Five Years Old

My baby girl turned 5 years old yesterday. I can't believe the time has gone so quickly. It seems like just yesterday Mike was calling us to tell us that Tiffany had gone into labor and was already at the hospital so we had better get there quick! She was so beautiful. A perfect complexion. Deep blue eyes that were wide open instead of the sleepy newborn daze. A headful of strawberry blonde hair. 10 fingers and 10 toes. LONG legs and gigantic feet. She never did fit into those newborn diapers or newborn clothes people showered us with! Unlike most newborns, she didn't sleep all day. She needed constant stimulation. I cursed all those dispensers of advice that told me to sleep when the baby sleeps. My baby didn't sleep! Little did we know that this was a sign of things to come! She seemed to take in everything from the very start even though all my books said she couldn't see more than a few inches. By a week old she was entranced with the ceiling fan and studied her pacifier with the intensity of a PhD thesis. Yet more signs of what lay ahead! She was stubborn, oh so stubborn and her personality has only grown stronger and more interesting as she has grown. We had some friends who used to joke about Hannah being a "super genius baby" because she just seemed to know everything. Speaking before most kids were saying even their first words. Conjugating verbs correctly before her peers were putting 2 words together. Little did we know how right they would be. Sarah and Jason, you guys called it for sure.

She's had many struggles as she grown, but now when I look at my beautiful, precious little girl I'm so proud of the young lady she's become. I don't know what I would ever do without her. I thank God every single night for bringing us together with Tiffany and Mike and making us parents of this absolutely amazing little girl.

I leave you know with a multitude of pictures of my baby girl from each year of her life! Enjoy!

Adoption Through the Eyes of a 4 Year Old

So adoption is nothing new to Hannah. Because we have an open adoption with Hannah's birthfamily she's always known she's adopted and has been able to give age appropriate explanations for what that means. We've discussed the ins and outs of adoption with her since the day we brought her home from the hospital. Lately, there have been many examples we have come across in books, tv, and movies that portray adoption. Some of them have been positive portrayals and some not. Some of them have been fairly accurate and others, well, let's just say they seriously missed the mark. Anyway, each time I've spoken with Hannah about what was real and what was not about each depiction and she seemed to get it. We compared the fictitious situation to her adoption and founded the similar aspects and the ones that weren't the same. I thought she had a good handle on things. Imagine my surprise when she opened up with some real adoption zingers that flew so far off base from reality that you would think they were coming straight from a 1940's handbook on how to be a happily adjusted adoptive family or how to place a child for adoption! I was horrified!!!!! Here's just one example. Hannah wanted to play house. She was the mother and I was the kid and several of her baby dolls and stuffed animals were to be recruited to be kids too. She turns to me and says,"Sweetie, you're going to be getting a new baby sister. We're going to adopt her because I can't grow a baby in my tummy." So far so good right? Then she follows up with. "I have to go to the store and buy her. I'll be right back." OH MY LORD! Never once have we ever discussed the fact that adoptions cost money at all. Where did she come up with equating it to buying a baby!?!? I immediately worked to put out that fire and explain how we NEVER buy humans. How when humans used to be bought that was called slavery and slavery is wrong. When you adopt a child they become part of your family and they are not slaves. I'm not sure she was buying into the thought that the baby was not available at the store. Then later in the play session she brought out ANOTHER whopper. She said, "Sweetie, the lady next door really wants a baby and since we have two babies now (we had since adopted a baby brother for me!) we are going to give her your sister to be her new baby. She's going to adopt her." I about died! A discussion began immediately about the reasons people place babies and children for adoption and that the reason is NEVER simply because someone else wants to be a parent. Babies are not traded as property simply because someone else likes them. We talked about the reasons that Tiffany and Mike placed Hannah for adoption and that they would have NEVER placed her for adoption simply because Daddy and I wanted her. They placed her because they could not care for her. Tiffany and Mike chose us because they knew we would love her and care for her, not because we wanted a baby. Hannah put up a fight about this explanation and still insisted that it was only right to share the baby with the lady next door since we had 3 kids and they didn't have any. UGH! I never managed to get through to her on that one and she got angry with me and we had to abandon the conversation for another day. That particular conversation brought back memories of a conversation we had just after Abby died. Hannah had informed us that if either Kyle or I died she wouldn't be sad because she would still have another parent left! Adoption has really been on her mind lately all around because she's asked me to tell her the story of her birth and adoption practically every day for the last 2 weeks! Never before has she expressed such interest in it. I suppose this is just another step in her journey to processing what it means to be adopted and how that makes her who she is, a unique combination of her birthfamily and adoptive family. I'm sure in the days, months, and years to come we will continue to revisit these topics again and again. Please pray that I am able to calmly and successfully guide her through the process!

Adoption Thoughts

Lately the desire to adopt again has been weighing heavy on my heart. From the very beginning of our adoption journey I've flip flopped back and forth about whether or not we should adopt more than one child. Before getting too far in the adoption process with Hannah I was certain I wanted to adopt twice. Two kids sounded perfect to me. However, I wasn't prepared for the stress of actually adopting and shortly after Hannah was born I was sure I was DONE. I couldn't do that again. It was just too emotionally hard. The more removed I became from the initial emotions of adopting I started to think about how it might be nice to have another child someday. Then the stress of parenting Hannah hit and I was pretty sure I was DONE again. Being a mommy of one was plenty for me. I was content, if not a little over my head at times, and I felt like our family was complete. Then, for reasons unknown to me, I decided to look at a website with photolistings of waiting children through the department of child and family services. That was pretty much the end for me. I'm pretty much convinced that at some point we are meant to adopt again, but this time through the foster system. This thought scares me a lot. We've successfully navigated an agency adoption and have a healthy open adoption with Hannah's birthfamily. That's what we know. Hannah was adopted at birth. We know her birthfamily. We have frequent contact with them. A child that is adopted through the foster care system had a life before you came into the picture. They lived with their birthfamily. They may have had multiple foster families. They may have experienced abuse or neglect and they have most certainly experienced at the very least the trauma of being removed from their birthfamily. All these things make their mark on a child. They have to be dealt with eventually and they'll always be a part of their past. I don't know if I'm a strong enough parent to help a child through that. Then there's the issue of birthfamily contact. Hannah has a close relationship with her birthfamily. How would we handle things if we adopted another child that was not able to have contact with anyone from their birthfamily? How would this affect both Hannah and our hypothetical 2nd child? Then there's always the matter of whether or not I'm cut out for the stress of parenting more than one child. Could I successfully parent a child with possible emotional or behavioral problems when I so often feel helpless and unable to parent Hannah effectively? Still, with all of these doubts I still keep coming back to the thought that we are meant to do this. I'm not sure how. I'm not sure when. I just feel led to pursue this.

As I've been thinking about adopting through the foster care system I've started to notice some differences with regards to attitudes about and the prevalence of adoption between Rhode Island and Indiana. When we lived in Indiana we personally knew many people who either were adopted themselves or who had adopted children both domestic infant, international, and through the foster system. We've lived in Rhode Island for a year now and we've yet to meet a single person who is either adopted or has adopted. I find that a bit odd. There are two possibilities for why this is that I can think of. Either fewer people here in Rhode Island adopt or people just don't talk about adoption here because there is a stigma about it. Based on what I've observed while living here I would imagine that the reason is a combination of both of my theories. Whenever the subject that Hannah was adopted comes up people always express shock and surprise. When they learn that we have an open adoption they are even more taken aback. Generally after the initial shock wears off one of two things happens, either the person I'm speaking with quickly grows uncomfortable and changes the subject abruptly or they start gushing about what a wonder service we have done for Hannah and her birthfamily and we are quickly elevated to sainthood. They don't believe me when I say that Hannah isn't the lucky one, we are. We wanted desperately to start a family and adoption was the route we chose. This just seems inconceivable to most people here. Another thing I've noticed is that I see very few multi racial families. This could signify both that there are few international or foster care adoptions or that anything that is "different" is frowned upon and both adoptions and mixed race families without adoption are "different." This leads me to wonder what adopting through the foster care system here in Rhode Island would be like. Would it be hard on Hannah and the hypothetical 2nd child because adoption is not as accepted here or am I just imagining things? The Midwest is not the most accepting place in the country, but adoption is actually fairly common there and there are many areas where multi racial families are also quite common. Would we be better to wait until we didn't live in Rhode Island? So many questions to think about. But one thing I'm still so sure about is that we should do this. Our family is meant to get just a little bit bigger. The details can be figured out later, but the big picture seems clear.

Heavy Questions

Hannah has recently begun asking some heavy questions about her adoption. We have an open adoption with Hannah's birthfamily so we've always discussed Hannah's adoption with her. I knew that eventually Hannah would have questions about exactly why she was adopted, why Tiffany and Mike did not choose to be her Mommy and Daddy, why Tiffany was Kayla and Chase's Mommy AND birthmother, but only her birthmother. I knew these questions would come. I've been preparing for them, but I didn't expect for her questions to come quite this early. I thought that by being so open with Hannah about her adoption we'd have the basics covered for quite some time and that the deeper questions wouldn't come until later-much later so the answers I'd been preparing and the questions I'd been anticipating weren't age appropriate for a 3 year old. I shouldn't have been so naive. A few weeks ago I was reading Hannah's adoption story with her. On one page it describes how Tiffany and Mike were sad to say good-bye to Hannah when we all left the hospital after her birth and it shows a picture of Tiffany holding Hannah and wiping away a tear. After we read that page Hannah looked right at me and asked, "Why were they sad to say good-bye? We visit each other." I wasn't prepared to explain to a 3 year old how Tiffany could KNOW she was making the right decision, but at the same time be sad that she was unable to make a different decision. I wasn't prepared to explain that just because she wanted to be Hannah's Mommy she couldn't handle it at that point in her life and that made her sad. I wasn't able to verbalize that she was content with her decision and happy that she would have ongoing contact with Hannah, but that in an ideal world that wasn't enough. In an ideal world Tiffany would have been able to parent Hannah herself. Those are just things that are too complicated to explain to a 3 year old, even a bright one. I stumbled and stuttered around the question for a bit and then finally settled on this explanation. I'm not sure it was the right one to give, but it seemed to satisfy her for the time being. I told her that she was sad because she wished that she could see Hannah every day instead of just for visits. I said that sometimes when people love us they wish they could spend as much time as possible with us and Tiffany knew that she wouldn't be able to spend as much time with her as she would have liked.

Stranger Anxiety

Hannah has a BAD case of stranger anxiety at the moment. She absolutely does not want anyone besides me, Kyle, Grandpa, or Sarah to hold her or really even look at her. She's even been giving her friend Evelyn the cold shoulder :( My books say that this is normal and even a healthy display of her attachment to us, but it worries me. It seems like overnight she went from a social, happy little girl to a terrified baby who clings desperately to me any time she thinks I might leave or someone else might touch her. I'm at a loss for what to do. Do I comfort her and hold her until she warms up to people or do I make her tough it out and leave her at the nursery at church. It's so hard to decide and I've found literature supporting both approaches. I don't want to prolong this stage or keep her from learning how to branch out on her own, but it hurts me to see her so unhappy when someone else reaches for her. It really does break my heart when she clings onto me for dear life.

Hannah's skill in pulling up and standing is getting quite good. She really does not need anything to grab ahold of now to stand up. She just needs something like a wall to brace herself against. She's even started cruising a bit on the furniture, but I'm not sure she really gets that she can travel around that way yet.

Hannah had her 9 month check up on Monday and she passed with flying colors. She now weighs 21 lbs and is 29 inches long. She's in the 90th percentile for height and the 85th for weight. Her growth has slowed down a bit although her weight did take a major setback when she got sick since she lost an entire pound in 5 days from the diarrhea! Speaking of her weight, she's getting so heavy that it's really starting to get difficult for me to pick her up and carry her around. My hands and wrists are starting to get sore from the repetitive motion of it all. Even Kyle says he's starting to get sore from hauling her around. She had better learn to walk and travel around by herself pretty soon if she plans on getting any heavier.

Hannah continues to plow right through her food and seems to be hungry ALL the time. She makes the sign for food about every 1 1/2 hours! Consequently she's been eating more table food because of that and she LOVES it. In the past week she's had watermelon, apples, honeydew, lasagna, cheese cubes, and toast. That's in addition to her baby food, formula, and of course her wagon wheels, veggie puffs, cheerios, and zweibeck toast!

Books continue to be one of Hannah's favorite things to play with. She will sit in her tunnel for sometimes 15 or 20 minutes and just intently look at her books. She flips the pages one by one slowly as if she's actually reading them! Of course we know she's just looking at the pictures, but it's still very cute!

Ok, so it's been almost a week since I started this post and I have a few new things to add. First, Hannah has started saying the word "hi" when she sees someone (even herself in the mirror!). Today she was with me at the grocery store and twice when she caught people looking at her she said "Hi!" in a very sweet voice. Of course when they tried to talk back to her she got scared and ducked her head, but at least it's a start. She also says "hi" to Kyle everyday when he gets home from work.

The next news is a little weird. You see, Hannah has this purple caterpillar that has 26 legs with a letter of the alphabet on each leg. Well, the caterpillar does many things like say colors, letters, letter sounds, and play music. It also would make this creepy little laugh every so often. That laugh really wigged me out, but I could never figure out what button needed to be pushed in order to make it laugh and I never actually saw what Hannah did each time that it laughed. I was starting to be convinced that the caterpillar was possessed or something. Anyway, today it made that laugh again and Kyle happened to see part of what Hannah was doing just before it went off. I had thought I had pushed every button and combination of buttons on that darn bug to try to get it to laugh, but apparently not because Kyle was able to figure out the secret combination of buttons to make the caterpillar laugh. Not only did it laugh, but it also said, "That tickles!" So, the verdict is that the caterpillar has to be in the letter sounds mode and you have to push the "A" leg and then immediately push the "Z" leg in order for it to laugh. It's kinda like an Easter Egg on a DVD or video game or those hidden warp levels in Mario Brothers! I wonder how many more secret combinations of legs there are that will eventually weird me out even more about that darn caterpillar?!?

Ok, on to more news, yesterday Hannah had a surprise visitor. Her birthfather, Mike, stopped by to visit her! He was in Lafayette on business and was trying to get to Crawfordsville and got lost. He called me up for directions and it turned out that he was less than a mile from the house! So, he came on over and got to see Hannah for the first time since October and I wrote him out directions to get him where he needed to go. We are also going to get to see both he and Tiffany and the twins tomorrow after church since they will be bringing the pictures that we got taken of all the kids in their Easter outfits. I can't wait to see them again and actually have some time to sit down and visit without being rushed.

Hannah continues to use both her signs and words to express her feelings. Besides using hi she also uses mom mom and dada quite often along with Ella. I'm pretty sure she thinks that all dogs are called Ella since she says that every time she sees a dog or hears one barking, but we are working on that. I'm making a special effort to call the pets dogs and cats when she sees them and I've introduced the signs for dog and cat too. It seems like Hannah is a little sponge just soaking up information and trying to copy everything we do so I've really stepped up the signing and she really seems to be enjoying it. She's now proficient at using eat, drink, and more in the correct situations. She understands the signs for no, don't touch, and gentle touch and I've introduced dog, cat, help, mother, father, brush your teeth, brush your hair, and bed.

After talking to Hannah's doctor at her 9 month appointment I decided it was time to start slowly weaning Hannah off of her bottle and transitioning her to drinking her formula and eventually milk out of her sippy cup. Unfortunately Hannah is not too keen on that idea. Putting formula in her sippy cup caused huge tantrums! So we decided that we need to get her used to having other things besides water in her sippy cup. Today we gave her some diluted juice in it and after two tastes of it she refused to drink from the cup. She actually covered up her mouth and pushed my hand with the cup away to protest the juice instead of just not picking up the cup to drink! It looks like it's going to be a long road ahead teaching her that more than just water can be in a sippy cup.

Visit with Tiffany and Mike

We had another visit with Tiffany yesterday and Mike came along this time too. It was nice to see him since we hadn't seen him since Hannah was in the hospital. It was a nice, but hectic visit. Tiffany and I dressed all of the kids up in their Halloween costumes and had a photo shoot. It was fun! :) Hannah of course was Squirt from Finding Nemo. Chase was Spiderman and Kayla was a Barbie princess. We did have one catastrophe that I'm not sure what kind of havoc it will wreak. One of the dogs, not sure which one, managed to get ahold of Kayla's sparkly face make-up and eat the entire jar. Hopefully all that will happen is some mild digestional upset for the offending dog, but we are going to have to be vigilant for awhile since I'm not sure how bad that stuff is to be ingested.

Last Wednesday Hannah went to her first Halloween party at church. The church hosts a safe alternative to Trick-or-Treating called Trunk-or-Treat where members decorate their trunks and pass out candy from them in the church parking lot. They wanted me to take pictures so Kyle and Hannah came along too and Hannah got to dress up in her Squirt outfit. She looked adorable if I do say so myself!

Daylight Savings time is wreaking havoc in the Spontak household. The pets and the baby have their schedules all screwed up and are resisting the change vehemently. I've always been against daylight savings time and now I have one more reason why to add to my list! I'm praying that I will soon be able to get them all onto a new schedule, but I'm not too optimistic that this will be a quick transition.

Tomorrow Hannah goes to get her 4 month pictures taken. It's a few days early, but we had to do them tomorrow so that we could get the photographer that we love at JC Penny's. We thinks she takes the best pictures and she's great with babies too which is a must. I'm the kinda person that when I find something that I like that works I stick with it. So, I plan on requesting her every single month that we can possibly get her!

The other day Hannah decided to make me feel sad. When Kyle came home from work we went to the door to greet him. I was holding Hannah and she immediately spun herself around in my arms and reached both of her arms out to Kyle to be held. She didn't want boring old mom anymore. :( She wanted fun daddy! Kyle of course was thrilled. Me, not so much.

Hannah long overdue first haircut was finally performed. I held her head still while Kyle snipped. Her bangs are now nice and straight and out of her eyes. I'm sure she feels a lot better and it looks a lot better too!

Well, I just returned to the blog after tending to Hannah for several hours and while I was gone Hannah hit a major milestone! :) She rolled over by herself from her back to her tummy! I had been helping her practice rolling over like we do every day and then we stopped to take a breather. I was tempting her to reach out and grab one of her favorite wrist rattles, when all of a sudden she just up and rolled over to get it! I was so shocked and so was she! I gave her the rattle to play with for a bit and then I rolled her back onto her back and tempted her with the rattle again and she didn't hesitate a bit. She rolled right on over and grabbed it! Of course both times I didn't have my camera and she did it one more time before I got smart enough to go get the camera. As Murphy's Law would have it, once I got the camera Hannah was through rolling over to get the rattle, but if I put her onto her side and waved the rattle around she would go ahead and flip herself the rest of the way over. I did manage to get a video of that so I'm going to post it here. When she did it I was so excited I accidentally hit the stop record button on the camera! So, the video ends a little abruptly, but you can see the main part! :) To see the video, just click on the link. I'm so proud of my little girl I can hardly stand it! She's growing up so fast!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8393965075501961466&hl=en

Super Buddha

There are lots of Hannah updates today so I hope I don't forget anything! First I'll start with the title of the post since you are probably wondering already what on earth I was talking about. Super Buddha is what Kyle and I call Hannah's favorite sleeping position. I'll post a picture of it so that you can see what I'm talking about. She sleeps with the soles of her feet turned in towards each other (oftentimes touching) and her arms straight up past her head. We've noticed several variations of the Super Buddha pose such as Egyptian Buddha, Airplane Buddha, Buzz Lightyear Buddha, and many others. I'm going to attempt to capture a photo of each pose over the next few weeks and will make a photo post of them all for your viewing pleasure!

Another interesting thing we have noticed is that Hannah has a favorite toy on her mobile. This fact is quite evident as I've watched her several times and it's always the same. When I pointed it out to Kyle he saw it too. One day I was watching Hannah in her crib watching her mobile very intently. Every so often she would become very active and squeal with delight. Then she would grow anxious and start turning her head from side to side. As I watched I began to realize that this was a pattern that was recurring at set intervals. I studied her actions a little more closely and realized that she would become excited when the toy with a big orange smiley face on it would pass through her vision and then she would become anxious and begin looking for it once it was out of her range of vision. She would continue her search until the smiley appeared again and then she would get excited all over again! I'll try to post a picture of her favorite on here as well.

Wednesday, Hannah and I went shopping for her winter clothes with my friend Sarah and Hannah's buddy Evelyn. We ended up having quite the adventure. Poor Evelyn had some digestive disturbances while we were shopping and we had to make an emergency pit stop in the Macy's restroom for new clothes and a sponge bath! Hannah even had to let Evelyn borrow one of her bibs. Evelyn and Hannah seemed to get a kick out of watching Sarah and I scramble around cleaning up baby poop and searching for clean clothes and Sarah and I just had to laugh at our luck. During that shopping trip I bought Hannah a winter sleep sack. It was size 0-9 months and was huge. Well, last night Kyle put it on her at bedtime and when I came in to tell Hannah good night I noticed that her feet were all the way at the end of the sack already! The little stinker is doing it again! She's growing out of brand new clothes right after I finally take the tags off of them. That sleep sack was supposed to last her all winter! I don't think we can afford another growth spurt like this!

We also discovered this week that Hannah is officially teething. She had been showing the telltale signs for about a week (drooling, fussy, low grade fever on and off, chewing on everything) but Wednesday night we examined her mouth and we can actually see her bottom front 2 teeth just below the skin. I really hope they just go ahead and pop on through soon because this extra fussiness is for the birds. Last night the only thing that would soothe her was a cold wet wash cloth for her to chew on.

This weekend we also have a visit planned with Mike. It will be the first time he has been able to come visit us at the house. He got to visit Hannah once while she was in the hospital here in Lafayette, but this visit should be nice because we won't have nurses and doctors running in and out.

The final Hannah update is that we finally have Hannah's finalization date! On October 19th Hannah will officially become a legal Spontak! :) We have one more post placement visit on Wednesday and then our court date on the 19th is all that is left. It will be so wonderful to finally have all that paperwork completed and be done with the whole process. It was a long broken road to Hannah, but it has all been worth it. When I look at my little girl I can't even imagine how my life would have ever been complete without her. She was meant to be ours before we ever knew that our children would come to us through adoption and now I can't think of anything that could have been more perfect.

Grand Central Station

The last few days have been quite busy. Yesterday Hannah had 7 visitors! At one point there were 11 people in her hospital room counting us, Hannah and 2 nurses. We had quite the party going on! Tiffany and Mike came to visit Hannah and brought Tiffany's twins. Jennifer and Jorge also came to visit and brought us dinner. We had a bit of a picnic! It was actually fun. Didn't think I'd ever say that about the hospital! Speaking of food, we have been well fed the past week. In fact we have more food than I think we will ever be able to finish before it goes bad. So, we have begun sharing it with families of other patients and the nurses. Everyone has been so kind to us and taken great care of us. Our friends and church family are awesome! We feel so blessed.

Yesterday Hannah got a big girl bed. The day nurse decided she was too big for the bassinet she was in and didn't like the other nurse's job of jimmy rigging the mobile onto it so she brought Hannah in a baby cage! It's quite intimidating, but the mobile does fit on there better and Hannah certainly does have more room. She is getting bigger though. The nurse was right about that. She now weighs over a pound more than she did when she was born. Last night she weighed in at 9 lbs 15.2 oz. I'm sure tonight when they weigh her she'll be 10 lbs! That's my big girl! :)

Today I actually had a good experience with a nursing student. I must admit I was getting a bit fed up with the whole system, but today Hannah's student was great. This is the first time she has had a more traditional aged student. This girl was 24 and a mother of an 8 year old. Let me tell you, she knew her stuff. She asked if she could do Hannah's feedings while she was there and give her a bath. I was a bit reluctant, but I tried not to make her pay for the mistakes of others so I said ok. I figured if I didn't like how she handled Hannah when she fed her breakfast then I could say no to future feedings and the bath. I was pleasantly surprised. She was definitely better at bathing a baby than I am so I took some mental notes. The whole time I was thinking, "This is how it's supposed to be. If this is your chosen career, you need to have some skills by the time you are a semester away from graduating." I am no longer fearful of the downfall of pediatric nursing once this current class of students hits the job market!

The doctor wrote Hannah's discharge instructions this morning. She has to finish up her round of antibiotics, but as soon as her last dose is finished Friday evening we are free to go! The paperwork is already done. YEAH! Thank heavens for Dr. Hendrick. We just love him. He definitely knows how much we want to be back home with Hannah and how much we want to get into a routine again.

Football in the Rain

Well, we went to see Mike play football this past weekend and boy was it a nasty day! The weatherman forcasted a 30% chance of scattered showers, but we must have been "scattered" b/c we got downpours and more! It did however clear up long enough to get in the scrimage. It helped that the other team was over an hour late getting to the field. Mike's team, The South Central Broncos, played a scrimage against a team from another league. While the team was fairly good (I think anyway, but then what do I really know about football!), they sure weren't very nice. Lots of trash talking going on, but Mike seemed to be able to tune it out. Even though it was cold and wet, I managed to have a good time. I always love the chance to take photos and I got plenty of those chances at the game! I filled up the entire gig memory card! I'm going to send some to Mike and then print out some for the baby's scrapbook so she will know more about what her birthfather was interested in. I'm going to try to post a few pictures from the game on here if I can. Mike's number 85. He plays tight end and sometimes gets pulled in as the kicker too!

The day before the game I got to talk to Tiffany and it sounded like she was doing pretty well. She said the baby is getting big and is pretty active~lots of kicking her in the ribs! She's really ready for this baby to be born! Right now she's trying to decide whether or not to have a C-section. She really wants to have a natural birth, but is a little bit scared of the possible risks that go with having a natural birth after a c-section. Apparently there is a slight chance of her incision opening back up during the birth and causing problems. She's a little scared of that and I must say I don't blame her. Then again, with a natural birth her recovery time would be shorter. She has another doctor's appointment on the 19th and apparently she has to decide by then whether or not she is going to schedule a c-section or let things go naturally. Prayers that she will be able to make a decision that is best for her and the baby would be appreciated.

Talked to Mike

Mike (our birthfather) called us yesterday and left us a message. We had been planning on going to see him play in one of his football games, but we needed more details. Mike plays semi pro football for a team in Indy and Saturday is his season opener I believe. It's a home game anyway. So, he invited us to go watch. Kyle called him back last night and talked to him about the details. It turns out we are going to go up around 10:00am and have an early lunch with him and just hang out until he has to be at the field. Then we will probably go wander around Babies R Us or bug Heather at Old Navy if she has to work that day since we are having lunch at the Applebees in the Greenwood mall again. On Mike's message he said that he had bought us a present for the baby. Apparently it is some sort of a calendar to record baby milestones with a spot for pictures each month. Sounds cool. I thought that was very sweet of him. On his message he said he thought it was cute so he bought it. It made me smile to hear a guy as big as he is saying something like a calendar was cute! He also brought Kyle up to date on his commercial appearance. Apparently he's been chosen from his team to star in some sort of a football commercial with Peyton Manning and Terry Bradshaw. He's quite excited about it since he really likes both Peyton and Terry Bradshaw! He said the taping will be coming up soon.

We didn't have a chance to talk to Tiffany this weekend, but Mike said that at her last stress test and ultrasound they said that they were going to stick with the plan to either induce or have a C section before she is full term. According to Mike the plan is to have the baby in about 3 weeks! So it looks like we will be parents sooner rather than later.

Well, I'm going to try to add some more of the ultrasound pictures and pictures from our match meeting onto this post. I hope you all enjoy.


This picture is of Tiffany and I. She's so much taller than I am that she took off her shoes for this picture! I just love Tiffany. She is so sweet and very easy to talk to. I was really nervous the first time we called her, but after about 5 minutes on the phone it was like I was chatting with an old friend that I had lost touch with!

This is a picture of her foot. The ultrasound tech said she is kicking herself in the head! Quite the little gymnast already I guess! Right before the tech froze this picture the baby was showing off for me and wiggling her toes! I would have never have know this was a foot by just looking at it, but when she started wiggling those toes it was really obvious! It was so neat.