Introducing Baby Samantha

Samantha's due date was August 18th. We were really hoping she would come a week early because Sean was getting ready to start the new school year. My doctor stripped my membranes twice and we were hopeful but she did not come a week early. My doctor said that we would schedule a c-section if she was a week late so we just had to wait and see when she was ready to come. On Sunday the 14th, Sean decided that he would take the Subaru to school the next day. My sister Shantelle had barrowed it and had her car seats inside. Around 10pm we headed out to move them. As we came upstairs Shantelle who was in the kitchen turned and asked if my water broke. No, no it had not. She came outside and helped us move things around. As we stood outside talking, i felt some water gush. This happened three times and so i interrupted the conversation and said "um, either I just peed my pants or my water broke." The three of us spent the next 20 minutes trying to decide if it had. It is not how it happens in the movies!! Ultimately we decided that it would be better to go to the hospital now and be sent home than having to get up at 3 am in the morning and going. So, we loaded into the car and headed. On the way we saw Sonic and I really wanted a Diet Cherry Limeade but Sean said he would go get me one after we got checked in.

We arrived at the hospital and got checked in. They decided to do a check to see if for sure my water had broke since I wasn't completely sure. As I was laying on the hospital bed, the rest of my water came out. Yep, I was having a baby!! Having not gone through this before and having my only reference being TV, I was expecting her to come pretty soon. But, I was only dilated to a 3. The night passed, the morning came and went, and the afternoon came and went. I slowly progressed throughout the day and had lots of drugs pumped into me.

Finally around 5:30pm I was dilated enough to start pushing. So with the aid of the nurse and Sean, I had my legs in stirrups and pushed with the contractions. The epidural was starting to wear off so I could tell when the contraction was coming. After about twenty minutes of pushing, the doctor joined us, got everything ready and we were ready to go. It was really cool since I had the epidural and was not screaming the whole time. The four of us all chatted during the contractions and pushing. Sean and my doctor literally had a 20 minute conversation about sci-fi/fantasy books they were reading. Finally it came time to do the final pushing.

I have to say it was the most incredible experience of my life. It was so intense and hard to push harder but I gave it my all and then all the sudden we heard a cry. The doctor took the baby and plopped her on my stomach. Sean had already decided that he did not want to cut the umbilical cord but we didn't mention that to the doctor. All the sudden he was handing Sean the scissors and saying to cut here. Sean hesitated but the doctor told to go for it so he did.

The baby nurses were there and did there thing with her real quick and handed her back to us. Here is her first picture.
Here I am just admiring her. I can't believe she was there. 20 hours of labor and I now had this bundle of joy.
The nurse was nice enough to offer to take a picture for us. Here is our first family photo.Daddy's first moments with his little girl.My mom got off work around 5pm so instead of going all the way home she came to the hospital and hung out and waited. She is Sammy's first visitor.
Here she is sleeping. I took this one with my cell phone for facebook.Sean took this one with the cell phone while she took a nap laying on my chest.Here's a couple of pics of her in the basket cart thing they have them in. After a few hours they took her to the nursery so I could sleep and they could bathe her. When they brought her back she had this cute purple bow on.
We had a few visitors in the hospital though I forgot to take pictures of everyone. Shantelle and Josh came that night to see us. Throughout labor Shantelle kept texting us funny quotes. It was awesome. The next day we also had visits from Katie and Dave Collier and their girls, Celeste, and pictured below my Aunt Cindy. Sean was a little stressed the whole time because he was supposed to be in school at teacher meetings. Monday night he slept with me at the hospital but tuesday night I sent him home to get a good nights sleep because he was headed in to work Wednesday. He went into work and then came a picked us up from the hospital. Here is Samantha in her go home outfit. It is all newborn size clothes and were giant on her. Guess I need to get some premie outfits for a couple of weeks.Our family photo as we get ready to go home.

For 4th of July this year we headed up to Idaho to spend the weekend with Ryon, Jana, and the kids. It was extra awesome because everyone from the Brewer fam came up as well. We had a house full.... 12 adults and 11 kids!! We had a lot of fun!!

One of the really cool things we did was go to an airplane museum. Of course I did not take any pictures. There were a bunch of vintage planes from WWII and stuff like that. All the planes were still working too!!!

We also attended the Rexburg parade, which was awesome. I just love parades. Again, no pictures.

One of the funnest things we did was the giant water slide. Ryon's inlaws have been doing this for years. They take giant roof tarps and drape them down the hill on Ryon's yard. The first picture shows about 3/4 of the slide. At the top of the hill is an old rusted slide that you have to climb up. There is a hose tied at the top and away you go.
Here is Sean going down the slide.Being 7 1/2 months pregnant, this was definitely not the attraction to do.....but I decided to do it anyway. Only twice though. Celeste, who was 3 months pregnant did it too!! Here I go!
Here is Sean almost taking out Justin at the half way point
Some of the kids were not up to going down, but Brayden proved fearless and went down multiple times on his own. He loved it.Half way down the run we had another hose. Here is Paige having fun watering the slide.
The guys all decided they needed to have a competition going down the slide. Here they are going down one after another. Here they are at the end.
Here is a video of the guys competition, you'll notice at the end that Shantelle tagged along but does not have the body mass to make it as far so she cheated a little.

Utah Renaissance Faire

Back in Texas, Sean and I were introduced to the Texas Renaissance Festival. It was one of our favorite things about Texas. The Texas Renaissance festival is one of the biggest in the country. If you don't know what a Ren Faire is, well, Lets just say that people dress up in period clothing, walk around at different booths and many Ren Faires have shows based on Shakespeare or jousting or anything you can think of. We were excited when we found a Ren Faire here in Utah. This faire was in Ogden.

Here we are in our costumes.

Sean actually made the green dress I am wearing!! (Yes, Sean does the sewing in our house, and is dang good at it!!) As you can tell, I am very pregnant at the time. Over the years we bought different things to add to our costumes like belts, boots, cups, and even weapons. We definately enjoy ouOne of the attractions we wanted to see was the full contact joust. Now in Texas, the jousting they did was all choreographed. It was kinda lame. If one knight was supposed to fall off, he fell even if the other guy missed. We had low expectations.

Before the jousting started, they had a troop of girls that did horse vaulting. The horse would trot in a circle while the girls jumped on and off and did tricks. Here are a couple of pictures of them. They were pretty cool.

Next came the jousting. Little did we know that we were about to see the coolest thing ever!! This jousting troop is called the Knights of Mayhem. They are currently working at making jousting a recognized extreme sport. This first picture is of Charlie Andrews who is the leader of the troop and current world champion in jousting. I took so many action shots. Here are a few. They actually had two different sets of jousting and we were on different sides for each.


Here is a video that I took of a hit. Yes, this is Charlie being dehorsed by his opponent. So awesome.

Journey To Utah

As promised here is our funny little adventure to Utah. We closed on our house in Texas on December 29th. One of the things we wanted to do before leaving Texas was it visit all the LDS temples in Texas. We had been to only the Houston temple. Our plan was to leave right after the house closing and travel to Dallas which was a 3 hour drive. After doing a session we would drive to Dublin, TX, the home of the first Dr Pepper factory and of course do one last tour! That night we were going to stay in a bed and breakfast in Dublin then head off to the Lubbock tx temple. We were going to miss the San Antonio TX but it was way too far out of the way. After going to the Lubbock temple we were going to continue on our way to Albuquerque NM. We would drive until we were tired and get a hotel room near the Albuquerque temple. The next morning we would do a session and continue on to Utah. Sounded like a great plan.

First things first. The closing happened but we were not quite ready to leave. We had to go by a couple of places and then we had some friends give us a gift certificate to our favorite restaurant Sodalaks Beef Masters Grill. We absolutely love this place. Great Texas cooking.

We were going to go the night before and got there at 9:05pm....they closed at 9. It was one of the things we wanted to do before we left. So we did our final things and waited till 11am to go to lunch. It was super tasty! Well, this meant we did not have time to go to the Dallas temple since it was already out of the way. Its ok, we still were going to go to two temples neither of us had gone to. So we headed straight to Dublin.

We pulled into Dublin, checked in at the bed and breakfast which was so lovely. It is called the Patrick St. Bed and Breakfast. The lady who owns it was great to talk to. This was the house she raised her children in and converted it into the bed and breakfast.

Here we are standing in front of the house.
Here is a picture of our room. It was very lovely.
Sean and I love dublin Dr. Pepper, and its lovely cane sugar!! We had to go to the soda shop/factory one last time. and headed to the factory.....closed at 5pm. it was 5:30pm. Really? So we made the decision to go to the factory in the morning.....they opened at 10am. Here is a picture of the soda fountain counter. We got ourselves some Dr Pepper for the drive!!Outside the factory there is a lot of Dr. Pepper stuff around. They throw a really big party each summer marking the birthday of the factory. Here we are sitting on the stage.
This is our favorite place to take a picture, by the giant Dr. Pepper can.

Since it was Christmas time they had these giant Christmas cards outside, we just had to take some pictures.

Lastly we took a picture by the statue of the original owner of the factory.

We left Dublin and headed to Lubbock TX to be able to go to our first temple since this was a temple trip. As we pulled up into the parking lot, we were surprised to see the gates shut. I wipped out my phone and looked up the temple hours online. Sure enough on Thursdays they are only open until 11am. It was around 2pm. So instead of going to the temple we took a few pictures and headed on our way. At least we still had the Albuquerque temple.The plan was to keep driving until Albuquerque. We looked up the schedule and there were sessions up until 12pm. We were going to drive close and find a hotel so we would be sure to make a session.

Around 7pm we hit Santa Rosa, NM. I needed a break since pregnancy and traveling were not agreeing with each other. We stopped at the truck stop which had a restaurant inside. Sean had a bunch of grading with him he needed to get done so we sat and graded while we ate. As we were sitting there, we overheard a trucker and waitress talking about the road closure. Sean asked them what they were talking about and sure enough the highway we were taking had been closed about 3 hours previous due to a winter storm. Since the road had been closed for so long, all the hotels in the area and surrounding cities were all booked. Luckily for us (and I say luckily very loosly) the city set up an emergency shelter at the old middle school gym. Everyone was provided with a lawn chair, sheet and shelter blanket.

Here I am grading Sean's tests while sitting on my lawn chair.

We estimate there were about 50 people who stayed at the shelter. This is another time that pregnancy did not agree with my surroundings.

They provided us with sack meals that consisted of a container of apple juice, an orange, two pieces of white bread and some mystery meat. One of the mystery meats was some sort of turkey patty. The other was a cup of chicken stuff. I could stomach the bread but the meat, not a chance. Did I mention that today was our 5th year wedding Anniversary? Yeah, they say you should make number 5 memorable.....it was.That night was rough. The doors into the gym were heavy so every time someone went through they slammed shut. People started leaving around 5am in the morning. We were sleeping near the door and each time someone went through there was a draft of cold air and a slamming noise. At 7am I finally got up and we decided to get on the road. The roads were pretty bad. Here is a shot out the car window. The worst part about it, we were in my car, a 97 geo prism. This is not a vehicle made for snow, or hills.We ended up not going to the Albuquerque temple. First of all, we did not have any chance to shower and get ready and spent the night on lawn chairs. Second, the road conditions were really bad so we did not want to chance prolonging our driving into the night time.

We continued on our way, having some moments of tense white knuckle driving. We decided to stop in St. George and stay with Sean's brother Patrick where we were able to get a hot shower and a soft bed to sleep on. The next morning we got up and finished the drive to Lehi.

Halloween 2011

So I am going to jump ahead of my back tracking and post about Halloween!! Mostly because I can't access the pics right now for the next post and I have pics from Halloween.

Ok. So for Halloween Shantelle and I decided to host a Halloween party for my side of the family. It was our first annual Minute to Win It Halloween Party. It was great. Everyone was able to come! Ryon and Jana were going to be in town so it worked out perfectly. We set up a photo session station so everyone could dress up.

Mom was a clown and dad was a magician.
Ryon, Jana, and family are "travelers". They came down from Idaho and did not have time to prepare costumes (they are headed to Mexico for family vacation the next day).
Justin is a dead pirate, Ali is Cleopatra, Paige is a cute witch, Meg is a cat and Ty is a dog.
Shantelle, Josh and Family were from Peter Pan. Josh is Captain Hook, Shantelle is Wendy, Brayden is Peter Pan, and Brooklyn and Brynlee are Tinkerbell.
Here is my cute little family. Sean and I dressed up in our Renaissance costumes as an homage to the Texas Renaissance Festival we miss. Samantha is a cute little lady bug.
Celeste and Nate are sports players and Sadie is a little Minnie Cheerleader
Here are all the cousins! Top Row: Brayden, Harrison, Samantha, Hannah, Paige, Carson
Bottom Row: Simon, Brooklyn, Ty, Sadie, Meg, Brynlee

We all had a blast. Some of the games we played were:

Ready, Set, Hike- Hike 10 toilet paper rolls into a bucket

Face The Cookie- Starting with a cookie on your forhead, get the cookie in your mouth without using your hands in 1 min.

Spare me- Using a wrapping paper roll, shoot down pins with a golf ball

Bubble Blow- Blow a bubble and using only your breath, blow it across the finish line. Get as many points in 1 min

Defying Gravity- Keep 3 balloons in the air for 1 min

Caddy Stack- in one minute, stack 3 golf balls on top of each other and have them stay for 3 seconds.

Suck it up- Using a straw, transfer M&Ms from the table to a balanced stick on a bowl, stack as many in one min.

We had so much fun and the boys got really competitive. Most of the games had kid alternatives so the little ones like Brayden also had fun. Nate was our overall winner!