Our sweet and perfect and most beautiful boy that ever breathed, Emory James, was born on February 25th. He was quite jaundiced and so required light treatments in the hospital and at home for the first week and a half of his life. We had to go to the doctor just about every day during that time to check his biliruben levels and take blood from his poor little heel. About 2 days into this, Mark started his rotation in the surgical intensive care unit, his most intense rotation so far. He averages about 14 hours a day, and only has 5 days off in the whole month. So he has not been around a whole lot. Every night when he gets home I make him change and shower before he can so much as breath on our tiny new child. To top it off..about 3 weeks ago (when Emory was almost a week old), we found a house we wanted to buy. We'd been looking for a while for a house and had not had success yet, so even though it was not a great time we wanted to jump on it. The following 2 weeks were spent doing paperwork, attending the house inspection, and various other house buying related things...while Mark was at work all the time and we had a newborn with jaundice and 2 little girls in the house. Needless to say, things got a little chaotic. :) One afternoon as I was feeding Emory in my room, I could hear the girls running around the apartment laughing and singing in nothing but their underwear. It was like something out of Lord of the Flies. If either of them finds a conch shell I'm going to need to stage an intervention.
Rather than succumb to the rising panic in my heart, I decided to embrace the craziness. So on the Lord of the Flies afternoon I took a few snapshots of our house to remember this time by.
This is pretty much how the girls room looks all the time now... except sometimes there is more paper on the floor.
This side of our bedroom has become the baby station.
Our consistently unmade bed. The only thing this picture can't capture is the urine that is regularly sprayed on our sheets by Emory James when a groggy mom changes his diaper in the middle of the night. I'm at the point now where it doesn't even phase me...I just lie right down on top of it and go back to sleep.
And the crowning glory of this month...watching our beautiful boy change and grow before our eyes from a tiny sleepy and unaware being to an alert and bright eyed being.
He's got a piercing gaze, I can tell he's really studying everything out.
Like bees to honey, Vienna is drawn to this little guy.
I really can't express enough my gratitude for the happy craziness of our lives. In the middle of the night when I feel sleep deprived, I remind myself that all of this chaos is the result of happy things. Our beautiful new boy, our beautiful 2 girls, a husband with a good job and a bright future, and a new home that we'll be thrilled to call our very own on May 27th (our closing date!) We are healthy. We are happy. And most importantly, we are an eternal family. I thank my Heavenly Father every day for that most important blessing.
