The Boy You've All Been Waiting For

As promised, I am here to unveil the new addition, because I love you. Introducing:

Our little bundle of fun, Spencer Matthew Warner. Vital stats, so you can be in the know with celebrity gossip: 8 pounds, 3 ounces, born at 3:24 AM on February 16, 2012. 2/16/12. A plaindrome, incidentally, because Spencer is cool like that. We like him already. Except he's a punk. Normally I do not write birth stories, but I want to have a written narrative someday to embarrass Spencer in front of his girlfriends. We will attempt to keep things PG for the kids. But if words like epidural, dilate and adorable scare you, skip to the pictures at the end of the good-looking people I hang out with.

We could go into a lot of unnecessary detail of labor, but here's the gist: I had a doctor's appointment on Wednesday at which I was dilated to a 2. After the appointment, I had irregular contractions that came and went all day, which didn't alarm me because I've been contracting for three weeks with no birth story to show for it. So I ignored it. After we went to bed, the contractions kept going, so eventually I got up to time them. At which point they stopped completely, so I went back to bed. Twenty minutes later, I started getting contractions every two minutes, followed by a huge amount of bleeding, which caused me to freak out and wake up Jessie and demand we head to the hospital immediately. Because they know what to do with panicking hormonal women at the hospital. On the way to hospital, I all of a sudden started having extremely painful contractions extremely close together, and finally started to contemplate the theory that I was in labor. Upon arrival at the hospital, the nurses seemed remarkably less concerned about the bleeding than I was, and much more concerned about the fact that I was dilated to a 6. This seemed ridiculous to me, because obviously I had only been in labor about half an hour and there was no way I was that far along. But an hour and a half later, when Spencer was born, I was still trying to convince myself we were in labor. Talk about fast. I'm still a little shell shocked.

But, it's true, we're now a family of five. The girls were thrilled to wake up and discover their brother had decided to grace us with his presence. Madeline was especially thrilled to come see him, although she was worried about the hole in my stomach and was anxious to bring tape to fix it. She wanted to hold Spencer the whole time she was here, and alternated between calling him Spencer and Ali Baba. Kimberly really surprised me. She was neither jealous nor indifferent. She got really excited and said "Baby! Baby!" and even held him for a minute, looking very serious and grownup as she did so. Then she crawled into the bottom of a hospital cart and spilled my water cup. Jessie has been great. He's getting used to talking boy talk instead of girl talk. Spencer may get called a princess a few times before we're all on the same page.

Anyway, we're all adjusting and trying to get some sleep after a crazy night. We love our little guy, who thus far is pretty quiet and sleepy. I'll leave you with some pictures of the star of the day. Enjoy. Ooh and aww to your heart's content. Feel free to covet such an awesomely studly baby.

Did you miss me?

I'm back. You can exhale. There is still no baby around here. I know that if I leave you all alone for too long you'll start suspecting things and going crazy with curiosity and your whole lives become meaningless because you're on baby watch with absolutely nothing else to think about, and I hate to do that to you. (Or is that just me?) Anyway, rest assured that we would never leave you out of the loop for that long. Aside from family, friends, and other people we know, my virtual community is absolutely my top priority when dessiminating information. And let's not kid ourselves, there will be pictures and announcements all over Facebook within about 48.3 minutes of birth. So fear not.

But let's all step back and wander to other topics for a moment, celebrating the estrogen in our little family. My other kids have somehow managed to survive baby watch thus far with minimal damage to their self esteem and physical motor skills. In fact, today we took Kimberly to the doctor for a checkup and the doctor pronounced her fit for jury duty. She's really, really, really tall. Like 99th percentile. Doc said if she keeps up above the ninetieth percentile til age two, she's going to be a tall person. Poor Kimberly is going to curse her genetics when she's looking for guys over six feet to date and they're all making out with the five foot two girls. C'est la vie. She's also still skinny despite consuming more than me at most meals. So maybe that'll be a consolation prize in her teenage years. She's getting pretty talkative and just a little bit sassy like someone else we know (cough, cough, Madeline, cough) but she's still so dratted cute we can't bring ourselves to get rid of her.

Speaking of Madeline, she's a little person these days instead of a toddler, and it keeps freaking me out. She loves Primary and her friends, and is very into having boyfriends. I don't know why. Maybe it's the in thing among three year olds right now. She quit taking naps and instead likes to do puzzles while I'm passed out on the couch. She nods knowingly when I am thus reclined and says things like "You have a headache Mom?" or "You can play on the floor and bend over when Ali Baba comes. Ali Baba is taking longer." She's eager to hold her brother, but in the meantime is practicing her mothering skills on Kimberly, mostly by bossing her around, trying to send her to timeout, or trying to brush her hair or send her to bed. She has to have everything just so, and often gets a hysterical need to clean at bedtime or when it's time to walk out the door. She also manages to keep us enamored with her though, usually by saying I love you unprompted at opportune times that conveniently change our minds about sending her to boarding school.

Oh. And I guess I may have mentioned this in passing, but ye faithful will probably already know that Jessie has a new job now. He now works for a company called Lendio, which is fun to listen to Madeline say over and over. Attask was good to us, but it was time to move on, and now Jessie can go get into trouble elsewhere and wreak havoc upon unsuspecting victims.

So that's the lowdown on us. I'd update you all on me, but you know how that's going. Let's just leave it at: nine months pregnant. Hope you are all having a grand February. Please don't take my blogging silence personally. Top secret and sensitive information and undercover missions and all that. You understand.

A short note of sunny encouragement.

I feel like I've dropped off the face of the earth. I hear that's okay when you're nine months pregnant. I don't feel like blogging a lot because I feel like all I will do is complain. Because this is the fun part. Speaking of which, can I just say I hate false labor? I never really had it with the girls so it's a new and fun experience. While not really physically painful, it's driving me batty. Also I'm probably going to have a nervous breakdown. Stupid contractions. Also, our furnace broke and our house is cold. That is definitely helping my emotional well-being. Also, Jessie is starting a new job next week. This is a good thing but for some reason it seemed prudent to put it in the middle of my list of awesome things. So you can see why blogging is at the top of my list of priorities. Just one of many things being left on the wayside as I travel into irrational hormonal hermitage. Other things include dishes, laundry, cleaning, entertaining my children, cooking, church, and Words with Friends. So you see, this is getting serious. I'll let you know if the governor declares a state of emergency. Until then, direct all inquiries through our disaster management guru Jessie, who manages to maintain a happy demeanor by being amused at my eccentricities. Thank goodness for long-suffering spouses. Until next time, I'll be on the couch timing contractions and strategizing baby eviction plans.

All about pregnancy and me and pregnancy and babies.

I have a little bit of a one track mind lately. Can you blame me? When your every move feels like a freight train, you start to get a little obsessed with your stomach. And if it will ever return to normal proportions. We have five weeks until the due date, which sounds really close but not nearly close enough. Today we got a little crazy, and since Madeline is still obsessed with chains from Christmas, we combined our obsessions and created this:

It's a little hard to see, but you should be impressed. This is our Ali Baba countdown. It's highly complex and amazing. We have two more weeks of white chains. Then we move into yellow, which means CAUTION! FULL TERM! 10% chance of baby or maybe snow! But based on past experience, this is a depressing phase in which I will hopefully wonder every day if maybe today is the day, but nothing will happen except an excess of walking and drinking pineapple juice. My birthday has a special chain with balloons and birthday cake, because Madeline has expressed great concern that there is birthday cake this month. Then on Valentine's Day we have the special green link in honor of my due date. Green for go time, obviously. Not that we'll have a baby by then. Then we move into red territory. Red meaning danger: Cami is liable to be extremely hormonal and dangerous and ready to consume castor oil. Red meaning: We love you Ali Baba, but you're late and if you know what's good for you you will exit the premises immediately. Then, at the top, a handmade visual depiction of our new little man on the 22nd, which is my induction date. This was not my choice. I have no qualms with being induced the second I hit my due date. I also love epidurals and other medical interventions. I'm probably on some dangerous mother list somewhere. But back to induction: My doctor is out of town the week of my due date, so it was early induction or waiting it out. Woe is me. I'm going to be an unhappy blimp by the 22nd. Speaking of which:

I feel like I'm bursting. I know, other women have been bigger. But I feel like this is the biggest I've ever been pregnant, and I can't look away from my slow descent into rotundity.

Anyway. You've probably been thoroughly inundated with pregnancy updates now, so we'll give you a break. Thanks for sticking through. I promise that in a month there will be a reward for your patience. And mine. I have been assured that no women has ever been pregnant forever.

Happy New Year. Check.

Ha. Did I say I was working on a New Year's post? I'm only about four days late. Blame it on the fun we're having trying to get two girls to sleep in the same room. On the bright side, they've been sleeping in a little bit later than usual, which has the unintended side effect of proving to me I can be functional at seven if I don't have to wake up an hour before that. But I have thought about some New Year's goals. Mostly they are pretty short term. Survive until I have this baby. Try not to let my kids run wild. Try to keep my house in some semblance of order. Huge goals like that. I've decided to keep my sanity by not trying to make huge goals right now. So in honor of New Year's, I will instead give you a list of goals we've already accomplished this year, because we are awesome. Because that's much more fun than coming up with more things you have to do.

1. Move girls into the same room. Check. We won't mention the fact that we're still miles away from smooth napping and bedtimes. But their beds are in the same physical space. Score.

2. Get ready for baby. Check. Crib, car seat, bassinet, clothes, hospital registration, diapers, binkis, etc. Jessie got motivated and now all systems are go. The only problem is we've still got six weeks until D-day. Drat it all. And we haven't settled on a name yet. But babies don't need names. Just diapers. So we can totally cross this off.

(Random belly picture to show you how hard we are working on this baby thing. We take our goals very seriously.)

3. Put away Christmas. Check. We have successfully killed the Christmas spirit. All cheery decor has been safely stowed and hidden away. The front room is back to normal and Christmas treats were consumed and converted to fat. The piles of toys all over our house with no home are a different story. We don't talk about that.

4. Party like it's 2012. Check. We are fun machines. We've attended New year's parties, played Jessie's new Ticket to Ride game, attended a Jazz game/girls night, eaten eclairs, made cookies, and basically just been awesome. We're exhausted. But awesome.

5. Fulfill public speaking duties. Check. Jessie was supposed to give a talk in church on Sunday, but didn't have to because he spoke after a returned missionary who kindly used the whole meeting and got Jessie off the hook. Jessie knew this would probably happen, so he wasn't broken up about it, and I feel like this has probably gotten him off the hook for talking for another year. And more importantly, gets me off the hook to have to talk with him. Score.

That seems like a good list. Suddenly I feel very accomplished and productive. For the first time this year. I love revisionist histories. I feel like you all should go set New Year's goals to be as awesome as us. Hope your year is a ball of fun so far.

The post Christmas lull

Hello world, are you alive? Glad to hear you survived the Christmas holidays. We did too. Mostly. Christmas Day was awesome, but Christmas Eve night was even better because Madeline decided to be awake for most of it. In desperation we let her sleep in our bed for the first time since she was counting her age in months. In return for this generous gesture, she kicked us a lot. So no one got much sleep. Well, Kimberly did. So she woke us up at like 5:30. Silly girls. But other than the lack of sleep, Christmas was great. The girls got everything they wanted and a lot of things they didn't know they wanted. Kimberly was super excited and just bounced up and down for an hour going "wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow!" Madeline kept trying to open all the gifts she bought for other people because she thought they were for her. Jessie finally got to open his belt, and for good measure, contracted an awesome cold. Good times were had by all.

Because we were all sick and tired this week, we decided it was a good time to turn the girls world upside down and traumatize them, so we switched them into new beds. Actually, we've planning to do this for a while because I knew both girls were getting new bed sets and so we set Christmas as the deadline. Otherwise I'd still be procrastinating it in a year and poor Ali Baba would be sleeping in a bassinet until he was three. Surprisingly, they have handled the transition well, and Madeline is now in a twin bed and Kimberly is in a toddler bed. I thought Madeline would start a mutiny at any disruption in her routine and that moving a thirteen month old into a bed would result in a lot of escaping, but neither doomsday scenario came to pass, and both girls have been sleeping better than they have in weeks. Go figure. The next step is moving them into the same room, but I feel leery that our good luck can continue, so Jessie will be engineering that adventure. I'm just in charge of manufacturing a baby for the now vacant crib. Lucky me.

Well, we'll leave you with that until our highly anticipated New Year's post, for which I have to think of some new year's goals. I'm thinking lose twenty pounds by the end of February. And/or get more sleep. Too ambitious? Yeah, I thought so too.

Merry Christmas, and to all, some more sleep

Merry Christmas everybody. I know, I'm a bit early, but let's face it: I'm in no way going to blog on Christmas. Or even tomorrow. So you all get your bit of Christmas cheer now. We've been done with the shopping and baking (ha! baking! we're pretending there was some of that going on this year) and all the decorating and whatnot for a while now, because I didn't want to fight crowds or be stressed or forget anything. Only now it's two days until Christmas and we have nothing we need to do, which feels a little weird, and a little stressful, and I'm almost tempted to go get something meaningless from the store just to fight crowds and feel like I'm being productive. The house is mostly clean, thanks to a couple Christmas parties I was forced to clean for, the presents are wrapped, and the kids are sufficiently cranky and sleep deprived to guarantee barrels of fun. It's okay, because it's giving me lots of practice waiting impatiently for something to happen which I'm sure will come in handy in February.

We are excited for Christmas though. I'm ridiculously excited about the presents we have for the girls, and I hope they get excited too. Kimberly has gotten some practice opening presents so I think she has the idea this year, as long as she's opening someone else's present before the actual day. Madeline, of course, gets it completely, and knows exactly which presents under the tree are for her, how many chains she has to take off before Christmas morning, and how many chocolates she is allowed to consume every day. The only thing she doesn't get is the idea of a secret. Two seconds after we wrapped Jessie's gift she was yelling across the house, "Daddy! We have a secret surprise belt present for you! It's a surprise! It might be a belt...?" So I'm glad I didn't let her help wrap many presents. All of our ornaments are on the top half of our tree because Kimberly has a problem staying away from shiny round objects. And our Christmas lights get turned on and off twenty times a day, so if you drive by our house, we're not signaling for help with Morse code. Just celebrating, the Warner way. Hope you all have such a Merry Christmas. I wouldn't have it any other way. Well, I wouldn't say no to having the holiday involve a little more sleep. But other than that. Just perfect.