Tiny

Since most of our pictures of Pepper are close-up shots or shots of just her, you can't tell just how small she is. And since I know she's going to grow up too fast, I wanted to do something that will help me remember how little 18 inches really is. So here are some pictures of Pepper next to some random household objects.

One Week Old

Pepper is one week old today!
Some notes:

• She lost her umbilical cord thingie.
• She can roll over onto her back.
• She likes to suck on her hands :(

Goodbye, Jaundice

Pepper's jaundice levels were a little bit high when we left the hospital, but that's pretty normal, especially for an early baby. She was feeding and pooping really well so we felt pretty confident that it wouldn't last too long.

When we went in to get it checked again the next day though, it had gone up even higher and somebody stopped by our trailer to drop off some lights to put her under. (Pretty convenient.) It's this suitcase thing that you open up and plug in and try to keep your baby under the lights as much as you can.
There is a major design flaw in it though. There is this blue paper cloth thing that is supposed to hang down over her neck to protect her eyes from the light. Pepper hated it and kept clawing at it and grabbing at it and successfully ripped it off a few times. Another design flaw: the cloth was only held in place by velcro. Seriously? Don't they know how strong babies' grips are?
Anyway, we snapped these pictures after she had finally fallen asleep, but it was sooo hard to watch her scream and cry and thrash around for so long. I hated it.
Finally Josh figured out a better method. We completely took the blue cloth down and just covered her head with a burp cloth. Pepper likes being on her stomach so the above picture is how she spent the rest of her time under the lights. (Don't worry, we watched her closely the whole time to make sure she didn't suffocate.)

Anyway, we just got her jaundice level checked again yesterday and it was a lot lower, so she doesn't need the lights anymore. Thank goodness! I also hated going in to the hospital and having her get her heel pricked each time, so I'm glad that's over with as well.

Introducing Pepper!

Well it was no false alarm as I think all of you know by now, we really had our baby last Thursday! Here is a quick peek at her:
She was born March 4 at 5:13 pm. 2 hours of labor (after we got to the hospital) and 20 minutes of pushing. I went all-natural for her birth and have a few stitches that are still healing but other than that I feel great! Pepper still has a little bit jaundice that we're working on right now but she is otherwise healthy and happy and a joy. Here's a more recent picture:

Both me and Josh are extremely tired, our house is a mess, my boobs are incredibly sore, and we've never been happier. Thanks for all of your well wishes!

More pictures available here on Facebook.

A Quick Picture

I woke up early this morning to painful contractions 5 minutes apart, and the first thing I thought was, "dang! I never took any pregnancy pictures!"

Well here's a quick one I just barely snapped, Josh is at school so I had to do it myself:
At one point this morning the contractions got to every 3 minutes (!) but now they're back to 8 minutes or so... grrr... at any rate, a bunch of you may be getting an EXCITING phone call within the next 24 hours. Or not. This could be a false alarm, but I hope it's not. I haven't gone in yet because I'm supposed to wait until they've been getting consistently worse for two hours straight, or until they get so bad I can hardly talk, or until my water breaks, or something like that. So in the meantime, here I am, suffering every few minutes. Fun fun.

The Trailer 29 Blog, Finally!

OK you guys, it's here:

My new blog! It's obviously still in its beginning stages, but I'm pretty excited about it and hope you will all enjoy reading it. I'm hoping to gain a pretty large readership with this one, so please tell all your friends and continue to post comments and stuff. Hopefully there will be something for everyone there. (Food, books, words, obsessions, home improvement, DIY projects, etc.)

We'll still try to keep up with this blog, which is mostly meant for close friends and family. This one will have more personalized posts about what Josh and I are up to, as well as our offspring :)

Trailer 29 is meant to be a pretty public blog, so if you leave comments, I'd appreciate it if you left out certain pieces of information like our last name, baby's name, and city where we live.

Anyways, thanks for your support again. We love you guys.

Update

OK for the few of you who follow any of my other blogs you probably read recently that I'm getting rid of them so I can focus on a new blog that I'm going to actually work harder on.

I decided to keep "Can I Have a Tookie" around just for updates about me and Josh (and our soon-to-be-born-daughter), you know, just the kind of stuff that family and close friends would be interested in. This blog is meant just for you guys anyway.

My new blog will be for the general public and won't have very much personal information in it, mostly just updates about our trailer and some stuff about cooking and books and whatnot, I'll get it all organized soon. I'm probably going to call it "Trailer 29" so you guys can have that to look forward to soon.

We are really close to finally getting internet in our trailer, I think we're going to go with Infowest and hopefully it will get hooked up within the next week. So sorry about the lack of posts so far this year, but it WILL pick up soon, I promise. Not to mention I'm working on getting this new blog launched really soon too. I would love to have all of your support on that when it happens.