Family. Friends. Baths.

Today was a fun day in our home. Kani Boy still needs to be on his little tanning bed. Kaniela and Mommy continue to respectively grow and recover well. We are anxiously awaiting the day that we can have him out of the bed all day, so we can just hold him whenever we want. Today was full of visits from his friends (including one of his namesakes), his Aunt Sharla and cousin Katelyn. Aunt Jacki and cousin Carly continue to be here to help us and ooh and ahh about how cute he is. Here are some fun pictures of our day.

(our little glow bug)

(Kaniela and Aunt Jacki)

(he is so cute when he sleeps...all we practically do all day is watchi

(pictures from his first bath...isn't he so small?)

So needless to say, we have been having a really fun time with our little boy. Here is a video from the day...Mommy finally decided to narrate one for you all!

Homecoming

Good Morning Day #3

Happy day #3. Kaniela is going to be able to come home today. We're just meeting with doctors, and social workers and nurses to get us prepared to go home. We just met with Cea's doctor and he said that she is good to go, and we'll find out when Kaniela can leave in a little while. We for sure are going to be able to take him home today, we'll have to have a tanning booth delivered to the home for Kani Boy while they monitor his bili ruben (spelling?) count. Here are some fun pictures we took this morning, and also a really cute video of him. He was really awake this morning, so we've got some good footage of him. Enjoy!

We'll be sure to post more when we get him home! Thanks for sharing this time with us.

A change in sleeping arrangements...a pleasant surprise.

The second half of the day has been a little harder for us because Kaniela hasn't been able to be in the room with us because he needed to be in the "tanning booth". The only time that we got to spend with him and hold him was when he needed to be fed. Here are some pictures of Kaniela with daddy.

Kaniela is doing well. They've monitored him and he is making great progress. We're still schedule to leave the hospital tomorrow sometime, so we're excited to be able to bring our little boy home.

Fun thing happened tonight thought that made our little family very happy!

More Picture from Day Two and Kaniela goes Tanning!

Here are some more cute pictures from day two of Kaniela and Cea.
Cea is officially off the medication and had the IV taken out and feeling much better. This is a shot of her reading our blog, updating her Facebook and listening to voice messages full of congratulations from friends. To those who called, thank you. She wants to call all of you, but with taking care of baby and recovering, she may not have all the energy now, but she would like to say thank you.
We love these shots of Kaniela and Cea. We were able to spend some time today with just the three of us. We love having guests, but we'll have to admit that it was good to spend time with just the two of us for a little bit.

We decided that Kaniela is a little too light skinned for Kevin's liking, so we decided that he needed to go to a tanning booth. The doctor agreed and said that it would be good for him. Here are some pictures of Kaniela enjoying his time soaking up the (artificial) rays and getting his color. Sorry about the blueness of the pictures.

(laying out in the rays...getting ready for the beach)

(his cool little glasses)

Cea misses having Kaniela in the room with us, so we went and sat with him for a while...isn't this shot of Cea and Kaniela's hands so cute. Kaniela will be under the lights for a while...he's a little jaundist so they want to get rid of some of that yellow (there's a whole lot of other technical stuff that I don't want to bore you with).

Also, here's the video we promised. It's pretty cute to see his hands and feet move around, and again...sorry about the blue light.

We'll update more, if not tonight than early tomorrow. Until then...Alohas!

A picture a day the opposite way. We guess this is considered day 2

Happy morning. Mommy and Kaniela are doing well. So the response has been good, and we are going to do a "picture a day the opposite way" so that all of you can be a part of Kaniela's growth and development. I hope that you all have enjoyed our "picture a day 'till the tummy's away" countdown, and that you'll stay to enjoy our little boy's growth along with us.
Here is our picture for today. Isn't Kaniela so cute. He loves being with Mommy in her bed. For the next few days, we are going to post multiple posts in a day because there are so many of you who'd like to share this experience with us. Visit often, and hopefully we'll have fun stuff for you to see.
We had such a fun morning. We were up pretty early with Kaniela. We're happy to say that he is responding very well to breastfeeding. Cea said that she wasn't surprised at how fast a Wunder boy picked up eating. One of the fun highlights of the morning was that Kaniela got to meet his Aunty Jacki and cousin Carly. They drove all night from California to be here with him and will be helping us out the next couple of days.

Carly was probably one of our most excited blog followers. She would go online and watch our floating Kaniela in the countdown every day. The other day, she went to the blog, and the javascript took a little longer to load. She began yelling, "Mom I think that they've had Kaniela! He's not on their blog anymore." Little did she know how close she was to predicting it. That was Monday Morning.
Here are just a few shots of us. Cea eating her breakfast and Kevin laying down on his half of a half sized bed.

Thanks for coming to visit. We hope that you are enjoying our pictures. We'll be sure to post more throughout the day and we are going to post a video later this afternoon we're you can see his hands and feet and the rest of his body...because he is so cute. The most common heard phrase in the room, "I can't believe we have a baby. And we're so lucky that he is so cute!"

What a Day...Happy Birthday Kaniela

Sorry everyone, unfortunately we don't have a picture of day number 30. We think that this video will make up for it though:

So yes, there is no "30 day left countdown" because well...we didn't have 30 days left. So here's how it all went down. Well first...let's back up and put some things into context. So we were on track to have this baby. Kaniela wasn't due until Feb. 27, so that gave us a month to get things done. Our crib was on schedule to be delivered on Saturday from the Shaffers on their way down to Southern California. Last weekend we had picked out our changing table and a chest for all his blankets, and we were going to be picking those up over the course of the next week. Birthing classes were scheduled to start on Feb. 4, and we were going to do a hospital tour and register for his birth the following week. None of Cea's sisters had delivered early, so we thought, "Ah, we've got time."

Now that we've established some sort of context, you can imagine Kevin's surprise when he was sitting in a manager's meeting at work and he receives a text message that said, "When are you going to be done? The Doctor said I have to go to the hospital." Cea hadn't been feeling good the past two days...you know, the normal, back pain and heart burn. She had been hesitant to go to call the doctor because she didn't want to be a "sissy pregnant lady".

On their way to the hospital Cea was cautiously counting contractions. The receptionist had told her, "Count your contractions, if you have five in an hour, call us and we'll probably send you to the hospital." That was 30 minutes prior and Cea had already counted four.

Upon arrival, Cea was having contractions every two minutes or so. With a little stick in the butt of morphine, the pain went away, but the contractions never stopped. The doctors decided to run some blood tests and because we were early, they began giving Cea medication to stop the contractions. Midway through the treatment our nurse Danette came in and said, "You're doctor said that we're going to deliver the baby tonight."

(as you can tell...Cea loved the morphine)

To not confuse, but mostly because Kevin can't remember all the technical terms and Cea was too drugged to remember the specifics, the nurse told us that there were some conditions that required us to begin inducing labor. They also needed to monitor Cea and give her fluids and medication to get her ready. Here's where our little picture book begins:

So here is a good shot of what was shooting through Cea's IV (did we shoot out too many versions of "shot" in that sentence?). Kevin wanted to get a picture of her walking around with her IV pole, but she was forced to stay in bed.

So she waited....
...and waited...and waited through the night. She got some good sleep because she was given her epidural very early and had a long time to wait. Her contractions really seemed to slow down over night, so our nurse decided to put an internal monitor on to make sure that we were reading the contractions right...when she reached down to her cervix and surprisingly said, "Oh, his head is right there ready to go."


The preparation began and the Kaniela's birthday party began. Not that they'll ever read it, but we would like to say thank you to all the Doctors and nurses there that night: Brook, Danette, Heather, Ashley, Brittany, Dr. Reese, Dr. Jacob, and Dr. Jay. After pushing for an excruciating 45 minutes (sorry to all the other women who've been through the pushing before), we welcomed our little boy into the world.

(how can you not love that pouty face)

There he is, our little 6 lb 1 oz 18.5 inch long Kaniela...born at 8:45 AM on January 28....and here's what the rest of the day looked liked! We think that the pictures now will speak for themselves!

(sitting with Grandma Shaffer, and Aunty Mandee on the phone)

Glad you could share this day with us. We hope that you all enjoy these pictures as much as we enjoy him. Should I do a picture a day the opposite way?