Welcome to the World Julia Hope!!

Feeling great, thanks to the epidural

Fetal heart rate (top) and contraction monitor (below)

Julia Hope, 1 hour old

Julia and mommy

Daddy changing her diaper

Just about 24 hours old

Baby blues!

Kiss from daddy

Julia is full and sleepy

Being burped by daddy

Fussy girl!

Feeling a little tired..

All ready to go home!!

Starting Tuesday night (of last week), I started having contractions that were waking me up, but weren't very frequent. All day Wednesday at work I was having contractions that were getting more regular, but were still tolerable. I finally asked Tom to drive me home in the afternoon, and later that night we called the hospital. they said we could come in, but when they checked, I was only dialated about 2cm. The same thing happened Thursday, all day contractions and a trip to the hospital, and I began to get very uncomfortable. By Friday, I was in so much pain that Tom stayed home with me, and we just tried to do things to distract me and were trying to avoid another false alarm at the hospital. Athena called, and then I called Mom, and Mom convinced Tom we should probably go to the hospital anyway. Once we got there, the best thing we heard from the nurse was "good news, you're going home with a baby!!" I was admitted about 10 pm, by 11:30 pm I had an epidural (amazing!!), and was pushing by 4am. Julia Hope was born at 5:08 am, and came out screaming. They immediately put her on my chest, Tom cut the umbilical chord, and they gave us about 2 hours to ourselves to hold her and breastfeed. I feel extremely blessed that the delivery was relatively painless and quick. I also had none of the common delivery "battlewounds:, so I think my recovery is going to go very fast! The next couple of days we spent in the hospital learning how to nurse, change diapers (ok, I have to give Tom credit for doing 98% of the diaper changes!), and calm down our gorgeous daughter. It was an absolutely amazing experience, and undoubtely worth all the months of discomfort :). Enjoy the photos! There will be tons more to follow...we can't get enough of our baby girl! For right now though, we're enjoying our first night at home as a family :).

37 weeks!

I haven't posted anything in awhile, so Tom took a photo of me to share with our families. I'm almost at 37 weeks, so we're getting really close! We're really anxious to meet her, but are still doing some things to get ready (her room isn't quite set up yet!). We've also been going out a lot more, to movies and our favorite restaurants, to take advantage of our last few weeks of being just the two of us. It's nice to have this time together, but I think once our baby is here, we won't be missing our life the way it was!

Garmisch

Last weekend, Tom and I finally got to go on our weekend getaway to Garmisch! We've planning this since October, because the lodge we stayed at fills up very quickly so we had to make reservations far in advance. It's a really neat American lodge/hotel that's in the Bavarian alps. It's so gorgeous there, so we were really excited to be able to get away from everything and spend some quiet time together. On the drive there, we stopped at the Neuschwanstein Castle, which the Disney castle is modeled after. We got there kind of late so we weren't able to tour the inside of the castle, but we were able to take a horse carriage ride up to the castle and walk around a little bit. From there we continued on to the lodge, and had a nice dinner. On Sunday, we had planned to drive up to Munich and Dachau, but after spending about 5 hours in the car we didn't feel like driving anywhere, so we just stayed in town, relaxed, and window shopped a little bit. On Monday we made our way back home, and although it was a nice weekend, it was good to be back home! Tom was so wonderful, doing all the driving and everything, I always appreciate that :). We thought about the cats a lot while we were away, hoping that they were behaving...we had left a bunch of food for them in the food dispenser thing, and we'd left a couple days worth of food extra, just in case...and when we got home, all the food was gone! Jaegar looked a little chubbier, and Madison actually looked skinnier!

Koeln

In front of the cathedral

I'm married to the next Rocky?


Chocolate fountain in the museum...mmm

Just one end of the cathedral

Inside of the cathedral

A few weekends ago Tom and I went on a tour of Koeln with our friends Jason and Mariko. We've been trying to get in a few more weekend trips before Julia arrives :). Koeln is such a beautiful city, it sits on the Rhine and has an amazing and enormous Catholic cathedral. The cathedral houses the tombs of the Three Magi, which was also pretty incredible to see. It was freezing cold on the day we went and the tour we were on was a walking tour, so we all ended up splitting off from the group to do our own thing and try to stay warm! We got to see the cathedral, walked along the Rhine, and visit the chocolate museum! It was a good day, and nice to spend it with each other and our good friends. Enjoy the photos :).

Happy New Year!

A little late, but Happy New Year everyone! Tom and I had fun celebrating - I made scalloped potatoes for the first time, and they didn't turn out too bad. Much better than my pizza! I posted a picture of the pizza since I thought the "great divide" down the middle was pretty funny. Tom made sure to keep the pepperoni far away from my "poison" (a.k.a. tomatoes to us normal people!) and artichokes. It looked beautiful before I cooked it...but then when I went to pull it out it was a little burnt and VERY crispy. Tom is an angel for eating it anyway with no complaints; he always puts up with my experimenting :). I think next time I'll check on it periodically, rather than just setting the timer and forgetting about it...Anyway, for New Years we went over to our friends' house and celebrated with the usual group of friends. Everyone brought a ton of fireworks, so we had a lot of fun with that. Germans go nuts with fireworks! Nothing like in the states, so that was pretty cool.

I also posted a couple belly photos, this is about 30 weeks. We're getting close! We've been really busy lately, and Tom just came down with a bad cold, so we haven't made much progress on Julia's room...but, everyone has been so generous with gifts (THANK YOU!!) that we feel very prepared. I also signed us up for a crash course in child birth (it's a whole day of class, I'd rather have it spread out, but it's hard to work around our schedules), so that should help too. A lot of the guys at work have been telling me all the birthing experiences their families have had, and sometimes it makes me more nervous, but it also puts everything into perspective - at the end of it all, they went home with their precious baby! Julia's been moving around a lot, and sometimes I can feel her pointy joints through my skin. It's really cool, but can get uncomfortable. Tom and I like massaging her back too, it's really neat to be able to interact with her like that!

Merry Christmas!

Tom and I had a very good Christmas, but are wishing we could have been home with family. We are of course, very thankful that we are able to spend the holidays with each other though. On Christmas Eve we made cranberry bread and a lasagne and bread sticks for dinner (traditional for the Bryants :) ), and I also made a pasta salad to take over to a friend's get together the next day. We also went to midnight Mass, which was suprisingly not too crowded. Our parish started doing two vigil Masses, so I think a lot more people went to those rather than the midnight Mass. Christmas morning we slept in (we're enjoying it while we can!!) and opened presents. We also had some cranberry bread and coffee for breakfast, mmm :). We watched one of the movies Tom gave me (Wall-E, it's a very cute and funny Pixar movie), and then went to the dining facility on base to celebrate with Tom's boss and some co-workers. They served a really great dinner, and it was nice to spend some time with everyone. After that, we went over to our friend's place and had another dinner with all of our friends. It is so difficult for all of us being away from family especially during Christmas, and we have a least one friend who wasn't able to be with her husband, but being with good friends helps. There was a lot of good food, and we also brought a feuerzangenbowle. It's a traditional German thing, where you basically make spiced wine, and then pour brandy or rum over a suger cone that sits above the bowl of wine. You light the siger cone on fire, and then the sugar and rum drip down into the wine. Tasty! Tom had a lot of fun putting it together, and our friends got a kick out of it.

Christmas is almost here!

A couple weekends ago my friend Mariko and I went to look at Christmas trees, and I was going to hold off until Tom got here to get one, but they didn't have very many and I was worried about the selection being awful by the time he got home. So...I picked one out, and once I got it home I realized how huge it was! We had talked about getting a smaller one, that was no taller than Tom. I had to cut a little more than a foot off the top of it just to stand it up! And I had to rearrange the dining room too. I think next Christmas we'll pick out the tree together - Tom has much better perspective than me :). So, here's a few pictures of us decorating it. We actually had to move all the ornaments off the bottom half of the tree because Jaeger was being an imp and knocking them all off!

I also posted a belly picture, I'm about 26 weeks right now. We had an appointment on Tuesday, and everything checked out just fine! It's really neat to hear Julia's heartbeat every visit. Tom and I were watching a National Geographic show on how babies develop in the womb, and they said that sometimes you can hear the baby's heartbeat through the skin. Last night Tom tried doing that, but he couldn't hear her. I think she punched his head though, and he said he could hear her moving around, and it sounded like when you're underwater in a pool moving around. I thought that was so cool!! It's really nice having Tom home, he's been able to feel Julia move around every day now. I was also really sick yesterday, so it was nice to have him here to take care of me :).