Happy BOO to You!!!

It was a year ago today that our family started this blogging adventure. So I decided that I needed to be on the ball and post our Halloween pictures pronto. Our not so little anymore Michelle was Fancy Nancy, one of our all time favorite children's books. Our little man was a little Ghosty, thanks to Tammy once again saving the day and getting a super cute Ghosty onesie for him.

Happy Halloween!

The Last Two Weeks

Two weeks ago our handsome little boy, Ryker, entered this crazy world. Thankfully my wonderful sister-in-law, Tammy, posted immediately for me letting everyone know about and see our wonderful new addition to our family. Thank you sooooooooooo much Tammy. Well, I am now finally feeling like I am surfacing from the craziness of a new baby and will just post a bunch of pictures from the last two weeks with brief summaries. And when I said a bunch of pictures, I mean a bunch. So sorry if it gets really long, we are just trying to catch up with a really eventful two weeks.

Here he is in his birthday suit-literally.

I think my doctor is completely amazing and one of the many many many reasons I think so is that he saw Tory trying to get a ton of pictures so he then voluteered to take this first family photo. What a great man.

The two most handsome men in the world, especially to me.

One of the first pictures of mommy and son. And yes, that is me being the NICU nurse giving my son blow by oxygen because he was grunting and I was not about to have them send him to the NICU. So I had my labor nurse get the oxygen so we could get him over that little hump. Hooray, no NICU stay this time.

Pictures of the two of us with our two kids. We have yet to have a picture of the four of us together, we will work on that in the near future.

Each of us with our little man on the day that BOTH he and I got to come home. What a change to come home together. We kept joking with the nurse about what perscriptions or medical equipment were they going to send us home with. She would laugh and say that we would get to take home a baby and carseat. Hooray!!!

The going home outfit. That's our little Buckaroo.

Coming home with Mommy and Daddy!!!

The Grandma that helped mommy out so much and thus helped little Ryker stay in the oven until he was more ready to come to this world.

The Grandpa who had to give up grandma to help out mommy. By the way, I think that my siblings and I all have a picture with my dad and ourselves in this very same pose. What better way to take a nap.

He ended up getting jaundice so the first two days home he had this special phototherapy bed. Why we asked ourselves? Just because we wouldn't know what to do if we didn't have some sort of medical equipment.

Here is the first bath at home. Michelle is such a super sister and great helper.

Grandpa and Grandma doing what grandparents do best, loving on a cute grandbaby.

Like I said before a busy two weeks. The pictures above Tory just happened to take as Michelle took her first independent steps from Grandma to Grandpa. Then her happy high five to Daddy.

I found Michelle like this one morning when I got out of the shower. She has decided that Ryker is cute enough to keep now.

It still amazes me that we have been so blessed to get two completely beautiful children in our lives. We love them so much and can't wait to see the amazing things they will do in the future.

Once upon a pregnancy

Less than a week before Ryker was born, my very awesome neighbor and friend across the street, volunteered to take these pictures for me. This is something I did when I was expecting Michelle and loved. But since I was on bedrest 2 1/2 months before I was due and was scared that our little boy would come any day and way too early, that I didn't even think about it this time. I am so glad that she asked to do them, otherwise I wouldn't have any pictures of this last pregnancy.

And of course some super cute pictures of Michelle.

Thank you so much Angie for taking these fabulous pictures.

Ryker Douglas Thornton

He's here!!! This is Tammy (Tory and Elizabeth's sister-in-law). Just wanted to post photos and let you know all about the new baby.

Ryker Douglas Thornton

October 14, 2008

7:59 am

6 lbs even

19 1/2 inches long

They went into the hospital last night around 2am. She was dilated to a 4 1/2. Around 4:30 she was able to get her epidural (yea!) and then at 7:40 she started to push and ONLY 20 minutes later, baby Ryker was here! She was able to have a normal delivery (no c-section!!!) and everyone is doing well and are happy. He has lots of hair and long fingernails. He's super cute and was wide awake when we went to visit. Very sweet baby. Congrats Tory and Elizabeth and Michelle!! Tiny Ryker. He scratched his face a few times because his nails are so long! Silly boy.
Sweet baby boy.
He's so tiny! Wearing the cute onsie that his favorite aunt got him. :) :)
Sweet little toes. :)

Cute twin brothers holding their favorite boys. Toby and Dallas, Tory and Ryker. Look at how big Dallas is compared to his new cousin! Dallas--4 1/2 months, Ryker--14 hours old.

Riding Lessons

Michelle loves to "horse around" and here is another video of her playing one of her favorite games.

(I know that I have been posting a lot of videos lately, but somethings are best shown in action.)

Let it snow?

The Christmas season has become way too commercialized over the years. It is bad enough that the stores already have stuff out for Christmas, and that I am getting emails about getting ready for the Holiday season. Now they have even got the weather in on it.

Moving Forward

We have been working with Michelle for quite some time to move forward in her walker. She has been doing awesome going backwards, but forwards has been a different story. The last few weeks if Tory stands behind her and helps guide the walker forward, she would move forward. But she hadn't taken any independent steps forward, until now. Here is a little video of her moving forward.

I get pretty teary watching my little girl grow up, but so very excited that she is doing all these big new things. What an amazing girl.

Michelle is TWO!!!

I know that I am over a month late. But better late than never, right? Here is a little photo story of Michelle's Second Birthday Bash.

We started off normal with some presents. She reminded us that she is all girl, and her favorite presents were clothes and shoes. You will keep seeing her new shoes popping up in the pictures. Then we had cake and ice cream, she repeated last year's performance and wouldn't voluntarily eat any of the cake. At least there were a few other people visiting that could eat all that cake. Then we did something new and fun, we went to the State Fair. It was family day (No Alcohol, No Smoking). Definitely her favorite part was the petting zoo, and the best were the little chicks. She fell in love with the little chicks and was very sad when we had to leave them. She kept signing bird all night. Then to end the night, we of course bought the all important bag of cotton candy. It was of course a fabulous day all around.

Top Three Reasons

So I have been completely negligent on keeping up with our family blog. This summer was just a whirl wind of traveling and fun, but that is not one of the reasons why I haven't kept up. There are three main reasons, and I thought there are a lot of people out there that can commiserate with these reasons.

1: I have a two year old. You would not think that she is that active, but for the last few months the only time I have free is the one hour that Sesame Street is on PBS. Yes I know that using the TV as a babysitter is completely awful. But it has been the only time I can do the dishes, the laundry, or any other important chore. She just likes to be a part of whatever I am doing which is rather hard with her ventilator tubing that only reaches a couple of feet. I also believe she realizes she is big girl now since we had to take away her pacifiers (a.k.a. the num num). We had to take it away cold turkey, but that is another story for another post.

2: I have a husband who is a full time graduate student whose program is completely on-line. So who do you think is gets first dibs at the computer. Also when he is not on the computer he has his honey-do list of things I need to look up for him or do for him for school. So the computer has been completely dedicated to school, which is not such a bad thing since it means better job, better work hours, better lots of thing.

3: Well, four weeks ago I wasn't feeling too good and had a doctors appointment and told him how I was feeling and what was going on. Well with what I was saying and what he saw I bought myself bedrest. Yep, another pregnancy that ends with me being isolated to home, couch, and bed. This is definitely a bit more of a challenge because of reasons 1 and 2. If anyone has ever wished for bedrest, you are crazy. It is absolutely no fun, I hate just sitting around and having my already busy husband take over more chores (he does say that I can do more of his studying for him since I am just sitting though), plus it is a little embarrassing to call my mom and beg her to come stay with us so that I can avoid the hospital and yucky IV medication. However, I will take bedrest any day over having a baby born too early and spending months in the hospital (again that would be way too difficult with reasons number 1 and 2).

Well I better get back to reclining on the couch. I think I have way over spent my 15 minute quota of off the couch time and I really don't want to have Tory lecture me the again on the fact that my contractions are aggravated by gravity, and start having him rationing my bathroom privileges again. So for all of you who thought we had fallen off the face of the earth, there's our story.

Yes, I am pregnant

I know that it has been quite a while since I have posted. I will apologize. Yes I have a lot to post to give you all the family updates, but first I must post this after a few rather funny situations.

I was feeling pretty good about my pregnant self. I had made it past my half way point and people would still tell me that they had no idea that I was pregnant. I felt big, but was hoping that this was a good sign that I was not going to beat the hugeness I accomplished with Michelle. If you don't think that I got big with Michelle, I delivered at 36 weeks, but was measuring 42-43 weeks. Yes, I was big.

Well recently someone asked me to turn to check out my profile and then asked how much longer I had until my due date. When I told her, she just gave me this really sad look like she felt really sorry for me. I just acted super excited and talked about how I was so happy that this baby was growing so well.

Then more recently someone was making a comment about my cute pregnant belly and I felt really complimented, until, she also asked me how much longer I had and when I told her she started laughing and said, "Wow, you are going to get HUGE!" After getting over the stun from the comment, I said something about how I doubted anything could be more huge than my last pregnant belly that measured post term size. (Also, I think the word HUGE becomes a dirty four letter word when it comes to pregnancy.)

So, yes I am pregnant. And yes, my belly does like to expand to the size of another solar system. I already know that and honestly, I don't care. I love to be pregnant and I love that my belly does expand so well giving my babies all the room they need to grow.

So if anyone out there wants to add any funny things people said or did to them while pregnant, please comment. I am really in need of few good laughs.

(disclaimer: The above picture is not of me. It is just a really funny picture that represents how I feel with our little man practicing Kick Boxing inside of me 24 hours a day.)

Vacation Time ! ! !

We just returned from our latest adventure. I feel like all we have done the last little while is travel, but it has been fabulous. Before Tory and I became parents, we traveled all the time and tried to take one really big vacation every year, but we calmed down and put down roots when we got our little miracle from heaven. We only have one little problem, we still love to get out, so this last couple of weeks has been so awesome.

We were able to spend some time vacationing with my oldest sister and her family in Central Oregon. (Side note, I really didn't take as many pictures I usually do, you know like only about a 100 or so, I was too busy relaxing and enjoying myself.)

Here is one of the few pictures of our whole family together, it was at this awesome museum about everything from Native Americans who originally lived in the area to the pioneers and Basque culture that came and settled. The exhibits outside were live reenactments of life in the 1890s, but we were there on a special weekend that they had a Civil War exhibit (not that the Civil War took place in Central Oregon, but still cool.)

Here is one of evening activities, pick up game of softball. I of course sat out and just cheered, but it totally killed me since softball is my all time favorite sport.

Here Michelle sits with me, you can see the disappointment in her face too that we can't join the game. Maybe next year.

One afternoon the girls were exhausted and Ella loved sitting with Michelle, well I happened turn and find Ella sitting on Michelle's lap. The best part is that Michelle thought it was the funniest thing ever, what cute cousins.

Here is Ella doing her favorite thing of the trip, pushing Michelle around in her stroller. The funniest thing was when we were in the parking lot a car started coming so we warned Ella to be careful, so what does she do, abandons Michelle in the stroller and runs back to her mom. Good thing Michelle has no fear and is well trained in defending herself.

The Civil War heroes. The war is over and they are waiting to return to their families back home.

I couldn't resist taking this picture. It is a symbol of why I was born in this era. I truly am thankful for flushing indoor toilets, if you don't believe ask Tory about our first camping trip together, now there is funny story.

This garden from the 1890s was amazing. It makes me feel awful that our garden is so weed infested, maybe after I get done posting this I will go brave the insane heat outside and weed.

My older sister was totally awesome. Most mornings and after afternoon naps she would come get Michelle so that I could get some some sleep if I wanted. I usually just felt guilty and would just get up and go find them. One morning I heard a bunch squeals coming from, my younger sister, Christines's room. Michelle and Ella were having a sleepover with Tino.

Also most mornings while Tory and I were getting ready for the day my sisters would volunteer to watch Michelle, which also meant by the time I got out they had her bathed, dressed, and were doing her hair. Well this morning they turned my beautiful little girl into Super Rock Chick Michelle. She was all ready for the role after watching us all play Guitar Hero all weekend.



This last picture is actually just a funny story. If you can't tell what that black thing is on my sister's back, it is completely squished-to-death spider. We were watching the boys play Guitar Hero when my sister felt a tickle on her arm and started trying to get off the hair she supposed it was. I turned and realized it was actually a spider trying to attack her and grabbed the magazine that sitting on the coffee table and started beating her until the spider stopped twitching. She wondered what kind of maniac sister I was, I was just trying to save her life. Then we realized the magazine I had grabbed was the Ensign and the Conference Edition none the less. I felt awful using such sacred doctrine to commit murder, but at least I saved my sister's life.

I really wish I would have taken more pictures (I will just have to steal some from Tino and Shellie because I know they took a lot), but it honestly felt so good to just relax. The one night I truly wish I would have taken more pictures was our last night of vacation, our Luau night. Shellie decorated the deck with a bunch of Hawaiian decor and then had flower leis for each one us. They barbecued pinapple and had VIRGIN pina coladas, oh how yummy. Oh Vacation Time, why does it ever have to end.