Elizabeth Martin

Short Version:

Elizabeth Martin was born.

Long Version:

Thursday Annette had a doctor's appointment.  The doctor said that the baby was so low and that I was dilated pretty far that a few good contractions and the baby may just come right out fast.  The last thing that I wanted was to have the baby at home.  With that and the fact that Charles started his new job on my due date (Monday the 21st) we decided to go ahead and have Annette's water broken.

Friday morning we dropped off the boys at a friend's house where they played all day and had tons of fun.  Charles and Annette headed down to the hospital.

Annette had already been having contractions, so after breaking her water around 10:30 they were a bit more.  We walked up and down the hall to help things along.  They eventually gave Annette a low dose of pitocin to get the ball rolling.

Annette had decided forego the epidural and was doing okay with the pain.  She did eventually ask for some pain relief via her IV.  The pain medication unfortunately didn't relieve the pain and made her want to pass out and highly irritated at everything.  She couldn't really control her emotions and started screaming through all of the pain.

Once she felt the baby start to come she gave one huge, long push and sent the baby out.  Charles looked at Annette for a split second to give some encouragement and almost missed the baby's entry into the world.

After the birth the doctor told us that in all of her years as an OBGYB she had never heard anyone scream so long and loud.  I guess there is a first for everything.  Annette says that although Elizabeth's birth was only four hours long she would have much rather taken Charlie's or Henry's 20 hour labor and delivery over Elizabeth's four hours.

Elizabeth weighed in at 7 lbs 3 oz and 19 inches long.  She came out of the womb screaming but settled down after a little bit.  She has blonde hair with a possible tint of brown or possibly red.  Her eyes are a vibrant dark blue.

The boys came to visit her the evening she was born.  They weren't terribly interested since they were hungry.  They did eventually get around to saying "hi."  Charlie has taken a bit of interest in her and wants to talk about what she is doing.  Henry generally ignores her, but doesn't understand why he can't crawl over Annette all of the time any more.

Elizabeth is sleeping well during the day and night.  She is a great little nurser and pooper.

General Conference and a New Job

We enjoyed General Conference as much as possible between me being sick and having to go to the hospital and Charles trying to run the house without assistance while trying to catch a little bit of GC.  This will definitely be one of those conferences where I have to re-listen to every single talk because I was really out of it even though I was sitting right in front of the computer watching.  Here is a cute picture of the men to make it all better though.

Charles' company, to say the least, isn't very loyal to their employees and is constantly hiring and laying off employees all of the time.  Charles got cut since the product he was in charge of wasn't selling like the company thought it would.  So they let him go with a ton of other people.  But, there is already a bright side to all of this.  The Monday just before Charles lost his job I had invited a new family in our ward over for FHE.  I hadn't felt like I had felt the Spirit tell me to, but it absolutely was the Spirit.  The family came over and the husband told us about his new job as a manufacturing engineer.  He then said, "They need more engineers so if you want a new job they have positions."  Charles politely said, "That's good to know, but I have a decent job."  That night both Charles and I had the same thoughts of, "Maybe Charles should just switch jobs."  Totally the Spirit.  Then on Wednesday Charles lost his job.  Charles got things going with the new company and will begin work on the baby's due date.  And just incase you only look at our blog for cute pictures, here is another one.

Sleeping

The boys are really good at sleeping when they are tired.  We really don't have to struggle much to get them to go to sleep.  It is a little difficult now that it is still light outside at 7 PM for bedtime, but they are still pretty darn good.  Henry is good at taking naps during the day and will put himself to bed.  Just today Charles told Henry to go take a nap so Henry walked to his room, crawled into bed and went to sleep.

Being pregnant I have been sleeping a ton during the day.  This is how Charles found the three of us one day when he came home from work.  Charlie, Henry, and I are all sleeping together with the stuffed animals on Charlie's bed.  I am glad Charles took a photo.

We needed to wake up the boys so that they would be ready for bed.  We knew it would be difficult to get them to awaken so we decided to video it, here is the YouTube link http://youtu.be/UpWRDHBZ9BY (Blogger kept not being able to find this video from my YouTube channel even though it could find my other videos.  So, I hope this works.).

They are so good at sleeping through noise.  At night if one of them needs help and is crying the other will totally sleep through the entire thing.  A while ago Charlie threw up in bed and I had to change all of his bed sheets and such and bathe Charlie.  Through all of the noise and lights Henry stayed completely asleep.

Charlie's Schooling

Charlie has been learning lots of things in his little school.  My main goal with school is to introduce the ideas to him and so the second he is ready to learn something he will already have a background in what it is.  Another goal is to teach him to follow a routine in school and be able to sit down and pay attention.  He does this part perfectly.  He loves school so much!  He will tell me multiple times a day that when Henry takes his nap that he gets to do school.  Anytime that Henry cries for whatever reason Charlie immediately tells me it is Henry's nap time and that he wants to do school.

Charlie likes learning the nursery lesson each day and coloring the picture.  I cut open a plastic page protector on one side and taped up the bottom so that I could slide it over the coloring pages in the book so I don't have to photocopy the pictures and I just have to wipe the page protector clean at the end of school.

Charlie loves learning what the animal-of-the-day is.  We are almost done with animals and will soon get to start working on the solar system.  I am pretty excited for the solar system.  We are also going to start another section of school introducing and maybe memorizing the LDS prophets.

Each day we review some relatives.  Either a family or a set of families.  Charlie always asks to review my sister's family.  Why?  I don't know, maybe because they have kids about his age and he knows them the best from spending so much time with them at Christmas.  Or maybe because he seems to really like Colleen since she and I look alike.

Charlie is enjoying learning about his body.  He is more specific now when he gets hurt.  He has learned his facial features (eyes, mouth, nose, hair), bones (minus his skull, that will be later),  lungs, and the digestive tract.  He knows all about his digestive system and has no qualm in telling us about how it works while we eat our meals.  Next we will add the heart and blood, kidneys and bladder, skull and brain, and muscles.  I am super excited!

Charlie knows all of his letters and is pretty good with their sounds.  We are now working on basic reading.  He enjoys sounding them out and is starting to memorize what they look like.  At the bottom of the board are five plastic holders for index cards with words on them.  We make new sentences and read them each day.  I write the sentences on a paper and Charlie traces the words and will then draw on the rest of the paper.

He learned his colors, shapes and numbers so we started combining the information in lots of different ways.  On the left of the board is where we counted 10 different shapes in 10 different colors.  I had him write the numbers on every shape.  It was a great activity.  We are currently using Rummikub tiles to help him to recognized each number visually and not just know the order by sound.

(sorry it is blurry)

On the right of the board we learned about reading the clock.  I have the hours from 6AM to 7PM in digital format and then next to specific hours we have pictures of waking up, meal times, and bedtime.  He is pretty good at reading the clock and being responsible for when he eats.  Now I don't have to be the "bad guy" when it isn't time to eat yet.