Stowellzone

We hadn’t ever carved pumpkins before with the kids, but this year, Mason was really wanting to, so we headed out one weekend to get the perfect pumpkins!  This kids had blast going through the corn maze, running through the pumpkins, riding in the wheelbarrows and playing on the tractors.

A few on the little guy on his first outing that didn’t involve a hospital or Dr. office!

We took some pictures of the kids and family while we were there.

And then some of us were all worn out, hehe

A few day later, we carved ‘em up!  The kids thought it was pretty gross pulling the insides out, but they also thought it was fun!  Mason wanted just a basic face, with circle eyes, a triangle nose, and a toothy grin!  Daddy did a great job!

This is what Austin did while we carved…such a good baby!

One of the hardest things I’ve had to do as a mother was be told that Mason had to go under the bili lights.  I had no idea what it meant and what were in store for, so when the home health guy came to our house, set up this ugly suitcase with lights and instructed us that he had to keep these stupid glasses over his eyes and we had to leave him in there and only take him out to feed and change him, I broke down in tears.  It was an awful experience.  So, when we could see that Austin was looking quite yellow, we had a feeling what was coming.  We were told to take him in for a 2 day check up on Friday, but I was concerned about his bili level and the swelling from his circumcision, so I took him on Thursday.  It was lucky I did because his level had gone up so much in less that 24 hours, that he had to get on the lights right then.  If I had waited until Friday, he most likely would have been admitted to the hospital.  So we geared up for another awful time and waited for home health.  This one was MUCH better.  No glasses, the bed was actually soft, and he actually loved it and slept great on it!

We are extremely grateful that he did so well on them because he was on them for an entire week!!  He did get off of them for a day, but his levels bounced back up so back on the bed we went.  Between the bili tests everyday and all the blood sugar test in the hospital, his poor heels and hands were so poked and prodded by the end of the week, I felt so bad!  But we are just so glad he is healthy now!  Here’s a few more pictures we took the day after we brought him home before the lights.  The kids were so excited and wanted to hold him constantly!

And just some cute ones during his first month!!

Little Smile!

 

It had a been a long day on October 3.  Both Jeremy and I had colds and weren’t feeling great and were very much looking forward to crawling into our bed and going to sleep.  Just as we were climbing in, our little baby decided that was not in the plan!   I was pretty miserable and uncomfortable, I had found out the week before that I was measuring big…which I already knew since it seemed like none of my maternity shirts were really fitting.  Apparently the baby decided that he was out of room, because at 11:45 p.m. my water broke!  After I reassured Jeremy that, no, I hadn’t just peed my pants and few minutes of me panicking and pacing back and forth while Jeremy ran around trying to get things together, I decided to call my neighbor to see if she could come and sleep on our couch until my mom could get up there to be with the kids.  As luck would have it, she was still awake and came right over.  I called my work and let them know I was on my way while Jeremy drove the 45 minutes to the hospital and said repeatedly to me, “we can stop at this one if you want.” as we drove past several other hospitals!  I wasn’t really contracting, so I knew we were ok!!  When we got there, my dear friends had decorated my room so cute!!  They tried to keep me out so they could finish, but I was really wet and wanting to not be in those clothes anymore, so I went in anyway!!  Some people think it would be weird to have a baby at the place where you work, but I think it’s great!!  They took such great care of me! I was only dilated 2 cm and contracting a little, so we settled in for a long night.  I needed antibiotics because I was only 36.5 weeks and hadn’t gotten my group B strep test done yet (my Dr. appointment was the next day) so we waited a few hours before starting pitocin.   Things were still moving pretty slow, then around 5:00 a.m., his heart tones started dipping a little and  I was still only about 5 cm and I was not feeling good at all.  My heart rate kept shooting up and then dropping and we couldn’t figure out why!  Let me tell you that having to wear an oxygen mask while having a cold is not very fun!  A little while later, I suddenly started feeling pressure.  In about 15 minutes, I went from 5 cm to complete and ready to have this baby!  When the Dr. got there, he was pretty surprised, he had figured I wasn’t going to deliver until later in the morning!  And soon, our beautiful little boy was here, weighing in at 7 lbs 8 oz and 19.5 inches long!  Even though he was 3 and a half weeks early, he was our biggest baby!  It took him a few minutes to start crying, he’d had the cord wrapped around his neck a few times.  Then he cried for just a second and then just stopped and looked around at everyone.

Now, for some reason, my boys think they need to come out posterior, so the Dr. had to turn him and his poor little face ended up being pretty bruised up, so sad!!  His poor upper lip was bruised and swollen for several days.

During his bath, he started crying hard and turned really red!  The nurse got a little worried and took his blood to see if something was off, but we just learned he turns red when he cries!

His blood sugar was low, so they had to stick a tube down his throat and feed him a little.

And then he finally came to my room so his brother and sister could meet him!!  They were pretty in awe of him, it was pretty cute.

Then he got to meet his Grandparents (Grandpa Stowell came up a little later when the camera man was gone)!

This was my longest stay in the hospital after having a baby and by the end, I was pretty stir crazy.  They weren’t sure if they were going to let us go home that next evening because of his blood sugars and I was group B unknown, but after a long an very annoying evening, the on call pediatrician finally said we could go home. He also had to pass a carseat test, where he had to sit in his carseat and be monitored for an hour to make sure his heart rate doesn’t drop.  They always do this on preemie’s, but everyone thought it was pretty funny to see such a big baby doing a carseat test!!   Then right before we left, the nurses brought him back from the nursery and we noticed that he was VERY swollen from his circumcision.  The nurses agreed that they hadn’t ever seen that before and that we should probably have our Dr. look at him, but I wanted the pediatrician who did the circumcision to look at him, so we waited even more longer for her to come back.  She too, was surprised, but in the end decided that he probably had an allergic reaction to the medicine they used to numb him!!  We didn’t get out of there until almost 10:30 pm, but I was very excited to get home.

Austin resting on Daddy while we were waiting.

One of my favorite pictures!

Finally going home!

I was pretty apprehensive about our yearly camping trip during the elk hunt seeing that I was 8 months pregnant.  We have it pretty nice, my dad brings both his trailers and my mom and I usually sleep in one with the kids while Jer and my dad sleep in the other one since they get up so early.  This year, my mom slept on the big bed with both kids and I got to have a bed all to myself!  Well, if you don’t count the baby taking up most of the room.   I will say that I don’t think I’ll do that again being that pregnant.  I hardly slept, was, of course, really uncomfortable, and the drive in and out was pretty bad with all the bumps!  Despite that, the kids had a great time and the weather was really nice!

The kids got spoiled and got to drive the truck with Grandpa

My dad was hiking with the kids and they were walking along a log when suddenly a swarm of bees came and chased them.  He grabbed both the kids under each arm and started running while Mason started crying that his back hurt.  When he felt they were a safe distance away, he set Mason down and told him to keep running.  That’s when Mason started saying his hand hurt, too!  Meanwhile, me and Jer were back at the camp rolling our eyes, thinking he was crying over nothing!  We felt a little bad when they got back and showed us the damages!  It turned out that while my dad was running with both kids, the bee’s were chasing them and one stung Mason on his back.  Then once they were pretty far away and he set him down, one STILL came and stung Mason in the hand!! They chased them a pretty long way!  Kinley somehow made it though without any stings and my dad ended up with a little bit of a swollen nose (hehe!)  Luckily we discovered Mason isn’t allergic to bee stings!  It’s kind of hard to see them on the pictures.

 

My dad’s favorite thing to do is paint Kinley’s toe’s and finger’s. So manly! (hehe)

Mason stole my camera and took LOTS of pictures of everything!

Here’s a few of his best!

And just playing around camp!

Always a good time!

Mason has one more year of preschool before heading into the big Kindergarten!  Crazy!  He really loves this school and last year he grew in leaps and bounds so we love it, too!  He’s really excited to learn to read and is asking all the time how to spell things and trying to sound out words.  It’s really fun to watch him learn.  He was really excited to see his friends again, too.

Getting Ready

Dropping Him Off!

And the pick up…he loved it!

He also started another year of soccer.  He’s on the same team as last year and was excited to see his friends and coach again!  They have some fun orange and blue colors this year and they picked the team name “The Bulls” this year!

And we are off to Disney World!!   It is really amazing how incredibly huge this place is.  It consists of 4 main parks: Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, Disney Hollywood Studios, and Epcot.  Again, if we would have realized how much there was to see, we would have stayed for more days, but we did the best we could.   We kind of decided that we wouldn’t do too many character meet and greets.  We weren’t sure how the kids would react to them and didn’t want to waste time to have them just cry and cling to us.  Plus, we can do all that at Disneyland, whenever we go there.

The first stop was to Magic Kingdom.  We knew we would spend an entire day here.  The first thing we knew we had to do was go and see Rapunzel.  As soon as the park opened we ran right there and only had wait about 20 minutes before we made our little girls dream come true!  Kinley loves Rapunzel so much and we knew there was one character we had to see.  It was worth the trip to Flordia, just for this.

 

She was seriously so happy!  We then rode some rides.

Saw some parades.  These were great cause the kids got to see all the characters.

This just proves how much we had been doing, Mason never falls asleep anywhere!  This was a nice break for us.

More rides and shows

Waited for a dinner table and watched the kids play.  Normally Kinley’s hair is pretty straight, but the humidity made it go really curly, it was so cute!

Watched the light parade and then the amazing fireworks over Cinderella’s Castle.  They were amazing!

Kinley loved this one, you can see Rapunzel at the top with her hair coming down the castle

 

The next day our plan was to go to Animal Kingdom for half the day and then Disney Hollywood Studios the rest of the day, but we loved Animal Kingdom so much we ended up spending most the day there and then just went to DHS for the evening.

Digging for Dinosaur bones

The only other character we talked to, just because he had just got there and no one was in line yet.  Just as I had predicted, Mason wouldn’t go near him and Kinley walked up, gave him a high five then didn’t want anything to do with him.  So glad we didn’t spend any more time meeting characters!!

 

A very cool safari ride that I maybe shouldn’t have gone on being pregnant and all, but I just held my belly so it didn’t bounce so much!

A few family pictures…don’t we look tired!!

The prizes from here were that big dinosaur Mason is holding and a Nemo for Kinley.  Mason loved the dinosaur ride even though it scared him a little!  We hurried over to Hollywood Studios only to find that most of the shows we had wanted to see were done for the day.  The main ride I wanted take the kids on was the Toy Story ride and the line was 2 hours long!!  We hadn’t waited very long in lines, so we decided to take our kids while Kay, Roger, and Ethan went on some bigger rides and then saved us seats for Fantasmic.

But we walked out of the ride to an absolute down pour of rain!!  Luckily our stroller was covered so it wasn’t too wet.  The first thing we did when we got to Florida was buy poncho’s because we had heard it did this a lot.  So we packed up those poncho’s every day in preparation and the only time it rained is when we weren’t together!  We got a hold of poor Kay and Roger and met up with them.   They were completely soaked!  And to make it worse, all the rides that they wanted to go on had too long of lines, so they had spent all that time saving us fantastic seats for the show, only to see a few fireworks go off before the rain started and they canceled it!  While it was really sad, it was only thing that had gone wrong on the trip so we just laughed and chalked it up to good memories!

For our last day, we went to Epcot and then left early to go to Tree’s house for dinner.  I wish we could have seen more of Epcot, we didn’t even really walk around too much. It was the hottest day and there was no shade and everyone was tired.  We went on a few rides and saw a few shows.

Don’t the kids look so happy!!  We ended the trip having a great time with family and just relaxing at their amazing house!!  The kids loved swimming and playing with all the toys.

It was seriously a wonderful vacation!  We got home later than planned, packed everything up, went to bed just past midnight and then got up at 4:00 am to get to the airport and fly home.  Luckily the kids crashed soon after we got on the plane and slept the entire way home.   It was an incredible trip and adventure (especially being 7 months pregnant) and I’m so grateful we had the opportunity to go!!