A week in the life...revisted

August 12th-18th

There was a season that I was a rock star about putting up some highlights of our week on the blog. I thought this would be so fun to look back at and remember some of the ways we spent our time each week. Well...if you check my posts you can see I haven't done that in awhile, but here we go again. A week in the life of T and Bram revisted! :)

Here are some of the things we did this week:

played in the pool with friends

on a rainy day mommy taught me how to play on pbskids

A porch party up top and LOTS of walks! We used a gift from mawmaw & pawpaw to get this stroller! THANK YOU mawmaw & pawpaw!!

Embrace the Mess

God is working on my heart in a lot of areas right now, but there seems to be a specific focus on my desire to control. Control and not trust, control and not love, control and not "fill in the blank". If there is one thing that having a new baby will do to your world is make it spin out of control. I'm seeing that my desire to try to control (in the midst of spinning) is leading me to be super anal about things like how clean our house is, eating healthy, etc. Thankfully God in his grace is teaching me to trust him with those things and to not allow those things to keep me from engaging the IMPORTANT things, i.e. my two beautiful boys.

So to practically fight this desire to control (while God works on my heart), Titus and I decided to embrace the mess. I know to a lot of you this might not seem like a big deal, but when you are not sleeping much with a newborn and can barely find a moment to fold laundry the thought of a dirty kitchen is overwhelming! All the other moms just said amen! :) We embraced the mess and made cookies!

We didn't just bake cookies, we made a huge mess! Titus was my helper the whole time! You can imagine how that increased the mess. Titus even did some of his own cooking with cheerios! (He stirred and dumped cheerios everywhere while I read the ingredients and got everything out!)

At one point when I started feeling overwhelmed by the cheerios we were crunching into the floor, we decided to start chanting, "mess, mess, mess". It was fun!

here's our cookies in the making, recipe thanks to jami's blog

And where was Bram during this wild time...

HERE

Introducing Bram Mac Marasco

Surprise...My water broke
Our sweet little Bram was born on July 3rd 2012 at 2:48am. Bram's arrival caught us by surprise when I went to see our Midwife and found out that my water had a slow leak. This meant that Bram had to be induced that day. Matt and I left the doctor's office, dropped Titus of at a friend's house, went home to pack a bag, and were at the hospital within about an hour! We were nervous since I was only 35 weeks and 5 days pregnant, but we were also excited to meet our new little guy.

Whoa...Labor Time
 They started the pitocin at around 1pm and labor was slow most of the day. Around 7pm the contractions started getting to the "oh my" point. Matt and I were trying to go through labor without an epidural, if possible. From 7pm to 10pm things went really well with labor. The contractions were painful but we were getting through them. Matt was a great support and we were enjoying working together to help me handle the pain. Around 10pm things got way more INTENSE. The pain was well....the wrath of God. Honest. But we tried to keep working through it. Around midnight I starting begging Matt to get our wonderful nurse and ask her to call in the epidural! (Side note: We couldn't have been more blessed to have a wonderful midwife and a great labor and delivery nurse. Rachel and Lindsay are both truly God sends. Rachel, has delivered both of our boys. Matt and I couldn't be more thankful for the way she was has walked with our family over the past 3 years (since I got pregnant with T)! She goes above and beyond in every way. She is so loving and helpful. Lindsay was such a great help through labor. She was so helpful in giving advice for handling the pain and so encouraging. We praise God that she was our nurse that night.)
I finally did get an epidural at 2am, right after I got it Lindsay checked and I was dilated 10 cm! No wonder the pain was so intense...I was in transition (a labor term that basically means the roughest part of  labor!) The epidural got me through the pushing part of labor

Just chilling waiting for the pain to kick in

Pain had finally kicked in, for some reason I'm excited about the pain at this point...means baby is coming soon...about an hour later I didn't look this happy about the pain!

Unexpected Route
 Before I started pushing we learned that because our baby not quite 36 weeks they would have to have the NICU staff at the delivery just in case. We were all hopeful that baby boy would come and everything would be fine but they needed to be there as a precaution. There was the obvious risk that his lungs wouldn't be ready to breath without mama's help. So two pushes later, sweet Bram was out! (Though we hadn't named him yet!) There was also a chance they might have to transfer him to the NICU at Children's Mercy because the NICU at St. Luke's was full. As soon as we heard that we started asking some people to pray. When they put Bram on my chest it was obvious that he was struggling to breath on his own. After what seemed like seconds (was probably longer), the staff from the NICU took Bram off my chest and started the processing of admitting him into their care. Thanks to answered prayer Bram was able to be admitted to the NICU at St. Luke's and was not transferred. Matt went with Bram to help with that while Rachel and Lindsay stayed with me until I could go down and see Bram.

Not the best picture thanks to bili lights!  BUT one of the first pictures of Bram

 TO BE Continued...
More on our journey in the NICU later

(side note: I'm sharing all this a month later on here because I was convicted last night about how important it is for me to write our story (before I forget!!). I think it's important to keep track of the story of our family so that our boys can look back and read it some day and even share it with their kids.)