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