25

So my birthday was August 4th and this year it fell on a Saturday! I love when that happens, because it's easier for everyone to get together because you don't have to schedule get-togethers around work schedules. Anyway, I was super excited to have dinner with my parents, my family and my sister, Mindy's family at Boo Dawg's in Boerne! Our kids had a great time playing and all the adults enjoyed our time talking and catching up with one another...I am so blessed to have such wonderful people around me!

The Whole Clan

The Big Kids

Cupcake Faces

Rylie and Reagan got me a present! :)

My Mom and Dad

My Family

Then on Sunday night, Craig's family had a birthday gathering for me. Rylie had been telling me all week that I wanted a strawberry cake for my birthday, but I actually wanted homemade chocolate ice cream so I got completely and totally spoiled with both! Along with that, Mom Cobabe made me my favorite meal of West Texas enchiladas and fried eggs! :) So awesome. I'm so happy I have such great in-laws.

Thank you to everyone who wished me a happy birthday! Yay to being a quarter of a century old!

It's Been a While...

I'm not much of a blogger (obviously, since it's been almost 4 years since I posted last) but someone recently suggested that I start it up again to keep people up to date with the family. So here I go!

I have been super blessed with Rylie (10/8/08), Reagan (2/27/10), and our newest addition, Rochelle (5/8/12). Craig finished up his last full semester at UTSA in May for his bachelors in Electrical Engineering. He has one class to finish up in the fall and he'll have that diploma!!! He's already got a full-time job at a place called FBD (Frozen beverage dispensers) where he helps to design/test the electrical boards in the machines that provide us with those yummy slushies! Anyway, he loves it and is super excited about all of the new things he's learning and getting to be involved with there.
I am getting to stay at home with my babies and not miss one precious moment of their little lives! :) I knew that raising kids and staying home with them would be difficult, but I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. However, I love my girls so very much, and I wouldn't trade my position for any amount of money or anything else in this world. I definitely question myself as a mother on a minute to minute basis, but ultimately all I can do is trust that God knew what he was doing when he gave me my girls and pray that he will guide me.

Rylie currently has a cold so she's pretty lethargic right now, but she's regularly very energetic and so funny. This summer we started dance classes at the library and she has really eaten it up! Reagan dresses up each week with her. At home, she tries to do these very "emotional" dances and she'll throw herself around and act very serious while twirling and doing weird acrobatics on the floor. So incredibly cute!

Reagan is Miss Independent. I always assumed that my second would be attached at the hip with my first, but my goodness, she has her own little personality and she loves to play by herself. Don't get me wrong though, she loves other people too, babies in particular. Any time we're at a play place, she will find the baby in the room. She also loves Rochelle to death (literally, she'd smother her with hugs if I wasn't there to stop her!). Rylie has taken more of the helper role when it comes to Rochelle, she'll sing to her occasionally but mainly she just wants to help meet Rochelle's needs and keep her happy. Reagan on the other hand wants to play and cuddle and hold and be all up in Rochelle's personal space at all times. When Rochelle was tiny, like a week or two old, she'd be crying and I'd put her in Reagan's lap and no joke, she would stop crying. If she started back up, Reagan would make up songs and sing them like lullabies, often going a lot like, "don't cry baby Chelle, don't cry!". Along with babies, she also loves Dora very much and bananas lately. She eats them so incredibly fast that I've decided she must be hiding them away somewhere. I'm going to discover a big pile of rotten old bananas one I these days. ;)

Both Rylie and Reagan are obsessed with getting their nails done all the time now. It started at Mama and Papa's house where Aunt Chelsea and Aunt Alyssa would do them, but now it's pretty much every other day at least. Painting nails is always a good way to cheer them up if they're upset.
Reagan is independent BUT Rylie and Reagan are great friends. They get into a lot of trouble together...most recently they got into lipstick and got it all over the bathroom floor as they were dumping out all the soap trying to clean it off of them before I found it. When I asked Reagan to go get the lipstick for me Rylie goes, "no Reagan! Don't tell her where it is!!!" She's not even 4 yet; what am I going to do!?! In all seriousness though, they are pretty well-behaved girlies.

Then there's Rochelle...she is definitely my hardest baby so far, but still easy in comparison to the "nightmare babies". She's just a little higher maintenance, and I think it's just because her tummy is more sensitive. She has started to interact with us a lot lately and her smile is just beautiful. She looks more and more like Rylie as a baby and apparently (according to my previous posts about Rylie) they act a lot a like too. She has started to get excited and coos a lot when we talk to her or play with her hands. She hasn't laughed yet, but I don't think it'll be too much longer. I got her ears pierced when she was just over 2 months old in hopes that it would encourage Rylie and Reagan to get theirs done (didn't work...), but they look so cute and girlie! She likes to be cuddled in a blanket when she sleeps, and when we hold her, she needs to be facing out. She is in the 10-25% in length and the 50-75% in weight according to her 2 month check up so basically, she's short and chunky, but very healthy!

Overall, I guess you could say we are pretty lucky in life right now! :) Hopefully I can start keeping everybody up to date a little better than once every 4 years!

Habits

I'm afraid we have already gotten Rylie into a habit of watching TV...she always turns her head to watch it when we've got it on. It's really cute though, to see her recognizing it as something that interests her.

I can not eat tomatoes because it upsets Rylie's tummy and she's up crying all night. When I'm feeding her, she likes to punch me...she fists up her hand, winds up her arm, and wham she punches me over and over. It's cute, but as she gets older I'm sure it's going to start hurting me. Yikes.

She likes to sleep with her Mommy and Daddy, and she hates to be alone. When she's asleep and we try to leave her in another room, she wakes up and yells for us until we come to get her.

She's finding her fist lately. When she doesn't have her pacifier, she starts to suck on her hand, not her thumb, her whole hand. Man, I love that little girl. I wish I could spend all day every day with her. Lately, I've just been imagining myself quitting work and just leaving, or screwing up so I get fired. I feel like I might be a bit depressed...I want to cry a lot, and my head is in the worst shape it's been in for years. I love my baby, I just want to be with her!

Little Miss Piggie

Rylie is starting to smile so much now! Especially when she has just finished eating. She'll get really excited and start kicking and moving her arms a whole lot. Then, if you talk to her or touch her little cheek real softly with your finger, she smiles. She's trying to talk more lately too, she'll let out these random loud screams. It's pretty dang cute!

When Rylie gets really upset and is crying, she snorts like crazy...pretty much every time she breaths in she snorts! She's our little miss Piggie, and it's not because she's stuffy, because I've tried cleaning her out, she just likes to snort. I pretty much love it!

On a sad note, Rylie has baby acne really bad! It's everywhere! Even in her hair...my poor baby. It's weird, because a lot of times it doesn't look that bad, but when she gets mad or sad it shows up really good! Other times you can't see it, but you can feel it.

Anyway, life for the Cobabe's is going great right now. Wishing I didn't have to go to work and be away from my baby so much, but she sure is loved by her Nana and Grandma.

My Little Turtle

I'm a total mess...I start work tomorrow, and for the past two days I cry at everything. I can't imagine how many special moments I'm going to miss with Rylie because of work. I want so badly just to be able to stay at home and raise her the way a mother should be able to. I don't want to miss all of her firsts, and when I do, it's going to hurt so bad. What if she doesn't know me? What if I can't help her to stop crying, because she's so used to what the person taking care of her does? Will I have to call her grandmother to find out what my own daughter's schedule is like so that I can keep her on track on the weekends? It sucks so bad that things are the way they are right now financially, because that's the only thing keeping me from staying with my baby girl. She's not going to be a baby forever...I'm going to miss out on it all. :(

Another thing to remember is that when Rylie does her stretching, a lot of times she'll stretch her neck out and poke her head forward real far. I call her my little turtle when she does that. She's so adorable, I love her so very much.

Things to Remember

I wish I could record every single little moment in Rylie's life so that I don't forget anything, but since that's not possible I have to write down what's important to me now.

When Rylie is sort of waking up, she stretches really big and her whole body stiffens up, so when I move her she just stays in the same exact position. She also makes this little grunting noise whenever she wakes up, or is getting annoyed and aggravated.

Sometimes, at night when we put her in her bassinet, she just cries because she wants us to come get her. She loves to be held. Our bassinet also plays this music and there's one song that Rylie really doesn't like and every time it comes on she starts whimpering. It's so funny that she can already decipher songs and whether or not they are agreeable to her. Rylie hates to be cold. She loves getting baths, but when she gets out of the bath, she's always cold so she screams. One day I decided I was going to blow dry her so that she wouldn't be cold, and she stopped crying right away. She stretched her arms and legs out as big as she could, and if she could have smiled, I'm sure she would have. Ever since then, every time I blow dry her she pees...I guess it makes her so warm and comfortable that she can't help but let it out.

Rylie loves to be cuddled up...we wrap her in this snuggle wrap thing at night that keeps her arms in real tight and keeps her nice and warm. She loves to sleep, and she has a lot of dreams.

When we first brought her home from the hospital she would jerk a lot. I think it's from the NICU when they would poke and prod on her all day, so she started having nightmares. Now, at a little over 4 weeks, the amount of times she jerks a day has gone down so much. I think her dreams are good now, because sometimes it's almost like she smiles while sleeping, and she almost purrs a lot of the time.

Craig was holding Rylie one time and Rylie was very hungry, and for some reason we didn't have a pacifier on hand, so she was not very happy. She was crying pretty loud and flailing her arms like crazy, when her hand came across her face, and crazy enough her thumb went right into her mouth. She started sucking on it, and quieted up real quick. It was so funny to see how she reacted to something so small!

One day Rylie had a major blowout on our bed, and it came out of the top of her diaper and got everywhere. I pulled off her outfit real quick, put her over my shoulder and ran her over to the changing table. I set her down to get her ready to be changed and her umbilical cord was gone...what the heck? I retraced my steps to find out where it was, thinking maybe it was in the outfit I pulled off, or on the floor or something, but I couldn't find it. I looked down, and low and behold, it was stuck to my nursing bra! Gross! Anyways, that was on November 3rd, so it took 3 weeks and 5 days for it to finally fall off.

I'm sure there will be much more to come, as there isn't enough pages to recount everything amazing about my little girl Rylie. For now though, that's it.

Welcome Rylie Ann

The day before Rylie was born, Craig and I had lunch with my Mom at the Hungry Horse. When my Mom called to invite me, she made the following comment: "This might be your last lunch before Rylie gets here!". She had some type of intuition of the following day.

Then, the night before Rylie was born both Craig and I could not sleep. I had woken up after about an hour of sleep to go to the bathroom (which I did very frequently), and Craig was sitting in his chair in the living room because he couldn't go back to sleep either. This is very weird for us, because we both really like our sleep. It was like somehow we knew that Rylie was on her way.

We decided to go ahead and turn on the TV to try and get us tired, and around 1:50 am I had my very first contraction. Of course, I thought perhaps it was just a false one, but we decided to write down the time anyways. About 35 minutes later I had another one, then 14 minutes later, then 14 minutes later again. We decided that once they got 5-7 minutes apart we would head to the hospital. After not very long, the contractions just went from 14 minutes to 6 all the sudden, so we freaked out, ran and got dressed and hopped in the car pretty quickly. We were headed out of town and realized we needed gas, and by the time we got there my contractions had spread back out to 14 minutes again. Because they were so abnormal, we were really hesitant to go to the hospital so we went back home to get Craig's tennis shoes (it was cold and he had just put on flip flops), and on the way home they shortened again, so we got back in the car and headed to the hospital.

When we got to the hospital, we were introduced to my nurse, Sarah (she was absolutely amazing). My contractions just continued to get worse and worse, and closer and closer together. I can't even describe what it feels like...horrible. They were about 2-3 minutes apart and it was about 7:45 am when I finally got my epidural (amazing invention!). After that, the whole process was a breeze. I could not feel the contractions at all, until the time came to push and then it was just a bit of pressure. My doctor came to check on me, and told me that I would probably give birth around noon or one, so when my nurse told me to start pushing at 10:45 am it was pretty surprising.

I pushed for a little less than 30 minutes and Rylie Ann was born at 11:12 am on October 8, 2008. I was so scared, because she didn't cry when she came out, and then when she was on the table, they called in specialists. Wow, that was a really scary moment. Turns out, she had some fluid in her lungs, so she couldn't cry like other babies do, and instead she'd just do this little grunting thing :(. They let me hold her for about a minute, and then they took her to the Newborn ICU, and I didn't see her again for 7 hours, which was only for about 10 minutes, and I couldn't hold her.

They kept telling me that she would be fine and that they'd bring her up to me at a certain time, and then they'd push the time back over and over again. I got so incredibly frustrated, because all I wanted was to hold and enjoy my baby. Then finally, we were told she was going to have to stay in the NICU for an entire week because she had to receive antibiotics to be on the safe side.

Craig and I would sleep for farely short intervals in my room for the first couple of days, and then we'd go downstairs to the NICU and sit with Rylie as much as we could. After I was discharged, we didn't want Rylie to be alone, so our parents (my mom, and Craig's Mom and Dad) would come and stay with her thorugh the night, and Craig and I would stay there all day. Rylie is so incredibly loved; What a beautiful blessing she is! Craig and I finally got to take Rylie home around 11:30pm on October 14, 2008. We didn't want her to stay any longer than she had to, so we took her right after her last dose of medicine.

She's been home ever since, and we have enjoyed every single moment of it! I love my Rylie so very much! Thank the Lord for her!