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.

Fulfilling Lifelong Dreams

We all have them. At least I assume we do. Some of them have personal meaning, like revisiting a mission area. Some of them are educational, like seeing all the capitals of Europe. Some of them are spiritual, and I won't speculate as to what these might be, because they are so different by person. And some of them are just silly. For example, one day, I want to be able to do a Tuesday afternoon seminar in the BYU Statistics department. This will have to be after I do some research that would qualify me, so I don't expect it any time soon.

But I have had another dream very closely related to that one that has now been fulfilled. Or at least it will be starting in January. I'm teaching Stat 221! Ultimately, this is what I would like to do with my life. Of course, this is all dependent on my husband having a job, so for now, it's more of a part-time avocation than a career path. I'm just excited that I get to start so much sooner that I expected. I'll be up at the BYU Salt Lake Center once a week on Mondays. I don't know a whole lot more than that, but I'm sure excited!

Beginning of December

For the past seven months or so, I've been telling myself that I don't have to think about having a baby until at least Christmas. After all, he's not due until January 11th, and that's ages away. But yesterday, I woke up and realized that it's really not that far away. Less than six weeks, in fact. I was born earlier than this.

I guess it really hit me that I should probably think about what life is going to be like when we have a baby. And that Andrew and I should really invest some time in putting together a place for the baby to live. And we should probably buy some things like, oh, onesies, diapers, wipes, binkies, and all those other strange items no one would consider buying normally. I'm sure there are at least another thirty absolutely essential items I'll need, but at this point, I can't even think about those. My whole concentration right now is to get a dresser of some sort, so all of the stuff we do have for the baby will have a place to live other than our living room sofa. If I can accomplish that, I'll feel good about my month.