This Week at Our House # 46

1. This was the week we were expecting the baby, but he did not come until Saturday night. I will write about that in another post later. Basically John just worked all week and came with me to my final midwife appointment. And of course he was there for the birth and very happy to meet the little baby that looks more like him than all of our kids. 
2. I had a hard time focusing all week while anxiously hoping for the baby to arrive so I spent too much time on Facebook reading too many opinions on the election and finding myself in too much silent disagreement. I was terrible at getting dinner made too, but we had a very nice sister in our ward drop off a lot of food from a banquet her husband was in charge of on Wednesday night. Thursday was my midwife appointment and we decided that if the birthing center was not busy, I would come in and take some herbs and such to get labor going. It turned out that they were not busy, so I got there in the afternoon. Samuel was born at 6:23 pm and John and I and Samuel were home by 2:20am. And that is the biggest reason I am glad to have driven the two hours to have the baby in a birthing center.
3. Ruth was sick for a couple of days this week. She also had a huge art project and had to miss out on hiking with her friends and roommates. I made the kids wait about 4 hours to find out the gender of the baby. I have several texts from Ruth saying please and what is the name. That was fun.
4. Kate is my right hand man. She had a lot of young women stuff this week, but was always diligent about putting the family first. She babysat most of the day on Thursday and for 14 hours Saturday. She plans on making dinner again today.
5. Johnny has been computer programming and John has been buying him things to make it easier and more possible for him. Johnny of course helped Kate with all of the babysitting this week. He seems quite happy to meet his newest little brother.
6. Adam and I planned and did a little homeschool project. We mixed silicone with food coloring and corn starch to make rubbery toys. It was much harder than it looked.-- a lot stickier and a lot harder to get the right consistency before it dried. But it made really awesome bouncy balls. Joseph, Rachel, Anya, and Johnny did it with us. We will try again in a few weeks. Adam is in love with his baby brother. I just love seeing Adam hold him.
7. Rachel is in love with the baby but has been a bit emotional about getting to hold him as much as she wants to. Rachel was the only one that was successful at making a molded toy with the silicone mix.
8. Anya is in love with the baby too. She came to greet him in the middle of the night when we got home and just had the biggest, sweetest smile. 
9. Joseph is glad that the baby is a brother. And now Joseph is losing the title of the biggest baby. Samuel was definitely bigger. 
10. Joshua has been in trouble a lot this week. He was goofy about his school work, and disobedient with everything else. Hopefully he will have a better week next week.
11. Arwen is delighted with the baby. She wanted a sister, but was very excited about getting any baby. She was the first to greet him this morning.
12. Suzy was antagonistic about the idea of the baby and when Kate showed her the picture we sent in the kids in a text. Suzy said "No baby!!! No, no, no, no." She also said to no to holding him and kissing him and everything. But when she saw him this morning, she smiled real big, held him, and sang rock a bye baby.
13. Samuel is a strong, healthy, perfect little baby. He is so very, very calm. He is alert and seems to enjoy looking around at all of his siblings.

Tender Mercies

1. The birthing center turned out really well. The two hour drive has been very hard, but the benefits of being able to get right home to our other children was well worth it. Home birth was not an option here, but even then it would have cost us a lot more than the birthing center which took our insurance.
2. Kate's willingness and capacity to do hard things.

This Week's Pictures