Adorable!

This is for you Gma! ;)

I promised Gma Evans pictures on Friday night....ooops! Sorry Gwynn! Here are some cute ones. I have more I will post soon (they are just on my mom's camera since mine was dead). Lukas is hilarious because he always sits in either Lydia's car seat or bouncer (which he is bound to break one of these days!). He's too cute!

More pics of Lydia (which will probably be the case for a while) :0)

Isn't she BEAUTIFUL?! She just keeps getting prettier and prettier. As you can tell Lukas loves kissing and hugging his little sister. He held Lydia for the first time today and he didn't want to let go of her. We think he thinks that she is one of his precious stuffed animals. haha. He's too cute with her because he doesn't want to let her go. My mom has been awesome during this whole thing. She got here on Thursday night (just in time) and since Lydia came 3 days early she is thrilled she will be here for the next 3 weeks of her life. She has been awesome with watching Luke and is a happy Grandma. Thanks mom!

Our Lydia's Here!

She's finally here! She was a wonderful 7 lbs 10 oz (Luke was 9 lbs 1 oz so I was VERY happy). She looks totally like Matt's fam to us and is beautiful! Lots of black hair too, gotta love it! Lukas loved meeting his little sister and kept giving her hugs and kisses...SOOOO CUTE! Right after posting my sob story this morning I said a little prayer that the contractions would quickly hurry up to being 3-5 min apart so I could go to the hospital and have this baby. Well, careful what you wish for! ;) They did around 5:30am and we were at the hospital around 6:30am. They checked me at 7:20am and I was already at 6 cm! HALLELUJAH! haha. It's just nice to know that I was in pain for a reason. An hour later I was at 7 1/2 cm. 1/2 hour later they broke my water and so I was at 10cm in 5 min where I began pushing. All this I did NATURAL! Can you believe it? I was SO proud of myself. Then I couldn't push her out and I was SO exhausted so I said stop and I wanted an epidural. I know total cop out in the home stretch :) After waiting an hour for the epidural and getting an hour rest we began pushing again. After 2 pushes she was here! So all in all it wasn't terrible. i'm very grateful I got to experience labor mostly natural. But as you can tell I'm also very grateful for epidurals. :) Anyways, we're very grateful that ur here with us Lydia!

Induction sounds so sweet right now....

It's 5:03am right now....why am I up???? Oh wait, is it because of these HORRENDOUS contractions I'm having? Why yes! Ahh, I'm going nuts. Everyone says that after your first baby your labors tend to be shorter. However, for me that does not seem to be the case. Some people thought it was hard to go 10 days late with Luke (me included sometimes) just to be induced. But now I'm seeing the bright side to that whole induction episode. I was induced at 8:30am, they broke my water at 9:30am, I screamed epidural shortly thereafter, and got that blessed relief around 12:15pm. I was still at 2 cm at that time. Luckily the epidural relaxed me enough and I got to 10cm by 3:15pm. After 25 min of pushing Lukas came into the world. I never really felt painful contractions for too long. But going from no pain to the worst pain I've ever felt in a matter of minutes was excrutiating no matter how short it was.

This labor: I started having painful contractions yesterday (Friday) morning. They would go on for every 2 minutes for about half an hour and then they would gradually get longer in between just to die out a few hours later. This happened on and off yesterday. Then last night I started bleeding quite a bit that I thought my water had broken at first. I quickly went to the hospital where they monitored me for a couple hours just to send me home with the reassurance that the baby was doing fine and the bleeding was normal (especially since it stopped, mostly). They checked me again last night (after a whole day of PAIN I swear) and I was still only at 1cm and 50% effaced! Now I've been having worse contractions since 11pm last night. At first they were 20 min apart and then 10 and now 7-10 min apart. What on earth is taking so long?! haha. I know I shouldn't be so impatient but man, this is my second baby for goodness sakes, can't I get a little relief sometime soon?! ;) I guess I'm just a wimp but I just thought it would be shorter than the 7 hour induction, not longer! Knowing my luck though these contractions STILL aren't doing a thing to dialate me even though it feels like I'm being stabbed by a knife every time. Ok, ok, I'll stop complaining now. ;) I feel better now that I've vented. Thanks for listening to my sob story. Hopefully I'll be able to report a birth sometime in the near future! haha. Oh and a side note. I was going to try it all natural.....but now I'm screaming epidural again and I don't feel bad about it one bit!!! ;)

Catching Up...

Wow, 2 months have just flown by and I feel like our lives are completely different now! Well, I guess that's because they are. ;) We are now in California, Maryland! WOOHOO! We absolutely LOVE it here! It is gorgeous, the people are awesome, and the house isn't bad either. haha. We were fortunate enough to get into "military housing" that was just built in 2008 - we are the first to live in it. It is HUGE compared to our 750 sq. ft. apartment for the last 2 1/2 years and especially to our one bedroom hotel room for the last 3 months! We are incredibly blessed to say the least. We've also been lucky enough to get an amazing ward with very friendly people and I already have 2 new best friends which I pester almost every day to hang out. haha. Thanks for not minding girls!

Christmas was wonderful, even though we were sad to be away from family. The Relief Society president invited us over to her house for dinner on Christmas Eve with a few other families. It was scrumptious and very fun. Then Matt's good friend from BYU, Dan, invited us to his home just outside of Baltimore for Christmas dinner with his whole extended family. We had a blast there, especially with the hilarious white elephant gift exchange. On New Years we were invited to a family's house in the ward for a big shindig with all the other ward members. It has just been unreal how welcoming everyone has been. I count my blessings every day for how the Lord has really looked out for us!

Oh and update on baby Lydia. I'm 11 days away from my due date but she seems pretty happy on staying where she is at. That' right, haven't even dropped and not even dialated. haha. Go figure, with Luke I was 10 days late and had to be induced. Let's hope that doesn't happen with this one. :) Although, I am really enjoying my time getting ready for this baby and spending some one-on-one time with Luke. I am just praying he will be ok when baby Lydia is here! I just love my little guy!

Here's some pics of our home (before our stuff arrived) and Christmas. (And Yes, we know we are spoiled - just keep in mind we don't get to keep it. We joke that it is probably going to be the nicest house we ever live in while in the military. haha).