Baby Showers

I actually had 3 baby showers for Te3. This seems a little excessive for a third baby, but it just shows how much love there is for her before she even got here!

My first baby shower was in Arkansas. My sister Sara and my cousin Tara hosted it. It was beautiful and I loved getting to see all my friends at the same time. It doesn't happen enough!

The second shower was at work. My friends Jill and Kris put it together for my friend Johnna and I. Johnna was due on July 5th. We ended up having our girls exactly 1 month apart! The C on the table is for Charlotte and the A is for Johnna's little girl, Amelia.

Our third shower was thrown by our friends that we have dinner with Wednesday night here in OK. I somehow managed to not get a single picture from this one! I am going to blame it on the fact that the boys were swimming and Charles was late!

Te 3

We found out we were expecting Te3 in November. Three has always been our number for how many children we wanted, so of course we were excited! I was pretty positive Te3 was a boy, but Charles said girl again. I have said boy every time and he has said girl. He finally got to be right! Here are some ultrasound pictures and a bump photo at 32 weeks. This was the only bump photo I took with Ephram, so the only way to compare all three pregnancies.

Te3                                             Ephram                                             Wills

OKC Shower

Last Thursday, our friends here in Oklahoma City threw us a surprise shower. Unfortunately, Charles ended up working late, so he didn't get to make it. This also means I have a grand total of two pictures from the gathering.

Wills had a great time at the O'Neal's house, making himself right at home. He was in Dash's room and he took off his shoes and crawled up in bed, got under the covers, and leaned against the wall to watch TV. I couldn't even get him to come out for cake!

Speaking of cake, how adorable is this cake they had for us?

And here are a few of our kiddos having dinner. They were all at the table together for about two minutes.

It was so thoughtful of our friends here to do this for us. I am so thankful for our OKC "family".

Last weekend in Arkansas for a while

The last weekend in September, we headed to Arkansas one last time before Te2 arrives.

We spent Saturday at the farm. Wills got to pick some pumpkins from Grammy's pumpkin patch and Papaw took him to see the cows. He apparently let everyone know that they are his cows by yelling "my cows" over and over. He got filthy and actually needed a bath before nap.

We have season tickets to the Razorback games and were able to make 3/5 home games this season. We played Texas A&M this time and unfortunately, not only was it raining, but we lost too. Thankfully it wasn't a cold rain and only did it during the 3rd quarter, so it was actually a pretty fun game other than the loss.

On Sunday, my sister and two of my roommates from college threw me a baby shower. This was so sweet of them. It was great to see so many friends that I don't always have the opportunity to see when we are in town. They were all so thoughtful and definitely helped with the second child neglect. Te2 got a lot of cute things!

We likely won't be back in Arkansas until the holidays. This was a great last weekend for a while!

35 weeks

We hit 35 weeks on Thursday and I had my monthly appointment with my perinatologist on Friday. Here is what Te2 looks like now. The ultrasound tech said she was having a hard time getting good pictures of his face because he was pressed up so closely to my placenta. I guess he is running out of room!

For some reason I have never asked for them to show me where they were seeing palate involvement, so at this appointment I did. Dr. Smith (the perinatologist) said that it is still really hard to see the whole palate because he doesn't open his mouth wide for them to see inside. She was able to show us his upper gum line and where there is a gap in the bone. This pretty much confirms palate involvement, so now we know. 

They got Te2 weighing in at 8 lbs today. Assuming he is truly 8 lbs and he gains the 1/2 lb a week he is supposed to gain between now and our due date of 10/24, we will have a 10 lb baby! Hopefully they are overestimating by a pound and he is only 7 lbs right now. 

I should technically have one more appointment with Dr. Smith before my due date, however she does not think that we will make it to our due date, so we didn't schedule anything. If I am still pregnant at that point, then they will see me one more time. 

32 weeks

So I keep getting remarks regarding my size, "You like like you're about to pop!", "Are you having twins?", "I don't think you will make it till the end of October.", etc. It's getting a little old. It did get me to thinking about how my bump compares to when I was pregnant with Wills. I have not been doing weekly photos this time around (again, second child neglect already), but decided maybe I should just compare. So here is probably one of the only, if not the only weekly photo for Te2.

So at 32 weeks, Te2 should be the size of a honeydew at 4.5 lbs and 19 inches. 

Here is a side by side comparison 

32 weeks with Te2               32 weeks with Wills

This definitely made me feel a lot better! My coke shirt is for sure looser this time around =) 

31 weeks

On Thursday, we hit the 31 week mark. I also had my monthly appointment with Dr. Smith, my perinatologist. Charles left that day for Chicago, so my mom came up to go with me and to spend the weekend with Wills and I.

To make a long visit short, the take home message from this appointment is that Te2 continues to grow. He weighed in at a hefty 5 lbs 8 oz and we are measuring 3 weeks ahead. We could also see hair in some of his pictures and he had his eyes opened. I never really thought about babies opening their eyes while in there!

And as usual, his hands and feet were in the way quite a bit while trying to get good shots of his face.

Te2's First Doctor's Appointment

On Monday, Charles and I met with Dr. Kevin Smith, the director of the Cleft Craniofacial Clinic at the University of Oklahoma. He will be the one doing Te2's surgeries. He went through a power point presentation with us that reviewed the different types of cleft lips and cleft palates. It also covered the different types of bottles available for feeding a baby with a cleft palate. We found out that they are pricey, about $40 a piece! It also covered the typical surgery timeline for Te2.

Dr. Smith told us that he cannot guarantee that there is actually palate involvement. He said we will not know that until Te2 gets here. This definitely gave me a little bit of hope, which I'm not sure is a good thing. We had already accepted that the palate was involved, so hopefully hearing this won't cause us to have to go through that disappointment again if he is born with a cleft palate. It would be such a blessing if it isn't, because it would mean a lot fewer surgeries and complications. I guess we will just have to wait and see!

There are a couple of devices that I have seen other cleft palate teams use, the NAM and the Lantham. Dr. Smith talked with us about those and it seems it is dependent on how large the cleft is. It would be preferable to not have to use either of these. The NAM requires weekly appointments for adjustments and the Lantham has to actually be surgically placed, so it would be an additional surgery.

Assuming we don't have to use either of those devices and that there is cleft palate involvement, the surgery schedule would likely be similar to this:
Lip Repair at 10-16 weeks
Palate Repair at around 12 months
Alveolar Repair between ages 5 and 11

Other surgeries he might have to have depending on development, growth, scar tissue etc.
PE tubes
Velopharyngeal repair
Nasal tip reconstruction
Lip scar revision
Orthognathic surgery

This is the site for our cleft palate team. It has a great overview if you want more details about cleft lip/palate and the specific surgeries.

We won't see Dr. Smith again until Te2 is born. He will come evaluate him in the hospital and then we will go from there depending on what he finds.

3rd trimester!

We are officially in the third trimester!

I had my glucose test a couple of weeks ago and I don't have gestational diabetes. It did show anemia though, so I have had to add a daily iron supplement. It's so weird to me that this showed up because I eat more meat now than I did when I was pregnant with Wills.

I had my monthly perinatal appointment on Thursday. Charles couldn't go with me, so my mom and sister came up. A definite benefit of these monthly appointments is that they do an ultrasound every time and switch in to the 4D mode on occasion. It is a lot of fun to get to see our little man growing. The ultrasound tech and Dr. Smith, our perinatologist all remarked on his size. He checked in at 3lbs 3oz, which is apparently on the large side for this point in the pregnancy. Dr. Smith wanted to know if I had done the glucose test yet and what the results were since large babies and gestational diabetes happen together a lot. Since the main reason for these visits is to monitor his growth, we certainly confirmed that he is growing!

He puts his hands and feet in front of his face all the time. He is a pretty limber little guy. Luckily he moves around A LOT, so if you just wait a minute, he will be in a different position.

In this picture you can actually see the cleft lip some. They think it goes up into his left nostril and that is why they believe there is palate involvement as well. 

We have our appointment with the baby's physician on August 5th. It will be so nice to get some answers regarding surgeries and to get a loose timeline of when things will happen. 

Update on Te2

We had our second ultrasound with Te2 at 19 weeks, on March 29th. I think most parents go into this ultrasound primarily concerned about what sex the baby is going to be. Thinking about the anatomy scan is secondary, or at least it was for us. Unfortunately, this time around, finding out that Te2 is a boy was secondary.

Our ultrasound tech left the room a couple of times during our scan. As health care providers ourselves, you would think this would have clued Charles and I in to the fact that something wasn't right. Needless to say, it didn't. When the radiologist walked back in to the room with the ultrasound tech, I was wondering why this guy was busting in on our appointment. The reason was that he was there to tell us that Te2 has a cleft lip. At this scan, they told us it looked like unilateral and left sided. They could not tell if there was any palate involvement. They assured us that everything else (kidneys, heart, spine, etc) looked great and this was the only thing they were seeing. We were then sent directly over to our OB's office to talk with her. There is a small chance of other genetic abnormalities, so we opted to go ahead and have a blood test done that would test for Trisomy 21, 18, 13 and the presence of Y chromosomal material. We figured if it came back positive this would help us be more prepared, and if it came back negative then this would be one less thing for me to obsess over.  It took a week for the results to come back, and thankfully they were negative. Our OB also referred us to a perinatologist, who is essentially an OB that specializes in high risk pregnancies. The soonest they could get us in was a month out, June 26th. We decided that other than immediate family, our OB and our pediatrician, we would wait to share the news until after this appointment. That way we would have more information and know exactly what we were going to be dealing with.

There were lots of tears for a few days after finding out.  I also went through a bit of a mourning process. I know that Te2 is the perfect baby for us and that God does not make mistakes, but I still had to mourn the idea of the perfect baby that I had been visualizing. It would hit me at the most random times too. Once during swim lessons, Charles was in the pool with Wills and I was thinking that next summer we would both be in the pool because we would have two boys. And then I started crying because I was thinking that people would be staring and judging our little one.

Over the next few weeks I did a lot of research. As an audiology graduate student, I was actually part of a cleft palate team with speech pathologist, ENTs, oral surgeons, dentists and social workers. I think this was good and bad. Good in the sense that I knew how successful these kids turned out to be, and bad because I also knew how hard it could be on them too. The surgeries and recovery periods can be extensive. By far the most helpful things I read during my research were actually the blogs of other moms of children with cleft lip/palate, particularly this one and this one. Getting to read about the process from the parent point of view was so comforting.

We finally had our perinatolgoy appointment yesterday. They confirmed the unilateral cleft lip and said that the palate also appears to be involved. Due to the negative blood test and all other anatomy looking good, they believe it is an isolated finding and there are no other concerns. I will follow up monthly with the perinatologist for ultrasounds to monitor Te2's growth. This will be in addition to my monthly OB appointments. We will also meet with the oral surgeon in a few weeks to map out the plan for Te2 in regards to appointments and surgery timeline.

It is going to be an interesting journey and I know we are going to learn a lot about ourselves. Please keep us in your prayers!

Te 2

I realize I never announced on the blog that we were expecting Te 2. Whoops! Already neglecting the second child. We had our ultrasound yesterday to find out the gender. I had thought all along that Te 2 was a boy and Charles was saying girl. I just love being right =)

Walking!

Last Friday Wills decided to start walking. He is still a little unsteady, but he is definitely getting the hang of it!

Eleven Months

Eleven months today! My baby is almost one and almost a toddler. It is so bittersweet. I love watching him grow and learn, but sometimes I just wish I could freeze time. Everyone is asking if he is walking yet and the answer is no. Charles and I are in no rush for this to happen. He is still crawling like crazy and so fast. Charles made him a tunnel out of cardboard boxes and he loves it. He is pulling up and standing. He really likes standing at his activity center and playing. 

Nightime sleeping is going well again. We haven't had any more wake ups lately. Naps are still out of control. You never know what you are going to get. Yesterday we had a 15 minute morning nap and a 2 hour afternoon nap that had a 20 minute intermission. I have decided to accept the fact that this is not something I can control and just roll with it. This is so hard for me! 

Wills now has 4 teeth. Two on top and two on bottom. There is quite a large gap between the top two. He might be sporting a gap like his mommy did. We will just have to wait and see. Now that we have all these teeth, we eat like a big boy. The amount this kid can eat is astonishing. We actually had the exact same thing for breakfast this morning, except he had milk to drink with his and I just had water! We have become a little more flexible with what he eats when we go out. I have realized that I will probably always be packing him a vegetable and a fruit since for some reason these are really difficult to find a most restaurants. Finding meat and bread is super easy though. He had duck last night and steak tonight. Loved them both. He is definitely not a vegetarian! We quit using bottles this month and now he only uses sippy cups. He was super unhappy the first time we tried this, but we worked through it. He also decided this week he no longer needed formula right before bed. I am so thankful he did this on his own. It has really shortened his bedtime routine, so I think we are going to have to read a few books now to allow us some extra quality time before bed. 

Eleven Month Stats:

Weight: 22 lbs

Length: We didn't even try
Clothing Size: 12 months are getting too short and 18 months are fitting pretty good 

Nicknames: Buddy, Buster, pumpkin, little man, big man

Must haves: Board books, basketball, puzzles, Fisher Price Laugh and Learn table 

Milestones:
May 27 Third tooth, bottom
May 28 "Where's Wills" game
May29 Fourth tooth, top
June 18 Standing without holding on
June 20 Started brushing our teeth
June 24 First trip to the zoo, clapping

9 month photo shoot

Wills' 9 month photo shoot is up on 3 blessings photography website. Here is one of my favorites:

If you would like to see all of them then go to www.3blessingsphotography.com

Click on Your Proofs

Enter password: wills619  

You better hurry though. They will only be up until June 19th!

Ten Months

Ten months today! Our little boy will be a year old in two months. I just cannot believe how amazing and wonderful the last ten months have been. I know it will only continue to get better. Wills' crawling has progressed dramatically. That guy can move fast! Sometimes he will crawl with his right leg out straight. We can't figure out why he does it, but it's pretty funny. He had a hard time staying still for photos this month. There were several attempts to fly off the chair. And he maybe tried to eat his sticker too!

So sleeping this month has been rough. Night time sleeping is still decent. He does wake up crying on occasion, but works it out really quickly. I'm not sure he is ever really awake. Nap time is another story. For example, today he took two 30 minute naps. Unfortunately this has been the norm lately. I am blaming it on a combination of teething and possibly a cold. He has had a runny nose for a couple of weeks now and this week he started with a cough. It makes me so sad for him.

We got our second tooth this month. It is directly on top of the bottom one. He started clicking them together, which was cute. Now he likes to grind them together, which is not cute! It gives me the chills every time he does it, but he thinks it is hilarious. Something he is not a fan of right now? Being fed from a spoon. He has found an independent streak and wants to feed himself. Help is not needed! This has been a little challenging since oatmeal and yogurt have been dietary staples. Thankfully, there is pinterest, which gave me ways to turn both of those things into finger food.

Ten Month Stats:

Weight: 20.8 lbs

Length: We didn't even try
Clothing Size: 9 months are on the short side, some 12 months are even to short, but they are the best fit right now 

Nicknames: Buddy, Buster, pumpkin, little man

Must haves: Board books, Baby Einstein Take Along Tunes, basketball, Laugh and Learn Puppy

Milestones:
April 25 Crawling for real
May 2 Pulled up to standing
May 11 Met cousin Clara
May 12 First family reunion and first wedding reception
May 16 Second tooth

April

I lost track of time last month and neglected to post about a few of the neat things Wills got to do.

One was the Great Cloth Diaper Change.I think most of you know we use cloth diapers. We joke that it is a cult, because those that do it love it. And who would think you could love anything about diapers? Anyway, this is something they do to help raise awareness of the benefits of cloth diapering. This year, the local event was held at the Oklahoma Science Museum. They had a raffle, informational sessions about babywearing, diapers, etc and then the actual change happened at 11 am. The first 100 people got a free goody bag. The doors opened at 9 and Wills and I got there at 9:30. Sadly we did not get a goody bag. Those cloth diapering mammas are crazy and some of them got there at 8 just to be sure they got a bag! =) It''s okay though, because we did win one of the raffle prizes and it was the one I really wanted.

Getting ready for the big change

I was joking with one of the other mom's about how the babies probably thought we were all nuts. Especially those getting changed who had dry diapers!

Wills' certificate of participation

We also went to the Festival of the Arts. We go for the gourmet fair food. We are too cheap for the art! I decided to wear Wills in the Moby because it is so crowded we didn't want to mess with the stroller. I still can't decide if this was the best choice or not. 

I had a giant black bean and spinach burrito. It was really tasty. I usually get the Indian taco and decided to try something new this year. While the burrito was good, I was sad I skipped out on the taco. Charles had some amazing catfish and french fries. We then shared a banana fudge sundae and fried peaches with ice cream. The fried peaches were amazing as usual!

Charles ran in the OKC Memorial Marathon relay this month too. He had the longest leg, a 12k. Wills and I had grand plans of being there at the part where he finished to cheer him on. Unfortunately it was raining, so we didn't make it. We did go and pick him up so he didn't have to walk the almost 8 miles back to his car!

Speaking of cults....Crossfit is it's own cult.

The last thing we did this month, which was actually all month, was swim lessons. Every Tuesday and Thursday in April Wills took swim lessons at the local YMCA. It was parent/child swim lessons, so I swam on Tuesdays and Charles swam on Thursdays. Wills' friend Blaine and her parents joined us for lessons. It was a lot of fun. He hasn't quite mastered the backstroke yet, but I'm sure we will get there. 

Looking back, we actually did quite a lot in April. I'll attempt to do better next month so there won't be one extremely long synopsis post!