Busy Book for my favorite boys!

I made a Busy Book (aka Quiet Book / Activity Book) for my boys for Christmas. It was so fun to make but it took forever! I'm glad that I finished in time for Christmas and that they (and their mommy) like it! :)

Here are pictures I took, Mostly before it was assembled, but after the pages were completed. FUN!

Alphabet

Planting Grass, Carrots, and Flowers

Picking Apples

Make an ice cream cone

Burger and Fries

"Paper" doll

Phone (and #'s for counting and learning phone #'s)

Tic-Tac-Toe

Mr (and Mrs.) Potato Head

(she's kinda ugly! haha!)

Cars (and color matching)

Vroom Vroom!

Barn & Animals

(If some of these pages look familiar... I must admit, I stole some ideas from other blogs/websites, and some ideas were my own.)

Decorating the tree

I'm so excited for Emilee's first Christmas! :) Tonight we decorated our tree. I made yummy pepporcorn steak for dinner with rice and green beans. We built our tree (Yeah, it's fake, whatever), put the lights on and decorated. Emilee slept through ALL of that! I can't believe we actually got it all done! I found Taylor Swifts Christmas album on grooveshark and played it while we decorated the tree. We also sipped peppermint hot chocolate with whipped cream, marshmallows and crushed up Ghirardelli's peppermint bark on top. YUM!

Ryan stringing the lights

All ready with our hot chocolate!

Yum yum!

This is my newest ornament. No special meaning - I just love snowmen and he was sooo cute and on sale! :)


This one is for our first year of marriage. It's our wedding photo and the tag says "2006" which is the year we were married.

We got this one when we bought our first house

This year Nae made me a beautiful cupcake ornament in memory of our best friend Carrisa! I love it! :)

I got this last year shortly after she passed away. It's a bling-y frame, just like she'd like. One of my favorite pictures of us. I miss her!

We got this when we were in Maui last November.

Ryan LOVES sports...

And I love GIRAFFES!!! :)

Daddy also loves Emilee

The Family! (Tried to set up the self-timer. HAHA.)

Emilee the Christmas-Cutie!!!

Now I just need to get a special ornament for Emilee's first Christmas. I really like the one Grammy Tammy got this year. Little pink booties! I need it! :)

My sweet girl

Emilee is such a sweetie. She just turned 7 weeks on Friday. I can't believe she's almost 2 months old. It makes me feel like I if I close my eyes it's going to go by in a flash and I'm going to miss everything.

She is already growing and changing. She weighs over 9 lbs now and has grown 3 1/2 inches since birth! She has been really interested in faces lately. She likes to stare at me and she'll even give me a sweet little smile sometimes. She'll go from concentrated, furrowed brow look on her face to a big, wide-eyed, crooked little smile. It is by far the sweetest little thing I've ever seen!!! Sometimes when she's looking at me I can tell she's looking at my hair. I guess she likes my fluffy bed-head. :) The best is when she stares at her Daddy's face and gives him smiles! I love when she starts to stare at him across the room, just waiting for him to come look at her and talk to her. I think she misses him when he's at work! :) Ryan gets the whole week off for Thanksgiving and we are so HAPPY about that!

Emilee has a lot of different sounds. She is a GASSY little baby. She's always making us giggle with her farty-butt, and sometimes we just look at each other with surprised looks wondering how THAT sound came out of THAT sweet little body. Bahahaha! She also has a lot of different cries. She gets PISSED if I set her down unexpectedly or when I take off her diaper just before her bath. She sometimes does a big, loud cry and then it turns to "the silent cry". She turns all red and I wonder for a second if she'll ever take her next breath or if her angry silent cry will last FOREVER! She also has a really quiet, sweet cry. (That's my favorite, for obvious reasons.) :) She has an urgent cry. She has a "my tummy hurts and I'm miserable" cry. She also has a cute little whiny cry that she makes when she's eating and she loses it and can't find it for a second, or when I take her away to burp her. She's starting to make a lot of cooing and squawking sounds. I love it.

She sleeps a lot but has a cranky time in the evenings. She loves to be held and snuggled. Her hair sticks up all cute after her bath. She snores and makes funny snorting sounds. She loves to lay on her tummy lately. She's got the softest skin EVER! She has a little outie belly button right now. She already likes to watch TV and look at the computer screen - SIGH!

I love watching her grow but I'm sad it's going by so fast. Last night Emilee & I went to bed earlier than Ryan, and I just stared at her little face for a while before I turned off the lamp. I prayed and thanked God for her. I'm so thankful for her. I asked God to protect her from harm, lyme's disease, cancer... boys. :-/ I prayed that she would grow up knowing Him in a deep, personal way, and that she'd make good choices easily. Thank you Lord for my sweet girl!!!!!! :)

Missing her

I've been thinking about Carrisa all the time lately and I've been missing her A LOT. The weather is changing and it's starting to feel like fall which will eventually feel like winter. I guess it's just getting close to the time she passed away last year. I'm also awake at crazy hours feeding Emilee with nothing else to do but THINK. And she comes to mind a lot these days. Everything reminds me of her...

It's random stuff, too. Like, sometimes it's stuff no one else would understand. We used to make this one funny face that we called "the bass face" because it looked like a fish with it's mouth open. Well, earlier today Emilee TOTALLY made "the bass face" and I was cracking up and I wanted to tell her about it. And then there's stuff that reminds me of her that would remind anyone of her - like if a Johnny song comes on the radio, or that song If I Die Young (which was sung at her funeral). And a bunch of stuff in between.

The girls (Jessica, Carla & Nae) and I were talking about her the other day. We were discussing how weird it is that life just goes on without her. Before Carrisa died she knew that Lynae was having a boy and I'm pretty sure she knew what she was going to name him, but she never got to meet Caleb. She never even go tot know about Emilee. I would have loved for her to be a part of Emilee's life. I would've loved for her to meet Emilee and see her sweet face. Emilee is sooooooo special to me, and Carrisa was like a sister to me. It just seems like they should know each other. It's just crazy that I went through a whole pregnancy without her and now I'm starting an entirely new chapter of my life, and she is not here. I'm looking at Emilee now, thinking about how much Carrisa would've loved her. She would've probably bought cute shoes and clothes for her. I would've been just as excited for Carrisa to bring Norah to meet Emilee as I was for Emilee to meet the boys (James, Joey & Caleb).

I can't believe it's almost been a year. Somehow it seems like yesterday and like forever ago all at once. I see pictures of Norah on Jenni's blog and sometimes can't believe it's her. She's so grown up! I miss her. But it's crazy how in my mind's eye, she's kind of just frozen in time at the age she was when Carrisa died.

Tomorrow we are having our "Friends Thanksgiving". Carrisa will be missed. It was an event that she usually planned or helped plan, and something she got really excited about. Later this year we'll also be celebrating Christmas together with our close group of friends. It will be bittersweet. It was during our Christmas celebration with friends last year that she was quickly and unexpectedly taken. I still sometimes can't believe that was real - that we pretty much watched our best friend die right in the midst of a happy, fun, carefree celebration. It sounds more like a sad movie than something that could've really happened.

Carrisa will be on my mind a lot this season. I will remember her joy. I will remember her beautiful smile. I will remember her hospitality and how much she loved others. And probably mostly I will remember our inside jokes and the little things that remind me of her. Something will happen and I will look over to share a giggle with her, but she will not be there. And then, instead of be sad that she's gone, I will have to try to be thankful that we had that bond and were able to share those memories, and be thankful that I will see her smile again someday.

Emilee

Emilee Amber Bryson

Emilee made her first appearance into the world exactly 1 month ago today! :) (Well, technically yesterday now that it's after midnight. I'm feeding her right now and also getting a head start on our Halloween candy stash (hey, remember, it's technically the 31st right now!) so I'll probably be typing most of this with one hand. Please excuse typos. :)

Emilee's birthday was September 30th at 5:52pm. With her due date being Oct 21st, I really didn't think I'd be having a September baby. But the Grandmas were happy because they both have September birthdays themselves. We went in early on the 29th to be induced because of my low amniotic fluid levels. Not a whole lot happened that day. I laid in bed most of the day hooked up to a couple of monitors and an IV. Overnight and the next day I did start to notice contractions, although they weren't very strong. I still didn't sleep well since I had my eyes on the monitors most of the night, and I still had to pee every couple of hours, and it wasn't my own bed, and a million other reasons.

In the morning my doctor checked me and I was only at "almost 2 cm". It had been about 24 hours since they started the induction. They gave me larger doses of meds and the contractions started to kick in a little. Still, not too bad, but I could definitely feel them and some of them hurt. My doctor told me he'd check in with me later that day. He was hoping to break my water then (that morning), but I hadn't progressed enough. He came back around 4pm later that day. He checked me and I was still at only about 2cm. He told me he would try to break my water anyway. He left for a few minutes, and while he was gone I felt a gush which I thought was my water breaking. I had Ryan peek to see if that's what he thought it was, and he said that he wasn't sure and that it just looked like a lot of blood. I was pretty sure that sometimes blood came out too when your water broke, but it didn't seem normal. We called the nurses and doctor in and they checked it out. It turns out it was not my water breaking. I'm still not sure what that was. They didn't seem to be too concerned. But they did say that if it happened again that they would send me in for a c-section since they weren't sure what it was. Then he broke my water.

At this point I wasn't totally freaking out, but I was a little bit freaked out by the blood. I realized I was worried about the baby, too. I was also EXTREMELY tired at that point. It had been a day and a half, I had barely slept, I was nervous about all sorts of things and worried that the baby was going to be ok. On top of that, the contractions started to kick in pretty hard within minutes of him breaking my water. I started to stress out A LOT and I told Ryan that I didn't think I was going to make it to the end. I was only at 2cm, and that took almost 36 hours! Was I going to be able to do another 12 hours, or even 1 hour? It didn't feel possible. I was wayyy too exhausted. I was also in more pain now AND way more worried, and even if I made it to 10cms, then I'd have to have the energy to PUSH her out. I can't do it. I wanted to get the c-section. But it just sounded scary. It was never something I pictured myself doing. It wasn't because I had anything against c-sections - I just never planned for it. I didn't know if my labor would be 2 hours or 2 days, but I never pictured it being a c-section. I may have ended up getting a c-section anyway though if any little thing went wrong at that point. So was it worth laboring for several more hours just to have the same end result? I wrestled with what I should do. The decision was mine (and Ryan's) to make. I am sooo indecisive. And Ryan isn't much better than I am. We can't even figure out what to eat for dinner most of the time! haha! I didn't want to "give up" or take the easy way out. I realized though, it wasn't going to be much easier. It might be easier beforehand, but the recovery isn't any easier. I had already been through a day and a half of this. It was OK to get a c-section. So, we made the decision to have a c-section. I thought I would be all freaked out, but as soon as we made the decision I was SO happy. I knew she'd be here soon. Safe and in my arms. :)

They prepped me and told me she'd be here in less than 30 mins. Oh my goodness! They gave Ryan clothes to cover up with which included shoe covers. We joked about whether they'd fit him or not and told the nurses they might have to sew two together for each foot (he wears size 15 shoes). I guess they ended up fitting him though.

Our anesthesiologist had a really weird sense of humor. I wasn't sure about him at first, but I ended up liking him (I think). He prepped me and gave me an epidural for the surgery. I could not feel my legs AT ALL, and it kicked in almost instantly. I couldn't feel any pain during the surgery, but I could feel a lot of tugging around. It was the strangest feeling EVER! I was so tired at this point, and I just looked at Ryan with really wide eyes the whole time, thinking "what the HECK is going on?!" They told Ryan he could peek over the curtain to see the surgery if he wanted to. He said "umm, nahhh". Haha!

Pretty soon we heard the sweetest sound in the world - little Emilee's first CRY! We held hands and smiled and kissed and couldn't believe our ears. They told me she had a lot of dark hair. I couldn't wait to meet her. They took her away to clean her up and weigh her. They called Ryan over to hold her. I could hear them all over there, but I couldn't see them. I forgot that the doctors would have to take a few minutes to sew me back up again (duh). They were over there with her for probably only like, 3 minutes but it felt like FOREVER! Then Ryan brought her over to me and put her really close to my face. She was the most precious thing I've ever seen. 6 pounds, 12 oz of pure CUTENESS! Ryan looked so happy and excited. It was awesome.

They brought Ryan into the recovery room while they finished up with me, and he got to spend a good 5 minutes in there all alone with his daughter. He loved it.

They lifted me off the surgery table onto a bed to wheel me into the recovery room. I could see them lifting me and my legs onto the bed, but I almost didn't believe they were my legs! I couldn't feel a thing. It was SO weird. In the recovery room, they let me hold her and right away she started to look for "food". She was the sweetest thing I had ever seen. It was hard for me to hold her since I was so tired, but mainly because I couldn't move most of my body. It just felt awkward to hold her. But I didn't want to let go either. :)

A little while later our family came in to see her. They were talking to me and taking pictures and the nurses were telling me things but I was so tired. I literally could hardly keep my eyes open. I kept closing them and just nodding, pretending like I was hearing what they were saying when I really wasn't. It was crazy. I had never been so tired in my life. But I was so happy. And I definitely wouldn't have made it much longer had we not had the c-section. It was the right decision. And Emilee was there, in my arms, safe & sound. :)

Stuff for a 5 day stay at the hospital, plus gifts for Emilee from all of our visitors!

We needed a cart to wheel it all out of there!

On our way home :)

Our little family of 3. :)