Cutie Pie

Sleepyheads (she was a little too bundled up...one of our new parent moments!)

Totally relaxed

Sleepy Jules and a tired Mommy (it's a theme!)

Daddy time!

All bundled up to go shopping with Grandma and Mommy

I think she's going to be a blonde kid...

Shopping is exhausting!

Here are some random photos of our beautiful Julia in her first few weeks (She'll be 3 weeks old on Saturday!). Everything is going really well, especially now that Grandma is here! At Jules' last weight check she was about 8 lbs. She also had a hearing test that didn't go too well, so we're going back on Monday for a follow-up appointment. Hopefully she was just congested and everything is ok. Other than that, she's growing lots and keeping us busy! Enjoy the photos :).

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone! Today is also Julia's original due date, but she's now 10 days old :). Grandma and Grandpa Bryant sent a really cute "Kiss me I'm Irish" outfit, so I got her dressed up this morning and took some photos. The other ones are just random ones of her being cute. In the one of her in the yellow blanket you can see how much really blode hair she has. Tom and I think she's going to have his hair, and it looks like she has his forehead, eyes and ears too! I think she has the Bryant mouth though. Things are going well for all of us! She's such a joy, not so much in the middle of the night...but we're really enjoying being parents, despite the weird sleep schedule!

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!