Kara Elizabeth is here!

It has been a busy, tiring and baby-filled last couple of weeks......Kara Elizabeth was born on 11/10 at 5:43 pm and came into the world at 5 lb 9 oz and 18 inches long.
To catch everyone up, here are some pictures from the last couple of weeks:

The first three are the morning of Kara's birth. 

I woke up at 3 am with my water breaking and knew it was the day I was going to have a baby :)  We had plans to get pregnancy pictures taken just two days later, on Saturday, but that didn't get to happen so we snapped just a very few pictures right before we walked out to go to the hospital.

Fast-forward about 10 hours and we pick back up later that evening....

Right after she was born.....I loved this moment!

This is Kara getting her first bath

And here is Daddy shielding Kara's eyes from the really bright lights....I think Daddy is in love all over again!

Kara's serious face :)

Now the next few are after she came home.....

Sleeping beauty :)

I added some bright things for Miss Kara to check out while hangin' out in her bassinet.  She seems to really like the pink butterfly!



Here is Daddy and Kara.  He really likes just chillin' with Kara!

And here is Daddy with feeding duty.  I am actually breastfeeding but Miss Kara doesn't like to stay awake long enough to get all she needs to eat, so we are now bottle feeding while I pump.  Although I'm looking forward to getting to breastfeed again once she gets a little bigger and once she can stay awake long enough, this way Daddy and Grandma get to feed her also.

Well that is all for now.  I'll post more soon!

Baby Wearing

I decided I wanted a baby wrap carrier after reading about them but they can be fairly expensive to buy one.  So I set out in the wide world of information and found a great tutorial on the web for this Mei Tai.  It seems like a well made design.  We’ll see how it turns out in real life, but those who have used the style and tutorial speak highly of it.  I made the carrier so that you could wear it reversible. Here’s the colorful side….

And here’s the plain (more dad-like) side.  There is the solid piece that keeps the baby in place and then there is a hood attached to the top that has the ties to secure it so it stays put while you are walking around.  You can use it to put over baby’s head if she is sleeping, or if it’s too sunny or drizzly, etc. 

Here’s a couple of pictures of me wearing a stuffed cow.  Just to see how it works/looks.  You can actually put newborns up to several years old in here and can wear the child either on your front or on your back (newborns would be front only though).  Anyway, I’m pleased with the way it turned out and about the only thing I may change is making the straps a little bit shorter.

Baby Lanier's New Room

So I know some of you are wondering what exactly the baby’s room looks like right now.  Well it is definitely still in a state of “coming togetherness” but there is progress to be seen.  Here’s an around the room view of its’ current state.

This first one is the entrance to the room along with the closet.  I decided I had to hang at least one thing up for pictures, so since I had already determined this piece would be going beside the closet, I went ahead and hung it up.  I remember having this in my room as a child and my Mom gave it to me not long ago, knowing I liked it.  It makes me smile still  :)

This next picture is just showing the inside of the closet. I’ve organized the many clothes I’ve already acquired into boxes according to sizes. I figure that will make it easier to change them out as the time comes. We’d like to eventually put in some permanent shelves in the closet to make more efficient use of space to store stuff but that is second to the other stuff which really needs to get done before she is born.

Panning over, this is the window in the room. It takes a large portion of the wall that it is on. The curtains are obviously temporary until I get the real ones made. I’ve just got to go find material that I like. In three weeks, I plan to start working part-time (and can’t wait!!) so I’m hoping I’ll have some more time during the day to do things like this.

Here is where the bed is planned to be, along with the rocking chair.  I’m looking for a small table to sit beside the chair that I can put a lamp on and other small stuff.  I also plan to find a place for books beside the chair also.  The mirror sitting behind the chair I plan to put on the small wall to the right of the yellow curtains and off to the left of the chair.  I figured baby girl will have fun looking at herself when she gets tall enough to stand in her crib.

This final wall is where the changing table/dresser will go.  We’ll be moving it in sometime in the next week or two.  Most of the stuff sitting there will either be going in or on top of the table.  And you can see the doorway off to the very right hand side, which is where we started our tour.

This is a mural that my friend Marianna is painting for me.  It is actually a collage and I just LOVE it!  It isn’t finished quite yet but when it is completed, I plan to put it above the changing table.  I’m so lucky to have talented friends and family!

That concludes the baby room tour for now! I’ll post an update once I’ve made some more decent progress on the room.

Baby Movement!

Baby Lanier was being particularly active last night!  We'd been trying over the last week or so to get video of her movements without much luck.  Last night paid off!

2 Months To Go!!

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted an update. My dear sister Alicia decided to point that out to me this past weekend so I figured I had put it off long enough – it was time to get to posting!

So technically, we are 9 weeks away from a new birthday in the family. I’m definitely starting to get bigger and notice.

Changes I’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks:
• I definitely cannot see my feet – in fact shaving my legs and tying my shoes are becoming rather difficult tasks
• My belly gets in the way when I try to wash dishes now
• When I squat or kneel down, there’s not quite enough room for my belly (and baby girl usually lets me know with a stiff kick!)
• Getting comfy at night is now getting difficult
• She’s apparently a night owl (she always seems super active when I wake up during the night – which in turn means I don’t always get to go back to sleep like I so wish I could!)
• I can actually feel different body parts – head, legs, back – which is just really weird and cool at the same time
• I feel pregnant all the time – I know this sounds weird. But before about 30 weeks there were times in the day when I got wrapped up in what I was doing and since my figure didn’t get in my way or distract me, I would almost forget I was pregnant. Now, between the flutters, kicks and protruding belly, there is always some sort of reminder.

So what is going on in baby-world these days? Well, she is getting close to her birth length. In fact my handy dandy phone app says she could be up to 19 inches long! She’s also becoming quite the chunker, weighing in somewhere between 3 and 4 pounds. Wow! Her big job in the next few weeks is to pack on the pounds. She is accumulating fat under her skin to keep her nice and cozy warm when she is born.

Anyway, that is about it as far as how we’re doing. We started our every two week appointments last week (it was every month) and so far, the nurses still say everything is looking great. I’ve been so extremely blessed to have such an easy pregnancy (thank you God!!) and with only 9 weeks left, I hope to keep it that way!

Now I’ll leave with a few pictures over the last few weeks…..

25 weeks 1 day (August 15)



29 weeks 2 days(September 13)



31 weeks 1 day (September 26) –
These are taken in the newly painted baby’s room. The pictures didn’t come out too well, but you can at least see the color we chose. Oddly, the pictures looked fine on the camera when we took them….

24 Week Update

Here we are at 24 weeks – almost 6 months along. Things are still going great! I'm starting to truly show so that people I haven't actually told are asking if I'm pregnant. Baby girl is growing like crazy too…. I can tell in that her kicks are getting stronger seemingly every day. The kicks, jabs and rolls span from side to side and from my hips up to my ribs, so she is definitely getting bigger. Mark and I have found it quite intriguing to sit and watch my belly until it moves :)

This week in Baby-ville
Your baby is about eight and a half inches long (crown to rump) and weighs one and a half pounds, gaining steadily at a rate of six ounces per week. Much of that weight comes from accumulating baby fat, as well as from growing organs, bones, and muscle. Those little ears of hers are getting sharper and can hear very loud sounds, from a yapping dog to a jackhammer. Also by now, that fabulous face is almost fully formed, complete with eyelashes, eyebrows, and hair. Is your baby a brunette, a blonde, or a redhead? Actually, right now her locks are white since there's no pigment yet.

Also, last time I promised a sonogram picture of Miss Baby Lanier so here she is! This is a profile picture of her face so you can see her head on the right side with her little nose and mouth and forehead and then her chest is over to the left and you can actually see her spine on the bottom. Pretty darn cool if you ask me!

This week in Mama-ville
We haven't kept up as well as we were with pictures of me (partly due to much time by me spent in Buffalo, NY). Here's a very recent couple of pictures of me though. And for those who wonder if I'm showing yet, well, I think the pictures speak for themselves. Do I hear a resounding "yes"?

23 weeks 3 days (August 2)

As for the house preparations, they are coming along. The baby's room is getting close to being cleared out and the office/spare room is becoming more like what it will be. Still a long ways to go but progress is being made. In fact, in the extensive cleanup, Mark found some MRE's from his Navy days (yes it's been a while) and decided to "explore" one of them to see if they were still good after 20 years…yikes!! His take on it… "it tastes old". I'm just going to trust him on that one! As for the baby room, I still haven't totally figured out how I want the room to look, although I've been gathering ideas.

In addition to figuring out what we want the room to look like, we've been researching all the things you need for a new baby: car seats, strollers – those are the biggies since we have to have those to come home from the hospital – but there are still plenty more other things like playpens and highchairs and swings and other stuff. And oh the options you have! Almost overwhelming! We went window shopping yesterday and in addition to a lot of looking, we had fun test driving strollers. In fact I think Mark may have enjoyed it more than me, figuring out how they all worked and what all "features" there were for each.

Well that's where we are this week. More to come!

Angela.

20 Week Update

Well I had hoped to make these updates more frequent but we have been so extremely busy! We've done a lot of visiting and enjoyed it all, but I'm actually looking forward to a weekend home this weekend.

So, we are now at 20 weeks… halfway… woohoo!! Exciting and scary all at the same time. My figure is starting to reflect the fact that I have a foot-long baby housed inside my tummy. I'm starting to get to feel the tiny kicks and rolls too, which is just too cool! I'm sure in about 3 months I'll be asking for less kicks to the ribs but I welcome them all right now. It's especially neat to be sitting at my desk at work and feel a little tiny kick in the abdomen…just enough to remind me of what is going on and remind me that I'm not alone at all :)

This week in Baby-ville
Many of your baby's senses are developing as specialized areas in the brain are geing designated for smell, taste, hearing, vision and touch. Millions of motor neurons are continuing to develop in your baby's brain allowing more controlled and conscious movement. This week your baby's skin will become covered with a waxy-like substance called vernix which will protect her skin from becoming scratched or chapped. Your baby is also starting to produce meconium, the result of digestion, which will accumulate in her bowels and eventually pass during delivery of her first diaper.

Baby size: 6.5 inches (head to bottom, so about a foot long total length), 10.6 oz (over half a pound!)

This week in Mama-ville
I've gained about 10 pounds and am attaining a little bit of a belly. Finally I'm looking more pregnant and less like I stopped working out!

For those curious, here's a snapshot of my growing self over the last month or so.

15 wks 5 days (June 10)

17 wks 2 days

Baby's first blueberry picking experience: 18 wks 5 days

19 wks 2 days (July 5)

Lastly, we had another appointment last week. Everything is looking great and we get to start thinking about birthing classes and hospital tours. And two days ago we got another ultrasound. Being "old" like I am we got the extended version and got to see lots and lots of baby's heart beating and brain scans and such. It is really cool that we can already see the chambers of the heart and watch the blood flow in and out!! And there at the end of the 15 minute ultrasound, we found out what everyone's been asking….what's the flavor.

Well, it’s a …… GIRL!!!

(And no, we don't have a name picked out)

We'll have to scan in some of the pictures and I'll show them in a later post, but I'll just add that it is really cool getting to see a mini human moving around inside of me up on a big screen!

That's about all the baby updates for now. If I get time maybe I'll post more on other stuff going on in our lives. Like I said, we've been staying quite busy :)

Angela

We're Pregnant!

I'm 14 ½ weeks pregnant now (out of 40 total). We've made it to the second trimester and things are moving right along. I have been so blessed to not have morning sickness (thanks Mom!!). I was quite tired in the first trimester. That eased a little bit in weeks 11 and 12 but it's back in force now. They say that you are supposed to have super energy in your second trimester, but a quick search shows not everyone gets that luxury. So I'm settling in to 9 hour nights and mid-day tiredness to boot. Sacrificing morning sickness for needing more sleep sounds like a tradeoff I'm willing to take though.

Today we had our 14 week checkup with our nurse midwives. There are four of them in the office and so far I've been very pleased. They are all very nice women and seem to be Christian women as well. Now don't get too scared by the name "midwife", I won't be giving birth at home. They actually operate out of a hospital in Fort Worth and operate under the supervision of a Doctor (which is actually who referred me to them). We got to hear the heartbeat again today (very cool!!) and she said things were going great. We will go every month until the last month, then every week from there out. Our next sonogram will be at 20 weeks (about mid-July) where we'll get to find out what "flavor" we get :~)

I've definitely begun to grow. I spent last weekend taking all the clothes out of my closet that I can no longer wear (~90% of them) and replacing them with a set that should stick with me for at least another month or so. I was quite lucky to have a mother-in-law that recently closed a used kids clothing store down and let me raid her unsold maternity clothes. It didn't totally outfit me but sure got me a good ways along. Now that my closet is revamped, I'm better now that I don't have to spend 20 minutes trying on clothes before work to find something that'll "work" for that day!

Finally, several people have asked about my growing self, so here is a snapshot of the time gone by so far.

8 wks 3 days:


9 wks 7 days:


11 wks 1 day:


13 wks 2 days:


14 wks 2 days:




Angela :-)

Warrior Dash

So after Angela, Keith & I finished the Fayetteville 1/2 Marathon back in Dec 2010, Keith would periodically send suggestions for future runs. One of the ones he suggested was the Warrior Dash. After checking up on it a bit I knew I had to do it! I mean, I'm not the biggest fan of running. Running an obstacle course though... that's a different story! The Warrior Dash is a 3-1/4 mi course of numerous obstacles connected with short runs between each... almost makes the runs feel worthwhile :-) So I signed up! It took place last weekend 4/16 & 17, and me and a friend from work signed up for one of the waves on Sunday.

They start a limited number of people every 30 minutes all throughout both days... This is mainly due to the obstacles since they slow everyone down. You see, it turns out that 14,000 people ran this thing over the course of 2 days... if all those people were trying to go through each obstacle at the same time... well, lets just say the wait time would be uninspiring :-(

All in all, we had a BLAST! We got dirty! And I wore a video camera, and got some really cool shots! I plan to upload video in the next couple of days... for now, here are a few pictures... Oh... there are prizes for the best costume so some people dressed for the occasion ;-)



The friend I ran with from work, Gwen, is in front of me in this picture... Good pic going over the fire! I'm behind shooting video!



The last obstacle on the course is a mud pit that you're forced to crawl through due to barbed wire being suspended only a few feet overhead! After that, it's a short dash to the finish line!

Whoops... Cowtown 10K... DONE!

Was scanning the old blog tonight and noticed I never published the results of our 10K efforts... my bad! We did it! Yea for us! Results can be found here (put our name in the field at the top). Keith finished in 1hr 1min 19sec, Angela and I ran it together this time and we finish in 1hr 6min 34 sec (and that was with a stop at one of the port-a-johns along the way :-) you know... 10Ks are more my style!

New Tree

I've kinda been lax on this... meant to post a picture a while back... sorry about that. Good thing is the tree is at least blooming now :-)

So here ya go... our new Gala apple tree. It's our understanding it'll need polinating from another apple tree so we're hoping there's another one in the neighborhood somewhere so the local bees can do their thing!

Tree Change

Something happened to our peach tree at the end of the season last year and it was looking like it had seen better days. Angela decided that a change was a good idea. So, a couple weeks ago I took the chainsaw to it and made some firewood :-) This past weekend it was time to remove the rest of it, so I spent a little time diggin'er out! We plan to put, more than likely, an apple tree in it's place, so I needed to remove as much as I could. First step was to get access to the roots...


Once the roots were exposed it was time to cut 'em loose...


Once all cut, the remainder of the tree basically removed itself :-)

Training Update

Well, I suppose it's time for a training update... Only 20 days left until the Cowtown 10K, and training is picking back up (cramming I guess). I've been a little lax but have started to kick it into gear here lately. Weight training is going well, but running is hit & miss... mostly miss. I'm still having issues with my knee. Nothing major, but enough to make me find excuses for not running. I'm going to do my longest run to date (10K training-wise) tomorrow night. I'm very curious to see how that will go. Angela now has soccer on Monday nights so we rearranged the schedule so I can run while she's out running on the field.

It's COLD!

It's 10 degrees outside at 7:00am! Angela & I stayed home from work yesterday... most of the roads were frozen over and all the major school districts were closed (even the ones that "never" close). I mananged to take advantage of it by getting our taxes done (yea!) Unfortunately we're not scheduled to get above freezing until Friday... yikes! We have a lemon tree in a really large pot (it's a really small tree). Since it'll be left outside we had to come up with some way to protect it for the next few days. It's not exactly convenient to move so moving it inside wasn't an option. We looked for alternatives... a quick internet search suggested Christmas lights... now duh! Why didn't I think of that! The older style incandescent bulbs do produce a bit of heat. So we wrapped the tree with 2 strands, and then covered it with a couple of sheets to help keep the heat in. Ta-da... Christmas in February... plus the glowing red blanket in the middle of the night looks pretty cool ;-)

Hope it's warmer where you are!!!

10K Training

Well, so far so good... legs are sore! Did my first run last night. Actually felt pretty good for being over 3 weeks since the last time I ran. Knee didn't really give me any issues until afterwards (but in a different spot... go figure!), and I was able to make the full 3 miles with only a short bit of fast walking about 2 mi into it. Oh yeah... my arms and chest are sore!!! First time I'd done any upper body since last summer... yikes, has it been that long!

Angela was trying to get sick again yesterday so she opted out of the run... that's ok... I'm the one who needs the head start ;-)

What's this... Another Running Event???

First of all... Happy New Year!!!

Secondly...

Uh-Oh... Here we go again!!!


Yeah, I know I said running sucks... and I still think that. But at the same time, we didn't want to give up everything we accomplished. So, we came to a compromise. We wanted more weight training but less running. I never had knee issues until I began running for the half marathon so something shorter was definitely necessary. Both Angela & I think the knee issues will be helped by less running and more weight training as well. So we decided on a 10K this time. We could train for that and still weight train at the same time.

So here's our plan... 2 days of running each week, and 3 good weight training days. The other 2 days will just be an ab workout so it should give us enough rest for the week. We'll also be keeping separate logs this time just so we can keep track easier. Wish us luck ;-)