Movers and Shakers

The title of this post comes from two of Isaac's favorite things to do: move himself, and shake things. Hitting should have been in there too, but alas, no clever titles that I could think of involved all three. Because of these three favorite passtimes, Isaac now sports a very lovely red bump on the side of his eye, and I think he'll have a rather large one on the back of his head soon. Marble will do that to you.

All in all, I knew that the day would come when my child would always look a little worse for wear. I never expected it to come before his eight month mark.

On the other hand, there's nothing quite as beautiful as watching him sleep. Because he's never still any more, I treasure these times. Yes, I admit that I crawl into his room just to watch him sleep. Pretty soon you'll find me singing "I love you forever..."

Being a mom

Sometimes, I wonder about this whole mom thing. Only as a mom...

1. I find pear puree in my hair and consider it normal.

2. I hear the words "No, we don't chew on power cords" coming out of my own mouth and I consider it normal.

3. I participate in a variation of red-light, green-light while going to bed. Isaac's the stop light.

But then again, only as a mom do I get baby hugs and smiles and the joy and worry of a first tooth. Life is good.

An Eventful 3 months

Since my last post, we've moved into Alpine, gone on a month-long cross-country road trip, moved out of Alpine, and moved into a single bedroom in Fountain Valley. Hey, real estate is a bit more expensive here. I'd say that qualifies as eventful. Isaac went from swinging his arms and legs wildly to being a fully active crawling dervish who can pull himself to a standing position in his crib and cry AT us. Andrew went from being a stay-at-home dad with no responsibilities beyond himself and Isaac to being a full-time medical student, and I went from being a full-time working woman to a stay-at-home mom. I wondered for a minute if I could fit any more hyphens in this paragraph, but I think I'm done.

With all these changes, life is still great. I love being a mommy, and it's especially fun right now because I'm living with my sister-in-law who has a baby about three months younnger than Isaac and near another sister-in-law with a baby about five months younger. Another sister-in-law is expecting in the beginning of October. It's so fun to be with family who are in the same place. We trade screaming baby stories.

This is a fairly boring post, but I felt like something was required to bring us up to date. Currently, we're waiting for our apartment to open up, and then we'll once again have our own home. Right now that sounds like paradise. I was going to post a picture, but since the cable is missing, I will consider this a sign: time to stop.

Singing Baby

While we sat in our living room, with Andrew at the piano and Rebecca singing, we found that Isaac likes Handel. A very poor version of "Rejoice, Greatly" went from a solo aria to a duet. Isaac was not on pitch, but was very enthusiastic in his singing and very happy while doing so. On the Isaac front, he has a flat head and a twisted neck. I guess if you have to pick problems for your child to have, these aren't too bad. On the other hand, he woke last night at 1:30 for the first time in a LONG time, and kept his daddy awake for a long time - like an hour. We weren't really sure what to do about that, since he's spoiled us so much. We take him into the doctors office this week for his 4 month appointment. More immunizations and a check for his growth. Everyone we'ved talked to lately has commented on how long he is. Last time he was the 50th percentile, so we'll see if that changes. We've been so lucky with how healthy he's been.

On to the Becca front. I'm excitedly counting the days to when I finish work. 14 work days, if you want to know. Memorial day is in there, so I keep telling myself that I only have two full weeks left. This last week, my supervisor became my former supervisor. I feel kind of bad, but I had a feeling his job was in danger several months ago, and he didn't seem to realize it. If he did, he certainly didn't make any adjustments to what he was doing. Now, we're leading the team by committee and it's great. I'm doing way more interesting things and remembering why I liked this job in the first place. Andrew's also trying to convince me that I should get my wisdom teeth out in the next three weeks before we lose dental coverage. My head knows that he is right, but I really don't want to go through that. My mom was mentioning that my brother got pills to take to knock him out. If they can do that for me, I'm all in. We'll see if my knowledge that Andrew is right can beat out my fear of nasty pain. My days are great, because I work from 6:30 to 3:00. I love that schedule. I went biking this last week for the first time since the triathlon last year. It hurt. I was on one of those really narrow seats, and they are NOT comfortable. I really can't think of anything else to say about my life.

Andrew has become the ultimate male slug. He sleeps in, rarely gets out of the house, and generally does nothing. Just kidding. Kind of. He takes care of Isaac in the morning while I'm at work. He says he takes care of Isaac all day long. At the very least, he is our resident diaper changer. I like it. Since graduating from BYU, he's been gradually boxing up our possessions, and trying to convince me that we can take most of our stuff to DI. I'm not buying it. He's also slightly disgusted by the number of holiday decoration boxes I have. Sue me. Sometimes he plays Wii, and he goes running with Isaac in Sarah's jogging stroller. He also looks up and sends really obscure YouTube videos to the family, as I'm sure you've noticed. Isaac is sitting in Andrew's lap, and he just pulled himself into a half sit up position. If only he could do that on his tummy.

The weather here has been absolutely beautiful. The lane that leads up to our house is bordered by lilac bushes, and they will be fully blooming in about three days. The tulips
have been absolutely gorgeous, and are just now starting to fade. All the blossoms are starting to fall off the trees, and leaves are appearing. I love spring in Utah. We've had temperatures in the high sixties and low seventies, which is perfect here for taking a walk outside to appreciate all the flowers. We even, after much begging on my part, went to the Tulip Festival at Thanksgiving Point. It was gorgeous, but then again, it always is.








Friday night, we went to take family pictures with one of my friends who is considering a side job in photography. She wanted free models, and we wanted a free photographer. We'll see if anything turns out from that. I hope so, but Isaac was in one of his rare bad moods and wouldn't smile. Oh well. That's what you get with a four month old, I guess.

Our ward choir is uniformly bad. We're speaking in church the 24th. We're also singing in church the 24th. I'm also playing the organ the 24th. The exective secretary came up and asked if we'd also like to say the prayers or pass the sacrament or something. It's our last week in the ward, so I guess they want us to go out with a bang. That is, with everyone glad to see our backs. Church today was really good. We had a youth speaker, and then two adults, one of whom had been a single mother for years. She gave a great talk on how much she loved being a mother, even though it was a lot harder to do alone. The last talk ended with 20 minutes to go in the meeting, and we sang the closing song and ended. I was a little surprised, but I definitely remember what was said in the talks.

Yes, this letter is definitely long, but hopefully it makes up for the fact that we haven't written in months, and for all of Andrew's bad YouTube videos.

Hasta la vista, Baby.
Andrew and Rebecca (not Isaac, he can't talk yet)

End of school, beginning of office

Well, the school year is coming to an end for Andrew, and I think he's pretty excited about it. Could be wrong, of course. But I think so. And since he got into UCI, the excitement just keeps building. As of now, our life consists of Andrew finishing up school, me going into the office for half days, Isaac continuing to be the cutest and happiest baby in the world, and all of us looking forward to our last family summer break.

Since this is the last summer we'll all have free, we're planning on living it up. We'll spend the month of June playing in Utah, culminating in what promised to be a very exciting family reunion in the Springville ward building, and then head down to California to play for the month of July. In August, life begins again and hopefully we'll have a little more stability, but definitely less play time. It is too bad that Isaac will probably not have any memories of family activities until he's about eight, but there's not much we can do about it.

Here's the video

Isaac's smiling!

Isaac has been smiling for about 4 weeks, but he's been remarkably difficult to catch with a picture. Finally, we gave up and just started filming. Much easier. We didn't have to try to hit the button at just the right moment. Then we got this one picture that seemed to turn out ok. It figures.

Pictures

What a cute boy! Even as a newborn.

I was pretty happy to finally have that baby in my hands and not my body.

And here we are, two weeks later, as besotted parents. He has so many facial expressions, we decided to start taking pictures. I think we got all of these in about 10 minutes.

Our New, Expanded Family

I realize this is a little late, but from what I hear talking to other people, that's pretty normal. Yes, we had our beautiful baby boy, but after sending out maybe two emails, Andrew calling a bunch of people, and a few pictures on Facebook, I felt totally overwhelmed and the blog posting had to wait. So, here we are, two and a half weeks later, and Isaac's alseep. I therefore pull out my computer and begin to write

I went into labor early Sunday morning, but with contractions coming about 10-15 minutes apart, there was no reason to go to the hospital. I didn't think I could make it to primary, so I had Andrew come pick me up before Sacrament meeting, which I spent in the mothers room. My reasoning was that in the mothers room, I wouldn't be disturbing anyone with occasional moans during someone's talk. I thought it might be a bit distracting in the chapel.

After church, contractions slowed down, so we decided to go to Alpine for dinner as we had planned. Since you're supposed to have contractions five minutes apart for an hour before going to the hospital, and Alpine's only 40 minutes from the hospital, I figured we'd be fine. And sure enough, we were. After Alpine, we went to my grandparents and stayed there for a few hours. By this time, it's about nine o'clock at night and contractions are still about 15 mintues apart. We went home, and they started getting a little closer together, but still about 10 mintues apart. This was the one and only time I broke down, thinking that this was false labor and I would have to go through all of this again. However, around 11, the contractions were coming 5 minutes apart, and lasting for close to 2 minutes, so we went to the hospital. We got there, they put me in a room, told me that yes, I was going to have a baby, and if I wanted an epidural. At this point, I'd been having painful contractions for almost 20 hours, so of course I said yes, I wanted one. They hooked up the IV (probably the worst part of the whole procedure) and the anesthesiologist came soon after.

To condense several hours into a single sentence, the first epidural didn't work, and a few hours later they gave me a second one that worked marvelously. I was very happy at that point. My water never did break, so at 6:30 in the morning my doctor came in and broke my water and told me to start pushing. Isaac Monson Richardson was born at 8:37 in the morning at 7 lbs 11 oz and 19 inches long with a bit (ok, a lot) of tearing for me. I guess he was worth it.

I'm now sititng in our living room, while Isaac rocks on his daddy's lap, wide eyed and calm. That might be the best adjective to describe this child. He yawned through his circumsision, stared at the doctor while she poked and prodded him, and just looks up at us while we clean goop out of his eyes. And other than two or three growth spurt nights, he sleeps between 5 and 7 hours at a time at night. I don't think we could ask for a more perfect child. He's beautiful and well behaved. If only I knew where that came from.