Happy Halloween!!!

Love,

The Lowders

p.s. Logan is a giraffe in case you can't tell. A giraffe who's hood is too big.

Pumpkin patch!

Well folks, its time for the obligatory pumpkin patch photos! We took advantage of some gorgeous weather on Saturday and went to battle the crowds.

But first we got distracted by Logan in this outfit for the first time and took pictures.

My friend loaned me her moby so I could try before I buy and let me tell you I love it! Logan is so happy being wrapped up and carried around. Putting him in it pretty much ceases all crankiness.
He was super into the pumpkins let me tell you what.
Speaking of into pumpkins... Tyson loves to find the biggest pumpkin he can that stands up on its own. Our traditional location in Utah just writes a price on the pumpkin, this place charges by the pound.

87 lbs later we were on our way.

It was pretty awesome watching Tyson carve that beast.

It was just a little bit thick.

Oh look! It's as tall as the baby!

The obvious next step is putting him in the pumpkin.

Tyson's pumpkin is representative of something in your house. Props if you can guess what it is.

This post brought to you by one handed typing moms of america.

One month

I can't believe my bitty baby is one month old today! Bah! I'm pretty sure this has been the fastest month of my life which seems weird since I've been awake for more of this month than any other. This has also been a month of much learning. For example, I learned how not to give a baby a bath by yourself:

1. Don't pick up a naked baby with ice cold hands. The baby will scream as if shot and continue screaming for the duration of the bath. (I'd cry too)

2. Don't fill the tub with the perfect temperature of water and then spend the next 20 minutes playing with baby. The water will cool to an uncomfortable lukewarm before he's even in there and the baby will scream for the duration of the bath.

3. Don't hold the baby awkwardly by one arm while bathing him. He will slip and squirm and startle and feel like he's falling and scream for the duration of the bath.

4. Don't leave the towel on the bar.

5. Don't stand in the middle of the bathroom holding a screaming, naked, freezing baby at arms length while wondering how to get the towel off the bar.

6. Don't spend several minutes calming a naked baby wrapped in a towel. It is better to get the torture of bathing and dressing over all at once.

Yeah, it was rough. Let's just say it took a lot of snuggling, rocking, and hair brushing (he takes after his mother in liking that one) to calm him down and convince him to forgive me.

In honor of his one month birthday I meant to take a million pictures and show them ALL to you, but alas, I left my camera at Tyson's parent's house so here are a couple pictures from a few days ago. He still basically looks like this.

Here he is trying to smile at me. He's almost mastered it, heh heh. It does make me wonder though, since I know he's imitating me, how much of a goober I look like grinning at him.

And here he is looking a bit more normal.

Happy one month birthday son!

Auntie Em, Auntie Em!

Did you guys see that episode of fringe where people were literally dying of exhaustion?
I can so relate.

It's no big deal really, except that I think my blog is gonna be real boring because I have a hard time doing stuff, like thinking. Sorry folks. As a result I think this will temporarily be a blog that only a grandparent would love with 800 billion photos of Logan.

As for our latest update: Logan's Auntie Em came for a visit this weekend! Actually, Logan has two Aunt Emilys as both Tyson's and my youngest sister share that name.

We all enjoyed having her here, especially once Logan realized she was as easy to sleep on as the rest of us.

She's so pretty.

And kinda funny. For example, we were at the mall and she was pushing Logan in the stroller. I made some comment that people were gonna think he was her baby to which she replied, "They'll know he's yours, you look like you just had a baby."

...

:-[

Then she backpedaled and told me some story of a lady who had a baby and didn't look as good as I did.

Ah, Emily, how we love you.

I shall now sprinkle these photos with a few random thoughts...

I'm pretty sure there needs to be a universal "dude your blinker is on" hand gesture that we can give each other on the road. Perhaps the "beam" of "Jesus wants me for a sunbeam"? Let's try it.

I have found that there is nothing more satisfying, save a good piece of chocolate, than comforting a crying baby. Tyson doesn't feel that way. Is it a mom thing? A woman thing? A me thing?

I look forward to the day when Logan smiles and is actually awake.

Midnight adventure

Ok so this didn't really happen at midnight, it was more like 2:37, but I thought that made for a better title.

I was maneuvering Logan into position for a late night feeding when Tyson observed that our boy was rather stinky. I directed a little mental energy to my olfactory glands and agreed that yes, the odor actually was quite overpowering.

Now here's my dilemma.

Frequently when Logan eats he makes a little poo. Makes sense to me, he's a little person right? If something is going in, he's gotta make room for it with something coming out. So I should change his diaper after he eats.

But... at night my goal is to get him back to sleep ASAP-o-rama - feeding him puts him to sleep, changing his diaper wakes him up. So I should change his diaper before he eats.

?

Usually I change him after and suffer the late night consequences, however, since he was already stinky Tyson volunteered to change him before and I willingly surrendered the babe to him.

As I drifted back into my coma for another few minutes of precious precious sleep I heard Tyson say there wasn't much in the diaper, he must have just been a little tooty.

2 seconds later I heard Tyson shriek and I sat up to see what could only be described as projectile poo flying through the night. After pausing briefly to snicker (for some reason Tyson wasn't quite as amused), I jumped to my husband's aid and helped mop up the damage.

I then scooped up my sweet little baby to feed while Tyson spent the next several minutes washing his hands... and feet.

P.S. Apparently we have an equal opportunity kid. He had a major blow out while sitting on my lap this morning. Super fun!

2 weeks postpartum

I survived the first 2 weeks!

Everyone says those are the hardest and now they're over. But are they really the hardest? Do I want to know?

A few things have changed in the last couple of weeks, for example, me.

Here I am a couple days before delivery.

Huge, uncomfortable, ignorant.

Huge.

Here's our first family photo after coming home from the hospital.

Apparently, I went in 9 months pregnant and came out 5 months pregnant.

And here I am today!
Although this looks suspiciously like a newly pregnant shot, it's not. Seriously, even though I've still got a pooch I cannot believe how fast the weight is coming off.
I love it!

And the crazy thing is that I pretty much can't even remember what it feels like to be pregnant. Was I pregnant? Who's baby is this? How did he fit in there? How did he get out of there? What the heck!?

Ok, sleep deprivation is taking over, must fight back.

One thing it seems like everyone wants to know is how breastfeeding is going. Well, allow me to answer that question with another question.

How much do you think he weighs?

Oh wait, that wasn't an answer. Well, today we went to the doctor for his two week check-up. If you'll recall, when he was born he was 7 lbs 8 oz. A couple days later he had lost a little and was 6 lbs 15 oz.

Today he was 8 lbs 15 oz.

Whoa, 2 lbs in 12 days.

Some might call that feeding like a champ. I call it life. It still makes my feet sweat when he latches on, but aside from the initial chomp I've had no pain and no problems in that area.

He's a good boy.

Also, there has been some curiosity as to who Logan looks like. After examining pictures of Tyson as a baby I discovered that I was merely a vessel for his clone.

Good thing Tyson is a hottie.

Well, for only getting a couple hours of sleep each night I think this was a pretty good update. I probably wont even remember tomorrow that I wrote it. Good times.

The many faces of a newborn

In the spirit of confession, which I am often struck by, I confess that I carefully and lovingly choose the most beautiful pictures of my baby so that you all will think him at least half as cute as I do. I didn't photo shop them or anything, but I definitely used careful discretion in my picture choices.

The same way I don't show you ugly pictures of me.

At any rate, on occasion, RARELY, Logan has moments where he is just slightly less photogenic than usual and in the spirit of sharing I thought I would show you a few of those moments.

Really, these things are our fault because sometimes we catch him in a sneeze...

Or with his eyes closed... (although I do think it's cute that you can see his dimple :-))

Or we're showing his bad side...

Or... um, er... huh. I have no explanation for this one.
I prefer not to leave you with those images though, so just know that he usually looks like this.

And this.


Do you ever wonder what your kids are gonna find when they Google themselves in 10 years or so?

:)

The birth - part 2

Ok, where was I... Dilated to a 6 and discovering I was in labor, right.

So, even though I wasn't really feeling that much pain I thought that I should probably request an epidural because it might get worse. Looking back that was probably the best decision I made that night.

I was so happy to find that I had really good staff helping me, the iv was put in quickly and the epidural was very tolerable.

Unfortunately, due to the epidural and/or who knows why my labor totally stalled out and I was stuck at 6 cm until 2 a.m. when the doctor finally came in and broke my water. I think the idea was for me to get some sleep and really relax before I needed to push, but the epidural and I started having a love/hate relationship that made it hard for me to calm down. Not feeling contractions - good, not feeling my legs, like at all - bad. And frustrating. I also started shaking really hard which was impossible to control and kinda embarrassing for me every time the nurses came in.

Oh and get this, they had to give me medicine for what? Heartburn. Yeah, I know. It haunts me.

So when the doc came in and broke my water I was happy to get this labor going again and meet my baby! And get my labor going it did. Unfortunately, it also got something weird going on with Logan. It seems like baby's heartbeats are always fluctuating during labor, so when the nurse said that something like that was going on with him, I didn't get that nervous. She had me change positions several times to try and get his heart beat back to normal and then strapped an oxygen mask to my face so that he would at least get a higher concentration of it in his blood.

A bit before 4 am the doctor came back and checked me. 9.5 cm, yay! However, the baby's heartbeat was making him nervous, especially because he couldn't tell why it was going down so much. He watched the printout of my contractions and Logan's heartbeat for a long time without really saying anything. Finally he said the words I had been dreading, "I think we should do a c-section."

Crap.

A c-section was my worst fear. Especially after laboring for so long I was not excited to give it all up for a c-section.

Very quickly, people started coming in a getting ready for me to go into surgery. The anesthesiologist filled a syringe with drugs, someone brought clothes for Tyson to change into, and reports that they were holding the o.r. for us came in.

But the doctor still wasn't sure.

He said that all signs were saying that my baby was totally healthy except for this heartbeat problem. He really didn't want to do a c-section for a healthy baby.

Finally, after a few more minutes of agonizing deliberation that involved everyone but me, the doctor said that he would check me again. If I was at a 10 I would push, if I was a 9.5 we'd go in for a cesarean.

I was at a 10.

Game on.

Now, here's where my perception of things varies from reality mainly because I couldn't see what was going on.

My point of view:

The nurse and the doc quickly explained how I was supposed to push and on their mark I went for it. I was sure to glance at the clock so I would know how long I was pushing.

It was about 4:10

I pushed like my eyeballs were going to explode and prayed that I was making progress since I couldn't feel a darn thing. I could hear the doctor mumbling something about being transverse and the nurse asking him if he wanted forceps. He said no, thank goodness! Everyone, and by everyone I mean the doc, the nurse, Tyson, my mom, and the whole O.R. team, was cheering me on so I kept at it.

At some point during the pushing phase I heard a LOUD sucking sound and I glanced up to see the doctor jerking back with a surprised look on his face and blood spraying across the room.

I couldn't dwell on that though because the pushing must go on!

At 4:21 everyone shouted "stop!" so I did and a few seconds later Logan was out and being laid across my chest.

What really happened:

As I was pushing and the doctor was mumbling about being transverse, he was using both hands to try and turn the baby from inside me. Apparently we were in a rush and I basically had once chance to prove I could push this baby out, or else it was c-section for us. I pushed well, so we kept with it.

That loud sucking sound I heard? The doctor had been using a vacuum to help get Logan out faster and he was attempting to avoid an episiotomy. Because of the restricted space he didn't get a good grip on his head and the vacuum lost suction right as the doctor was pulling really hard.

Yeah, that epidural decision? A good one.

Two seconds later he snipped an episiotomy and was assisting the birth again. Logan's head came out so fast I tore some more and everyone was shouting stop so they could unwrap the cord that was all around him.

And then I had him wriggling on my chest.

I left the hospital with a 3rd degree tear which one of the nurses jokingly called a vaginal c-section (sorry to use the v-word) which has been a beast to heal from but Logan has been an angel which has made everything easier.

We are healthy and happy and don't ever want grandma to leave or Tyson to go back to work!