Declan has more style than we do

Not much has been going on lately with us. Darren is keeping really busy with school. Only a little while longer and the semester will be over, we can't wait! 

Declan and I are heading to Arizona to visit my family in a week. While I am there it will be our two year anniversary! Two years is a long time but it also feels like we have been married for forever. 

Right before we leave Declan and I have doctor appointments. Then when I get back it will be almost time for the 32 week check up at the hospital for Everly. We are hoping they will be able to give us a better idea of when to expect her to be here. Right now her due date has been bumped up a week. The latest she will be born will be June 29th, right before my birthday!

Other than that all I have to share are a few cute pictures of Declan :)

 Our friends that live upstairs had a baby girl, Elinor. Declan loves her!

Hugs!

Declan got a new wagon and loves going on walks in this nice weather.

 I hope these videos work..

 Declan loves his daddy. Any spare time Darren has he plays with Declan and he loves it.

 Declan doesn't know how to give a good smile on command yet.

 Fish face!

 Walking to church. Such a little man.

 Love that chubby cheek smile :)

Okay last one. 

 So a lot of pictures. Sorry. I just think he is so dang cute!

Baby Shenanigans

The last few weeks have been kind of crazy.

At our 20 week check-up the doc said there were a few red flags that they were concerned about. One was that I had half the amount of fluids that I should. The second was that part of Everly's heart looked underdeveloped. And last was that there was a concern with the umbilical cord. All of these things combined were not a good sign. We were told all of the possibilities and it was all pretty scary. We needed to go in for more testing at the hospital but they were scheduled out for three weeks, gah. Those were the longest three weeks of our lives. 

Finally the day arrived and we went in. One of the red flags was confirmed, and the other two dismissed. Amazingly, my fluid level is much better and will hopefully no longer be a concern. Which is stellar because I really would hate to be put on bed rest. Also her heart looks perfectly healthy. But the umbilical cord is a two vessel cord when normally there are three. So normally you have two arteries and one vein. The arteries taking junk away from the baby and the vein taking nutrients in. So the fluids get a little bottle necked which stunts her growth because not all the junk is taken away. 

What this means is that she is small. Also I will likely be induced early because she will stop getting the nutrients she needs so it would be better to have her out than in. Starting at 32 weeks I have to go to the hospital weekly to have non-stress tests done to determine when she needs to come out. Some of the common problems linked to this are kidney or heart problems, down syndrome, and Trisomy 18. At the hospital they informed us that her kidneys and heart look great. Trisomy 18 was also said to not be a concern because you can tell at this stage in an ultrasound if the babies have it or not. She still has a chance of having down syndrome but we don't want to do the testing because it just tells us what the % chance she has of having it.

We were prepared for much worse and are so glad the risks are much lower now. What we are expecting is that she will just be slightly smaller when she is born and she might have to be in the NICU for a short while. But hopefully that is all.

I am now almost 25 weeks, which is kind of crazy. Just three more months and we will be a 4 person family!

She has a name!

Darren and I have been having a difficult time on what to name this little girl. We had Watson set aside in the thoughts that we would have another boy. We had given no thought to girl names. So we started a list of names that we didn't hate. But there weren't any that stood out.

Five weeks into the name search I was doing laundry and as I was laying out the shirts to put on hangers a tag caught my eye. I took a picture of it and sent it to Darren because he was at school. We then quickly decided we liked it and were going to stick with it. 

Everly Faber.

She's going to be so awesome :)

Sign Language

No one knows we have this blog yet. But I feel like we should have a few things to read before people know about it. So. Here goes my first blog post!

Declan has just started learning some sign language.

His 'more' is pretty spot on.

His 'please' is not but it is still cute. Instead of one hand on the chest he does two hands rubbing his belly.

He also can sign 'all done' but he doesn't know what it means. But progress is being made! It is nice to have even just a small way he can communicate what he wants with us. 

So there it is. Post numero uno. 

:)