My Kids: Darian

My brand new baby is now 7 weeks old. We have passed that magical 6 weeks where supposedly life is supposed to get back to normal. It is getting easier to get out of the house and we are all forgetting what life was like two months ago.

When I step on the bathroom scale holding Darian, it says he is about 11 lbs, but that can’t be all that accurate.  In any case, he is outgrowing the hats and one-sies that fit when he first came.

Darian is becoming a champion smiler, though sometimes it’s hard to catch it in a picture.  He can get his fist to his mouth at almost every attempt.  He does not seem to like the car seat and does not fall asleep there often.  But, at night he sleeps pretty well.  He normally goes to sleep about 10pm, wakes at 3am and again at 7am.  There are a handful of nights where he wakes 2-3 times, but normally it is just once.

His sisters seems a bit indifferent to him, almost like a toy they don’t have much interest in.  They both want to help hold his pacifier in while we drive, but other than that they don’t bother with him much. 

We are loving having new baby and loving watching him grow.

My Kids: Eliora

Eliora is our jewel, our precious little girl.  She is starting into the stage of 2 and the most common phrase we hear in our house is, “I do dat”. She washes her own hands, wipes her own nose and puts her own seatbelt on.

The next most common phrase we hear is, “Read it to me”.  She will bring books for hours.  I normally get tired after 5 or 6, but she would keep going till she had read every book we own twice. It was great when grandparents came to visit because then there were that many more adults to read to her.

Eliora finally has enough hair to hold a hair clip and she insists on having me put them in 12 times a day (they don’t stay in for very long ).  She is getting very good at getting dressed and undressed.  I got her out of naptime yesterday – her pants were pulled half-way up and backwards and her shirt on inside-out.

Eliora loves to sing.  She sings in the car seat, in the highchair, in bed.  She sings herself to sleep most nights. She is a good sleeper, normally taking a nap from 1:00-4:00pm (which is a great reset time for all of us).  Bedtime is about 7:30 and she stays in bed till 7:30 the next morning.

My Kids: Kaela

The family is growing and changing so much, so I thought I would post what each of my little munchkins are up to.

Kaela is 3 1/2, loves to giggle and be silly. She is getting very talkative and tells everyone everything that comes into her mind. 

She has entered the phase of, “Why?”  I find myself explaining everything before she can ask. Instead of saying, “We are going to Daddy’s work”, I say “We are going to Daddy’s work to bring him lunch since he forgot it this morning.”  Without fail, she will still ask “Why?”  I think she does it more because she gets a response rather than actual curiosity.  She also asks metaphysical questions, “Why do birds have wings? Why do germs make me sick?”  and I am sometimes hard pressed to come up with a suitable answer (though yesterday that the reason birds fly is so that they can get food up to the baby birds in the trees- of course!).  But it she is growing, learning and changing.

Kaela’s favorite game is “I’m an acrobat” – which consists of her grabbing the bars on the underside of the top bunk bed and swinging around.  To harness this, we gave her a gymnastics class for Christmas.  It meets twice a week for three hours at a time, and while it does some gymnastics along with games, snacks, free play etc, it is also nice in that it gives Kaela an opportunity to interact with people other than Mom.  She is enjoying it and comes home tired. 

Her imagination is growing.  The dress-up she got for Christmas gets used a lot. She loves to make houses under the table, or bed and take all her toys in there.

My Birth Story

So I wanted to write a brief post about my birth experience with Darian. This is something that I didn't do with either Kaela and Eliora, but I feel that I've been blessed to have some of the experiences that I have, and I that many small things could have changed to make things turn out very differently. I also would hope that my experiences might serve someone else who is trying to learn about childbirth, possibly for the first time - especially natural childbirth.
Darian was born at 6:22am on Wednesday, December 21st.  To give a little background, I think I had better start at the end.  After Darian was born and weighed and was being wrapped up, my midwife sat down and asked, “So what do you mean that there is no pain in birth?”  She is a midwife and deals with natural childbirth frequently, so I was surprised.  I replied that it doesn’t hurt and don’t know how to clarify further.  She said, “So, does that mean you don’t feel pain, or mentally you don’t believe it or that there is really no pain.”  Oh, I am not someone that can’t feel pain, “This IV hurt going in and still hurts hour later, I definitely feel pain.”  But in Hypnobirthing, we learn to work with our body.  Yes, my uterus is contracting and I don’t use these muscles often, so yes there is strain of working very hard, but it doesn’t hurt.  Just picture running really hard and long – you are tired, your legs demand that you stop but if you push past that point you feel great and have an extra wind for longer.  Does it hurt?  Well, sort of, but not pain.
So, we went to bed about 11:00 pm.  Lee’s parents had driven in the day before and all through the day I felt great.  I had been contracting pretty regularly for 2-3 weeks and that day was like no other day.  On Friday my midwife had announced me 3 cm dilated and 70% effaced and ready to go, but here it was Tuesday night and nothing was really happening.  But come bedtime, I said “Hmmmm, these feel like pretty real contractions.”  I went to bed, knowing that if I could sleep through them then it wasn’t real.  Well, at midnight I got up and really started timing them: 5 min apart + lasting a minute + over an hour = go to the hospital.  So, at 1:00am I asked Lee, “Do you want to go to the hospital and have a baby?”  He smiled at me and said, “Really?  Yeah.”  And fell back asleep.  Five minutes later he jumped out of bed when he heard me on the phone saying I thought it was time to go to the hospital, and was dressed in 15 seconds flat.  We left Lee’s parents and our girls sleeping and drove off.
At the hospital I was admitted and found to be 4 cm dilated, not much more than 70% effaced.  I was disappointed that almost nothing had happened since Friday, and we walked over to my labor room.  The nurse started out with asking me how much pain I was in and strapping me to the monitors to watch the baby.  The second time she asked, I told her, “I don't believe there is pain in childbirth.” I was glad when she said, “Ok, I won’t ask that again.”  It was also nice that she only came to monitor the baby every other hour, instead of the 20 out of every 60 minutes that was hospital protocol.
We were left pretty well alone all through labor.  My midwife went and took a nap after she checked me and I didn’t ask again till about 5 am, and which time I was 8 cm, and fully effaced.  During those hours I was doing a variety of things, from trying to sleep, sitting on the exercise ball, walking around, holding onto Lee, sitting on the toilet with my feet propped up to open my pelvis.  Most things we tried were suggestions that my midwife with Eliora had given us and which had helped that labor progress.  This time when we were left to ourselves, it was Lee who had to be both support and labor coach.  Meaning that by 5:30 am I was so exhausted from being up all night in labor and frustrated at Lee that I lost my focus.  That half hour was the hardest part because I just wanted to give up.  I stopped concentrating on relaxing my uterine muscles and it became much harder. I don’t say that to blame my wonderful husband who was there helping labor go more quickly, but I now know that his support was more important.
At 6:10 I knew that something had to change and asked my midwife to rupture my membranes.  I was afraid that the intensity of contractions would skyrocket, and it was definitely did increase, but it allowed the baby to come down fully. I had been reclining in the bed at that moment and was very suddenly very uncomfortable.  Lee said that when Eliora came, I was lying on my side with him holding my leg up.  I laid like that and Darian Oliver Johnson was born at 6:22, a mere 12 minutes after my membranes were released, and 4 hours of labor in the hospital.
As a disclaimer, I do not believe in natural childbirth because I feel that I'm supposed to, or to earn some sort of badge of honor for suffering, or even accomplishment as if I had run a marathon. I do natural because I believe I was not created broken - I think I am likely to do less damage to myself and my baby when I am working with my body, and the relatively quick and easy of recoveries I've had have strengthened my belief in that fact. I think that medical intervention usually unnecessary, which can make it more dangerous, and can not only lead to longer recovery times but may even lead to unpleasant complications during childbirth.  Non-medicated childbirth is possible and even wonderful, and I hope that any other mothers out there who may be apprehensive about childbirth will consider my experiences when choosing how to birth their babies.

Christmas Morning

So Christmas is here! We’ve woken up – believe it or not, Mom and Dad were up an hour and a half before the girls (ok, so having a 3-day-old infant might have served as an effective alarm clock – no snooze button). We got to sit together and read scriptures and talk. It was a wonderful way to start the holiday.

We’d left some dough rising overnight, and we had a Christmas breakfast of hot chocolate, pecan rolls, and oranges. Yum!

Kristin and I have decided to rebel against materialism this Christmas and not open presents at all Christmas morning. Mostly just because we wanted to find a way to make it more about the Savior. Not surprisingly, we met with little resistance, since at this age we’re just starting our family traditions. As a result, our Christmas tree is still waiting the arrival of gifts. We thought we’d all gather our gifts and put them under the tree tonight, after we act out the nativity and have a devotional where we share our favorite stories of Christ’s life.

We actually adopted the idea a little from our time in Madrid, where they celebrate King’s day on January 6th.   This is when the three wise men supposedly arrive, and they’re the ones who bring the gifts. Since then we have found quite a few traditions that wait those 12 days between Christmas and Kings Day for gift giving.We’ll see if we make it all the way to the 6th once the presents are out under the tree. But either way, we liked the idea of just putting the gifts out on Christmas, since it kind of focuses more on the giving.

So now the girls are all dressed and we’re off to an hour of church! We’ll post more later.

Darian Oliver Johnson

 

Sea World

Once a year Sea World allows active duty military and their family a chance to go to one of their parks for free, so we took advantage of Veteran’s Day off work and went to the park here in San Antonio.  It was a very fun day.

Sea World has a strange combination of amusement park rides and large sea creatures to see perform.  I was expecting to see larger exhibits where you could go see the animals, but what we saw in the performances was amazing enough.

 

Shamu Show at Sea World San Antonio

Kaela loved the roller coaster and giggled the whole way through.  She really wanted to go on one of the big ones, but we had to send Daddy alone (I am sure they would not have allowed me on the ride, supposing I could fit with those harnesses – baby shouldn’t come for another 6 weeks).

Eliora probably never would have gotten off the Merry Go Round.  She kept asking to go back.

The only way we got Kaela to crawl through these tunnel nets was to assure he r that she would be very, very brave if she did it.  They were very high and I am proud to say she did well.

Though Kaela has no idea who Burt and Ernie are, she does make a cut smiling picture.

We ended up staying the whole day and we were all exhausted by 6:00pm when the park closed and grateful to go home to an early bedtime.