Easter Weekend and Lydia's Blessing

I love Easter time! We had a great time celebrating it. On Monday for Family Home Evening we watched a couple of short videos on the Resurrection and made Resurrection Rolls. I had never even heard of this idea before, but ran across it on an article from the LDS Church website. It was a fun activity that I look forward to making a tradition.

Primary Easter Egg Hunt

Jason's parents were also there for the week of Easter and we loved celebrating with them too! We dyed Easter eggs, went to our church Easter Egg hunt, and had another Easter Egg hunt at home. Ethan loved finding the eggs. It was fun to see him get so excited about it!

Ethan just opted for holding the eggs in the dye so he came out with green hands by the end.

 Saturday was a really nice day outside so we drove to Riverfront Park along the Ohio River and enjoyed the sunshine. Ethan loved the big slide and kept going down over and over again! He was wearing slick pants and got going so fast that Jason literally had to catch him at the bottom as he flew off.

Grandma, Grandpa, and Ethan going down the slide with Jason waiting at the bottom

 On Easter Sunday we blessed Lydia at church. It was a very special day and Jason gave her a beautiful blessing. I'm glad that Jason's parents were able to be there and we missed a lot of family that we wished could have been there too.

This is my favorite picture of Lydia in her dress!

I love Grandma's smile in this picture. For some reason it just captures the joy of having a new baby.

Melody let us borrow one of her blessing dresses from when Charlotte and Kate were blessed. So Lydia and Victoria will be blessed in matching dresses. Lydia at 6 weeks

Lydia and Grandpa catching some zzzz's together :)

Ethan enjoyed all the play time with Grandma and Grandpa Burningham

Monday morning Grandpa sawed a limb off our tree and helped level the dirt in our front yard. Ethan was only too willing to help!

Mowing the lawn with Grandpa

Cute 4 week picture of Lydia

Home with Lydia

Welcome Home Baby Lydia! Thanks to some kind friends that brought meals, and the help of my mom for a couple weeks, we made it through the first few weeks alright.

Loved the flowers, cake, and dinner from the Hymas Family. We're so grateful for their friendship!

I feel like this is life unedited. The front room starts looking like an all-purpose room, serving as the toy room, bedroom, living room, etc. You can see how cooperative Ethan was for this picture since he was supposed to come sit by us. :)

With a little perspective, Ethan now seems huge! When did he get so big? When we had a 5 lb baby to compare him to.

My two cute boys! :)

Ethan loves to tackle daddy. It's a favorite past time now.

This represents how we all feel.

 My mom was in the trenches with me staying up late at night to help with Lydia and taking care of a very active 2-year-old during the day. Thanks for Grandma, Ethan learned several nursery rhymes like Humpty Dumpty, Hickory Dickory Dock, and Baa Baa Black Sheep. He also learned a few dance steps and read probably hundreds of books with Grandma. Ethan got to go to the playground a few times, to the library, and played downstairs crashing cars and practicing dribbling and shooting the basketball for countless hours. Mom and Grandma also sewed and tied a twin sized Cars bed cover/blanket for Ethan's bed.

Looking at pictures on mom's phone

Ethan loves his new Cars blanket!

Relaxing in the sun on the swing for a few minutes

I think this is a cute funny picture--Ethan looking all funny and proud and Lydia looking at me like "Mom, are you going to do something about this?" :) Lydia is wearing a dress that all of my sisters and I wore as babies.

Library play time

Playing with Doc and Sheriff

Playing with the water in the sink has also become another favorite past time.

Lydia at 3 weeks

A New Baby

We welcomed Lydia Ann Burningham into our family on February 17, 2016 at 6:07am. She only weighed 5 lbs 1 oz and was 18 1/2 inches long.

We were a little surprised, but mostly ready for her early arrival. At my 37 week check up, the doctor told me I was already dilated to a 3. He said he would be surprised if I made it another week to my next checkup. Because of some other pre-labor symptoms I'd been having, that appointment got Jason and me all worried that Lydia would come that night. We got our hospital bags all packed and we spent a restless night waiting for me to go into labor.

After several more days with no progress, we figured the baby probably wouldn't come until my next checkup on Friday. So we were both surprised on Tuesday night when less than 30 minutes after we went to sleep, I woke up to my water breaking. That was a new experience for me! But it was an answer to prayer because I was hoping my water would just break for this labor so I would know when I could go to the hospital and they wouldn't turn me away because I hadn't dilated enough like last time.

We called our neighbor Karen from down the street who is the Primary President at church. She had volunteered to come sleep at our house if the baby came during the night so we wouldn't have to disturb Ethan. She came over shortly after midnight and we left for the hospital. My contractions were just starting at this point and weren't painful or regular.

Checking into the hospital and getting all the IVs etc. took more than an hour. I got an epidural around 3:30am when the contractions really started to be painful, coming about every 5 minutes. They finally left us alone around 5:00am to "rest." Within the next hour I dilated from a 6 to a 10. So when the nurses came to check me an hour later I was completely dilated and ready to start pushing. The doctor came a few minutes later. He had me do one "practice push" as he called it, and Lydia started coming. He had to hurry and finish putting on his gloves and gown etc. and then Lydia literally just popped out. We were all surprised by how quickly and easily Lydia came in comparison to Ethan's delivery. I think the doctor was only in our room for about 10 minutes and was finished with all the birth and afterbirth. Lydia was very small, but she is healthy and scored a 9 on the Apgar test. Because her weight was less than the first percentile for babies her age, she was monitored very closely for the next several hours. Fortunately, she was able to eat enough and slept well and we were able to keep her out of the NICU.

Ethan visited us at the hospital on Thursday. He stayed with another friend, Emily, from my church and her family for the two days we were in the hospital. It was so nice of her to take care of him, and he had a great time. Ethan loved visiting us at the hospital and meeting Lydia for the first time. He is such a great big brother!

Friday morning we checked out of the hospital to go home. The nurses were so great and we had a huge suite of a room at the hospital. It was a good experience overall and I was able to recover quickly from the delivery.

Leaving the hospital

Lydia barely fit into the smallest settings of the carseat

Going home from the hospital was a dose of reality again in balancing the demands of two children, but we're loving it! Lydia is such a blessing to our family. We're grateful to have her in our family forever!

Lydia lying on the quilt my mom made for her. You can see her head is only slightly larger than an orange.

1 week old

2 weeks old