Some summer fun

Summer has been pretty good to us so far. A little different with a baby since we are used to being able to go on any hike we want, go on evening walks, play cards all night, etc. We can still do those things with Sienna, it's just a little bit more of a process, but we love having her a long!

We went to Waterton with my sister and her kids while they were here. We walked around red rock canyon and then had a little picnic

I love seeing my dad with Sienna. He is so tender with her and I can't wait for them to be buds as she grows up 

This is how we hold hands nowadays. It's so romantic. 

We took Sienna on her first hike in Waterton on Saturday the 26th. I think she actually quite enjoyed it. When she was awake she stared at the trees with her eyes and mouth wide opened. But I think unless we hike something that is only an hour or so hike we won't be bringing her along. She just got too heavy. Sure we had a baby carrier, but after 10 mins, my back is killing me, so I opted to carry her in my arms. So next time she is staying with the grandparents, which will probably be more fun for her anyway. 

Matt's first time in B.C. The hike starts in Alberta, but after about 15 mins you hit this sign. Pretty neat

Us at wall lake. Sienna hasn't quite learned to look at a camera yet when she isn't laying down.

She is already using body language to tell me to get out of her face. But look at how long she is getting! 

I forced her to wear a hat even though it was ten times to big. I was worried about her getting a tick plus a sunburn. This is how she looked the majority of the time she had it on. 

It was my sister and her kids first time meeting Sienna. So to say they loved her is an understatement. The moment I pulled up to the house it was cheers of "baby Sienna baby Sienna. Where is baby Sienna? I want to hold baby Sienna" my poor sister hardly got to spend anytime with her cause the moment she was in her arms her kids all wanted a turn holding her. It was very tender to see how much they loved her and she was such a good baby for them and let hem hold her quite often without complaint. 

All about my favorite girl

Sienna hit 3 months a few days ago. 3 MONTHS!! She is growing so fast. It made me realize that I want to document moments in her life. Things she likes to do as a 3 month old and such. 

{loves to listen to music} She especially enjoys the children's song book. If she is ever being fussy for no real reason I turn those on and she is as good as gold. 

{loves to be read to} Whether it's the scriptures or a picture book, Sienna is all eyes and ears when you start reading.

{hates having her back scratched} she doesn't mind if you rub or pat her back! but when you start scratching she starts squirming. 

{loves to make squeaky noises} She doesn't cry in the middle of the night to let me know she is hungry . She just makes squeaky noises, like squeaky grunts. She also squeaks when she stretches and when you bring her feet up to her head.

{loves to have her hands up by her head when she eats} If you put your finger by her hand she'll usually grab it and hold it by her head while she eats

{disinterested in toys} the only thing that we could even say remotely held her attention is a toy rattle, which she will hold in her hand and move up and down but I don't think she really knows what she is doing with it.

{loves having her hands in a fist} it's almost impossible to spread her hands out straight! Even when she is sleeping. She is always so tense. 

{loves to suck on her fist and fingers} it's so cute to watch cause she will lift up her hands, stare at them, and as she brings them to her mouth she goes cross eyed and stays that way for a couple of seconds.
{Loves to kick kick kick} We feed Sienna on our laps cause that's what they showed us in the hospital and we just haven't changed so we get lots of kicks to the chest and stomach. And they actually hurt

{has the worst gas ever} You wouldn't think something so foul could come out of such a petite cute baby. Matt has diagnosed her with A.S.F- adult sounding farts. You could also change it to adult smelling farts cause those things are stinky

{loves to be swaddled} in order for her to take a good long nap she must be swaddled. If not her rouge hands will smack her in the face at some point and wake her up. 

{has the best pout} She will have us wrapped around her finger if she keeps that pout up. I have never seen a baby be able to stick out their lower lip so much. Still need to catch on camera.
{has mixed feelings about tummy time} She likes it for about 10 mins. In that time she does some super man poses and almost flips herself over. Then she cries hysterically. 

Now for some pictures that may exhibit these characteristics about her. And others just to show off her cuteness. 

                           The straight jacket swaddled 

                                     Semi pout

                               Loving the rattle

                                  Eats and sleeps like a queen

                                   Diva by day

                                               Thug by night

                                               Canada day

                                  Independence Day

Love this picture for a few reason. Shows her pulling her hands to her face and going cross eyed. Plus shows her size. This is my best friend jennicas baby. They are about 7 weeks a part, yet if I didn't know better I would think Owen was older. 

          Nothing better then sleeping with my sweet girl.

June happenings.

June has been a pretty good month for us. My dad's birthday was June 1 so I made Sienna a little onesie to wear and my sister in law Gina brought birthday hats and I couldn't help but put one on Sienna. I don't think she was very impressed with it. See for yourself.

Regardless, she is still stinkin cute. And she sure loves her Grampy. Ever since I found out I was pregnant I was so excited for my little babe to hang out with my dad. He just loves kids and is kind of a kid at heart still. I love that Sienna will get to spend a lot of time with him and my mom as we will be loving in cardston for the next few years. 

Next we did some crafts with Sienna. We made belated Mother's Day pots for our moms using Sienna's feet. (Her feet perfectly censored this picture) 

Sienna and I also made Matt a shirt for Father's Day. From the moment I got the idea for it, it was so hard to keep a secret. I just wanted him to know I had something planned! Sienna semi cooperated with the shirt. She has no problem with you painting her feet to use, but don't even think about touching her hands! If she is awake her hands are in a tight fist, if she is asleep, 98% of the time her hands are in a tight fist. So opportunities were rare, and as soon as you thought you had one, all you had to do was put a little ain't on and they were back in a fist. So I had to revise and just do two foot prints. (One footprint is the fishing pole and the other is a fish)

Next in June it was my birthday on the 20th. Matt always tries to surprise me, but he usually ruins the surprises by bringing up the present at random without saying he wants to give it to me, but just testing to see if it's something I would be interested in. But he actually surprised me this time. We went to my cousins wedding reception and during that time he had our friends come over to our house and hide. I was definitely surprised. He then brought out a dq cake with one single match on it, cause he forgot to get candles. I was pretty sure he had gotten me the cake though and hid it at rob and Cammi's house, which I was right about. The next morning he said he wanted to go to babb to get the shorts he ordered for our family pictures. I didn't really think anything of it, until he comes back and has me play hot and cold to find the game he wants to play with me. I get out to our backyard to find spike ball all set up. I was so excited. We loved playing spike ball with our friends at school and now we have our very own! We just need to get our friends as hooked on it as we are. 

These little cuties are all within one month of each other, Sienna being the youngest and the littlest! It's hard to imagine that if Sienna didn't have her esaphogus problem she would likely be as big as they are. While they are sitting at 12-14 pounds, she is sitting at a whopping 8 6. They are so cute together and were all quite happy laying down next to each other. Sienna especially loved Emmett's hand. We made jokes about how she shouldn't be sucking on a boys hand yet, she needs to be at least 16 months old. (Play on not kissing until she is 16 years old.) 

Well that about wraps it up! 

Mother's Day

YoI am a mother and as such I can write a Mother's Day post (never mind it is a few days late though.)

I love being a mom. The average kid when asked what they wanted to be when they grew up would answer something like, astronaut, basketball player, fireman...etc. My answer was a mom. I can't remember ever wanting to be anything else. I might have said something else, but I knew that a mom was the only job for me. I can remember begging my mom to have another baby and I tried to convince her that all she had to do was have it, but I would get up with it in the night and feed it and change its diapers. She didn't buy it, but I don't blame her. A 5 year old can not keep a promise like that.

My first Mother's Day was nice. Matt made me breakfast and cleaned all the dishes. He also got me a frame and put pictures of him and Sienna in it. I love it. Sienna's gift was being home in time for Mother's Day. And she also slept 5 hours straight that night. Yup I am pretty blessed.

Well I have been a mom for a month but the real mom duties didn't start until a week ago. So I haven't learned much, but I will share the few things I have learned.

*Always have an over stocked diaper bag. Because your baby might poop four times in an hour, or pee on the new diaper you were getting ready to put on her.

*Dont feed or change your baby on your bed. If you do, be prepared to wash your sheets EVERY DAY. We are still trying to apply this rule

*You really can't have enough blankets.

*Holding a baby while preparing and eating a meal is considered a workout. 

*Somehow the baby always knows the moment you got comfortable in bed because without fail they will start to cry. 

*Sleeping babies are the sweetest thing

*She can have all the gas in the world as long as she smiles while she passes it.

*Snuggles in bed with daddy cannot be beat.

*You will love your husband more as you seem him interact with the baby. 

*My clothes will never stay clean for a full day again

*Goodbye freedom. 

*Hello love you couldn't before imagine feeling. 

*I loved sleep before, but now it's even more precious

*I am amazed at the end of the day if I didn't take a nap. 

*You get special parking spots at Walmart. 

I am sure there is more. I know if I were to do this every year the list would grow, just like Sienna and there would be more negatives but here would also be more positives and those would far outweigh the negatives. I love my baby girl so much and feel honoured to be her mom! 

The End.

I got really behind on the blog updates on Sienna. The hospital doesn't have Wi-Fi and when you are spending a large part of your day there you don't have much time to write posts, especially when things are changing all the time!

So to kind of rewind on Sienna, mostly for my own record and memory is after the dye test, things really took off for Sienna. We could now try giving her a bottle because nothing would leak out. Sienna loved the taste of breast milk. She could only have 5 mls to start off because despite being 2 weeks old, her stomach was still the size of a pea cause no food had ever gone inside. One night I called the nurses to see how she had been doing with bottle feeding and was told that she had been doing good but was really fussy because she wanted more then they were allowed to give her so they were hoping the Dr's would give them the okay tomorrow to up her dosage because she was ready and wanted it. The goal was to get her to 150 mls which she eventually did, but some of it came thru the bottle and the rest was given thru the tube in her nose. After she reached that we were allowed to try breast feeding. But because of being given milk thru a bottle and a tube she had gotten kind of lazy and would tire really fast and then give up completely. On Thursday we were told that the feeding tube could be taken out the next day and if it went well with her eating from a bottle or breast feeding we could go home on Saturday! That was huge news because we were told to expect her to be in the hospital for about 2 months based on an average. Least amount of time would be a month, longest 3 months. So when we got told it could be saturday, we were ecstatic because we had only been there for not even 2 and a half weeks. It was also a blessing cause matts mom was going to be leaving in just over a week and really wanted to see the baby blessed, but the NICU was on lockdown to help prevent the babies from getting the measles or the flu so only moms and dads could come in and see them. 

But then Saturday came and Sienna had not been gaining any weight. So it became not today but tomorrow. And then tomorrow came and the answer was the same as the day before. And I was starting to get really emotional and frustrated because I felt like we were never going to leave and that we'd be taking steps backwards because we would have to put back in the feeding tube and IV's so that she would get the nutrients that she needed. I just wanted my baby home. 

On Monday she was still losing weight so the dr's decided that we should try supplementing a bottle of  my milk to give her extirpate calories and if she gained weight by doing that then we could be leaving on Wednesday. That was encouraging but almost frustrating as we'll cause my thoughts were, she hasn't been gaining weight for the last 6 days... Why did you not think of doing this sooner! I am sure they wanted to see her gain the weight in her own but this seemed like such an easy solution I wish we had tried it sooner so we could have left sooner. But the great news is, the supplement worked and on Tuesday (May 6) they told us we could take her home! Oh I have never smiled so much and so big as I did on that day. We didn't tell our parents cause we wanted to surprise them. We also wanted to stay a little longer at the Ronald McDonald house was a few reasons. 1) we wanted a nice dinner before we left and 2) we had signed up for free haircuts that night and didn't want to miss out on that opportunity. 

So we got sienna out of the hospital at about 400, went home and napped, showed her off during dinner, had one of the best dinners there in the 2 weeks we stayed and got our hair cut. 

It was so much fun surprising our parents. It was about 11:00 pm when we got in, so we were pretty exhausted but we still wanted to surprise them. Matt's mom was staying at mine and Matt's place so we went to pick her up first and then go to my parents. When she saw the car there I don't think it quite registered to her that Sienna was in the car until Matt told her there was a baby in there and she needed to put her shoes on. Her smile got so big and she looked like a little kid at Christmas. We snuck into the house my parents were house sitting at the time and told them that we had someone here who wanted to see them. They got so excited. It was so tender to see our parents hovering over Sienna, oohing and awing over how beautiful she was. It was such a beautiful moment and worth the wait. 

We have loved having Sienna home. She is the sweetest baby. She sleeps pretty good at night, like 4-5 hours at a time. She gets held and snuggled all day long so she is becoming a little conditioned to being held, a habit we will have to try and break if we ever want to get anything done again! But we lover her so much and couldn't be happier.