Sleeping beauty

Brooke loves to be cuddled all up when she sleeps. Blake was exactly the opposite when he was little! So we are enjoying our baby that likes to snuggle! Here are some random pictures that I've taken of our little snuggler :) 

All bundled up at the hospital. 

Being outside on a 85 degree day I didn't cover her up :) she got plenty sweaty without a blanket on! 

When the house gets hot I cover part of her up, she sleeps better when she is 

bundled up at least some! 

Helping me edit wedding pictures yesterday didn't excite her too much :)

She also likes to hang on to something, today it is her burp cloth, yesterday it was the string of my sweatshirt hood :)

She really likes being in the carrier! Thankfully I think I have only used it maybe 2 times in the house so far!! 

Smiles

We love this little girl more and more each day! We are starting to get a few smiles out of her! A couple mornings ago I just happened to catch every part of her smile so I thought I would share :)

Not sure why but I happen to think she is the cutest little girl ever :) 

Brooke Lee Earney

Brooke joined our family on Monday April 7th at 5:21 in the afternoon. Her due date was the 1st so she was a week late. I went into the hospital at 7 am to be induced. I got hooked up to all the monitors, got my iv in and we were ready to go! The nurses told me that they had to monitor Brooke's heart beat for 30 minutes before Dr. Louck (our family doctor) could put me on any induction medicine. About a half hour passed so we were hoping I would be started soon.  We waited a little while longer then a nurse came in and explained that I needed to be taken off my monitors. Another patient had came in and she needed them. Turns out they have 2 delivery rooms and 3 patients. One was there when we got there, she was induced in Sunday night, so she had medication in her so she couldn't be taken off her monitors.  Don't they have a back up monitor?! Yep, it wasn't working :( The patient that came in was having regular contractions, I wasn't. Since I was having no contractions and wasn't on any medication I was the lucky patient that had to wait :) So we sat, and sat, got kinda frustrated, sat some more and sat some more :) Finally we were updated. The lady that took my monitor was scheduled for a c-section the next morning, on Tuesday. Her baby was breech. Since she was in labor they were going to do the c-section as soon as they could. So once that was done we would be able to get a monitor back because she wouldn't need it. So around noon I finally got my monitor back!! Yes we sat there since 7 am without anything happening beside a very painful iv that was in my arm with nothing attached to it :) Now I had to do the 30 minutes of monitoring Brooke's heart all over :) that passed and the doctor came in. Everything looked good, he put me on cervidil. So I laid on my back for 2 hours without moving. This could do 2 things, one, it could make me have regular contractions or two, it might not do much at all. We were hoping for option one :) It was now about 3 pm. If option 2 happened I would have to wait 4 hours before they could start pitocin. Thankful my body listened to me and I was starting to have regular contractions! They were starting to get pretty painful so I asked for some pain medicine through my iv. Not much longer after that and Brooke was in my arms. I went faster than any if the nurses thought I was going to and Dr. Louck about missed it :) He has an office across town from the hospital and was there taking care of his patients when they called him and told him he better come quick. He said he had two more patients to see for the day then he would be there. The nurses told him if you do that you will miss it all. So he came and was in my room for about 1 minute before I started pushing. I only had to push two times and she was out, so he barely made it :) So at 5:21 pm our precious baby girl was born. She was 7 lbs 8 1/2 ounces and 20 1/2 inches long.  We were released from the hospital Wednesday evening. 

Daddy and his little princess! 

Blake wasn't too sure about things when he came to the hospital on Monday, this picture was taken on Tuesday. It didn't take him long to start liking her! 

Her coming home outfit! 

On Thursday morning this was Blake's favorite thing to do! He would sit for several minutes at a time and hold and kiss his baby sister. 

Daddy's first time brushing his little girls hair! 

Brooke went on her first tractor ride when she was about 3 weeks old. Daddy was hauling hog manure so when we delivered lunch we rode for a couple trips. Blake thought it was pretty cool to have his sister on a tractor ride as you can tell :) 

Brooke does not lack entertainment around this house!!

My favorite picture of my beautiful baby girl so far!!

Things are going great with 2 kids! Blake loves her so much! He comes running from wherever he is if she is crying for very long. He likes to help me out a lot. He gives her paci to her, he has fed her bottle to her, he covers her back up if her blanket falls off, he makes sure she has toys if she is laying on the floor, and he gives her way more kisses than he gives Tyler or I :) He likes to play on his own a lot during the day so that helps me out a lot! When I feed her bottle to her he likes to sit on my lap and help me or just to enjoy some snuggles with both of us :) Brooke is an excellent baby! She only gets up once every night around 3 am. She started that when she was around a week old. She has spoiled me! She likes to be awake and lay on the floor and look at books or toys. She also likes laying in her swing. I just can't believe it has been almost a month since she joined our family!! 

Myrtle Beach

This post will mainly be about our recent family vacation to Myrtle Beach but I will also add the recent winter news from around here. Not because I am complaining about how bad it is or because I want people to feel sorry for us; but because I want to remember it when I get caught up on my scrapbooks :) Which right now I am over a year behind.....so it could be a while before I get to this and I forget things easily!

The last time I posted we were living at my parents while they were gone. Well when Tyler came back to check on our house on Tuesday we had no water! We went to my parents on Sunday and no one had been to our house from Sunday to Tuesday. So we were hoping things were OK but couldn't get out on the roads until Tuesday. Our water lines had froze due to the cold weather. I know I'm crazy but I kept track of the temperature while we were there and lowest I recorded was -14 degrees with a -40 windchill!! This was off my parents weather station so I'm sure other people have different recordings but either way it was cold!! So it was no wonder why our pipes froze. Tyler and my grandpa tried thawing out our pipes on Tuesday but couldn't get any water to flow. So they tried putting a heater blowing into our crawl space. Tyler came back to my parents and a little later grandpa called and said he shut the heater off because he was afraid of leaks and if they thawed we would have a muddy mess! If they had to redo all our plumbing they didn't want to work in a mud hole :) So Wednesday morning Tyler and I both went home and we had water!! They thawed out on their own! Tyler crawled under the house and we only had 1 little leak! We were SO thankful!! Grandpa was able to fix it for us and we moved back into our house Wednesday evening before my parents got back! 

So that was Wednesday, fast forward to Tuesday morning and we left at 3:30 AM for Myrtle Beach!! It was a much needed break! We had a 13-14 hour drive down there so we wanted to get an early start so Blake would sleep the first several hours. We bought a portable DVD player for trip and it was a very good thing to have! That was about all he did on the way down and the way back! We got to our hotel and checked in around 5:30 that evening. We didn't do a lot of stuff while we were there but we stayed busy and relaxed a lot. We checked out some state parks that were in the area. We went to a Bass Pro shop and then walked around a mall that was connected to the Bass Pro. We went out to eat about once a day at different places that we found. We went to a Ripley's aquarium that was there. It was a lot like the one in Gatlinburg but smaller if you have been there before. Anywhere we went that had a beach we would walk and look for shells. Blake loved to play in the sand so he did that while Tyler and I looked for shells. We went swimming in our hotels indoor pool a couple different times. We went to a couple flea markets and checked out a Children's Museum but we both agreed that it was a little more like a kids activity center. Blake really enjoyed it though! They had a lot of different things for kids to do and Blake could have spent all day in there doing the different activities. We went bowling one night at our hotel. We had a lot of fun! Blake got fussy and actually fell asleep while I was holding him and bowling at the same time. It was quite challenging to be holding a 30 pound kid and bowl at the same time. Thankfully we were able to lay him on the floor after a little bit and Tyler and I had good evening with just us since he was sleeping :)  That pretty much sums up our vacation! We left our hotel Sunday morning around 8 and drove until 7:30 that evening then stayed in Louisville for the night. Then on Monday morning we went to Cabela's then headed home. We got home around 1 in the afternoon. We were very thankful for the time we were able to spend together!! As you will see in pictures we didn't have just overly warm temperatures :) But it was warmer than what we would have had at home!! I don't know if it got over 60 degrees at any point of our trip but it felt warm compared to the week before though! Now for an overload of pictures :)

The beach right out our hotel was very nice! It was the beach we spent the most time on.

Blake had fun trying to catch the seagulls, he never got one. He would come back to us and say "uh oh".

This is his new face he likes to give us a lot :) 

Blake really enjoyed having Daddy around for a whole week!!

My 2 boys! Blake never let daddy get very far from him.

Swimming at our hotel. Blake started to like swimming a lot on the last day :) He had fun jumping off the side to us in the pool.

Petting the sharks at the aquarium. I missed it on camera but Blake actually did touch one!

He enjoyed sitting in a fish mouth and sliding down the tongue.   

One morning we woke up early to go to a state park and look for shells. It was 33 degrees that morning so Blake and I watched a movie in the envoy while Tyler looked for shells. I got out a couple times though to get pictures of this beautiful sunrise!

They had a train station at the museum! It didn't take Blake long to find it.  

A big bubble maker that Tyler had more fun with than Blake did :)

An example of daddy couldn't go to far. Anytime Tyler would walk down to the water Blake would be running after him yelling "dadda".

Tyler digging a hole as Blake fills it in :)

Blake enjoyed bowling for a little bit before he got fussy!

Then this is how he looked for the rest of the night :)

This is looking off the balcony of our hotel room. We could see the ocean through the trees.

During the warm season Blake would love this place! Our hotel had a big swimming area for kids outside. 

This is our hotel. Our room was on the part that sticks out on the left of the picture.

The last night on the beach before heading home.

That sums up our vacation, now onto this past week. My parents left for Grand Cayman a couple hours after we got home from vacation. They picked pretty good times to be gone didn't they?! :) My sister is home this time though so we get to stay in our own house. But that doesn't mean we didn't have troubles :) We had a pretty normal week until Friday. Yes it has been cold, windy and snowy which isn't always fun but on Friday when Tyler was home for lunch he went to wash his hands at the bathroom sink and there was no water!  Yes our pipes had froze again!! Our house doesn't have the best heater or insulation anyways so we have always had a couple space heaters floating around the house. There is always one upstairs for Blake's bedroom and there is one that stays in the toy room because those windows don't latch and there is a breeze through there when its windy. But we have 3 other ones that we use where ever they are needed. So we turned one on in both bathrooms trying to warm things up. Thankfully the kitchen sink always had water but we put one in the kitchen to try and keep it warm so those didn't freeze too. We have two bathrooms and between the two of them we had one toilet and one sink. Neither shower worked! The sink that worked was in one bathroom and the toilet in the other bathroom :) On Saturday morning nothing more had thawed out. So we washed our hair in my kitchen sink for the day :) But by mid morning everything had thawed out by itself! So since Saturday we have had constant water running out of every faucet and shower that are in the house and I flush the toilets every 20 minutes to keep those from freezing :) It is only supposed to get colder these next couple days so we hope that nothing freezes again but with water running it shouldn't.  On Saturday Tyler and Josh piled snow up along the whole south side of our house trying to insulate the crawl space a little more so hopefully that helps. We are also very thankful that no pipes had leaks this time!! We keep the space heaters on as needed but they aren't always on. Then to top everything off last night we lost power :) Around 9:30 Tyler and I were heading out to do the chickens and the house went dark. We went back in to be with Blake so he wouldn't be scared as much. He doesn't like it when it is dark. Tyler headed back out to do chores while I sat with Blake because it had flickered about 4 more times before going out for good around 9:40. Thankfully our natural gas heaters still worked with no power. So we all stayed warm. Blake ended up sleeping in our bed for the night because he was certain there were bears in the house and wouldn't get too far from one of us. We had 60 mile an hour winds at our house so it was a nasty night to be out of power. Around 1 this morning we got our power back on! I am very thankful for the workers who were working up in a bucket truck in the winds on the telephone poles that were beside our lane!! When I got up to check stuff out once the lights came back on they were just leaving.
I think that is all the interesting stuff we have had this winter so far. I know it is hardly any trouble to most people and a lot have it worse than we do!! I just wanted to get stuff wrote down for the scrapbook so I figured I'd do a blog post about our winter so far and vacation. Off to flushing the toilets again :) Have a good week and stay warm!!

Snowed In

It has been forever since I posted an update. A lot has happened since then and I'm sure I'll forget lots of things. As I am writing this we are snowed in at my parents house. We came over here Sunday afternoon so we would beat the worse of the snow and wind. We came here because they are gone and Tyler is in charge of the hogs/barns since Dad isn't here. If something were to go wrong and Tyler couldn't get here because of the roads it wouldn't be good. So we packed our clothes and headed over :) Blake is enjoying being here and playing with all of his toys over here. I am doing several crafts and just being lazy, I have done our dishes and done some laundry though :) Tyler was in the hog barn all morning doing chores and making sure everything is staying as warm as it can. With it being -12 outside with a -40 windchill he can't do anything outside so he is working in the heated shop now.

 Here is a picture at my parents. I am standing on the porch, this doesn't show much of the snow, but I wasn't going to walk around too much :) I think this is the only day that it felt warm to go in a walk in freezer to get something for lunch :)

My brother and sister-in-law are in Jamaica for a week on a work trip. I think they picked a great time to be someplace warm!! So we are dog sitting there puppy Maggie for them. Blake is loving having a puppy around all the time. Although he likes snuggling a little more than she does :) He likes to lay on her if she allows him to, which isn't often, but he does every once in a while.

Since I am not at our house I don't have our old camera that has most of our pictures on it. And I say old because we got a new one! Well new to us anyways :) My parents got a new camera so we got there old one!! I was super excited! It is my dream camera to have, so I was sure to bring it along to document all this snow :) The old one probably won't get used much. So there won't be many pictures on this update.

My family had our 2nd annual butchering day on New Years Day again. I wasn't there for all of it, we had a little boy with a double ear infection, so we left a little early. But we butchered 2 hogs and 2 deer this year. It was quite a bit more from the 1 deer and 1 hog we did last year :) Tyler has gotten 2 deer this year. He got a little button buck, which counted as anterless in archery season, then he got a doe with his muzzeloader later in the season. So we butchered his doe. The button buck we made mostly into deer jerky. My dad also got a small doe the Sunday before we butchered so that was the other deer we did. Since we planned on doing this since last year it was a little more thought out than the first butchering we did. We did summer sausage, snack sticks, brats and ground meat this year.

 Blake and Maggie's spot for the day- under the work bench.

 Mom, Angie, Laura and Dad getting started for the day.

 Blake brought along a Thomas coloring book so he colored some, and let the woo wa (his word for dog) color in his book :)

 Lunch!! The freshest pork loin you'll ever eat! It was delicious! Along with some deer steaks and dressing.

 The smoker full of snack sticks and more pork loin.

Our 2 lovely hogs for the day :) And Tyler's broken down truck in the back ground :)

That is all the pictures I have to share with me. But in other news, everything is going good around our house. The chickens are still producing their eggs for us. It has slowed down a little with the cold weather but we still get plenty! I think right now I have around 13 dozen in my fridge :) Since we can't get home to check on them we are hoping they are surviving this cold weather we are having. Don't worry, we gave them plenty of food and water and they have a couple heat lamps in the shed with them! We figured on being here without being able to get home so we were prepared.

Blake has been his usual crazy self. He has a few words he says but isn't talking sentences yet. He is getting closer though! He is enjoying all his new toys he got for Christmas very much. He is into Bob the Builder, Thomas the Train and farming right now. He got some of all of this for Christmas so he is set for a while :) He also likes animals a lot. So there is consistently some farm equipment, a train, and an animal in every room. He keeps us busy though and there is never a dull moment with him!!

Tyler has been busy hunting, farming and keeping up with Blake. Hunting season is over now though, but that doesn't mean he has any free time. Blake is very fond of his daddy and doesn't let daddy stand or sit around for more than 20 seconds before he pulls him somewhere. Everything Tyler does Blake would be right beside him if he could!  If Blake knows Daddy is going somewhere he quick runs and gets his boots, coat and his hat so he can go along. We have some rough times when he realizes he can't go along. So Daddy is very popular in our house :)

I have been busy working around the house and at Homestead. Work has been closed since Christmas eve so I have been enjoying my break off. I go back to work on the 21st of January. They open for business this Friday the 10th, but Tyler, Blake and I are going to Myrtle Beach next week :) So I get an extra week off work! My days are numbered there though, I am quitting work at the end of February to stay at home. With baby #2 due April 1st I decided to be off all of March. I do plan to fill in though if they can't find someone else to fill the spot. Speaking of baby #2, we found out its a girl!! So we will be adding some pink things around our house shortly :)

I'm sure I'm missing some news that I could put on here but I am tired of typing :) So that's going to be all for now. Stay warm!!