Again Please!!

Once again I'm begging you to pray for Stellan! As has happened in the past, he's grown desensitized to his medications and has been having more and more SVT. He was admitted to the hospital this weekend in hopes of finding a new cocktail of meds to do the trick to buy some more time before another surgery becomes necessary. Unfortunately the plan isn't working as hoped and he has been in SVT for almost 48 hours now. He is not handling it well at all. And his poor mother is having a hard time handling it as well! Please keep Stellan and his poor MckMama in your prayers tonight. A new course of action will be decided on in the morning. Please pray for wisdom for his doctors too. They have never had as difficult of a case as Stellan.

Lucky Blessed 7!

Monday Brian and I celebrated 7 years of wedded bliss! Seems like just yesterday we were stressing over whether our DJ was going to show up or if we were going to have a "dramatic silent" wedding!

These last 7 years have been so fun! We've officially now been married longer than we dated!

We celebrated by having a family dinner out at a favorite - Olive Garden! We are easily swayed by commercials and the day before our anniversary we just happened to see yummy pasta on TV. (Seriously, we are the people they make commercials for, but that's another post for another day!)

No pics from our night out, so I'll just take this opportunity to sneak in some old school ones! Don't mind the low res - they are pics of pics because we got married in the dark ages before digital was popular and I don't have a scanner to make them fancy!




Isn't my hubby handsome?! I heart him!

Thank you for a wonderful 7 years, Babus! Love You!!

Where's the Teef??

When Austin's 1st tooth came in a few weeks ago, I had no idea it was going to take me this long to blog about it. Turns out it's very hard to get a good pic of a 1st tooth. Not only is it barely visible when it first cuts through, my little man likes to stick his tongue over it when you try to open his mouth. On top of that, the camera has a heckuva time focusing on a barely visible, shiny thing in a dark hole.

It's finally visible to where you can point to it in the picture and say "See that white spot right there? No not that shiny spit, the other white spot!"



Oh and ignore the piece of bread still in his mouth!

Extreme closeup

And what you normally get while trying to get a picture of a barely visible, shiny thing in a dark hole...

Happy Birthday, B Monkey!

My nephew turned 3 today! Three!?!

I swear that it was just yesterday that he looked like this!


And now he looks like this!


And the day he was born, his big sister looked like this!

How squishy cuddly cute was she? Not that she's not still, but you wanna just squeeze those little cheeks and never let go!

And yes, my hair was blond. And no, I don't think I'll ever do that again. Looking like Kelly Clarkson was great for the 1st few weeks or so, but then when the brown started growing in, I looked like a reverse skunk. Not cool.

But enough about my issues!

Happy Birthday, Little Man! I hope you have a wonderful day!

I Heart Storks

A long time ago, when online chatting first started, I thought it was pretty weird to have friends that you had never met. I thought I could never do that. Boy, was I wrong! (And that doesn't happen very often! =P ) In fact, I have a whole plethora of friends now that I've never met, who I consider some of my closest friends.

About 4 years ago I got bitten by the baby bug. Brian and I still had about another year before we were going to start to make a family, but that didn't keep me from wanting to talk about it and research it (cuz you know that's what Wileys and former Wileys do!) and more or less, just obsess over the whole thing until it was my time to have a baby! Well, rather than drive Brian nuts (or really, rather than have to admit that I had an obsession problem!) I joined an online community at BabyCenter for women waiting to TTC. (At work, in the automotive industry, that stands for "Time To Collision", but here is refers to "Trying to Conceive". Two very different things!)

About 3 years ago a small group of us graduated from the "waiting" to the "actively" category. The message board we joined had about 15 women on it and we chatted nearly every day. Posting about who knows what at that time, but mostly just allowing each other to vent our baby fever with other people with the same focus.

Eventually our little group of 15 grew to about 40 women and we decided we need a new private home. So we started our own website with a private message board. Even though I've actually only met 4 "in real life" (other than Rebecca, Susan, & Nicole who I brought along to the StorkNest), these women are some of my closest friends. We've seen each other through births, miscarriages, marital problems, infertility, layoffs, deaths of family members, weddings, career changes, and all the joys and struggles of mommyhood for most and the heartache of empty arms for a precious few. When we first started chatting no one had any children. Now there are 43 babies and another 12 on the way!!

I heart my Storks! I can't imagine life without them!

So all that background is necessary to explain what took place Tuesday. We had the biggest Stork meetup so far. 5 total Storks + 4 babies + 3 in utero babies. Our sweet Keisha was in town from Texas, so Rebecca, Susan and I met up with her and Nicolle, a Stork that lives in Orange County (she's also one of only two Storks that I've known since the "waiting board"). This was actually the second time I've met Keisha - she was in CA a little over 2 years ago and Nicolle and I had dinner with her. Keisha wasn't yet a verified "non-creepy-old-guy", so Rebecca had to miss out on that meeting.

We had such a wonderful lunch with Keisha, her husband, Michael, their daughter Isabella & Michael's mother. Hopefully their work will bring them out to California again soon!


Left to right: Keisha, Isabella, Nicolle, Dylan, Susan, me, Austin, Rebecca & Jack

Proud Little American

We had a really nice 4th of July weekend. Brian got an impressive 4.5 day weekend! Mattel usually gives them a 4 day weekend for big holidays but then also let him out early on Wednesday. So we had lots of fun relaxing family time. Austin is a little confused as to where Daddy is today though.

Saturday we had bbq lunch with Grandma Judy, Aunt DeeDee & Uncle Norm. Austin decked himself out in his best patriotic outfit.


(He won't wear a hat, so he has sunscreen in his hair. But I think it makes him look handsome! You know, if you ignore the greasiness of the situation.)


Modeling his new Ronald Regan Library sweatshirt that Grandma got him


He got to eat his lunch outside.


Hanging out with Grandma Judy

That night we watched fireworks at Torrance High with the Millers, Schneiders, Rebecca & Jack and Rebecca's parents. It was very fun. Austin didn't mind the fireworks at all, but wasn't horribly impressed with them either. That probably had more to do with the lack of solid naps during the day. About 1/2 way through he was done and wanted to eat and go to sleep. But we (and by "we" I mean Rebecca) got some cute pics before that point. Rebecca is very handy to have around during kodak moments. (Can you have kodak moments when there's no film??)


Having lots of fun while waiting for fireworks.


A rare family pic!


I love this picture. A sweet Daddy and son moment!


Me and my little man


Watching fireworks


Rebecca got some neat shots of the fireworks too. I heart fireworks. Next to good food, that's my favorite part of 4th of July!

What a nice way to celebrate our country's birthday. Best place to live!

9 Months

What Rebecca failed to tell me when she was taking Jack's month pictures, is that each month it gets exponentially harder to get a good shot! The more mobile Austin is, the worse the pics get. Thank goodness Daddy had the day off cuz the ones I got while Daddy was taking a nap were no good at all. Austin is at least smiling in this one and sitting. The rest have him staring at toys or trying to commit suicide by going over the side of the couch.

But seriously, where is the time going? My baby boy is on the downhill slope to 1 year old! His birthday will be here before I know it!




New things this month..

• He's an official crawler! He still army crawls every once in a while, but for the most part he's only on hands and knees. The main catalyst was seeing Logan Cook crawl around at church with perfect form. Logan is almost 2 months younger than Austin, so I think that was a small blow to his little ego. The next day he seemed determined to figure out legitimate crawling.
• And he is crawling everywhere! And He is into everything! We've had to ghetto-baby-proof our house. What does that look like? A bunch of pillows blocking things he can't have. We need to find a better way to keep him from pulling on cables that run along the floor and keep him from behind the TV. Unfortunately, our family room is laid out in a way that makes it difficult to keep him just in the TV area. So for now we're just keeping a close eye on him.
• He has his first tooth! Just barely though. You can feel it with your finger, but can't quite see it clearly. It took nearly a month of teething to come through. Thankfully it only seem to bother him off and on.
• He loves to play with pots and pans. He'll crawl over to the cupboard they're in and pat the door until you get them out for him.
• He can pull up on furniture and stand holding onto it for long periods of time.
• He can clearly say "up". And he's babbles Dada now.
• He's getting really good with finger foods. Mac&Cheese are pretty slippery so he doesn't have a good success rate with them, but he's getting better.
• He loves animals. He gets really excited when we go outside to see Herb, our cat. He's not horribly gentle but we're working on that.
• He rough houses with Brian. He's way more aggressive with him than he is with me. It's so very cute to see them play together.
• He got a big boy carseat! He easily had outgrown his infant seat. So now he's in a fancy-smansy combo seat. Although, he won't be forward facing in it anytime soon. I'm thinking when he's about 15! I've seen too many crash tests.
• He is very anti-clothes & diapers this month. 9 out of 10 diaper and/or clothes changes becomes a crying and wrestling match. And going commando is not an option given his propensity for peeing on things!
• He still gets funnier and more fun everyday! It is so neat to see the things he discovers each day too!