{BabyT} At The Hospital

For Turner's birth, we were at the hospital from Tuesday afternoon to Thursday midday.

The funny thing about this birth compared to Arden's is that we literally spent less than two hours in the L&D room. For Arden's birth we were there for 18 hours!! We had really great L&D nurses but barely got to know them!

We got to know our nurses in our postpartum room a bit better & they were all so sweet! I'm so thankful Baylor has such an awesome team of nurses. I think we had 4 different nurses total (two different day-shift people and two different night-shift people) - they all rocked! Oddly enough though, three out of the four were pregnant. One of our favorite nurses was Bethany - coincidentally, she used to be a doula with NDDA!

We had so many sweet family members and friends come by to visit us!

On Tuesday night, it was just immediate family.

Gigi

Pops

Arden

(First picture as a family of four!)

Uncle Jax

(Who was very first to arrive at the hospital & the first uncle to hold Turner)

Uncle Saw & Aunt Sara

The next day (Wednesday) we had a few more people visit!

Carla

Turner's Great Aunt Tammy & Great Uncle Rick

We spent a lot of time holding our sweet boy, of course!

Arden came back for a second visit & was a little more interested in her brother this time!

Turner spent some time hanging out in his little hospital bassinet.

I made the little sign below and love how it turned out!

This time around we brought a few things from home to help make our hospital room a little more comfortable: my own water bottle, a wireless/bluetooth speaker, and our diffuser. I loved having my own camelbak water bottle - the hospital does provide a big water cup, but I liked that I could have mine in bed with me and not worry about it tipping over. The speaker was great for playing music while we hung out in our room - we were there for 2 full days so it was a good distraction. We also loved getting to diffuse a little lavender - it made the room smell so good and less hospital-y!

Thursday we got all packed up because "check out" time was supposed to be at 11am. We didn't end up leaving until closer to 1pm - we were ready to go home by then!!

We did have enough time to get a picture next to his cute sign that we hung on the door to our room.
I had this sign made for Turner's room & wanted it to double as a door sign for the hospital.
It worked out great!
It's from a shop called Mercy Inspired - a friend of ours from church, Sarah, is so talented and makes a bunch of wooden decorative signs. Sarah worked with me on the design for Turner's sign & it turned out super cute!

At last, after being discharged by my doctor, a pediatrician, nurses and the hospital, we were ready to leave!

Baylor makes their patients be wheeled out of the hospital, so Turner got to go on his first ride down to the car. He woke up when we started moving and had his eyes open the entire time. Before we left our floor though we had to stop by the main desk to have Turner's ankle tag removed - he was officially ours to take home!

Taylor pulled the car around & we were ready to head home!

Turner-man didn't love his car seat (and still isn't thrilled by it), but I still think he looked pretty adorable in his going-home outfit. I found this outfit in England a few months ago when we visited our friends, the Smith family. I found his hat here in Dallas at a little boutique & since we had decided on his name early enough, I had enough time to get it monogrammed! 

Easter 2017

Taylor's parents are out of town this weekend so we decided to move our Easter festivities to Saturday around our church's Easter party & then attend an a special Saturday Easter service.

Dad couldn't resist snapping a few pictures at home before we left:

Church & egg hunt!!

I was pretty excited for Arden to experience Easter this year. Technically it's her second Easter, but she was just a tiny baby for the first one so this year is the first time she's really grasped the concept of hunting for eggs. 

I have such good memories of Easter egg hunts with my cousins when I was little!

Arden kept saying "eggs!" over and over again and pointing to them:

We bought a small set of plastic eggs + a small basket a few weeks ago so Arden could "practice" hunting for eggs around the house. I think it actually did help her get familiar with the idea!

She had an egg hunt at school a few days ago, I think that helped too!

In any case, when we got to our church's "egg-stravaganza" & she saw the field of eggs, she was way excited!! 

We actually missed the hunt for her age group (1-3 yr olds) so we hung out on the edge of the next group (3-5 yr olds). She wasn't thrilled to have to wait to start collecting - we had to keep holding her back, it was funny. She was a little uncertain about the bigger kids, but it actually ended up working out really well! She only hunted about 2 feet in front of her, but she ended up totally filling her basket & she had a blast!

I can't stop laughing at the determined look on her face!

So we're "those" parents who don't give Arden candy (don't feel bad for her, I'm sure she's getting plenty of sweet from other people ahem: grandparents), and these eggs did have candy in them, so we very covertly emptied them all one by one as we walked around the Easter party. She didn't notice - we're pretty sure she hasn't yet learned that there can be treats inside the plastic eggs. Seriously though, she's always super excited to just to find them and put them in her basket. So we just rolled with that this year. I'm sure next year will be different and I'm sure she'll be teaching babyT that he needs to look inside the eggs!

Side note: Arden's school was pretty awesome about the no-sugar thing and for her age group (under 2), they didn't fill the eggs with anything (no candy, no toys) - I'm really thankful that they're conscious about keeping the sugar to a minimum! 

My personal thought is that we just don't need to push the sugar right now. I know that all the candy and toy stuff will be inevitable very soon, and so until it's 100% unavoidable, we're just going to skip it. That's part of the reason we didn't get her an Easter basket full of candy either; she's just not aware of any of it yet. I cannot wait to put together a fun Easter basket for her...but it'll just have to wait until next year (until then I'll just keep putting together little treats for her teachers, ha!). 

So Arden isn't a fan of the Easter bunny.

Like at all.

I'm moderately skeptical myself - I kind of think a guy in a bunny suit is weird so we definitely hadn't planned to take her to see a bunny specifically, but there happened to be one at the church.

From a distance she was excited.

"Bunny!" over and over.

We got closer and she was still fine.

We got right next to him to take a picture and she started bawling and clawing at me to get away from him!

She was 100% terrified.

It was so sad.

And just a little bit funny.

We stayed far away after that.

She kept saying "bye bye bunny" anytime she could see him.

Poor little love.

I don't blame her: I didn't really want a picture with the weird bunny anyway, ha!

No smiles after seeing the terrifying bunny:

Today we headed out early and went to the Dallas Arboretum with hopes of getting more formal Easter pictures of Arden. 

We were imagining sweet pictures of our girl, sitting calmly on a blanket, surrounded by flowers. 

Arden had different plans!

She was more interested in playing with her eggs and running around.

So that's what we did!

The best way to approach a basket full of eggs: dump 'em out!

Goooo get the eggs!

Our small child was somewhere behind us, don't worry!

And yes, momma is still pregnant:

Happy Easter!