Abigail #2: 1-4 months

When Abigail was just a few weeks old, we moved from Provo, UT to St. Joseph, Michigan for the summer.  Neil was doing an internship for Whirlpool (betcha didn't know their global headquarters are in Michigan) and so we spent the summer living in a tiny little resort town near the beach.  Happily, my parents lived about 45 minutes away and Neil's brother & his family were about two hours away, so it was fun to still be near family.

The picture above is one that I love--it looks like Isaac is holding Abigail!  In actuality, it's my nephew Joshua, who is now 12 or so and continues to be one of the sweetest and most adorable boys I've ever met.

 I wish we'd spent more time at the beach that summer (especially now that it's the beach we drive to with our kids!) but the fact is, I was so terrified of new motherhood and felt so clueless that I never went anywhere by myself and rarely left our apartment.  Occasionally I'd be very brave and venture out for walks with Abigail (which was scary because our apartment was on a busy road with no sidewalks), but mostly I just stayed home and slept and cried and ate chocolate chips and read Agatha Christie mysteries.  It was not a high point in my life, but in retrospect it was a turning point that has dramatically impacted the intervening years and has shaped almost everything I've done since.





































I realized that if I wanted to be good at this motherhood business, I actually had to really work at it and make an effort instead of just lying around and waiting for it to work out on its own.  (I also had to start exercising, which had never been a consistent thing for me since I quit soccer my sophomore year of high school.)  More about that journey in later posts.

One of the things that Neil and I remember most vividly about Abigail's early months (and so does everyone else who knew her) is her odd digestive schedule.  She would literally go for ten days between bowel movements--something which her pediatrician reassured me was normal--but it got pretty terrifying around day 6 or 7.  She would be totally miserable and I spent hours drawing her knees up to her chest trying to give her relief.  After a few weeks, we realized that if we took her to a local grocery store with a bumpily tiled floor, the bumping almost inevitably did the trick.  So we'd often drive to the grocery store, walk around until the Mt. Vesuvius-like explosion happened, and then wrap her backside in plastic bags and paper towels and drive home with the windows open.  (It smelled exactly like buttered movie popcorn, which means that whenever I enter a movie theater now, I'm still nauseated!!)

 I think this photo may have been taken at my grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary party.  Perhaps not, but it was really fun to live close to my family that summer and have a visit from my dear uncle and aunt who live in New York.

 The above picture makes me realize how long it's been since we took this photo--my youngest sister Rosalind, who is holding Abigail, was just married a month ago.

At the end of the summer, we camped through Michigan's Upper Peninsula with my parents and little sisters.  It was so, so, so fun and amazing beautiful.  One of my absolute favorite sets of photos from that is here and some more about our adventures here.

Some things I loved about baby Abigail:  her chubby square face and her big round blueberry eyes.

 I love it when Neil gives our babies this smile.

 And, of course, we can't forget Abigail's other defining characteristic--sucking on thumbs and toes!!  I haven't had any other thumb-sucker babies, but boy, Abigail made up for it on their behalf.  This kid had her toes plugged firmly in her mouth all summer, and once I covered them with socks for the cold Utah winter, her thumb just about never left her mouth until she was three.

This is kind of a lame way to end, but the school bus just pulled up, so I must run!

A new series: Abigail

 I began writing this blog when Abigail was 18 months old.  Which means, of course, that there are about 2000 pictures of her that exist only on my external hard drive and nowhere on this bloggedy blog that I use as a journal.  It's my goal to remedy that before the new baby is born.

Abigail was born during finals week of my first year of graduate school and at the end of Neil's junior year (he is almost three years older than me, but he was behind me in school because he spent two years serving his mission in the Philippines, and I finished my undergraduate degree in three years and began my master's program right away).  I was twenty-one years old (a few months shy of my twenty-second birthday in July) and he was twenty-four; we had been married just short of 2.5 years.

 At the time, my pregnancy seemed so hard (I was so tired! My sciatic nerve started acting up the final week of my pregnancy!) and now my aching back and I know it was a really awesome pregnancy.  :-)  But I was so excited to be expecting a baby, and I remember lying on the floor at my Grandmother Jere's house after Thanksgiving dinner and feeling that first little fluttering kick for the very first time.

We bought a digital camera just before she was born.  This is one of the very first pictures we took with it--I was nine months pregnant and sitting all folded up working on my thesis.  Note the awesome blanket hung over our window to block out our neighbors' porch lights.  (This blanket stayed on my window pretty much all throughout college. Jen and I used to refer to our freshman dorm room as the "bat cave.")

 Neil took the picture below on my original due date, April 13th (all of the dates on our camera were one day off.  Forever).  I was pregnant for another week and then my OB induced me.  Looking back, I really wish we'd waited longer, but I was so impatient to meet my baby!






The induction was nightmarish.  Absolutely awful.  I was given two doses of cervical gel 12 hours apart.  After the first one, they sent me home and I started having cramps.  When I came back for the second dose at 11 pm, the contractions set in immediately and they were so awful!  The nurses sent me to walk the halls for an hour and I remember that I couldn't walk--I just curled up on the floor crying with each contraction.  Neil was so embarrassed when I parked myself in front of the vending machines and just lay there sobbing.  I remember that he kept trying to persuade me to get up and I was so mad at him!

Eventually the nurses gave me a shot of morphine and sent us home (I really hated them for that).  I spent the night in the living room holding onto the legs of our end table and trying not to scream, because I wanted Neil to sleep.  Finally I felt like the contractions were bad enough that we needed to go to the hospital again.  It took me almost an hour to cover the ten feet to our bedroom (have I convinced you yet that this was awful?!) and when we arrived at the hospital, Neil completely forgot about labor and delivery parking and we ended up in the parking garage which seemed miles away from the L&D wing.

 I don't remember much about being in labor after that.  I know that after twelve hours of hard, intense, horrible labor I asked for an epidural; at that point I'd been awake for about 48 hours and I was completely exhausted.  I think I was on Pitocin and that was making things worse.  (I'd gone to Lamaze classes which were kind of a joke; looking back on this I was totally clueless about how to function when I was in labor and really had no idea what my body was doing.  Honestly, I didn't learn enough about labor and delivery until I did the Hypnobabies program with Luke and spent months researching what actually goes on during the entire birthing process).

Long story short:  I fell into blissful sleep after the epidural and took a much-needed nap.  When Abigail was actually born, my very least favorite doctor from the OB practice was on call, and he came in and draped me in these horrible plastic sheets.  I remember being SO sweaty and hot and miserable and hating that doctor during all 45 minutes of pushing! I was in labor for 24 hours total and ended up with an episiotomy--when I'd specifically told him NO on that--a third-degree tear, and a forceps delivery.  After Abigail was born I started hemorrhaging and I wasn't allowed to hold her for an hour while they worked on me (which was as fun as it sounds).



When I was finally allowed to hold Abigail, I thought she was the most beautiful baby I'd ever seen--that was the very first thing I said (closely followed by "look how long her little feet are!").  I couldn't get enough of her sweet rosebud lips and her tiny little hands and the way she always tried to nibble on her forefinger.  She had a fat little round head, and she was my heaviest baby (thus far) at 8 lbs 9 oz.  She was 20.5 inches long. She had stork bites on both her eyelids and downy brown hair with a little duck tail at the back.  The doctor who delivered her told me that she would be blond; I thought he was totally crazy.

I still think she was just the most beautiful baby.  So beautiful.  She was so sweet-tempered, and I hated putting her to bed at night and I would often (until she was about 3 years old) get her up late at night because I missed her and wanted to play with her.  She was such a good baby--a great sleeper, incredibly adaptable, and always cheerful and good-natured during the year that she spent navigating BYU campus in her stroller while Neil and I frantically traded her off during classes (she was queen of the TA lab and would throw Cheerios at the circuit sets when she was hanging out with Neil during his office hours, and played happily on the floor in my office when I was meeting with students).  But more about her later months in another post.

pictures that make me smile

 Last weekend the children and I went to the Children's Museum with some friends.  The girls were there too, but I didn't have my camera out too much, and what shots I did get were mostly blurred as everyone darted from one section of an exhibit to the next.

But I did snap some good pictures of the boys.  Isaac loves the carousel...

...but Luke isn't quite sure how he feels about it.

We hit the Egyptian exhibit at the very end of the day, and Isaac decided that the Sphinx looked like a good place for a rest.  And his Emma decided that he looked like a good place for a rest!  (another cute one here). A little background:  Emma is the younger sister of one of Isaac's good friends.  But while Isaac and Adam are good pals, Isaac absolutely adores Emma, and the feeling seems to be mutual.  Whenever the two of them are together, you can generally find Isaac in Emma's general vicinity either offering her a toy or snuggling up with her on the couch with his arm around her shoulder, showing her a toy.  He talks about her ALL THE TIME.  It will be interesting to see if they reunite at college in another 18 years.  :-)

 Luke is totally done being the third wheel here.

 I walked past the library while Neil and I were making dinner on Sunday and saw all my little bookworms happily bundled up together.

 And after dinner on Sunday, when we were using our piping-hot baguettes to busily mop up some black currant balsamic + extra virgin olive oil.  We may or may not have come up with a family chant that involves our last name and our general love of baguettes.




Isaac seems to end every meal sitting on the table...

Abigail is doing this ENORMOUS project on France right now (I was so happy she picked France, because part of the project involves cooking something from that country to share at the parent night. But a little sad for her, because she thought that by picking France, she would get to go on a field trip there and she came home and told me, "Mom!  I picked France and YOU CAN COME!  Let's go before the baby is born!!"  I tried to explain that it was an imaginary trip, and she was so sad...ever since she was four she's been asking me when I will take her to Paris so we can sit below the Eiffel Tower and eat baguettes and Brie).

Anyway, she put on my beret and posed with this baguette because we thought it would make a cool addition to her project.  We snapped about ten pictures and this was her favorite because she looked so happy with the baguette.  Funny kid.

Awhile back Abigail gave Isaac her Barbie sunglasses, and he has been wearing them all. the. time.

 Like seriously, all the time.

Sunglasses are an important part of his garlic-peeling arsenal.

Today we had the sister missionaries over for dinner.  I was a little stressed because Neil left for work very early this morning and won't be home until midnight or so, and I was trying to get dinner ready and get the house picked up, and Luke was all crazy because he has the Cold of Death and wanted to be held.  So sweet Jooj stepped in and got him all snuggled up with her and read him stories until dinner.

 And I don't have any photos, but Abigail did the same thing after dinner while I was washing the dishes.

 But I did take this cute one of her snuggled up in the other papasan enjoying her favorite time of the day--reading time!

Abigail and I made a deal (she was not happy about this, so I use the term "deal" sort of...loosely) that for every book of her choice that she reads, she then has to read one of my choice.  This is my sneaky way of getting her to read new series, because she tends to fixate on a set of books and doesn't want to read anything new because she's afraid she'll hate it and thus waste her reading time (I can understand that).  Right now she's reading The Lightning Thief, which was my choice, based on her obsession with Greek mythology.  Which means that we spent most of dinner today dissecting the Greek pantheon, with occasional interjections from the younger children, since we've been reading D'Auliare's Greek Myths aloud in the evenings (highly recommend that one).

And last but not least, Isaac dancing to his favorite Grooveshark mix as he bids farewell to the day.  Sunglasses at night.