold her.

Kaelyn all decked out in her big sister outfit.

Look at all that hair. That really was a surprise. I kept picturing her with dark hair, but didn't think it would be possible.

Its like my little baby girl grew up overnight! Look how old she looks.

What a proud big sister!

This one's for you Dad

My dad, Kaelyn's Poppa Paul, keeps asking when we are going to do another post on Kaelyn's blog, so here you go dad. Only 3 more days till Kaelyn is officially a BIG sister. In order for this to happen we had to make her a new bedroom so she could pass the nursery down to her little sister. I LOVE how it turned out, its exactly what I wanted. Thanks to a great husband that's willing to take on the projects I was shoveling out to him, we got it done. He did a great job with the bead board and painting of the walls. I did the interior decorating and painting of the bead board. We got all her furniture at Ikea, bedding at Pottery Barn and accessories at Hobby Lobby and Target. I now ban myself from all of those stores ;)

My Aunt has a vinyl lettering machine and let me go to town on it. Thanks Becky! (I've always wanted to put this saying up in Kaelyn's room because of this talk by President Monson. I read it for the first time the week we were waiting to find out if Kaelyn had Down syndrome. Whenever Kaelyn is sick or in the hospital I just sing that song over in my head to remind myself that she is being watched over.

The old radio looking thing on the bookshelf is her snazzy humidifier.

Taking a nap in her new big girl bed. She loves the extra real estate to roll around on. We lay her at the top of the bed and by morning she is down at the bottom. Thats why its facing against the wall, otherwise she would roll out every night.

The nursery is all ready for Bryn to move in!

On Sunday Kaelyn looked so cute I wanted to get some pictures of her, but she had a different plan. I spent an hour trying to upload the video of what she was doing, but its not working :(

32 1/2 Weeks

I posted this the other day on my personal blog, and Wayne thought I should put it on Kaelyn's blog too, so here you go. Its a long one :)

Today I am 32 1/2 weeks pregnant. I couldn't tell you how many times I've said that number in the last 2 years. Many times at doctors appointments, many times to friends, family and people we meet. This is the day of my last pregnancy when little Kaelyn joined our family. As I've been getting closer and closer to this day, I've reflected a lot on that day just over 2 years ago, June 13th, 2009. The night before my best friend Jamie and her husband were staying at our house. We had dinner and for dessert we dipped about everything we could think of in melted chocolate. Then we played a crazy ping pong game where you would hit the ball and then run to the other side of the table to hit the next shot. It was fun and quite wild.

On Saturday morning I woke up with an excruciating pain in my abdomen. It really was one of the most painful things I've ever experienced. I figured it was from all the chocolate dipped junk I had eaten the night before. So I got up and took a bath hoping that would ease the pain. It didn't, it just got worse and worse. Wayne wanted to go to the hospital, but I fought him on it. I didn't want to go to the hospital for a stomachache. So we called Grandma Ruth, she is the family nurse and I knew that she would know what to do. She told us to go straight to the hospital, so we did. We also called my cousin Kristen, the other family nurse, who told us she would meet us at the hospital. Wayne got us there in record time as I just kept repeating over and over, "It hurts so bad." I literally felt like there was poison running through my body.

When we got to the hospital we went up to labor and delivery, they have a little emergency triage. We told them everything that had been going on and they ran a few tests. They could tell I was in a lot of pain, so they tried giving me a GI cocktail, a bunch of medicine that would quickly alleviate heart burn, if that was what it was. I knew it wasn't heart burn because a few days prior I had my first and only bout with it, and this was nothing like that. The cocktail did nothing so they gave me a dose of morphine and that made it bearable. They checked my blood pressure and took some labs and discovered that I had pre-eclampsia and that it had moved onto it's more serious form, HELLP. From what I understand my organs were beginning to shut down. It wasn't until after Kaelyn was born, that we realized how sick I really was, and that it was pretty serious. They did an ultrasound of Kaelyn and she was not doing well. Before then we had been getting weekly ultrasounds and they score they them based on a few different things. Even though she was not growing well, she would always pass the tests they did. This time she didn't pass. She was barely moving.

So within about an hour we had talked to a few doctors, one being the Attending over the NICU. He was very re-assuring and told us that nothing told him that our little girl couldn't survive and that they were going to do everything they could to keep her alive. The only way to treat HELLP is is deliver the baby, so they set up for an emergency c-section. I still remember laying in the bed after my second dose of morphine and just feeling almost like I was having an out of body experience. I went from feeling so much pain, not to mention the emotional pain we had been going through the prior 12 1/2 weeks wondering if our little girl would live to be born. It literally felt like I was floating, and I just felt at peace.

After they took me back to the OR, and gave me a spinal tap, Kaelyn was born within about 6 minutes. We didn't even realize she was out and passed through the window to the NICU until she was gone. They did tell us that she was breathing on her own, and just requiring some oxygen. Our little girl came into this world at 1 lb 11 oz. She fought for 32 1/2 weeks to survive in an environment that just wasn't giving her the nutrition she needed to thrive. I am so proud of her for sticking in through that, and am so blessed to be her mother.

At our appointment on the Thursday before Kaelyn was born we had decided with our doctor that we would come back in on Monday and deliver her via c-section then. She just wasn't growing and had reached the point where she would do better on the outside than in utero. The way Wayne and I look at it is, if I hadn't gotten sick, she wouldn't have made it through the weekend. She needed to be delivered then. Heavenly Father took matters into his own hands and orchestrated everything so she would live. Throughout my whole pregnancy I had been quite healthy, and had never shown any signs of pre-eclampsia or high blood pressure. It literally came on over night.

Since Kaelyn was so small, they had to do a classical c-section, where they cut the uterus up and down, rather than horizontal, like they usually do. So with this pregnancy and all following pregnancies I will have to have scheduled c-sections at around 36 weeks, because they don't want you to labor at all when you've had a classical c-section. I knew that, but I never really knew why until my appointment yesterday. My doctor explained that if I was to labor I am at risk for the scar could rupture and I could bleed internally, or the baby could come out through it and the placenta would be compromised, so it would put both me and the babies life at risk. I'm not going to lie, missing out on the final month of pregnancy doesn't sound too bad, but now that I know why I'm even more grateful for it.

So here I am at 32 1/2 weeks, with 4 weeks to go! I can't believe we are coming to the end of this pregnancy and getting ready for the arrival of our second little girl! With how low key its been this time around, it really has gone by fast for me. I've felt great throughout the whole thing. Let me tell you this nesting business has kicked in on over-drive this time around. I didn't really get to that point when I was pregnant with Kaelyn. We didn't even know if we would be able to bring her home, so I didn't feel like I needed to get anything ready. Well this time I've had Wayne painting our other bedroom my favorite color and his next project is to put up bead board and put together Kaelyn's new bedroom set, so we can move her in there and then re-distribute the baby clothes into the nursery. I've also decided to organize and purge the basement and get new carpet throughout the whole house. So yea, we have quite a bit to get done in the next 4 weeks, but I figure I've got to use this ambition while I've got it ;)