Thanks Grandma!

Just wanted to show off some fun photos of my mom who came and stayed with us for a month to help out. I don't know if we could have done it without her! Thanks mom/grandma! Can't wait to see you in a couple weeks.

We were a little bored in the hospital room and I needed my toes pretty for the delivery. Grandma taught Nick how to do it so now I can expect this to happen more regularly right?

Some NICU pictures...

Logan LOVES his grandma!

NICU

So after a few short hours at home Logan had a few seizures when I was trying to feed him. Long story short he ended up in the NICU for the next week. It was a pretty horrible experience but Logan is a trooper and made it through hundreds of pokes and endless monitors beeping night and day. Good news is Logan is now a happy healthy little boy. Although the doctors are not sure why he had such troubles they are pretty sure it won't happen again and no permanent damage was found. We are so happy to have our little boy home now but here are the pics from, what we like to call, the "Nazi NICU"....

Welcome Logan!

So instead of posting the "Nursery After" pics I will post what happened instead of completing the nursery! Basically I went into my 36 week appointment and the doctor wheeled me from the appointment to the Labor and Delivery room shown below where I spent seven days awaiting Logan's arrival. I was considered to have borderline preeclampsia and combined with the fact that Logan was having a really rough time during each of my contractions (which I wasn't able to feel yet) my doctor told me to stay put for the week and she planned to deliver him if he didn't come on his own within the week. So I waited and waited........ one week of not leaving the room below and only able to get up to go to the bathroom was tons of fun! I had an excuse to do nothing all day except play on the computer, watch shows on hulu and people brought me food when I was hungry. Also, Nick stayed with me all day long! Of course the monitors stuck to me all night, the four in the morning blood draws as well as the fact that the noisy nurses station was right outside my room kind of spoiled the whole vacation idea.

Well after six days they decided they would induce me in the morning so they gave me some meds to get me ready but in the morning my water broke all on its own! So after six hours and some close calls Logan Nicholas Graves was born on July 6th, 2010 at 12:47 pm. He had the cord wrapped around his neck once and his body twice so I didn't get to hold him for a while but here are some pics......

They had quite a few nurses ready for Logan when he came out- four I think were all checking the little guy who came out looking pretty blue. These two pics are from when they were cleaning him up a bit.

Clean boy after his sponge bath.
Check out his tiny little crooked feet. We are working on that- updates on that will be posted later

Going home! If only for a short time.... below is the only pic from his first couple of hours at home. Then our next hospital stay came. Pictures of that to come.

Nursery Before

These pics aren't too exciting but here are the before pics of the nursery. I promise it was even more pink than you can tell from these pictures. The lighting is horrible when we took these. It took three coats of primer and paint in one to cover up the pink glow and still I swear I can see pink if I look hard enough.

As you can see we had already started taping. Now the room has been painted and it is almost finished so you will get to see some after pics soon!

Visit from Friends

Last month Peggy and Will came to Texas to visit and we had a ton of fun! We did quite a few different things but here are just a few pics from the weekend.....

(Above) Of course we had to visit the Alamo and take the touristy pics
(Below) Rudy's!

We went to Gruene ("Green") Texas on the way to the outlet malls and ate at The Gristmill Restaurant on the river.

We had a lot of fun exploring the town and having them stay with us! Come back soon!!!

Port Aransas

After the museum and aquarium we were pretty tired so we drove to the hotel in Port Aransas and then layed out on the beach and enjoyed the breeze. Nick decided to test the waters and sure enough it was warm! Very un-beachlike if you ask me but it was a nice change.

We then went to explore and find a restaurant to go to for dinner. I wasn't really impressed with the selection in Port Aransas but we settled on this interesting Spaghetti place and the food was just ok. The next day we set out to explore more of the town.

We found this jetty to walk out on and we sat and listened to the waves and watched people fish. We were on the lookout for dolphins!

And we found some!! Below is a picture of them- sorry they are far away but we left the video camera in the car so not a very good zoom. We had our binoculars and we spent a good hour or two watching them and enjoying the beach.

So after the dolphin watch we decided to do some touristy shopping. They had a few of those big beach shops with t-shirts and they all had some type of shark outside to tempt you to come in and spend money. I was very dissapointed that there were not shops like the beaches I am used to but we still had fun seeing what they had to offer. We took a few pics outside the shops but as you can see below my camera was not cooperating and did not want to open the shutter- I think the pic still looks cool though.

So that pretty much wraps up the beach trip. It was just a quick trip to the coast and back so not too many pictures- sorry. Overall we had a fun time even in the hot hot weather. It made me miss home and the Oregon Coast beaches so we will have to plan a trip home next summer and spend time there instead!

USS Lexington

Our next stop in Corpus Christi was the USS Lexington Museum. We went up and down tons and tons of stairs and saw all the inner workings of the battleship. It was a really good workout with so many stairs (that with my pregnant belly I had to climb up and down like ladders) and the hot hot weather. Here are some pics....

Nick and a big gun type thing- we were waiting here for the movie about fighter pilot training to start. The movie was actually pretty cool and I loved that the theater was the only place around that had a/c!

I can't remember what this room is called but it is where the captain steers the ship and below is what I am looking out at.

I used to have a thing for the Blue Angels when they would come to Hillsboro for the airshow every year so here is Nick and one of their planes on top of the battleship

Here I am in one of the jail cells. We took one of Nick in the other one but I haven't photo shopped them together yet.

Overall it was fun to be touristy for the day! After the tour we drove to Port Aransas to find our hotel and relax on the beach. More pics to come!