Cousins!

These girls are so cute together! Noelle and her cousin Anya love to play together, and Krysta occasionally likes to get in on the action too ;)
Sorry the video turns sideways. In my tired state I got stupid with the camera.

Going On 3 Weeks...

...And I am tired. Sheesh. I forgot about how exhausting it is to have a newborn. And now I have an older child. (Who is currently doing something that sounds very ominous in her bedroom, but I am too tired just now to get up off the couch and investigate.) Which means I don't get to "sleep when the baby sleeps". Lol. People have actually given me that advice again this time around. Ok, and what exactly shall I do with my two-year-old while myself and the baby are sleeping? Yes, I'm cranky too. I don't really remember what pics I have on my camera right now, so how bout I'll take a look through and see what I feel like posting? K? K.

We were being too loud I guess

Ready for your close up?

She has the best smiles! They are mostly just gassy smiles, but they are bright rays of sunshine anyway :D My favorites are when she just goes all out and gets the biggest, gummy grin on her face. She looks like she's just heard the funniest joke or opened the best present ever.

Tia Krysta and the girlies. Krysta was so very kind to me yesterday and watched the girls so I could take a nap. Cause Soleil was up all during Noelle's nap, and when she finally fell asleep, Noelle woke up. My sister is an angel.

Ok Maybe They're Not Identical...

But man they're so similar! Try and guess who is who, although it's prob pretty obvious cause the same picture of Soleil is in the last post. Ok:
Baby #1Baby #2 (sorry it's sideways and I don't wanna bother trying to fix it)

Could you guess? That's right, #1 is Leilei and #2 is Noelle. Leilei has longer, darker hair (who would have thought that was possible?) and maybe fuller lips, but it still astounds me how similar they are! And now for a 1-week update:

Soleil is doing fantastic :) She is still eating very well and really sleeping at night very well for a newborn, I think. She's already gained back any weight she lost after birth and we are having a fun time enjoying her sweet little personality. And doing her hair Elvis style.

Soleil Aneese Thurman

She is here, she is here! Our sweet little Soleil (So-lay) Aneese Thurman was born May 11, 2011 at 2:21 pm. She weighed 7 lbs. 13 oz. and was 20 inches long :) And she is just perfect! All us girlies! Noelle was quite happy to see me again, thought her little sister was pretty interesting, and even got a new shirt that says "I'm the big sister!"

My little "Plug-in" baby. She had to be on bili-lights for days cause of jaundice. More info on that below :)



A nice close-up :) Soleil and Noelle seem like identical twins, just two years apart. I've never seen such similar babies that weren't twins!

Getting her first bath! We've made it kind of a tradition now that Daddy gives the first bath. Maybe everybody does that, I don't know. Soleil LOVED having her hair washed, but wasn't too thrilled about the rest of it :)

It was such a relief to finally hold her in my arms and look at her sweet face! She is so wonderful. Her name means sun in French, and she really is our little sunshine, which has been nice with all this rainy weather!

Now, if you want the birth story, keep on a-readin! It might be kinda gross if you aren't a mother/expecting mother.

Soleil was such a sweet, obliging little baby. My due date was May 10th, but she was a very good little girl and stayed in mommy to let Erik and I walk at our Graduation on Sat, May 7th. We really appreciated it, but once graduation was over, we were ready for her to come! We graduated on Saturday, and had to move the very next Saturday! So we were pretty anxious for her to get here.

Unfortunately, she didn't really want to come right after graduation, which would have been perfect. She didn't come Saturday. Or Sunday. OR Monday. OR Tuesday. On Tuesday I had a Dr appointment. My doc knew we needed to move Saturday, so he scheduled for us to be induced the next morning at 7am (which, I found out is kind of a treat. They schedule most inductions for the middle of the night. I was a VBAC and I guess nobody wants to potentially be called into the hospital for an emergency C-section in the middle of the night, so they schedule VBACs for the morning :) She didn't come Tuesday night, so Erik and I went in Wednesday morning for me to be induced.

My Dr also knew that I wanted to have a natural, unmedicated birth, so the plan was that he would break my water and see if that got things going before we tried drugs. I was already dilated to almost a 4 when we got there, and Leilei was super low in my pelvis so things looked good. They broke my water and contractions started immediately. I was handling them pretty well. They weren't too strong yet and were about 5 minutes apart. However, after an hour I guess I had not made any progress in dilating, so I had to have pitocin.

They hooked me up and BAM, that stuff works really really well on me. My contractions got super hard and were only about two minutes apart-- all in the space of about 20 minutes. Then they upped the dose a little bit, and my contractions started coming one on top of the other. I would have three in a row, no rest in between, and then get about one or two minutes of rest before the next set started. It sucked. Bad. In no time I was dilated to about a 7.

So I tapped out. I had really hoped for a natural birth, but those contractions were just too much. I got an epidural, but it only worked on my right side; on my left I could still feel everything, and I was still rapidly progressing. So I had to have the epidural re-done. When they did the first one they said how much it was going to hurt to have all the tape holding the epidural in ripped off my back when I was done. Well, when they un-did it I just happened to be in the middle of a contraction and let me tell you, I didn't feel that tape come off at all.

When the second epidural was in, I finally felt instant relief. It was so peaceful, and just in time, cause on the last contraction I felt, I could tell it was time to push. So I started pushing :) It was a little difficult. I couldn't feel anything at all cause of the amount of meds I had from trying the epidural twice, but I think I did a fair job of it for being a first-time pusher. And to be honest it made pushing quite peaceful. It took about an hour and a half of pushing, but I didn't realize how much of that time would be spent waiting around for contractions to push with. My contractions slowed down and spaced out dramatically when it was pushing time. So I would push for a bit, then we would all wait around for 3 or 4 minutes for the next one. I was pushing so hard it was nice to have the rests in between.

She finally came a 2:21 :D I did have some tearing, but my doc decided not to do an epesiotomy. Either way I still ended up with stitches though. But it was all worth it as soon as she was here. They set her right on my belly and I just looked at her and held her and fell instantly in love. After about an hour of just holding her we were ready to try nursing, and she is a pro! She had it down from the start and has had no trouble since. It has been such a pleasant surprise considering all the troubles we had with Noelle. But now I have two darling daughters and I couldn't be happier :)

After her first day she had a biliruben test done for jaundice and we found out that it was quite high. Sadly, she had to go on the bili-lights. The worst part was that she could only come off them to eat and have her diaper changed. Otherwise she needed to be on them 24/7. We were anxious to follow the rules exactly, cause we didn't want to have to go home with the lights too. But it was very hard not to get to hold and snuggle her all the time. We were blessed though in that our hospital had the latest and greatest in bili-lights (one of the reasons I was adamant on having her in Cedar City is that the hospital there is so maternity/baby-oriented. They are fantastic) so she didn't have to be in one of those tanning-bed-looking-deals, just lights underneath her. However, the only size of mask they had to protect her eyes was preemie size, and she is not a preemie! They were so small and squoze her so tight that her eyes and ears got all red, puffy, and sad. She couldn't be swaddled and I couldn't hold her, so to comfort her all I could do was stand over her and put my hands on her and talk to her. We weren't going to give her a pacifier for a while because we didn't want nipple confusion (we think that's what happened with Noelle) but she needed comfort so bad that we gave one to her anyway. And she doesn't like it! Lol it is hard to get her to accept one at all, but somtimes it helped enough to fulfill those sucking needs babies have and give her some comfort.

We ended up staying in the hospital an extra day so she could be on the lights, but it was worth it because it brought her jaundice down enough that she didn't have to go home with them. Unfortunately, that meant that we stayed til Saturday, which was moving day. Saturday morning Erik, my mom, and several amazing people from our ward loaded up the moving truck, cleaned our apartment, and then left. About an hour later Leilei and I were discharged from the hospital. We hopped right into the car and drove from Cedar City to our new apartment in South Jordan. I never even saw our old place again after I left it to have her on Wednesday lol. But it does make me sad that none of our friends in Cedar got to meet her :( Now we are at our new house and loving life with our two girls :) And loving that things are a little calmer now!