Our budding little artist has been making stuff like this on his “V•Reader”:

Cataloging here.

At 10:30am on April 12, 2012, we welcomed our new son Emery Stephen into the world. He was 8 pounds, 7½ ounces, and was 21 inches long. “He’s a real singer,” the nurse complimented as he launched into a forty minute wail. But he is a handsome devil, and we cannot wait to bring him home.

Amy did great–about a 9½ hour labor, and no medication. The nurses said she made it look easy.

We are all excited (if a bit tired).

Holden had a dream (nightmare?) last night. He told it to us this morning, and it went a bit like this:

Me and Mommy and Daddy and Carl Sagan were in a museum looking at owl bones. And then we went to the hospital because Mommy was sick. And Carl Sagan was making us dinner at the hospital. And then the phone rang and Daddy thought it was annoying and he pressed the button and BOOM the telephone speaker burned up with star fire flames. Nobody could call us but the fire didn’t get on us.

OK, so I made it to 40 weeks.  Whew!  Now the real waiting begins.  I got checked yesterday, and I’m about the same as last week, but a little closer to 4 cm than 3 this time!  So I’ll take it.  I’m up 33 lbs total, so it looks like I met my goal of staying within 35 lbs. of my pre-pregnancy weight.  I have another appointment set up for next Wednesday in the event that the baby still hasn’t come by then.  I don’t really have any predictions about when labor will happen.  I went 9 days past my due date with H, and looking back on it, there weren’t really any telltale signs on the day that I finally went into labor.  So I guess I’ll know I’m in labor again once transition starts:)

We are continuing to make plans, because why not?  We’re taking H to a friend’s birthday party tomorrow night, and then on Saturday we have brunch plans with friends.  I’m still planning on going to yoga on Sunday morning.  There’s no point in stopping all of these activities—except for work.  I’m really glad that I’ve taken the past 2 weeks to re-group.  I haven’t been sleeping well at night, and I’m uncomfortable all the time, and work was kind of making that discomfort worse.  Plus, having the time off has given me the chance to shift from thinking a lot about work to thinking a lot about our family.  And that is something that I needed to do, I think.

Holden has had his own share of anxieties about the upcoming addition.  His behavior was really pretty bad for most of March.  We attributed this to normal 3.5 year old developmental stuff.  But then the last few days of March he started asking whether March was over yet, and how many more days until April.  We asked him what was happening in April, and he said “My baby brother is going to be here, and I really, REALLY want it to be April NOW!!!”  He then talked about how much he wanted March to be over.  He’s clearly anxious in a good way, not a bad way, but even good anxiety and good stress can affect us negatively.  He then said something surprising—he said that he would be a grown-up in April.  We explained to him that he would still be a kid, and that he did not have to be a grown-up at all in April, or after his brother is born.  I’m sure that all of the innocent questions from other people about whether he’s going to be a big helper with the baby, etc.,  facilitated this view.  The funny part about this is that he didn’t seem stressed about the idea of being a grown-up—in fact, I think he LIKES the idea of being a grown-up.  He even told me that he doesn’t want to be a kid.  Even so, the prospect of that must be stressful to him on some level, which is why I think he was acting up so much last month.  I’m telling you, as soon as that calendar flipped to April 1st, we started seeing enormously improved behavior from him.  I think he was really anxious about getting to his brother’s birth month.  We’ve tried not to make too big of a deal about the new baby (even though it *is* a big deal), so we’d avoid this sort of thing.  But here we are.  I think it will be OK when the baby is here.  I think H will adjust very well.  I just think that the excitement of leading up to the birth (and not knowing what day it’s going to happen) is driving him a little  batty.  But hey, I know plenty of adults who can’t deal with the uncertainty, so it’s not that big a deal for H to be struggling with the ambiguity of it all.

I can’t sleep tonight —I’m completely uncomfortable no matter what I do.  So here I am at 4:15AM, eating a bowl of Frosted Mini Wheats and blogging about our awesome day yesterday!  Yesterday was a beautiful spring day—chilly, but sunny outside with blue skies.  We started our day with yummy breakfast—brown rice pancakes, hash browns, and oranges, with lots of coffee of course.  We then walked over to our park for the annual Easter Egg Hunt.  Everyone in attendance was asked to donate a non-perishable food item as the price of admission (awesome, eh?!), and then all of the kids were divided into large, age-appropriate groups for the egg hunt.  The Pre-K group met out on the baseball field, and after a few minutes of hanging around with hundreds of little plastic eggs in plain sight, the kids were given the signal to start collecting the eggs.  They were given a 10-egg maximum per kid.  Each egg had candy inside, and when we were done, we deposited the plastic egg shells into a cardboard bin for next year.  Here we are waiting for the “hunt” to begin:

Here’s H in action:

And pictured with his loot:

Afterwards, he bonded with the Easter Bunny:

It doesn’t get much cuter than that, does it?  After snuggling with the bunny, we went inside the parks and rec building for donuts and juice.  We walked back home, played outside, played inside, and had a delicious lunch of leftover homemade mac and cheese, fried chicken, and pomegranate-raspberry smoothies (TOTALLY the best beverage I’ve had in a while, hands down).  After lunch, we went out to the store to buy H a bike helmet so that he could come home and practice riding his bike safely:

We topped off our fun spring day with a salmon dinner (complete with quinoa and cucumber relish), and finished up Little House in the Big Woods, which H totally LOVED!!  We read the whole book in less than a week, and now that we’re done, he knows that I mean business when I say I’m going to “tan his hide.”  🙂

Tomorrow:  If I get any sleep between now and 7AM, I’ll probably be in good shape to take a prenatal yoga class in the morning.  How we spend the rest of the day is up in the air!