First baseball game First Wednesday Night Sailing race First trip to the beach So many firsts for him to experience…

Those of you with more than one kiddo know how insanely difficult it is to get a good picture of all your children together….if you don’t know what I am talking about, check out this post or this one, and you will get an idea of what I am referring to. You have aspirations of all three children sitting still, smiling, and looking at the camera. After about 30 clicks of the camera and at least 20 begs and pleas to “look at mommy” and “please sit down” you suddenly set your sights a bit lower and just hope for all of them smiling… who cares where they look and how they sit….

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Mark your calendars now for the 2024 Olympics… our little gymnast has started training!  I must say I have truly enjoyed watching her at her gymnastics class this year. Since I can’t even do a forward roll, I am always so amazed as I watch her do back rolls or “flip overs” on the bars. Neither Scott nor I did gymnastics growing up so it is not a sport we would have normally thought of but she is so short, strong and flexible (remember she still sleeps folded in half) that we just had to get her involved.

I think we may have a future engineer on our hands. Which quite naturally brings a smile to the face of his engineer father. Last week my son came out one morning and told us he thought up a robot in his mind the night before. He wanted to know if he and Daddy could build it. The timing couldn’t have been better as Scott had taken the week off of work as we welcomed the baby into our family.

They say newborns don’t do much other than sleeping, eating, pooping, and crying. While that may be true, I gotta tell you the circus crew has not yet tired of watching their baby brother do these things. It’s been a week since we brought our little man home from the hospital. And every-single-time we have to change his diaper, one can hear a stampede of feet as the three of them race for a spot by the changing table to watch.

Funny how time dulls the memory. It’s been 3 yrs since I’ve had a newborn around the house and it seems I forgot a few things, like…. How many diapers a newborn goes through…this little man seems to poop, all-the-time, already went through the two small packs of newborn diapers we had in less than a week. Thankfully I had bought a huge box of Swaddlers size 1-2 which he can technically fit in and which totally saved the day night when we ran out of the newborn sized diapers in the middle of the night.

When our son was 36 hours old we were getting ready to leave the hospital and the nurse came in for official discharge. Those of you who have had kids know this is the time they give you all those important instructions, “back to sleep”, “umbilical cord care….” Those of you who have had more then one kid know that this speech gets progressively less interesting with each discharge. While I am sure the nurse had Scott’s undivided attention the first time we heard the speech, he seemed easily distracted this time around.

Just a few short weeks ago I was reminiscing about the birth stories of my first 3 children… I can’t believe I am now “on the other side” of this pregnancy as well and finally able to share the details of my son’s entrance into the world. It actually starts out very similarly to my first birth story. The night before my due date Scott and I went to bed early and as we were going to bed Scott jokingly said, “Feel free to wake me at 3 am and tell me you are in labor.

Our son was born at 10:27pm. Unfortunately, because he was born so late, his brother and sisters didn’t get to meet him until the next morning. We loved the first night with him but it felt like the birthing process was somehow incomplete until we were all together. When the moment finally came Scott brought them up and they eagerly ran to the bed to meet him.  When I told them his name, my son’s face light up as it registered that he got the baby brother he was longing for.