Almost 5 months old

It's Christmas time and Caleb got to experience his first snow last night. Pretty exciting for the little guy. We're pretty sure he wants to eat it. Along with everything else he sees...

Speaking of eating it, here is a video of Caleb trying to feed himself rice cereal tonight. He's eating rice cereal every night, and occasionally some other smashed up veggies.

Thanksgiving was a great time with both families. We really enjoyed seeing extended family and getting to show off our little guy. We are continuously reminded of how blessed we are with such a great baby. He is sleeping well and eating really well. He is really mild mannered. It's great.

We had a date yesterday while Aunt Nancy & Uncle Tim watched Caleb. We're pretty sure we're lucky we got him back from Nancy... she may have wanted to keep him. :)

We're looking forward to Caleb's first Christmas with family. This is definitely an exciting time. If you got a Christmas letter from us last year, you should be getting one in the next couple of weeks. If you'd like one, shoot us a message and we'll get you on the list! :)

Love you all!

Steph & Eric

Pictures

Hey all, here's some pictures posted on facebook. I'll get another post up soon...

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=16903682#!/album.php?aid=35793&id=145244855509946

3 months old

Caleb turned 3 months old on Sunday. It's pretty amazing to think that it's been that long since we came home from the hospital, forever changed.

We went up to Iowa State the first weekend in October to visit Aunt Amanda at their new married student housing apartment in Ames. Uncle Spencer was out of town for the weekend doing some coaching training, but we really enjoyed the visit with Amanda, who is looking more and more adorable every time we see her. Her belly is really starting to show now. Baby boy Fontana is due at the beginning of February. So exciting! It'll be grandbaby #5 for the Goldings, and grandson #4. Poor GiGi is getting pretty outnumbered. :)

Caleb is turning into an incredible talker. He lies on his playmat and will sing for hours at a time. His two most common words are "Ahh-Goooo" and "Geeee!" although he's beginning to pick up more every day. As I type this it's "rwoah" and "yah-ooo" Still no sign of wanting to roll over, but we're perfectly fine with that. :)

Here's some more pictures for your viewing pleasure. He's in 6 month and some 9 month clothes already, and not showing any signs of slowing down! He's about 18 lbs now. Seriously, how did we get such a big baby?

Caleb 3 months

2 months

Caleb is two months and 6 days old! He's big and alert, has figured out how to suck his thumb but doesn't have any idea how to avoid punching himself in the face. One thing at a time... :)

Sue Swanson came and stayed with us for a week, that was a huge blessing! She took care of Caleb at night, which involved a couple of nights of being up until at least midnight because he thought it was time to play. We were so blessed to have her here. It helped me get back onto a somewhat regular schedule, which was also aided by the fact that during that week he decided to try to sleep through the night! He's been regularly sleeping through the night since the 2nd week of September (8 weeks old), which has been a huge relief.

Caleb and I took our first airplane trip last week to visit Great-Grandma Bunny and Great-Grandpa Neil. Grandma Cindy and Aunt Lynnea met us there, and we spent the day out in downtown Chicago taking the boat tour and eating a fabulous meal at Red Lobster - all in celebration of Great-Grandma Bunny's 82nd birthday. Or as she claims, 28th birthday.

Last weekend was the K-State - Iowa State football game, and Aunt Amanda and Uncle Spencer came down to visit to go to the game at Arrowhead. Although we got to see the bump, we're all excited to actually meet the next cousin/nephew on the way in February!

Caleb's latest stats... he's setting his own curve on the chart. I really hope our future children aren't quite so big. However, I was holding a girl 4 days younger than him this morning and felt like I could break her. And she's 11 lbs... not tiny, that's for sure.

16 lbs 5.5 oz (average weight for a 5 1/2 month old boy)

26 3/4 in (average length for 7 month old boy)

Here's a few more pictures. Enjoy!

Caleb 2 month pictures

6 weeks old!

Wow, somehow I'm not all that surprised I haven't updated this since we had family in town. But here we go! :)

Caleb is doing very well... he's eating & growing like crazy and working on sleeping pretty well. He's regularly doing 5 hours at night, and recently not needing to eat much when he does wake up to eat. Eric was able to feed him a bottle this weekend, so I got my first night of full sleep since he was born! That was wonderful.

And of course, Mark & Sarah (Eric's brother) have their two-year old and their 3-month old twins, so we're really enjoying spending regular time with them. We took them all on a walk last night - three infants, one toddler, and 4 adults. It's really nice living less than a mile from them. We find we have a lot more in common now that we both have children.

We're adjusting well to being parents and really enjoy it. Caleb adds a whole new dimension to life. He is just now starting to smile socially and makes a lot of "cooing" and grunting type noises. We're pretty sure he's going to be a talker, even now he will be perfectly fine and just makes noise to make noise all the time, even when he's sleeping.

Sue (Eric's mom) will be coming into town this week, so we're planning our first alone date since he was born. Woohoo! ;)

I've posted pictures on facebook, but here's a couple more on Picasa.

Caleb August 2010

Settling in at home - 1 week old!

We came home from the hospital on Monday afternoon and have enjoyed this week with family and taking time to settle in with our new little guy. He's doing really well, eating like a fiend, and becoming more alert every day. He sleeps almost all day and night, but is a little confused about day and night... last night he wanted to be awake from 2 AM - 6AM, then finally passed out and we had to wake him up to eat about 3.5 hours later. :)

He's already in size 1 diapers and doesn't fit any of his newborn clothes. Darn... some of them were really cute. I guess that's the way it works when you have a 10-lb baby, though.

Stephanie's mom was in town this week being an amazing help with cleaning, laundry, and food and Eric's family is in town also, splitting time between Mark & Sarah's and our place.

Eric will be off work next week also and we're open to visitors almost anytime, just give us a call! :)

Caleb 1 Week Pictures

He's HERE!!!

He finally decided to make his appearance yesterday! Caleb James Swanson was born at 7:31 PM at 10 lbs 1 oz and 23 1/2 in long. He is huge. Taking after his father, who was also 10 lbs 1 oz at birth. :)

He has a full head of hair and everyone is doing great, although a little tired after all the excitement. 18 hours of labor and everything went really well, especially given his size.

Pictures are available here on Picasa. Enjoy!

Caleb James - July 2010

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And for those of you who would like all the gory details, here's how it all went down:

At about 1:10 Saturday morning, we woke up to Stephanie's water breaking - he had to start the adventure with a bang, that's for sure. We called the midwives, who told us to go in to the hospital to make sure that his vitals and everything were still fine while we waited for contractions to start.

As many of you know, we were wanting to have as few interventions as possible, so we discussed at the hospital how long they would let us wait for contractions to start on their own before inducing labor with Pitocin. They started naturally getting stronger by about 2:30AM, so we were able to be admitted and wait for them to continue without intervention.

At about 10:00AM, Stephanie was only dilated to a 3 and the contractions were slowing down and getting further apart, so we decided to start inducing with Pitocin due to the risk of infection and exhaustion if things didn't progress with the water already broken. We decided to go ahead without an epidural still and see how it went with the Pitocin. At about 3:00PM, we decided to get an epidural when the Pitocin kicked up to 13 mL/hr. It was definitely the right choice - Stephanie was exhausted by this point and unable to rest because of the strength of the contractions and there was only about a minute between when one ended and the other started.

After getting some rest when the epidural finally kicked in around 3:30PM or so, things progressed really well. At about 7:00PM, Stephanie was fully dilated, feeling the urge to push, and a short 30 minutes later Caleb James made his appearance into the world at his enormous size of 10 lbs, 1 oz. We are incredibly excited and should be out of the hospital on Monday morning. Stephanie lost a good amount of blood, so we'll definitely be taking it pretty easy for awhile as we get adjusted to home with our new baby.

Love you all!

Stephanie

Due Week

And it's here... we're due this Thursday! Not that it necessarily means much... according to a report in the Kansas City Star last week, only 4% of babies are born on their due date.

However, at our last appointment with our midwife, based on my current symptoms she thinks he'll be born on this Friday or Saturday (16th or 17th). She said that with first-time moms, the baby is almost always born two weeks after he "drops," which happened when I had several regular contractions last Saturday. Also, first-time moms on average have their baby 3 days past the due date, so that's right on. We'll see how close she is. :)

We haven't gotten all of our maternity pictures back yet, but here's a link to the few that we do have. We should have the rest pretty soon.

Maternity Pictures

Keep checking back and we'll let you know when he decides to come!

Steph & Eric

37 Weeks - Officially Full-Term!

We've made it! Officially full-term, although our due date is not for another three weeks. Anytime between now and July 29th would be completely normal for the baby to be born.

We've finally got the baby's room set up and the car seat, so we are ready for him to show up! We did get some unfortunate news from the midwife yesterday, though. Apparently it looks like I have late-onset gestational diabetes. This means that I am now on a no-refined-sugar diet and limited natural sugar intake. Darn.

The two risks are that the baby could be huge and also sugar-dependent, which would mean he would have a hard time adjusting after he is born. We're really hoping that he'll come early so he doesn't have much of a chance to get too big...

We also got some maternity pictures taken last week, so we'll post those when we get them!

Love you all!

Steph & Eric

Week 34 - 6 weeks to due date!

Hey! We're getting closer... and bigger... and Eric is nesting. Right now, he is sealing the back deck. The list of projects he's working on is getting pretty darn long. So far it has been:

• pour a new driveway/sidewalk
• till yard and plant new grass - and pull weeds at 10PM
• build raised garden bed in backyard (which included excavating)
• build garden beds in front yard
• rip out huge ugly bushes in front yard
• reorganize the basement
• scrub, bleach, and seal back deck
• install ceiling fan in our room

He's a rockstar, getting ready for the little man. They say 50% of all men get "sympathy" pregnancy symptoms. Since I have had very few of the awful ones, he's making up for the "nesting" symptom. :)

We just had our 2nd baby shower this weekend. The first one was April 18th in Kansas City, and that was great. This weekend we had a huge shindig in Cedar Rapids for Amanda's high school graduation on Saturday, followed by a baby shower on Sunday. The Golding family is amazing, especially Elizabeth for planning the party and Ben for planning the food. And everyone who helped get stuff ready. Wow.

Here's some pictures from the shower and the weekend in general.

http://picasaweb.google.com/swanson.sd/BabyShower?authkey=Gv1sRgCOSOgIn9h76mvQE&feat=directlink

And the update on the baby...

• He was breech, but is now head-down. Good news!
• The midwife guessed today he's about 5 1/2 lbs now and will be roughly 8lbs
• He got the hiccups in church on Sunday and Lynnea thought it was hilarious.

Have a great day!!

First Post!

Hey family and friends! We're starting a blog to keep you updated with pictures and news when the baby comes in July. We'll keep this updated as the big day gets closer to communicate.

So far, this is what we know... baby boy Swanson is supposed to arrive sometime in the middle to end of July. We haven't picked a name yet, although Stephanie's dad thinks it should be Horace Wilbur. No, those aren't family names, he's just that weird. :) We have some ideas, but we're going to wait until we see him to choose for sure...and of course there is always the small chance that the ultrasound was wrong. For now, the baby goes by "Ta" (which means he or she in Mandarin Chinese).

Right now we are at 25 weeks out of 40 (6 months out of 9 months). We'll keep you updated!

Love you all!

Stephanie and Eric

12 weeks (December 31)

18 weeks (February 11)

26 weeks...