Brooklyn Renee

Wow, what a week!

The three older kids participated in a soccer camp in the mornings so I could spend my "overdue" week resting and getting a few things done.  There weren't any major signs the baby was coming until Wednesday morning when some mild contractions started.  Wednesday afternoon we had a home inspector coming over so we had spent Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning getting the house spotless. I got up from resting through my contractions in the afternoon and found the kids had gotten bored of the movie they were watching, and had "forgotten" to not mess up the house.  There was powdered sugar all over the floor in the kitchen, toys strewn everywhere, the fridge raided and food left out, and the kids had set up an elaborate pretend play.  Just then, the doorbell rang - the home inspector had arrived 30 minutes early!  Tim just happened to call home to see how everything was going right at that moment.  I was in a bit of a panic  - early home inspector, messy house, sleeping Michael, in labor... thankfully we managed to get everything cleaned up while the inspector was outside.  It was 103 degrees outside so we headed to the library so I wouldn't melt in the heat.  Tim had left work to come help me and met us there and then we took the kids out for pizza afterwards.  During dinner my contractions started coming less that 5 minutes apart, so we headed home, found a babysitter for the night and took off for the hosptial.  The labor and delivery was different from our other four kids and went really well.  The best part was the doctor sprinting into the room and nearly missing the delivery as things at the end went really quickly.  Our little girl was born at 1:41 AM on Thursday, June 27.  She weighed just shy of 8 pounds and is 20 1/2 inches long.  She's our second smallest baby (Sarah still holding the reigns as our smallest) and has a ton of dark hair.  She definitely looks like she belongs to our family!  We named her Brooklyn Renee and call her "Brooke" for short. 

Late Thursday afternoon Tim brought the kids to the hospital to meet their new sister.  Sarah and Whitney immediately were doting on her, Spencer had to feel my belly several times to make sure there wasn't a baby in there anymore, and Michael - well, the minute he saw Tim holding our new little girl, he started crying and screaming.  It was like he was saying, "What?!  Mom and Dad, you traitors!"  He was practically inconsolible the entire time we were there, but we did manage to get a picture with him and Brooke.  I had two dear friends come to the hospital at the same time as the family and one of them had a camera and caught some priceless images of our family.  The noise in the room was deafening - the kids started having a pillow fight, Michael was howling in misery, and the grown-ups were trying to talk.  It was the perfect moment of the pure chaos of our new family.

We are now home from the hospital (oh, there's no place like home!) and spending our time recovering.  The best part when I arrived home was Michael putting his hands on his lips to try and close them and say, "Mmah" for "Mom."  He then saw the baby in Tim's arms and signed "Baby."  He's much more content today with the baby.  The kids are exhausted from finishing up soccer camp and art class.  I think we will be laying low for the next several days. 

Dr. Kozak made it to the delivery room just in time to deliver Brooklyn

Wow...check this place out!

Happy and content

Proud parents

Mom needs a bigger hospital bed

Pillow fight!

Sarah and Brooklyn

Whitney and Brooklyn

Spencer and Brooklyn

Michael and Brooklyn

Poor Mikey is no longer the baby in the family

Slipping schedule

At work we say that our schedule is slipping when we have to push out the date we expect to hit a certain project milestone.  After Liz's due date came and went last Friday with no sign of the baby, our schedule has definitely slipped.  In fact, at her doctor's appointment two days before her due date, the doctor said the baby isn't showing any signs of being anywhere near ready to deliver.  Liz is convinced she'll be the first woman in history to be pregnant forever.  So we're hoping the baby will come this week sometime, otherwise we'll have to induce and the baby could potentially be born on Michael's second birthday, July 2.

The good news this week is that we sold our house in only two hours!  It went on the market Monday afternoon, had five showings within the first two hours, and we accepted a fantastic offer. What a relief we can focus more on getting ready for the baby to come.

Summer "vacation"

Since Memorial Day, our summer break went from being pretty busy to crazy hyper-drive!  We have been swamped boxing and cleaning our house to get it ready to sell, handling some challenging decisions with the new house, hosting lots of family, starting new and intense therapy with Michael, getting the kids in the new summer routine, and keeping Liz's feet from swelling too much.  The baby is due this Friday and Liz is ready for the baby to arrive sooner than later.  A friend recently said to Liz, "I don't know anyone who has ever put their house for sale when they were 39 weeks pregnant."  This is not what we would have imagined for ourselves either.   Our house will be on the MLS Monday morning.

We can hardly believe this is all happening at once.  We also had a big hail storm last night so we've got leaves littering our lawn to clean up in the morning.

Last weekend Tim's sister Emily came to visit us with her husband, Tony and their kids.  The intent was to help us get ready for the baby to come, little did they know what that implied!  They worked hard helping us with landscaping, decluttering, cleaning, moving stuff to storage, and helping to watch our kids.  It was amazing to see what we were able to accomplish in a weekend with their help.  Their timing couldn't have been any better.

Riding the local kid's train with the Bradshaw's

On Saturday just as Tony and Tim were driving away from the house to take a load of our belongings to storage, some of the kids came running out of the house to tell us there was water dripping from our basement ceiling.  Tim went to investigate, and sure enough, one of our water pipes was leaking.  He cut open the drywall and fixed the leaking pipe, but here we were, just days away from listing our house on the market, and our basement ceiling looked like this:

The earliest we could get someone to patch the drywall was on Friday, the same day the real estate photographer was coming to take pictures of our house!  Talk about cutting it close.  The photographer came in the morning with the instructions to use a camera angle that didn't show the hole in our ceiling.  The drywall guy came in the afternoon and did a beautiful job repairing the hole. We are finally ready to go!

Here's some more of our summer fun:

The water table Grandma got for Spencer and Michael's birthdays has been a super hit.  Michael's Real Kids Shades have transformed his life as he can be outside in the sun now without his eyes killing him because he can't squint.

Michael has had several evaluations and therapy appointments in the past couple of weeks too.  We started a new speech therapist in Denver that focuses on oral-motor skills.  She is fantastic!  Here she is working with Michael to teach him how to blow into a whistle, something we wondered if he could ever do.  She is confident Michael will be able to eventually say all vowels and consonants.  We are going to try and see her often as possible during the summer with our busy schedule and then see her weekly when school starts.  She also recommended we see a regular speech therapist once a week locally as well to work on Michael's language acquisition and vocabulary skills so he will eventually have two speech therapy appointments a week.  While he understands just about everything we say to him, he is about 75% speech delayed, so we've got a lot of work to do to help him catch up.

Tim's brother, Scott, and his family stopped by for a day on their drive from California to Nauvoo (Illinois).  He and the older 3 kids spent the day with them at Rocky Mountain National Park.  It was so fun to see them.

We had a great night out with good friends in Fort Collins at the local dinner-theater.  It was great to get together and catch up.  Tim started out with these guys as friends at BYU.  They all eventually married and we now have almost 16 kids between all of us!

The kids just finished up 2 weeks of swim lessons.  On the last day, Sarah had the courage to jump off the diving board for the first time!  She did awesome.  Whitney and Spencer were in the same class and unfortunately still haven't made progress in getting their faces wet.  Whitney is almost too old for the classes offered for her skill level since she hasn't made progress for a few years so we will be looking into a good private teacher to help her.  Any suggestions?

Next post:  hopefully about a new arrival or a house sale!

We're Moving!

It's been a very eventful last few weeks.  For this post we'll talk about the house.  We've known for years that we'd eventually outgrow our starter home and need to get something bigger.  So we've been looking off and on for the last few years but never found anything we liked well enough to justify a move.  And with Michael's illness, any thoughts about moving have been put completely on hold for the last year and a half.

About a month ago Liz and I had a conversation to see if wanted to start looking at houses again.  We're starting to feel awfully scrunched with another baby joining our family in a few short weeks.  She's literally going to be sleeping in a bassinet in our upstairs hallway when we bring her home from the hospital.  But we decided there's no way we'd want to move this year, with a baby being born in June and how intense Michael's therapies have been.  We decided that if the right house came along we'd wouldn't turn it down, but we wouldn't be actively looking and we'd plan to stay in our current house at least another year.

Within a week of making that decision, we put an offer on a house.  It was a great house, in a great neighborhood, had everything we needed except a yard.  The next day we decided the lack of a yard was enough of a deal breaker and withdrew our offer (it hadn't been accepted yet).

A few weeks later we saw another great house in another great neighborhood and ended up putting an offer on that house.  Our offer was accepted!  So now we have to get our current house ready to sell, and we're going to be moving, and we're having a baby in a few weeks.  Are we insane?! :-)