3 weeks

Little baby Carter is 3 weeks old today! Hard to believe! This also means that Derek went back to work today,,,, after 3 glorious weeks of him being home helping out! He makes a fantastic house husband/stay at home dad!  What a blessing it was to have him home!

 We are adjusting good to having a baby in the house again. Jadon was a little emotional the first couple days, but he absolutely adores Carter now! He wants to hold him a lot, and then doesnt want to give him up when we need to take him to eat or change him. Avery obsesses over his little body parts... especially his feet and hands. She just came down with a cold, so I told her not to touch his face or hands with her hands, since he puts his hands in his mouth. She was extremely upset about this and cried and cried (literally.... with big old tears and all!) Overall they are adjusting well, and are doing pretty good with me sitting around feeding the baby all the time.
We had problems with Macy being jealous for a couple weeks, but she's calming down now for the most part.

My labor and delivery went well! From the time i got my IV and Pitocin to start labor until the time he was born was 5 hours, which was great. I got an epidural, which I kick myself for now. It only numbed my torso, so I felt no contractions (which was nice), but I felt everything when it was time for him to be delivered! I only had it for a little while before he was born. Id say I dilated pretty quickly once I got to 4 cm. At around 7cm my water broke on its own, and it seems like after that things went quick. The epidural caused my blood pressure to drop, and because of it Carters heart-rate was dropping, so I was stuck laying very uncomfortably on my side. (You'd think they'd make those beds more comfortable!) Then suddenly I had a major urge to push! It was extremely intense!! And it was a ton of pressure on my rectum... I thought for sure I was going to poop all over! I was scared to push because I didn't want to poop,  As far as I know, I did not poop... however Carter did.... he pooped inside me, so he had to be suctioned out quickly so he didn't breath in his poop when he came out. He came out after only a few pushes.
And I fell in love right away. :)
I keep telling everyone, if I could just skip 9 months of pregnancy, I would gladly go through labor and delivery and have a million babies!  I hated pregnancy! I was blessed with 3 good labor/delivery experiences i'd say, and I could definitely do that part over again.... but pregnancy, I could not.

Its really funny, but a girl from our church who was due 3 weeks after me, was actually in the hospital at the same time, just a few doors down from us. Her water had broke. So our babies are just a few hours apart in age! And both our babies ended up with jaundice.

Derek and I had our 12th anniversary the other day! We kept it low key and just spent the day together as a family. We went to church, then to the coast for the afternoon. The wind was whipping at the coast, and sandblasting us. Carter was NOT a happy camper! But Macy LOVED it!

And apparently naptime is over now, so its time to end this.