Spring has Sprung...almost!

And you know what that means....Cardinal's Baseball is back! And their number #1 fan has a little song for all of you in blog space tonight! The Cardinals take on the Pittsburgh Pirates tomorrow afternoon at chilly Busch Field.

We had some very nice weather here on Saturday and for part of today, and as such, all the grass and flowers (tulips and daffodils mostly) have come up and are looking gorgeous! I wanted to post how it looks now because.... dum dum dummmmm.... tonight and tomorrow, it might snow! And, even worse, the temps may get low enough for a hard freeze, which would kill all our flowers (had I not covered them), but you get the point.

So, here's the house (with the "Lawn Striper" in full effect for the first time this year)...and flowers. Let's hope it doesn't freeze too hard. Two years ago this happened and it killed off all the grape and apple crop, which was a bummer because we weren't able to go do our normal ritual of "picking apples"

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Love those "stripes"! and the tulips are lookin' good!!

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Crazy man chasing Allie too!

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So, Saturday morning to early afternoon, Mommy and Daddy went and attended the "Birthing Class Refresher" at St. John's. Auntie Elizabeth came to watch Aidan and boy did they have a fun time. First off, she brought meatballs for lunch, which as many know are Aidan's favorite. Then, they played and colored for much of the morning. To our surprise, they even made and decorated Easter cookies! Auntie E said that Aidan did a great job putting the candies on and licking the frosting off the spoon (!). All in all, he was such a good boy for her taking a long afternoon nap as well!

Here they are having fun and showing off the awesome cookies!

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Auntie E and Aidan and Aidan "chillin'"

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The Easter cookies, it took me awhile to get all the letters figured out, I thought she was trying to spell "Easter" but then didn't find the S and R. But what it is is the first letters of all our names, Tyler, Emmy, Aidan, Ethan and Allie!!

So, as for the child birth class, we really, really liked our instructor. She was very good at pointing out things that we should do in this birth that will make it much easier and more comfortable. Emmy and I just sat there and shook our heads at all the things at St. Luke's that we didn't have "control" over that we should have had. Some things, like the birthing position, Emmy's lack of getting up and walking around (because the nurses made her stay on her back while the induction was "progressing"), and many more things that happened really made us fruustrated and upset that we didn't do things differently. In fact, Aidan's whole ordeal with the brain bleeds and seizures may have been prevented if we just would have done a few things that this lady taught on Saturday.

So, with that being said, Emmy and I developed a Birth Plan today that outlined our wishes for birthing Ethan. It's only about 5 or 6 items, and they aren't really demands, but just some "evidenced based" practices that show better outcomes for baby and Mom, which as all of you know, is definitely something that you want. One of them, surprisingly enough is the holding off of clamping the umbilical cord until it stops providing nourishment to the baby. Some studies have shown that this extra oxygenated blood from the Mom to the baby after delivery helps the baby pinken up faster, and according to our educator allowed her to give an APGAR score of 10, which is extremely rare (she's given the score twice in 20 years). So, we'd like to try this this time...I mean it can't hurt right? You can read more about the cord clamping here (it's kinda propangada-ish)

So that's all about giving birth...what we definitely know now, which we should have been on top of before, is that you have the right as a patient to request and "be in charge" of your care. Things just got so crazy with Aidan, Emmy really didn't get the quality of care that she needed and for that we all suffered.

OK, I'm off the soapbox. This birth WILL go better, Emmy's got many people / friends in L&D at St. John's and they will be watching over us making sure that this experience far surpasses the first one.

Have a great night everyone!

Ty, Emmy, Aidan and Ethan too!