A New Little Blessing in the New Year!

Expecting our third little blessing 7/7/13!

"His mercies are new every morning; great is your faithfulness." Lamentations 3:23

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Introducing....

Camdyn McLaine Smith, Born Monday, 8/22/11 at 10:11am, 6lbs 12 oz, 19 1/4 inches long

Her Birth Story...

Everyone (including my doctor) told me I couldn't expect my labor and delivery to be anything like Grayson's since he was a preemie, and my water spontaneously breaking and my dilating so quickly was most likely unique to his birth. But, in reality, our experience with Camdyn couldn't have been more similar.

I saw my doctor the Thursday before she was born and I was dilated three cm. My doctor told me she expected me to deliver within the week. She sent me to the hospital that day for them to monitor me for a little bit just to make sure I wasn't having contractions and didn't know it. At that point, we called my mom to come in Sunday night, as we wanted to savor one last weekend as a family, just the three of us. At approximately 7:11am Monday morning (my water broke with Grayson at 7:15am on a Sunday morning), I felt a pop. About the time it occurred to me that it could have been my water breaking, I felt a little trickle down my leg as I climbed out of bed. Of course, with my experience with Grayson and being the obsessive planner that I am, I had already been driving around with a packed suit case for at least three weeks, and all our toiletries were laid out on the counter. I yelled to Brad that my water broke and we started throwing last minute items into a plastic bag. About that time, Grayson walked into our room, and Brad said, "Guess what buddy, your little sister is going to be born today!" and Grayson then yelled, "YAY!!!" Of course, once we got out the video camera, he refused to repeat his reaction. We were calm and out the door within 10 minutes of my announcement.

We then were quickly on the road right in the middle of Houston rush hour traffic on the first day of school. Luckily, we could hop in the HOV lane, which they had just extended to our exit literally the week before. As we made calls to family, I still was feeling no contractions. It took us about 45 min to get to the hospital (record time for that time of day), and I finally started having contractions about 20 min before we arrived. And at that point, they came on strong and were about 2/3 minutes apart. At that point, I told Brad, "Oh my gosh, this is going to be just like last time, you watch. This is happening really fast. I'm going to be 8cm by the time we get to the hospital."

On the way to the hospital, we passed a Camden Estate Apartments (Camden/Camdyn had been our front runner name for the few months leading up to her birth, although we disagreed on the spelling) at the exact same time we were behind an 18 wheeler with McLaine across the back (one of three possible favorites for a middle name), which I quickly claimed as a "sign" that that was to be her name.

Once we got up to the L&D floor, the nurses were taking their time with paperwork. I'm pretty sure they thought I was just being a wuss with all my screams. In fact, my nurse even apologized to me afterwards ("I knew you were in pain, I just didn't realize you were in that much pain"). Originally when she checked me, she said she didn't think my water had broken, but a few minutes later the OBGYN assured her that it had and that I was already dilated to 8cm (this is where I turned to Brad and said, "I told you so.") At one point, I even had Brad go into the hall and hurry everyone up because I knew I wasn't going to get an epidural if they didn't hurry (which being the nice guy that he is, I'm sure he walked out there politely and calmly and asked if they could please hurry it up a bit...unlike his wife who was in a panic at this point.) After what felt like an eternity of pain, the anesthesiologist was in my room and the on-call OBGYN informed me that I was 9/9.5cm dilated. She and the nurse asked me one more time if I was sure I wanted an epidural (that it might go faster without one). About the time I was ready to agree to do it naturally, the OBGYN asked me how long I pushed with my first child. When I told her an hour and five minutes, she responded, "You pushed an hour and five minutes with a less than five pound baby??!!!?" "Get her the epidural, she is probably going to need it!" At that point, they asked Brad to leave the room and gave me the epidural. I then said a silent prayer asking God to protect me from being one of those extremely rare cases of paralysis from the epidural because I was too big of a wuss to do it naturally (an irrational prayer I know, but at that point, I don't know if any of my thoughts were all that rational).

Brad later told me that I was like a different person once I got the epidural. And if I had to do it again, I would get it again because I was actually able to enjoy the experience after that. I told Brad natural child birth was kind of like running a marathon to me. While I'd love to say that I did it, I'm not really willing to go through the pain it takes to do it. Although I then pushed for only 20 minutes, I was fully aware then of what was going on and I actually got to see my daughter being born with a sane mind.

And our sweet Camdyn (even though we didn't finalize her name until the end of the day) made her arrival at 10:11am (Grayson was born at 10:43am), exactly three hours after my water broke. And I will never forget the sound of her sweet cry and how she felt and sounded when they placed her on my chest...the sweetest feeling in the whole world and something I longer for ever since I didn't get to experience that with Grayson.

Afterwards, the OBGYN congratulated me for nearly doing it all naturally and commented that the worst thing I screamed was "shoot" which she thought was pretty funny (although it was pretty obvious to everyone that the vowel in that word was changed only at the very last possible second). Overall, it was a pretty smooth delivery minus the fact that the nurse missed my vein in both arms, so the pitocin was just going into my tissue, leaving my arms swelled up like Popeye, which later forced her to shove with all her might on my stomach to get out all the blood clots (which was about as painful as the contractions).

Grayson got to meet his little sister later that evening and was reluctant to let anyone else hold her. In fact, he kept saying, "two more minutes Grandma, and then I get her back." So far, he absolutely adores her! If anything, he is just a little too loving, and wants to hug and kiss all over her all the time. We have been thankful to have alot of help from family and friends so far. And we are loving being a family of four! We praise God for his perfect timing and for growing our family with this beautiful baby girl!

The New House

I dedicate this post to Lauren Perkins who has been persistently reminding me to post pics of our new house once we got our stuff in it :)

Gray's room, we are acclamating him early!

His room is in desperate need of some curtains, but one improvement at a time...


The dining room, which has also become Brad's office since it's the only table in the house big enough to spread blue prints across

Our office/

/Gray's Play Room


The Guest Room (So, come stay with us!)

The Master

Kitchen/Breakfast

Living

Houston Thus Far

While I can't say that we're in love with the city of Houston, we are learning to love our little suburb in North Houston. When driving from downtown home, it's like a breath of fresh air when you enter the suburbs and see the trees lining the streets. While we have loved our new house from the beginning, the city itself is just starting to feel a little bit like home, which is probably why I haven't wanted to blog about our lives here until now. I guess I finally have something positive to say :)

It's really pretty funny to think about since Brad had to practically drag me from Dallas to San Antonio kicking and screaming (no, not literally, just complaining and pouting.) But once we got there, our life just fell into place so quickly, and we fell in love with the city (Brad for the second time). It was as if the Lord just poured blessing after blessing upon us in the first month of being there...a wonderful church, friends...and a beautiful baby boy 7 months later. I guess he knew how much we were going to need those things if we were going to survive Gray's early arrival and 6 week stay in the hospital. Because that transition ended up being so easy, it really wasn't terribly difficult to think about moving again, although we were of course so sad to be leaving our wonderful family and friends in San Antonio.

But, the transition just hasn't happened quite as easily as we would have hoped here. While Brad is loving his new position, unfortunately, I was laid off from my ideal, part time, work from home job and the church search has been anything but fast. One of the best things about being here has been getting to reconnect with some old friends. But, in four months of living here, we have also had to say good-bye to 2 of our wonderful friends who already lived here when we arrived :( We miss you Miranda and Lauren&Andrew!

But, things have been looking up the past few weeks starting with finding a church home! FINALLY! After visiting 7 churches (yes, we realize that's a ridiculous amount), we were about ready to just pick one and dive in since we were tired of searching when a friend of ours told us about a new start up church right in our area. Then when several staff members from our church in San Antonio recommended the same church, we decided to at least check it out. After the first Sunday we still weren't positive if that's where God wanted us, but we felt like we should go back. The next week, I met a girl at the gym and I came home to tell Brad that I felt like I needed to pray that I would run into her again. Then when we walked into church that next Sunday, there she was! That was the last of several things confirming it in our hearts that that's where we should be. It has felt good to finally find a church home....who knew how long 4 months could feel not being plugged into a body of believers. And we're so excited that some of our best friends from Dallas (Heather & Chris) will be moving to the Houston area very soon, which helps ease the transition even more!

While I'm still getting used to being solely a stay at home Mom, I'm learning to love it more every day. Sometimes I just sit back and watch Grayson and just think how cute he is and how precious his little personality is. While certain things in life aren't always how I imagined them (like having a career :), I almost always can't believe that being a wife and a mom are exactly what I hoped they would be (hard work but wonderful)!

Thank You for your Prayers

I just wanted to thank everyone who prayed for my Mom and for the sweet emails, texts and voicemails we received.

My Mom had the heart cath this morning and everything went well. They did not have to put in a stint because she only had about 50% blockage, which is actually pretty normal for a diabetic, and they don't take action unless it's 70% or more. So, it looks like her heart issues were a result of the severity of the pnemonia, and she most likely did not have a heart attack. Thank God!

She will have to have heart exams regularly moving forward and someday something may need to be done, but not now. It was definitely best case scenario and she should be able to go home tomorrow or Saturday. Praise the Lord! She is ready! And so are we!

An Update

Hey all!

Just a quick update tonight. Momma is looking really good. She had catheter and all IV lines removed except one port in case they need to draw blood again. She would have been moved to the cardiac step-down unit today but they didn't have any available beds so they're going to keep her again overnight in ICU. The doctors suspect coronary artery disease and the plan is to have a heart catherization done on Thursday and if a stint in needed they will put that in during the procedure. Thank you for the prayers and support and please continue to pray! Our family really appreciates it.

Whitney Coben (Haley's sister)

My Mom

Hi wonderful friends:

Thank you for the sweet texts, voicemails, emails, ect and most importantly prayers. I appreciate each one, I just haven't had time to respond to them.

Basically, on Tuesday my Mom went into the hospital with what we thought was dehydration from a bad stomach bug. Then penmonia was discovered and then heart issues. Now they speculate that she may have even had a heart attack which manifested itself as stomach issues (common in women apparantly). Friday night she was moved to the ICU because she was basically headed towards septic shock, with her kidneys starting to fail, acid in the blood, unable to get her blood pressure up, ect. ect ect. In the opinion of my sister and me and some of the nurses, a pulminary doctor should have been brought in much sooner than he was and she should have been tranfered to ICU sooner than she was.

But, thanks to the LORD and your prayers, she has had 100% improvement in the last day and a half. Basically, all of the issues she was experiencing are gone and all of those things I listed are back to normal. Praise God! The doctors kept us in the dark enough that we didn't even realize the severity of the situation until they already had it under control, which I don't know if that's good or bad, but that's what happened.

It is a possibility that she may be released out of ICU as early as tomorrow. We don't know if that's good or bad because she wasn't necessarily recieiving proper care when she was on the general care floor. At one point her blood sugar even dropoped to 15, which is just neglegence in my opinion, but I'll save my soap box about the health care industry for another time :) I thank God for my wonderful friends in the medical field that I know are making a positive difference in the lives or their patients every day!!! There are not enough of you out there!

Anyway, I'll send updates as things progress. Please keep up the prayers and THANK YOU!

Haley

Almost Houstonians

Bye House! :( "Where'd it go?"

Our Wonderful Life Group

My San Antonio Girls


Calvin Hargrove



I don't know that we're "official" Houstonians yet. We own a home here, but we're not yet living in it. But the hotel we're staying at is in Houston. Does that count? Either way, we'll be official come Friday...only two days to go!

I know I personally don't always recognize God's hand in my life, but it has been so evident in this move. We prayed specifically that our house in San Antonio would get a contract on it in a time period of two days and we had our first showing on day two and the very same people put a contract on it in on day three. Considering we had so many..."This is a bad time of year to sell a house," "Good luck in this market," "you've only lived in it for a year," and "You will definitely lose money," comments, it was all a huge confirmation that this is God's plan for us when it all happened so easily. We were able to find a house that we love in Houston in one weekend with hardly any negotiation required. When I showed my mom pics of our new house to be, she asked, "Well, my Gosh, did you even special order the paint colors in your prayer?" Even the packers who came to our house were believers and prayed over me as they were leaving. It was so cool! As crazy and stressful as the whole process has been, God has really provided for us every step of the way.

In the last few weeks since I've had a chance to blog, lots of note worthy things have taken place. First, we got to meet Calvin Hargrove, Luke and Steph's little boy, who is PRECIOUS! If you read their blog, you of course already know about our visit since Luke blogs about 100 entries in the time I do one....seriously, Luke, it's a little out of hand. And that's the reason for the whole "Luke is the best person in the world" blog entry because he is a computer hacker and stole my identity.

Our wonderful San Antonio friends threw us a good-bye party and I pretty much sobbed all through church on Sunday having to say good-bye to them. What, me, emotional? Shocking I know.

We also said good-bye to our first house :( We took Gray to say bye after it was all empty. At first, he seemed concerned that his toys were not there, but then he was just excited to have all the room to play and started running around in circles.

Personalize your own invite

Here are some pics of the new house. This is not our stuff, but since it may be a little bit before the house is set up (knowing us only a couple days) I'm posting pics of the house with the seller's stuff :) That way, if someone finds something they want to steal, they won't know where to go to steal it because it's not ours!

Terrible Twos....Here we Come

A few days before Christmas, we had our first incident of Grayson climbing out of his crib. We knew it would happen someday, but we didn't think it would be as early as 21 months. Luckily, thus far, it was a one day fluke, but we're trying to prepare outselves for it to become habit. I mean, what do you do when a child climbs out of their crib? Do they make cages to keep them in? Don't worry, we would never really seriously cage our child, although there are moments where the thought crosses our minds.

After having a wonderful, healthy Christmas, Grayson rang in the New Year with a yucky case of RSV. For those of you who aren't parents, it's an upper-respiratory bronchial virus which in our case requires daily breathing treatments. The good news (haha) is that the medicine in the breathing treatments is a stimulant, which makes our already very active boy into a tornado. Seriously, we're giving a child who is already 110% boy a stimulant, it's really quite a hilarious concept. I don't know if the med is giving him super-child powers too, but he started opening up our child locks this week that we have on our doors. Child proof locks were the best invention ever from the time Gray was about 15/16 months until now.....now nothing is safe, I mean NOTHING! Some children are early at speaking and reading...ours is a little Houdini protege.

Besides getting into EVERYTHING, Gray is becoming such a little helper. Tonight when I was dumping our smaller trash cans into the main one, he insisted on carrying the smaller ones and dumping them for me and then taking them back to their original rooms. It was so cute! He was huffing and puffing trying to carry our heavy bathroom one, which I'm sure is great for him when the poor thing is already struggling to breath. But, I think having a boy may come in handy with house hold chores as he gets older :)

In other news from the Smiths, Brad and I celebrate four wonderful (most days anyway)years of marriage tomorrow! I can't belive it has been four years! And in those four years, we have lived in three cities and about to move to our fourth, plus three apartments and a house, about to move to our fifth dwelling place. That's got to be some kind of record. I have informed my husband that I'd rather not keep up this migrating record in the future. Our house goes on the market on Thursday, please keep us in your prayers for a quick sale. While we love our San Antonio friends and are not excited to leave them, Brad will have to start traveling to Houston soon regardless if we've sold our house or not. We do not want to do the long distance family thing for long!

Fall Festivities

Sometimes I don't blog because I feel like I have nothing new to report and other times (like recently) I don't even know where to start. October was a crazy month for the Smith family. Elaine (Brad's sis) got married, so Grayson now has a new Uncle Josh!!! (Sorry, Josh Roberts, we're going to have to teach Gray to call you something else now.) We went to Colorado to visit Evan and Lauren Perkins who are in seminary there and we did our usual fall festivities such as the pumpkin patch, weekend company, and Halloween. I had to make a little slide show (below) for those of you who are not on facebook or haven't already seen our pics. Lauren is an amazing photographer and took some wonderful photos, which is really quite amazing when you consider the incooperativeness (don't know if that's really a word) of our grumpy little toddler. I was framing some of the pics today which required taking some of his baby ones out of frames :( and couldn't even believe that he was the same child who was born 2 months early and couldn't even breath on his own. Now, he is this little crazy thing who is all over the place and doesn't stop unless he's asleep. I had to try really hard not to cry when thinking about it. He is growing up too fast!

Taking Grayson on an airplane was probably our biggest adventure of all. When you put a little boy who doesn't like to sit still in a confined place where there's really no way to mask the screaming or take hime outside, it can be quite a challenge. The best part was when Grayson first started squealing and Brad tried to fix the problem by covering Gray's mouth with his hand, which just turned the noise into an even louder, yet slightly muffled, scream. I thought for sure the people next to us were going to call CPS :) We made it there and back though. I'm sure everyone on the plane hated us, but we'll never see them again, so we're not too worried.

Despite all of our crazy activities, for those of you who don't know already, we found out that we are moving to Houston (we don't know when and we don't know where yet) because Brad got a promotion with his job. I'm SO proud of him, but still sad to leave our San Antonio friends :( We are excited about reconnecting with some of our old peeps in Houston tho! We're guessing the change will most likely happen around the first of the year, so please keep us in your prayers! Hopefully it won't be another two months before I find time to blog again, but I make not promises :) I just don't know how you weekly/daily bloggers do it!

Make a Smilebox scrapbook

Gray's First Year

As a follow up to the "We're Back" post :) and since I probably should have been blogging since Gray was born, here is a little tribute to his first year of life! He has brought more joy to our lives than we could have possibly imagined. From our oh so rough start, he has turned into a little toddler who is into everything! I never would have imagined seeing him laying in the crib in the NICU!

Psalm 138:8

The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me;
your love, O LORD, endures forever—
do not abandon the works of your hands.

Make a Smilebox photobook

And We're BACK!!!

Once upon a time almost two years ago now, I created a blog, and once upon a time only a couple months later, I deleted it :) I must admit I used to be anti-blogs because let's face it, I don't have time nor do I care to sit around reading people's opinions about which is the best laundry detergent or who they think I should vote for in an upcoming election. But, I'm realizing as time goes on, that I love the blogs that update me on my friends lives, especially the ones that are far away :( So, here goes take two on the Smith Blog!

And I thought it would be appropriate to start with photos from Grayson's first Bday party for those of you who couldn't be here! What a miracle he is from the tiny little peanut he was when he was born with so many tubes you couldn't even see how cute he was underneath. So, I dedicate this blog to our loved friends and family who don't live here in San Antonio! We love and miss you more than you could possibly know!

Make a Smilebox slideshow