update

well, it has been 2 1/2 months since i last put anything on here. ok, i'm still riding the learning curve of a first baby. Jade is growing so well. She is up to 10 lbs and is now 3 months old. She has over doubled her weight since she was born. Yeah Jade! She is starting to smile a lot and interact some. I have started sticking out my tongue and she responds back with a big smile and sticky hers out to. it is so cute. I'm probably just a little biased but i think Jade is the cutest baby on the planet. David always says we won the baby lottery. I love being a stay at home mom and am enjoying every minute of my time with Jade. I'm actually feeling really desirous to try for another baby soon but i have to patiently wait for my body to heal fromt he c-section. I was hoping to get my pregnancy weight off before having another one but I don't know if that is going to happen since i haven't lost even an ounce in the 7 weeks that i have been working out and eating well. I guess i'm the 1 in 5 women that doesn't lose much of anything while breastfeeding. oh well, Jade is so worth it!

Baby Jade is Here!

Jade was born almost 6 weeks early, 5 weeks and 5 days to be exact. David was with Jade every moment of her rather traumatic entrance into this world.
This picture amazes me because it shows how many people are involved in the process. With Jade coming so early she was at risk for so many things. They had to put her on oxygen immediately and time was of the essence.
This pictures makes just makes me realize how blessed I am that Jade is ok. So many things could have gone wrong and they didn't. Although Jade is struggling to breath at times she is doing really good and off of needing the oxygen 24/7.

Here is Jade now as of a week since she was born. They are monitoring a lot of things on her, hence all of the cords. She is also mostly fed through the tube in her nose, although she is doing so well now that I have started to be able to feed her a few times a day. She will be able to go home when she has the energy and ability to take to all 8 feedings without the tube and when she can maintain her temperature by herself and not stop breathing at all. Her doctor calls her his miracle baby and said she is doing unusally well for her age and she should probably be able to go home in about 2 weeks if she keeps progressing as she has been. He said she is acting more like a 37 week old baby instead of a 34 week old baby. She's already an overachiever!
Now for the story for those of you that haven't heard it yet. Last Saturday was my baby shower. Later that evening I started to not feel so good. I thought i just had normal weird pregnancy stuff. About 3:30 in the morning I woke up and was in a lot of pain and was up for a couple of hours from the pain. I thought I just had a bad flu. The next day was Sunday and I continued to feel really sick. Monday was even worse. I got 3 blessings from David in 2 days and he blessed me to know if there was anything wrong. About Monday afternoon I started to be a little concerned that this was more than just a flu because it didn't exhibit a lot of the normal flu symptoms and it was a lot worse then any flu I had ever had. I still just figured it was probably the flu, however I looked up my symptoms in my pregnancy book and they somewhat matched that of preeclampsia so at about 8:00 pm I decided I better go into my doctor's office and just make sure this wasn't pregnancy related. So we went down to my doctor's office and was told that I needed to go to the hospital because they didn't have the equipment to make sure the baby was ok.

Well, to make a long story short we went to the hospital, they took my blood pressure and a sample of my blood and within 20 minutes of getting there I was told that I had HELLPS syndrome which is a very serious form of preeclampsia and that I had to have a C-section immediately to get the baby out for the baby's sake and for mine. They said I was having contractions 2-7 minutes apart with most of them 2-4 minutes apart but that my body wasn't at all ready to have a baby vaginally. I was shocked because I had been having contractionsd since 3:30 am on Sunday but didn't know it because the HELLPS was making me really sick and it was hard to distinguish them. Anyway, within another 30 minutes I had had a C-section and Jade was born.

I was really scared at first because I felt so unready to have a baby and I was scared for the baby's health. I also felt guilty that maybe this was my fault because I had been running around so much and pushing it a lot. But my doctor told me that this had nothing to do with working hard and that everything would be ok.

Dr's still don't know what causes HELLPS syndrome although there are many theories. It's a strange thing because it can happen suddenly with no previous signs or problems. In my case I had had an ideal pregnancy the entire time and had felt great and was working out and everything and then suddenly within a few days I had HELLPS.

David and I are just so grateful to Heavenly Father because things have turned out so well and we haven't had any of the complications that women can have with HELLPS. Baby Jade is beautiful and she has already brought so much joy into our lives!

Baby Shower

Thanks to everyone who came to my baby shower. It was a lot of fun and all i can say is that my baby is now is going to be more in style then me! It was a lot of fun and I can't believe how i got such a great variety of things with no overlap in presents. We played some silly games including "what would Alisa choose" The funny part is that what i told my mom over the phone in answer to these questions when she was putting this game together differed some then what I thought the day of the shower. For example i told her that i would like to vacation in the Caribbean more than in Australia, Hawaii, Peru or Canada. But then the day of the shower it was Peru. Hey, I'm pregnant, ok! I only have a little while longer to use that excuse so I'm gonna take advantage of it.

Baby Jade at 31 weeks

Baby Jade at 31 weeks

I just love this saying!

Here is my 16 year old step son and his poor little wrecked Geo that he spent 2 months working his butt off to earn on his own without our help. He was free at last (for 2 weeks) before the accident. Ironic, because I also wrecked my first car after 2 weeks.

Kittyboy FLOYD

This is our cat Floyd. He managed to widdle his way into our hearts and home by a most cunning plan that I know he devised in his little cat brain. I didn't even know that cats could be so cunning.

To preface my story I need to say that one thing i was really happy about when we decided to buy another house is that I wouldn't have to feed all of the homeless cats everywhere. David is a sucker for animals and bugs and anything alive and so being his wife I have to support him in feeding every homeless animal that comes along. Anyway, so not more than a day after we move into our new house here comes Floyd meowing at our door. I was, needless to say, not too happy about not even getting a one week break from homeless cat feeding. So Floyd started coming along daily for food and sometimes lingering for hours in hopes of getting some affection. At first i thought for sure that he was a house cat because he was so pretty and so good with people. Usually stray cats are very scared of people. But it turns out he wasn't. Anyway, soon Floyd became a problem because everytime we would open the garage to drive out of it Floyd would run in hoping to claim his territory and set up a home for himself. Sometimes he would run into our house too if we opened the front door and we had to chase him, catch him and let him back out. Well, one day he ran into the garage as we were pulling out and he went right to our stairs of the garage and sprayed on them. I never knew this until this happened but apparently male cats that aren't neutered spray to mark their territory. The spray is awful smelling and very hard to get out. We were really late for an appointment and i was so annoyed with this stupid cat trying to take over our house and leaving this awful odor in our brand new garage and also making us late for an appointment that i kicked him. Not super hard but hard enough that he got the message that this was not his territory and to get out. Well, he ran away.

Yes, i felt so awfully bad for doing such a terrible thing and the guilt set in. The next morning David left for a tradeshow for 4 days. Late in the morning i saw Floyd come around again to see if there was any food for him but this time he was limping and very scared to get close to me. I felt so awful thinking I might have kicked him harder then I had thought and caused this injury so i called our vet who lives in Provo and started the 30 minute trek to take this homeless cat to be looked at.

He was such a good cat on the way there and back and i thought "what a sweet cat" The vet told me his injury was from a fight with another cat which relieved my conscious. Somewhere in the process of it all though i started thinking about adopting him. Partly because we had just had our beloved cat of 12 years die so there was a cat opening in our house (my cat max is 2, David would have 10 if I let him), partly because the vet said he was a very good natured cat and would make a great house cat, partly because i was a little lonely with David being out of town, and partly because when i held him he snuggled up to me in the sweetest way that I haven't had a cat do before.

So that is how i ended up with Floyd. I decided to adopt him a few weeks later and we had him fixed, declawed, washed, and given his shots. For any of you reading this who knew me before I met David you will probably think it is funny that I chose to have a cat because as you know I was pretty much not at all an animal lover at all, and sometimes bordered on animal abuse. Don't get me wrong, I never did anything really bad just teased cats and stuff because i wasn't too fond of them. But cats have really grown on me since being married to David and this little guy is the sweetest cat ever. he's a big time snuggler just like me

I've finally entered the blog world

The first time i heard about blogging was last year (ok, so i'm out of the loop but that's what happens your first 2 years of marriage, or at least that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it). I was given my visiting teaching assignment my 2nd week at our new ward where we had just bought our first home. Both my visiting teaching partner and the girl we went to see blogged, and had babies about 1 year old and stayed home with them and cooked and blogged all day. I was really just bored to death the whole time listening to them talk about their babies and blogging.

Fast forward to a couple weeks ago when i went to lunch with 2 of my mission companions Alyssa and Erin. They mentioned blogging, but this time my interest peaked because I have a baby on the way and I hate scrapbooking. So that evening i went to Alyssa's blog site and sort of fell in love with blogging as i read her delightful entries. Thanks Alyssa, you are my blog inspiration and I only hope with time my blogs can be as cool as yours.

So here we go. I'm excited for my new blog adventure and to share the many delights of life with my family and friends!