Harriette Grace Wells

No, I didn't set a world record as the first woman to go 6 weeks past her due date...I'm just crappy at updating my blog, and having two kids is kicking my butt!  However, our beautiful little girl did finally make her appearance on October 4th, 2011, at 4:37am, weighing in at 8lbs, 7 oz, 20.5 inches long.  She was a mere 6 days overdue.

The short version of the birth story is that I was induced with Pitocin, had my water broken, experienced my body's own labor when my body took over from the Pitocin, dilated to completion, pushed for an hour, and then had a C-section.  The long version of the birth story is a good one, and I wouldn't dream of depriving all those birth junkies of a good birth story (yes, even one that ends in a C-section can be a good one!), so look for that some time in the coming weeks (or maybe months? We'll try for weeks...).

Anyway, here are some more pictures of our cute little girl, who is now a month old!

Meeting Mom for the first time.

With Dad and Big Brother Cyrus (who could not possibly be more in love with his little sister)

With cousin Jackson, who was born almost exactly 4 weeks earlier.

At about two weeks old.

Phoenix and I are having a falling out

I hadn't gotten around to posting this yet, but I have actually quite enjoyed living here in the Valley of the Sun, far more than I ever thought possible.  The weather from December to May was so lovely that we could go outside every single day.  And the sunshine!  Oh, the sunshine!  Growing up in Portland, OR, I never thought that I was impacted by the seasons, but my one winter there as a stay-at-home mom was probably one of the more depressing times in my life.  So the contrast of the sun shining every day was very welcome.  I was beginning to think that I could live in Phoenix forever.

Now, I'm not so naive that I wasn't expecting the summer to be extremely hot, perhaps even unbearable at times.  But I had prepared myself for days exceeding 110 degrees, and I was pretty sure I could handle that for a few months, in exchange, of course, for the other 9 months of the year being lovely.  I had been warned of these high temperatures, but everyone always qualified it with "but it's a dry heat, so it's more tolerable".  Having experienced some ridiculous levels of humidity in New York, New Jersey and South Africa, I figured I could handle an extra 20-25 degrees of heat if that humidity stayed away.

Why do I Ever Make Plans?

Cyrus and I arrived in Denver yesterday for another month so that I can work 30 hours a week for my uncle.  Jason took Friday off to facilitate the laundry/packing process.  As I often do when I have a lot to accomplish, I had a basic schedule laid out in my  head of how Friday should go:

6:00am  Wake up, play downstairs, eat breakfast
8:00am  Go for a walk with Cyrus and Jager
9:00am  Get home, start laundry
11:30am In and Out for Lunch (what, I've been having a craving!)
12:00pm Home, Cyrus down for a nap, pack while he sleeps
2:30pm   Cyrus wakes up, we go do something fun, like go swimming or go to the park
5:00pm   Get home and make dinner, which we then eat together as a family
7:00pm  Cyrus to bed, Jason and I spend the rest of the evening relaxing
10:00pm  Go to bed

I should know by now that when I make plans, God laughs.  Here's how my day actually went:

It's A...

Oh.  Wait, did I forget to mention that I'm pregnant?  Perhaps that's because I've forgotten to blog for the past 3 months or so....

Well, I am pregnant.  Somewhere around 16 weeks or so, due date around the end of September.  I've decided not to put a lot of stock in my due date, considering that babies just don't care about them.  Cyrus thought that 16 days past my due date was the appropriate time to make an appearance.

Anyway, back to being pregnant.  Now, normally, you don't get to find out your baby's gender until somewhere between 18 and 22 weeks when they do the full anatomy ultrasound.  However, there was some concern from my midwives that perhaps I was further along than we all thought.  I can tell you this - I started fighting my non-pregnancy clothes at about 8 weeks.  Yikes!  I was hoping I was further along just for some validation on the oversized belly.  So we had an ultrasound last Thursday.

Alas, no.  I am in fact right about where we all originally thought that I was.  However, on the plus side, I am far enough along that they could tell the baby's sex!  Woohoo!

Before I share the results, I'd like to give a little background.  With Cyrus, both Jason and I suspected we were having a girl, though neither of us felt particularly strongly about it.  Obviously we were wrong.  With this baby, I almost didn't feel the need to find out the sex because I was absolutely, dead certain that it was boy.  Convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt.  Plus, there were several reasons why having a boy the second time around would be absolutely PERFECT!

1.  Every storage space in my house is packed to overflowing with baby boy stuff.  Not one to waste, I saved everything of Cy's, knowing we planned to have a few more kids.  I also hate spending money, and the thought of being able to reuse 99% of what would be needed made me positively giddy.  If this baby was a boy, I would need exactly two items: a crib, and a double stroller.  Perfect!

2.  We have a boy name all picked out.  Easy peasy.  If this baby was a girl, it was going to be all out war.  We had hypothetically talked about girl names, you know, just to be fair, not because we thought we were having one, and we flat out could not agree on a single name.  Not a one!  It had to be boy, just so that the poor thing could have a name!

3.  Cyrus is a boy.  The kiddos will be just over 2 years apart, and having another boy means a best friend and playmate for life.

4.  Most importantly, I feel like I know what I'm doing with boys.  Girls are kind of beyond me.  They confound me to a degree.  To this end, I think I had convinced myself that we would only have boys. Oh sure, the thought of one girl, maybe the last baby, was kind of nice, but really not necessary.  Nope, this one needed to be a boy so that he could have a chance of being somewhat normal.

Are you laughing yet?  Because God was.  Are you seeing where this is going?  Because I did not.

Since Jason couldn't make it to the ultrasound, I asked the ultrasound tech to write the sex of the baby on a piece of paper and fold it up so that we could see it together.  When we opened the envelope, we saw a cute little drawing and the words:

It's a GIRL!

Bring on the naming war and pink frilly dresses!

* As a side note, my brother-in-law and his wife are also having a baby in September, toward the beginning of the month.  They found on the same day as us what they were having.  They were as convinced that their baby was a girl as we were that ours was a boy.  They were wrong too!  It would appear that Wells parents are just terrible at parental instinct when it comes to the gender of our babies!

The Tenacity of Toddlers

First of all, for those who follow (and I mean that in the loosest sense of the word, since it has been almost a year from the last post) Cy's blog, I've decided to go ahead and start posting over there again.  We'll see how long it lasts. It is private, so if you want an invite, or need a new invite, just send me an email or reply to this post, and I'll hook you up.

Now, on to my post.  This evening before dinner, Cyrus and I were building towers with his Mega Blocks.  He's just started to figure out how they work, but likes to stick to stacking those blocks that are similar: for example, only blocks with four pegs, or only blocks with one peg.  The one peg blocks seem to be his favorite, as there are many, many of them, and he can make a really tall tower.  Here is how the tower building went tonight:

Tower #1.  I had to balance it very carefully to get this picture. 

Oh!  And it's down!  Cy was just getting ready to place this stack of blocks on top of the tower when it collapsed.

No matter.  We'll just start over again.

Cy's particular tower-building strategy includes placing several blocks together and then placing that section onto the tower.

Just. A few. More. Blocks! Seconds later, the tower came tumbling to the ground, much to the glee of one little boy.  

This process was repeated several times over, until it was time for dinner.  I love it!