Back to Blogville

I'm not even going to begin to try to explain the 16 month hiatus. It happened. I wish I knew why (I really do know why), but the reason isn't important. What is important is that I'm back. Reinvigorated. Loving life. Things have happened that I cannot do justice in one measly blog post. I promised Michelle that I would get back to writing -- and in a small way, I missed it a little bit. I blame Facebook. It just became so easy to throw anecdotes out there as a status update, that I forgot why I started this site to begin with. All things considered, I'm glad I'm back.

Lots and lots going on, and it's hard to pick where to start, so I'll start somewhere random (ish). December 9th, 2011. It was a fairly atypical day...Michelle was going to the doctor to find out how our newest addition was progressing. At 12 weeks, the heartbeat was in the 160s and all was well. Before she left, she had decided to have a sonogram (sonographer needed a few guinea pigs to obtain certification). Michelle obliged.

Meanwhile, I was sitting in class and started to notice that the appointment had taken a while. I texted Michelle a couple times to no avail. I called. Still nothing. Really getting nervous now...when finally, I got a text back from her. Here's our conversation exactly as it occurred:

By now, I'm sure you can figure out the rest (or you probably know). That was the day we found out we were having twins. Baby A and Baby B. We also found out they are fraternal (they used some fancy medical term, but I'll stick with fraternal).

What you probably don't know about that day...when I finally got the chance to call Michelle she was sitting along side the road. Not because she was overcome with joy or emotion....but because the car broke down. To make that (very) long story short, Dan Coon drove over and took a look at it. Between he and Michelle, they figured out that the lug nuts on one of the tires were not tightened properly. We had just had new tires put on -- and luckily Michelle knew enough to pull over. Yikes. Regardless -- we're still having 2 babies.

Things we've found out since....the due date is now June 18. What that really means is the babies are not going to come any later than June 4. With twins, there are a ton of things the doctors keep an eye on. If any one of those things gets out of control, they schedule induction as soon as it's safe.

Fast forward to our first perinatal appointment...my first time to see the babies. We had thought all along that the twins were a boy and a girl. Our resident soothsayer (Gillian) had told Michelle some number of months ago that there were 2 babies in her belly. That was long before we actually knew there were twins. So..taking Miss Cleo's word for it, we had resigned ourselves to the fact that we were going to have a boy and a girl. Needless to say, we were all very, very shocked to find out that we're having 2 girls. Yup, 2 more girls. Oh wow. I just went from a daddy who freaks out about college, to a daddy who freaks out about weddings. 3 of them? Wow. Michelle is so much more rational -- her thoughts go to the more immediate needs...2 infant carriers, twice the number of diapers, two cribs. But oh no...not me. I go to the big stuff.

Over the days and weeks since we have found out, I have begun to digest it more. But it's still overwhelming at times. Honestly, the one and only thing that keeps us grounded is knowing that our family and friends will be there every step of the way. We couldn't do it without all of you. I'll make you all a deal...don't abandon us with the twins, and I promise to update the blog more often. Seems fair to me.

Gillian and Gabriel vs. Bubble wrap

In the kitchen last week, Gabe and Gillian decided to take on a piece of bubble wrap. You can only imagine how that went over!! Let's just say that Michelle and I are contemplating throwing out toys and buying giant rolls of bubble wrap. The wraps would take up less space, we would never have a problem shipping something fragile, and best of all the clean-up is much easier. Unroll, pop bubbles, discard.

Oh - one more thing. If you're looking for a translation to Gilly-speak, the word that she says the most in this video is "moos". In this case, moos = move. That should help you understand :)

pool or river?

On Sunday we were heading up to visit Uncle Josh, Aunt Abby and Aunt Amy. Since they live in Parkville, MO, we have to cross the Kansas River to get to their house from ours. The following is a conversation that I had with Gillian as we were on the bridge over the river:

Gillian: poo, daddy.
Me: Did you go poo poo?
Gillian: No. Poo, daddy
Me: Are you full? (some clarification is in order here. Gillian's new 'excuse' for not doing something that we ask her to is that she's "poo". It took us forever to figure out that she is telling us that she's full, as in, I've eaten too much and I'm full. The gestures she gives when telling us she's "poo" is hysterical).
Gillian: No. POO, DADDY (becoming increasingly more agitated).
Me: OOOOOOOHHHH. Do you see a pool?
Gillian: ah (pronounced like 'yeah' without the y -- which is her version of yes).
Me: Well, that's actually a river, Gilly. Not a pool. You can't swim in rivers, but we swim in pools.
Gillian: Oh ah. (her version of oh yeah, i knew that)

Gabe's baptism

Gabriel was baptized on July 5, 2009 at Good Shepherd. After the ceremony, we held a small reception at Art Source & Design, owned by Eric Schmidt, who was kind enough to host our family and friends for the celebration. After lunch, since we had so many family members in town, we decided to have cake and ice cream for Gillian since her birthday was coming up...

Here are my favorite pictures.....turn up your sound! (Google Video which is who I used to use as a hosting service no longer allows videos to be uploaded :( -- as such, I'm using Picasa, which forces the user to click and sends you to their page to watch it. I'm on the lookout for a new video uploading service that will allow me to directly embed video into the page -- send me any cool sites you might know of -- aside from the obvious youtube....everyone does that!!)

From My Videos

Happy 2nd Birthday Gillian!

We can hardly believe we've come to this day. We are reflecting on how truly bittersweet the day is. I guess the bitter, she's really not a baby anymore and she'll never be "1" again. And the sweet, we have found that every new stage is so much fun. Here are a few pictures from yesterday. We had a few friends over last night to help celebrate. The pinata was pretty fun!!

Patriotism

Michelle snapped this picture over the weekend at the 4th of July parade in Lenexa. I thought it was a pretty neat shot.

Gabriel's baptism was also this weekend. I'm about halfway done with a slideshow from the big day. Hard to believe but Gillian will be 2 this weekend too. We have LOTS and LOTS of things to put up here.

Here's the pic from the fourth...

Welcome Landon!

Michelle's sister Mary gave birth yesterday to the Danz's 3rd child, and 3rd boy no less! According to Mary, he looks just like the other boys did when they were born, and the delivery was much easier than the other 2.

Landon Walter Danz joins his older brother Will and Drew. He weighed 7 lbs. 10 oz. and is 19 3/4" long. You can see photos of the entire Danz clan at www.danzfamily.com

Congratulations Don and Mary!!

Easter 2009

This year's Easter celebration kept us at home. We went to mass at 9 AM at Good Shepherd and then came home to hunt eggs. Unfortunately, with spring-like weather (what would you expect), the Easter Bunny was resigned to hiding eggs in the house this year. Hopefully next year, the weather will cooperate. Here are a couple of pictures from our celebration:
The whole family:

More pictures...

Gabriel and Gillian met for the first time in the hospital, and we have been very impressed with the way that Gillian has handled being a big sister. She is way excited every day to "hold, hold" as she puts it. We are never far away when she does this, but it's the cutest....

I put together a video of some pictures that have been taken over the last week (and a few from the weeks before it for good measure). Let me know if you want any of them and I can share them.

From Movies

Gabe's play-by-play

So...I haven't posted much about how all this went down, but here's a little synopsis of Gabe's birthday:

Michelle was scheduled for an NST (non-stress test) on Tuesday at 3:30 PM, because she was over her due date. When she arrived at her appointment, they put the baby on the fetal heart monitor and watched her and baby for a while. The nurse asked if there had been any contractions. Michelle's response was yes, but they're not painful, just uncomfortable. Dr. Baker then came over to see what was taking so long (this was only supposed to be a 20 minute test). As it turns out, the nurses had been watching Michelle's contractions from the nursing station and were paying close attention because of their frequency. Dr. Baker decided to go ahead and see if Michelle was dilated before sending her home. Lo and behold, Michelle was dilated to a 4. Needless to say, they admitted her immediately and began delivery preparations. This all took place in the span of an hour and a half, so it's right around 5 o'clock by this time.

Since it was a workday, Gillian was at Miss Melissa's so arrangements needed to be made for her to be picked up and brought to the hospital so we could see her. Josh and Abby picked her up and took her to eat and brought her to Menorah. She got to hang out at the hospital til a little after 9, when Dan and Margie showed up to take her to their house where she would spend the next couple days.

Now...back to Gabe: in the name of modern medicine, Michelle chose to have an epidural. The anesthesiologist was giving Michelle a hard time because she was not in any pain at that point. He wanted to know why do the epidural if you're not in pain now...Michelle made the case that she knew things would get painful in due time.....just like most everyone to ever give birth, she was right.

Over the next couple of hours Michelle progressed and was dilated to a 6 by 7 o'clock. From there things stalled and she remained at a 6. Around 8:00, Dr. Baker started to push pitocin to help Michelle's contractions become more consistent and get her dilated further. Over the next 2 hours, Michelle didn't dilate any more, but the baby was moving into position.

At 10:30 the nurse spoke to us about a procedure that would monitor the intensity of the contractions and see if the pitocin was actually doing what it was supposed to be or if the contractions were actually too close together. If they were too close together, they were going to immediately stop the pitocin because it had done it's job (even though she had dilated no further than a 6 -- baby had moved and was ready to make an appearance). In the midst of that conversation, Michelle experienced the longest and most painful contraction she had had to date and we also noticed that the baby's heartrate dropped due to the intensity of the contraction.

After that was over, our nurse Stacy mentioned that she would watch the contractions and baby's heartrate at the nurse's station. She would return in 30 minutes if this pattern of strong contractions and lowered fetal heartrate continued. She was back shortly (around 11:00) because she noticed that things were continuing the same way. In order to curb baby's dropping heartrate, Stacy wanted to roll Michelle to her left-side to get baby in a better position. Pretty much right at that moment is when Michelle starting having severe contractions and also began to shake/shiver.

Because Michelle's contractions were still very severe, she asked our guests to leave and Stacy rolled her to her back and checked dilation. Michelle was dilated fully and Stacy immediately called for the delivery team, and had the nurses page Dr. Baker for delivery. Well-oiled machine, I say.....we went from 1 nurse to about 8 in the span of 45 seconds.....and everyone had a job. Pretty cool. Another nurse rolled Michelle back to her side and gave her oxygen. Within a couple minutes, Michelle was pushing....Dr. Baker pointed out that she was gonna have to do better than that -- so she pushed one more time and Gabriel was born at 11:22.

This all happened so fast and there was so much going on, that we wanted to make sure Gabriel knew as many details about his birth as possible....stories get lost over time, but if we write it down at least we're guaranteeing not to forget anything :)

Portraits of Gabe

Gabe's first few hours in picture form:

Gabriel Paul Madison

Gabriel was born at 11:22 PM on March 3, 2009 (a square root day, as it was affectionately called). He weighs 8 lbs. 5 oz. and is 20" long. Mom is doing beautifully, and was (once again) a champ through delivery. The nurses kicked visitors out around 11:10 and Gabriel was born a mere 12 minutes later. Quick indeed.

Pictures to follow...

Things are a-happenin!

Just to let everyone know that Michelle is in labor and she is currently dilated to a 6. she is progressing nicely. Our nurse, Stacy has told us that new baby has a little bit of hair. We were coincidentally at the hospital today for a post-date NST (stress test for the baby), and Michelle just happened to start contracting and go into labor while the baby was hooked up to the fetal heart monitor. Conveniently Dr. Sarah told us we could stay put. (No chicken tacos for us for dinner tonight!).

I will keep this updated along with Facebook, so please keep checking!

Big "Bah" Theory

Big Bang Theory is one of our favorite shows (it airs on Mondays at 7:00 on CBS), and so we thought we would check it out tonight(it was a rerun, bummer -- yes, I know I can set my DVR to record first run only, but I like it this way). Anyway, we push play on the show and for those that don't know, the theme music is rather catchy. Gillian apparently thought so too.....the evidence:

Time is drawing near

We went to the 37 week appointment on Monday morning of this week, and at this point the baby is considered term. Everything still looks and seems to be normal, the only difference is that if Michelle were to go into labor now, Dr. Sarah wouldn't stop it from happening. eek. I'm not sure if it's defiance or me being stubborn, but I've been a little more lax about this baby. That's not to say that I am less excited, but definitely not as tense with everything as I was with Gillian. It's hard for me to speak for Michelle, but for the most part, she has been about the same with her approach--which is to say she is prepared for everything. Of course (here's a news flash) - she's the one carrying the baby, so it's pretty expected that she is infinitely more ready mentally than I.

Some Gillian updates: her new favorite thing is taking her baby dolls for a walk. She saunters around the living room with them and then gives us a firm and persistent (she won't stop saying it until we reciprocate) "bye-bye", then heads off for a trip around the island in the kitchen. Seconds later she's back to do it all over again. Rinse and repeat. Last night we also witnessed her playing Mommy to her babies as she was preparing them to eat by putting bibs on them. She also was seen sharing her beloved blankie with Laurie (her cabbage patch kid). I think one of my favorite things she is doing now is when she "talks" to her baby; the tone of her voice, the inflection, and her conversational skills are all hysterical. We can't make out of a word of what she is saying, but we're pretty sure her babies all speak baby-ese, so as long as they understand her, we have nothing to worry about :)

Gillian and Mommy in mid-January

Gillian and Daddy having a little fun with the mixers from butter pound cake

6 weeks to go

Since we all know it's been 2 months since I posted, no need to reiterate it here. I'll just move forward and pretend that it hasn't been that long :)

So.....Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year. We hope you all had a blessed holiday season. Ours was great. We were able to visit with a lot of people and spend time with family and friends.

There is only 6 weeks separating today and Michelle's due date. This week Gillian marked her 18-month birthday. She talks more every day and repeating what we say. It's remarkable when she repeats what she thinks is the right word, when it's not at all close :) One of her favorite things to do is to "kiss the baby". She walks over to Michelle, lifts Michelle's shirt so she can kiss her bare belly and smooches away. She also loves to blow kisses, and does so especially when we say I love you.

Here's a video of Gillian at the dinner table one night a week or so ago when she would repeat what we said. Notice the similarities in several of the words.....

Susan Shaughnessy 1978-2008

It is with a very heavy heart that I post today.

Our very dear friend, Susan Shaughnessy, passed from this life on November 17, 2008. She died peacefully in her sleep surrounded by family and friends on Monday evening.

Funeral arrangements are currently being decided upon. Services will most likely be held at the end of this week in St. Louis, and we have been told that a memorial mass will be offered for Susan in Washington D.C. sometime in December.

Susan's family wishes to extend their thanks for all thoughts and prayers that have come their way in this time of need. Your outpouring of support and love is greatly appreciated.

We have a few photos from our wedding that we will be putting together tonight sometime, and hopefully we will have it up on our site tomorrow. Check back again later.

If anyone is ready for life eternal, it is Susan. God is getting quite the angel.

You will be missed, Susan.

Exciting news

As some of you know and for those of you that do not know yet, we are pleased to announce that we are expecting our 2nd child on March 2, 2009. Sorry for the delay, it's amazing how much attention Gillian takes away from informing people of important developments like this (yeah, that's right, I'm blaming it on an innocent little girl). We will post sonogram pictures just as soon as we can (hopefully tonight). But....no promises since it took us 4 months to post that Michelle is pregnant :)

Halloween Costume

No one saw this coming did they? Gillian was a dog for Halloween. Her very first trick-or-treating experience is captured on film below....Shaun and (Dr.) Lisa (note the shirt...) were first on our list. We also visited Jason and Sara, Margie and Dan, and Megan.

Pre-game photo opportunity with Mommy.
All fired up for candy!!!

Mom? Dad? Are you SURE this is gonna work?You tell me, who's more excited?

Pumpkin carving

In the happenings of last week, I fell a little behind in posting pictures, so here are some from our pumpkin carving endeavor. In the beginning Gillian didn't quite know what to think...then she decided she would help...
Uh, Gillian....why don't you pull the seeds out not put them back in.
Finally got it figured out but quite obviously Gillian thinks the inside of a pumpkin feels precisely the way that I do -- disgusting.