Two weeks old

Ezra is two weeks old today! Chad has gone back to work so things are becoming a little more "normal" around here, although we are still having family members come to visit. My mom is here now, and once Ezra meets his granddad & Ginny, I think he will have met all the immediate family. He is taking it pretty easy on Chad and me so far and starting to become more alert, and we've even begun to catch a glimpse of what his adorable little gummy smile is going to look like. He's a keeper and we love him more than anything!

More pictures

Emily came for a (too short) visit, and got lots of cuddle time with Ezra.Ezra & Grandma Caskey
He is starting to be awake more during the day. He has always been awake more at night.
Giving Emily a kiss on the cheek
I am glad we have a couple pictures where Ezra is not furrowing his brow, because this is the expression he has on his face a lot of the time. Seriously, what is there to be worried about when you are a tiny baby? (Actually, I think the light is just always too bright for him).
Getting some love from gramme.
And finally, here is a video of Ezra not really doing anything, but I thought those of you who hadn't met him yet (especially grandparents) would be interested in seeing it. Thanks Emily for letting me hijack your camera for the past couple days.

Ezra's birth announcement

One week old

Ezra is one week old today! He is doing great. Here are a few things he is up to lately...Lots of sleeping...he also enjoys being read to, but I don't have a really good picture of that.
He has also started having longer awake periods during the day. He loves when we just sit and talk to him. Here, he and Chad are having a heart-to-heart.

We are just enjoying every moment and I can't believe it's already been a week! At the same time, it's hard to remember what life was like without him.

Ezra's first doctor's appointment

Today Chad and I took Ezra to run a few errands, beginning with his first doctor's visit. He did great and is already back up to his birth weight...he had lost about 6 ounces by the time we had left the hospital. The doctor said everything looked good and we'll go back next week for his two-week appointment. After the doctor we went to the mall to get my engagement ring cleaned, then to the post office, then to Kinko's. It was nice to get out of the house, but the kiddo was ready to be home by the time I got back in the car from making copies.

Tomorrow Ezra turns a week old, and the time is really flying by. He is the sweetest baby. He sleeps a lot but is already starting to have more alert times, mostly around 3 to 5 in the morning. Every other time I feed him during the day, he sacks out almost immediately, but after he eats during the early morning he is ready to party! He is doing pretty well at holding his head up and likes to chew on his hands. We are just the typical first-time parents who think everything he does is the cutest and/or funniest thing ever.

So, that is the latest update. He is really ready to meet the rest of his grandparents, aunts and uncles, so y'all hurry and get here!

A few more pictures

Poor kid doesn't have any clothes.
I think I'm going to use this last one for his birth announcement.

First few days home

Things are starting to feel more "normal" around here as we have become a family of three. Here are some pictures we've taken over the past couple days since we've been home...There's nothing like a nap on dad's chest.
Stop taking my picture. (This is also what he was doing during our 3-D ultrasound)
I had to get out of the house yesterday, so we went on our first walk around the neighborhood. Ezra was super impressed the whole time.
The hat doesn't quite fit, but he'll grow into it. Start 'em young is what I say.
Paul and Carolyn have been here since Thursday helping us around the house and giving Ezra plenty of attention. I think Paul has held Ezra the entire time they've been over here...and Ezra's not complaining! (sorry about the blurriness...drives me crazy!)
Thanks for the swing, Erin. We are already putting it to good use.
This is how Ezra sleeps at night. Chad swaddles him in regular receiving blankets, but I'm not so great at that yet, but we have this blanket type contraption that has something like wings on it that you just wrap around and attach with velcro tabs. It works really well and puts him right to sleep.
The night we came home, Ezra got his first "bath," which was really a wet soapy washcloth. He looked so cute in his little towel. And he actually opened his eyes!
As far as our schedule goes, right now Ezra sleeps a lot as newborn babies tend to do, and he eats about every two hours. We go to bed right after he eats at around 1:00, then he wakes up twice at night to eat again. He goes back to sleep right after he eats, so I am able to get about 2 hours of sleep at a time. I am not nearly as sleep deprived as I thought I would be at first, and I am sure that is a combination of adrenaline, euphoria, and the constant help we have had. Check back with me in a few weeks when the family goes home, Chad goes back to work, and I'm on my own. Have a great weekend everyone! Tomorrow we make our first outing with Ezra...to church of course!

We're home!

We are finally home and settling in. Here are a few pictures from the hospital...


He really wasn't crying in this picture, just making a sad face.
So excited about going home...
Ezra in his carseat for the first time...thanks Gramme!Ezra took a nice long nap in his crib this afternoon and seemed pretty comfy. Maybe it was because nobody was poking and prodding at him and it was quiet in the house. Thanks for the crib, Granddad & Ginny.Tired (but happy) momma & tired baby. We will of course continue to take pictures but I am sure y'all will understand that I am not planning on posting to the blog every day.

Pictures of Ezra

Here are some pictures of the boy...


Proud daddy
Elena & me (Elena works with Chad at the hospital and came down to visit during her shift...she is due in 4 weeks!)
Erin and Josh got to be in town and came by to visit. Just after birth

Amanda and I couldn't miss the finale of the Bachelorette...labor or no labor!

At one point I had to get oxygen because Ezra's heart rate was getting really low when my contractions would get bad. I had to wear it for the rest of the labor and delivery. Claustrophobia!
Our little family...
Tired mom and baby

Ezra

Guess what? We had a baby today! His name is Ezra Paul Montandon and he was born at 12:23 p.m. on July 28, 2009. He weighs 6 lbs 14 oz., 18 inches long, and has a long second toe just like his mama!

The delivery went very well. I got my epidural around 7:30 this morning after getting the pitocin at 5:30. After a short time with a lot of pain because I wasn't pressing my epidural button enough, my nurse said it was time! After waiting for my doctor to get here from the other hospital in town, I pushed for about 5 minutes and there he was!

We took some pictures earlier but I still need to upload them to the computer, and I'll post them later today. He's got some hair, but it's closer to my color than Chad's. Of course, we think he's the cutest baby ever. Right now he's warming up in our room so he can go get his first bath, and he is just so quiet and sweet. I really want to thank everyone for the thoughts and prayers. It meant a lot to know that so many people were lifting us up in prayer today. We are so blessed!

Update!

Lesley here. Just a quick update...I am in labor and delivery, settled into my room. Things are going well so far and I am "progressing" as they like to say in the obstetrics world. I am not uncomfortable, just feeling a little claustrophobic being hooked up to IVs, monitors, BP cuff, etc. Small price to pay for the exciting blessing that we are experiencing. I will receive my pitocin drip beginning at 5 in the morning, so less than 7 hours from now. At that point I probably won't be as interested in updating the blog/facebook, but we will try to keep everyone as updated as possible. Keep us in your prayers, as I know you already are. And pray that you will be hearing SOONER rather than LATER that our baby boy has arrived!

40 week appointment

Today was my last prenatal appointment. The dr. thinks the baby is around 7.5 lbs. I will go in to the hospital Monday night, and they will induce on Tuesday. I am praying I go into labor on my own over the weekend, but it doesn't look promising. So, either way, we will be having a baby in the next few days. We would appreciate your prayers.

Announcing the arrival...

Of my new Gro Baby cloth diapers! They came today and I have been spending some time working on the different settings. The close-up picture (which I rotated correctly in iPhoto, but it isn't working in blogger right now) shows the toddler, infant, and newborn settings that the diapers can be put on. In the other picture, you are looking at 6 diaper shells, some extra inserts, wipes, a sprayer that attaches to the toilet (to be used once the baby starts eating solids), laundry detergent, and wet/dry bags...one for the diaper bag and one for the nursery. When I showed everything to Chad, he at first thought that the patterned bags were the diapers (he just glanced at them briefly). He said that he was going to have to tell me to send those things back if that was the actual diaper. Anyway, I'll let you know how this goes. I am excited to get started!I was just visualizing some of your faces when you saw the blog title. Please, family members, have a little faith...I WILL call you and let you know when this baby comes (or is on his way). Check back on Friday, which is when we should know a little more about when.

Doctor's appointment

I had my 39 week doctor's appointment yesterday. Everything was good, but not a whole lot of progress is being made in the "going into labor" situation. My doctor estimates that baby boy M weighs 7 lbs or more at this point, so he is a good, healthy size, and I am really feeling like he has no more room to grow...he literally spans my entire abdomen now, going above and in front of my ribcage, and all the way from side to side. So, here's the deal. I have one more doctor's appointment, next Friday, if I don't go into labor this next week. At that point, we will schedule a time for me to go into the hospital that next week for an induction, since my doctor won't let me go past 41 weeks (which at this point is completely fine with me...we are getting anxious, and this kiddo is full term, so I am not worried about him coming too early). So the good news is that we WILL have a baby sometime in the next two weeks. The not-so-good news is that I might have to be induced, which is really not my first choice, for obvious reasons. To me, the only benefits of an induction are knowing exactly when you need to go to the hospital and not having the "surprise" element, which I was actually looking forward to, and the other benefit is getting to have your baby early, which wouldn't apply to us either since I'd be past my due date. So please say a prayer that I will go into labor sometime this next week! You grandparents might want to start deciding on a time when you would like to visit, since we've got the time window narrowed down now.

My last post was about saving money, and we have decided to try out cloth diapering. I have ordered a bunch of stuff and am actually really excited about doing this, especially the money saving aspect. I'm sure I will keep you posted about how it's going.

I was looking through some old posts last night and found this picture, which I posted as my 13 weeks pregnant picture and I thought my belly was SO big:This is so funny to me. I'm sure I was pushing out my belly too. Yesterday Chad was asking me what I was most excited for about not being pregnant anymore (apart from the obvious "we'll have a baby"). What I am looking forward to the most is being able to move quickly again, bend over, not be out of breath all the time, and most of all being able to exercise and lose all this extra weight. If pregnancy has taught me anything, it's that my body was not built to carry around all this extra weight. So I am looking forward to being able to RUN again!

I hope everyone has a good weekend. It's finally out of the 100-degree weather here, so things are much more bearable.

Money stuff (post with pictures below this one)

So I mentioned a while back something about my "new role" as a homemaker and soon-to-be stay-at-home (wow, hyphens!) mom. Compounded with the hot weather outside, I have been doing lots of research about different money-saving things, and that's what this post is about. I've got another post below with pictures of the garden and my 38-week photo, so you may want to scroll down if this doesn't interest you.

Back at the beginning of June I started clipping coupons. This has taken some skill to decide what to clip and what not to clip, and how to file the coupons for easy access. Then Erin told me about CVS shopping. I have been shopping at CVS for a few weeks now, and I have started to become addicted to saving money and getting good deals there. It is really quite a rush. I have found that with the coupons I use and the Extra Care Bucks system, I can get a lot of things that are usually pretty expensive (laundry detergent, deodorant, etc.) very cheaply. Pretty simultaneously I found that there is this whole world of people out there (mostly stay-at-home blogging moms) that have this system down and spend a LOT of time finding deals and getting a whole bunch of stuff every week almost completely free.

So with this experience, I have learned a few things about Chad and myself. One, I am not interested in spending the time to read every money-saving blog to make sure I don't miss out on a single deal. I mean, you could spend all day, every day, just reading blogs and websites that have to do with saving money. Another thing I've learned is that I am not going to shop at a million different places just to get one deal here and one deal there. At CVS I can get pretty much all our toiletries/household items for a really good price. Then, right across the street is the grocery store we usually shop at, so it's almost as good as one-stop shopping to go there after CVS. I hate shopping at Wal-Mart anyway so it's fine that I don't need to go there very often, except for certain things like frozen strawberries that we like for smoothies (they are superior to the ones that we get at the regular grocery store. Weird, I know.) Another thing is that we are pretty brand-loyal when it comes to certain things like toothpaste. So to me, it's not a good deal to get really cheap toothpaste when I am just wishing we had paid the extra dollar to buy our regular kind of toothpaste. Also, we like fresh fruit and veggies and we are soda drinkers, so I buy all those things no matter what (although I got a great deal at CVS last week on Dr. Pepper). So anyway, thanks to those of you who have enlightened me on the finer points of couponing and saving money. It's fun and it works for me right now.

So in light of this, my latest research has been on using cloth diapers. I've been asking other moms I know who use them what their take is. Here is what I have discovered in my limited research, so far: one thing is that I think people have a misconception of what cloth diapers have become. This is another thing that you could spend weeks or months researching and still not really know everything there is to know, and that is because there are so many kinds of cloth diapers now. I mean really, there are SO many websites with different kinds of diapers, reviews, etc. that it can quickly become overwhelming. I am looking at diapers that have an outer shell that fastens with snaps or velcro with some kind of absorbent insert that you remove and wash and reuse. They are really pretty fancy. From what I have heard, these kinds of cloth diapers actually "perform" better than their disposable counterparts, with a lot fewer leaks and blowouts. I also think people associate cloth diapers with granola earth-mother types, which I think is another misconception. Yes, a lot of these diapers are organic and they don't fill up landfills and that is really important to some people, but the two main reasons I have found people going with the cloth diapers is the amount of money you can save over the course of 3-ish years that each child is in diapers, and the better performance of the contemporary cloth diapers. So, I think I am going to try a few just to see if I like them. Chad might be a little harder to convince. :) Anyone out there who uses a certain type of cloth diaper who wants to chime in with what you use and how you like them, feel free to comment.

So, that's what I've been researching/reading/doing lately. Time for bed.

How does our garden grow?

Hey! Look at me and my clever nursery rhyme blog title. As I promised a while back, here are some pictures of the garden that I finally got around to taking today. First up: squash. You can see one of the actual squash(es?) emerging on this plant. We only planted 3 or 4 squash plants this year, because they do really well here and we were struggling to use up all our squash last year. Some kind of bean plant. Last year the birds and squirrels got to these before they even had a chance. Chad put chicken wire over pretty much everything in the garden this year until it had established and wasn't a little seedling anymore, so the plants were mostly able to withstand the animals.
Here's a further-away picture of the squash plants (top left), some sorghum (Chad planted "just to see if I could"), and some tobacco and okra, maybe? I am never sure what's what--and pretty much every time we're out in the garden I'm pointing to plants and asking Chad, "What's that? What's that?" He patiently explains every time. The tobacco (another thing Chad just wanted to see if he could grow, before any of you think we are actually using the stuff) has turned out to be a good pest controller. The leaves are sticky and attract whiteflies, which are our main pest out here. And boy are they pesty.
This is amaranth. Another thing that didn't "take" last year because of the animals. Chad orders seeds from this place in Arizona and he's always finding these odd seeds to order.
And the following pictures are what I would consider "my" plants...first up, the basil plants which are doing great. I used basil in my pizza sauce last week, and yum!
Two of my tomato plants are doing really well, and they are my favorite variety that I've planted, Celebrity. They are growing like crazy and starting to produce blooms...hopefully we'll have about a month where the plants actually produce tomatoes. Interspersed among the tomatoes are a few different pepper plants--serranos and jalapenos. They're doing well too.
In the back of the bed, we've got some melons going (notice the lattices) and in the back alley (not pictured) we've got mint, thyme, and strawberry, and a honeysuckle plant which already smells great. Honestly this will probably be the last garden post from me, since I'm bad enough about it as it is and this blog is most likely going to become all baby, all the time pretty soon (which I'm sure some of you are not complaining about).
Speaking of...here is a picture of me in all of my 38+ weeks of swollen pregnant glory. I am feeling better than I felt a few days ago, maybe because my body has once again somewhat adjusted to the 7 or so pounds of person inside my stomach. I know y'all are excited to meet the little one, and believe me, I can't wait to introduce him.