Party of Five?

We have big news!  We are in the process of adopting from China...  ...and it looks like some exciting things might start happening with that very soon.  So, I wanted to capture the events that led us to begin exploring adoption...   I want a record of how it all came to be so that she and we can look back on it and remember :-).

...We had "decided" two kids were enough.  Before marrying, I had negotiated with Andy that we would have two children with an option for a third if the two were same sex :-).  I always wanted three children.  Andy wanted two.  But, Cooper's birth and first year wore me out.  I was approaching 40 and worried about having a healthy pregnancy anyways...  So, despite my having the "option" with Andy to have a third, I resigned myself to the fact that we were going to be a family of four.

Our boys are precious (I'm not biased at all ;-)).  I have never felt I had to have a girl to complete our family like so many moms seem to have.  I honestly feel so lucky to just have what I have.  I have a wonderful husband and two amazing boys - things I wondered if I would ever have.  I also really wanted private schools for our boys - and where 2 kids in private school is doable, 3 is a lot.  So, I thanked the Lord for our blessings and was content.

But, around a year ago, someone asked me if we were done having kids.  And I responded "Yes, unless we end up adopting..."  And that got me thinking...  Wait, Cooper is about to be two.  Adoption takes 18 mo - 2 years.  If we want to adopt and have our children close in age, we are already behind the curve ball...  So that got me started on investigating adoption.

I brought it up to Andy and asked him what he thought.  He surprised me by saying, I always thought when I married you that we would end up adopting...  That was not what I expected to hear from him!  But I went with it :-).

I had also been praying to God about how he wanted to use us.  I am big on purpose and having one.  Don't get me wrong - being a wife and mother to the guys I have is a big purpose.  But, reality is, our family is blessed beyond belief.  We don't consider ourselves "rich", but did you know, that most people who are rich, don't think they are?  That is all of us in the U.S.A.  We are all rich!  If you are middle/upper class in the U.S.A. you and we are the 1% of the 1% of the world.  I would ask "God, why have you blessed us so?" and He clearly said to me "I have blessed you, b/c I know you will bless others with your blessings...".

Andy and I were both blessed with good parenting.  Parenting that has taught us how to fend for ourselves, live independent lives, good educations, the Gospel, etc...  And, so, it all came together that look, if we can take one child that doesn't have a mother and father, if we can raise and provide for her and help her to have a productive life - what a way to bless others...    And, we get blessed in return by getting another child to love and raise.

Around this same time, a friend from church hosted the IF Gathering Conference at her home.  As you can tell from the name a the theme is/was "If God is real then...."    That's a really powerful question...  If God is real, then...  Am I prioritizing my time and resources correctly?  If God is real, is sending our boys to private school more important than providing a home to a child that will have none?  Whoa.  And, if God is real, do I not trust in his ability to provide for my family?  If we who have so much, think we don't have enough to be the ones to care for the orphans, then who do we think will?  

And, honestly, then and there I felt like God was kicking me in the pants, telling me to get off my bottom.  I felt an urgency that there was a child out there that needed Andy and me as their parent and we were supposed to go get that child - and we needed to start now.

So, we started doing our research.  I knew that in the U.S. children to be adopted are in demand and there are a long list of infertile couples who wait a long time for those children.   We don't want to compete with infertile couples for a child.  We want to provide for a child that needs a home and might not find one otherwise.  

When I was 30 and single, I had made a plan that if I didn't meet my husband by age 35, I would adopt a little girl from China because I knew they allowed single women to adopt and little girls needed homes because they were abandoned because they were not boys.  We also have two boys and thought if we are adopting a child, it would be nice to have the opposite sex so that she felt special and not competitive with her siblings.  So, we were led to China.  We were shocked to find out that the wait to adopt a healthy child from China was 7-8 years, now, for a variety of reasons.  But, we were introduced to the special needs program where the wait was 18-24 mo for a minor special need like cleft-lip/palate, club foot, etc...  

Honestly, the special need thing really stressed us out.  Heck, to be honest, it still does  But, we also began to see the beauty of it...  How wonderful that not only could we provide a home, but we could provide medical care that would help a child to live a completely normal life...  How many people are in a situation to do that?  ...and yet we are!

God kept working in our lives...  I was still stressed about being able to provide what we wanted for our family, and at that exact moment God provided us with three instances of unexpected financial blessings...  Just to show us - have faith.  I will provide.  We had just bought a home with 5 bedrooms  - so more than enough room for another child - and across the street from an amazing elementary school in a neighborhood where the boys would have friends who were also taught to love the Lord....    I randomly saw a sign in a store that said "what God leads you to, he will lead you through..."  Just so many things that all pointed towards God's plan for our lives...

And, we started to see how the Lord had been working all along to bring us to this point.  First, Andy and I didn't meet and marry until we were 32.  We wanted two years of being married before having kids (actually Andy did - I wanted one - but I didn't fight him on it. ;-))  It then took us over a year to get pregnant with Mack despite us having no infertility/physical reasons for this to be the case...  ...and it took 16 months after having Mack to get pregnant with Cooper..   ...And all that left me having Cooper at 37 (but two months from being 38)...  Cooper's birth was hard - he was 10 lbs and they had to cut my uterus in a 'T' to get him out where Mack's was a breeze.  I hemorrhaged for an hour after birth and they kept me in observation because they were worried about how much blood I had lost.  Then, Mack got pneumonia and was hospitalized for a week the day we brought Cooper home...

I don't know what your version of hell will be, but mine will be my sick child in a hospital trying to sleep with an oxygen monitor on him throwing off an alarm every time it goes under 90% - because you know waking up a deathly sick kid is probably what's going to help him get better.  So, instead of getting sleep, I watched the monitor all night long so that anytime it dipped below 90%, I could hit the button so the alarm wouldn't go off and he could actually sleep.  Keep in mind, I had just had a horrible labor that turned into a c-section.  I could barely get up and get down because I hurt so badly.   I was completely exhausted because of the birth, surgery and newborn feeding.  And, since I was in the hospital with my son who has pneumonia and Cooper is at home because the only thing that could make this worse is Cooper coming down with pneumonia too - so, I am pumping in the hospital every 2.5 hours.  My poor mother-in-law was home with Cooper who wouldn't take a bottle because he wanted the real thing and I am sure Cooper's birth was as much a nightmare for her as for me.  (Have I mentioned I won the mother-in-law lottery?)  In general, it pretty much made the whole birthing a baby process an absolute nightmare and not something I ever wanted to do again...  Plus, even if I miraculously felt like going through that again, even if I had gotten pregnant 6 months after having Cooper, I would pretty much have been 40 before having another child...  

...and I had always had a heart to adopt...

So, Andy and I talked and both agreed, we weren't ready to adopt at this moment...  But since the timeline of adoption was 18-24 months we thought we should start the process and see where it led us...  So we started the process..  It very much has felt like we have been building an ark on faith seeing where it takes us...   ...and, all of a sudden, it looks like it is about to take us somewhere wonderful!  :-) 

And Cooper makes Four :-)

So, in case you hadn't heard, we have a new baby.  A beautiful baby boy we names Cooper Andrew Sykes.  His daddy is Andrew Sykes so that's where the "Andrew" came from and Cooper - well, we just liked it.  Here's a picture of the new guy:

So, getting him here was a bit of a mess.  So, if you get bored with birth stories, feel free to bail now, but I want to write it down somewhere before I forget it :-). 

First of all, I was HUGE this pregnancy and told that was because Cooper was huge and I had a ton of amniotic fluid.  They estimated Cooper at 11 lbs!  Luckily (I guess) he was only almost 10 lbs (9 lbs, 14.8 oz to be exact) and 22.25 inches long.  He was born at 10:58 am on April 12, 2012.  And here I thought I was going to have a March baby!

Cooper was due on April 4th and since Mack was 3 days early and supposedly second babies come earlier, I thought I was going to have a March baby.  But, nope, Cooper was not coming.  I was doing all the things they told you to do, walked, ate spicy food, put my husband to work, stripped membranes (uggh, hate that phrase!) and he wasn't coming. So, you know what worked?  Castor oil.  That's right.  I glugged some of that down at around 2 in the afternoon and I was in labor around 7 that night. 

I had been to the hospital so many times with contractions that would never go anywhere, I didn't believe it and I kept thinking they were going to stop.  But they didn't - they kept progressing.  And my doctor basically said they weren't going to let me go home until that baby was born - she was getting nervous since he was late and apparently my placenta had started deteriorating.  I was nervous too and just wanted to get my baby boy out already!

So I progressed and all that jazz to 8 cm.  And then I regressed to something like 6 cm - they said b/c his head was too big and kept banging on my cervix which was swelling (sorry if this is TMI, but I seem to have lost the judgment to determine what is TMI and what is not, so you'll have to bear with me :-)).  So anyways, we kept going for another 2-3 hours and no more progressing.  SO, they tell me that it looks like his head is too big and they worry that even if his head makes it out that they might have to break his shoulders to get those out.  At this point, I was so tired and the doctor said we needed to go ahead with a C-section - so I was like "let's just do it". 

So, they pumped me full of drugs which make you shiver like crazy and went to cut him out.  Honestly the whole thing freaked me out which surprised me - I normally don't freak out very easily.  I was crying - not sobbing - but quiet tears streaming down my face.  I was pretty bummed about having a C-section I guess.  And, apparently they cut me and tried to get him out, but he was too big for the cut, so she had to cut me vertically on the uterus as well (so I have a T shaped incision on my uterus).  So I guess if he was too big for even the normal C-section inscision, I should just be grateful I live in the age of modern medicine where he was able to be born healthy and I survived :-). 

So afterwards, for some reason they thought I might be hemoragging?  And here is where I wonder if things were worse than they told me, b/c they sure seemed nervous.  After sewing me up, they kept me in the surgery room for like 2 hours beating up my belly.  They kept pushing in on it a ton and seriously like two people would be on top of me pushing on my belly - I don't really understand how that helps you not to hemmorage, but apparently that is the way.  And then they told me I might have to have a blood transfusion and according to accounts I was deathly pale.  They wouldn't let me out of Labor and Delivery until like 7 pm that night so I would continue to be observed. 

It is interesting b/c I had a vaginal birth with Mack and it is interesting how it affects you differently.  Like I wanted to make sure Cooper was okay, but I wasn't like "oh, let me hold him" (of course, I did) the way I was with Mack.  I don't know if it was the medicine or what - but it was weird. 

Well, I stayed in the hopital for like 4 nights.  I was happy about that b/c it was so hard to move around after a C-section, I was terrified of going home and having to take care of him on my own.  Finally I was able to get up and down on my own and that made me feel like I would be able to manage.  Poor Cooper had jaundice so he had to do the light treatment for that.  But that was just one day and he got better.

So during all of this, my mom and sister had been keeping Mack.  So we got home that day and my mom and dad brought Mack back that night.  It was so good to see him.  Since we thought Cooper would be born near the 4th, he had been with them for 2 weeks and I missed him terribly.  So we got him back and it was so good to finally hold him.

But he had a nasty cough, and a mild fever, so we gave him some tylenol that night (to bring down the fever) and put him to bed to recover.  The next morning he still had the nasty cough and his fever seemed even worse.  So I made a Dr's appt and brought him to our pedi that afternoon.  He gave him a breathing treatment and told us to come back in a couple of hours.  We did, he gave him another breathing treatment, his breathing was still not improved and so he told us to go to the hospital directly from there!  Cooper is not even a week old at this point.  So the last place I wanted to bring a newborn was a hospital full of sick kids.  So long story short, Mack was in the hospital for almost a week with something like pneumonia.  It was awful.  One of us had to be there at all times and we were lucky to have Andy's mom, my mom and us all doing rotations of either caring for Mack or Cooper. 

Here is a picture of him the first night in the hospital :-(:

I wasn't going into the hospital b/c I was breastfeeding Cooper and didn't want to expose Cooper to this since in a baby I felt it could be deadly.  But no one told me, Mack kept saying "Mommy come soon?" - uggh.  They kept saying he was doing really well.   I can't believe I didn't go be with my boy.  They didn't tell me b/c they thought it was better if I stayed home with Cooper since I had just had a C-section and couldn't lift Mack and I shouldn't expose Cooper, yadda, yadda, yadda.

So anyways, my mom let it slip that he said that and it sounded like Mack wasn't getting any sleep, so I insisted on going in and being with him.  Cathy (Andy's mom) stayed with Cooper - she was amazing - so I could go and it felt so good to finally be back with my boy.  I hated seeing him like that - he looked so miserable.  Luckily, the following day he was released - praise God!  And we finally had our whole family home.

Of course, I worried Mack would really resent Cooper since not only had I abandoned him to his Meemaw and Aunt Evie for two weeks, but then he was stuck in a hospital for another week.  Poor baby.  But he was amazing with Cooper from the get go and really just loved him.  Here is a picture of him that first week back home.  Isn't it adorable?

So now we are 12 weeks in and they are just adorable with each other.  Cooper lights up every time he sees Mack and Mack loves his baby brother.  He always asks me when Cooper cries - "Baby brother all right?" and he'll go give him a hug.  He is so funny.  Occasionally he does say "put baby brother down.  Hold Mack" - but I think that is pretty good.  No complaints here.  Two is definitely more than one, but you also get double the rewards. 

Feel so blessed with this beautiful family.  Thank you Lord!

18 month check in :-)

Our little boy is 18 months old. Where has the time gone? I can't believe it. He is getting so big and learning so much.

So we went to the doctor and I'm happy to report that Mack went from 10% in weight to 15%. Yay! He now weighs 22 lbs and 15.8 oz. I was pretty stressed when at his 15 month appointment he went from 15% in weight to 10%. I mean he is already skinny - I don't want him getting skinnier. He still has a big head at 50 cm (96%) and he is 70% height at 32 3/4 in (wonder if he'll keep that up).

The doctor was very impressed with his development as well. Mack says a ton of words now. Probably over 50. He was talking away in the doctors office and she was like - "wow, he is quite a talker". Then she asked me if he was saying two word phrases. He isn't - but he's not supposed to until 2 years. He also has done almost everything on the development worksheet which goes up until 2 years. I think I am so happy about this because he didn't walk until 16 months - 16 months! I can't believe that was just two months ago. Now he runs around the house. It is so cute and adorable. I will have to post his walking video since I didn't blog about it.

His favorite words are "dog", "ball", "daddy", "duck", "snack" and "elmo". But he says lots of other things like "bubbles", "baba" (bottle), "ready", "light", "keys". "Mommy" is still getting the shaft. He can say it, but to hear it is rare and normally prompted by me. Whereas everytime the phone rings or he sees a phone - he's like "daddy?". He doesn't realize that anyone else calls us. Hahaha.

He loves animals and says"elephant" (sounds like "eh eh fen"), "monkey", "panda"... He also knows where his eyes, nose, mouth and ears are - and can say them too. His favorite song is "Head, shoulders, knees and toes" and it is so cute to see him try and point to his "eyes and ears and mouth and nose" while I sing it. (He's a little slow, but he gets them all right. :-)) He has also started doing the hand gestures for "itsy bitsy spider" and "twinkle twinkle little star".

He is OBSESSED with Elmo - that deserves its own post, so I will write about that later :-).

In any case, he continues to be the apple of our eye.

Love that boy!

Gushing

So, almost 10 months into this motherhood thing, you would think it would have become old hat by now.... that I wouldn't still get an amazing thrill everytime I go to get Mack when he wakes up and he has that beaming smile for me. But, no, my heart still jumps with joy and every day I thank God over and over for our amazing little boy and the love we have for each other. I still don't mind those rare nights he wakes up and I have to go to him, because part of me enjoys getting to see him :-).

I can't believe God blessed us with a baby boy who is so perfect, so happy and just so fun - and beautiful! Do all babies smile every time you look at them? His disposition is just so wonderful. I am trying to treasure this time - it is so magical. I always find myself saying, oh I can't wait until this... And it's true, I anticipate all these things and this life that we get to live with him - but I don't want to focus on the future so that I don't fully appreciate, taste, smell, enjoy the present with him.

I just love, love, love to hold him close and breath him in. It is so wonderful. He does the cutest thing now....he puts his forehead to mine and just kind nuzzles our heads together - it is so endearing. He has such winning ways - and we can't even take any credit for it, that's just how he was born :-).

Oh, Mack, I love you so much and pray for wisdom and guidance to raise you such that you will live up to your full potential. You are such a special spirit. I know God intends amazing things for you and your life.

Sykes Christmas Card 2010

Most Wonderful Time Christmas Card

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Breaking News - or teeth!

Newsflash: Mack's 2nd tooth just broke through - wow! Amazing how baby books are right about everything - they do indeed come in twos :-).

Mack's First Tooth

So, Monday I felt Mack's gums while he was gnawing on my fingers as he likes to do and......... I felt a tooth that had broken through! I don't know why I think this is something to celebrate, but I do - yay!

It is his bottom tooth on the left. I can't see it, but I can definitely feel it. It is actually pretty hard to get a good look with a baby as they don't really just open up and say "ahhhhhh".

I feel a bit bad, because this weekend I actually left Mack with Andy quite a bit - Saturday night I went with some girlfriends to this awesome consignment sale and Sunday I had to go to church for volunteer training for the nursery. Well, Mack wasn't in the best of moods and I guess now we know why. Poor Andy said that he was screaming his head off. I might have a harder time getting Andy to keep Mack - oops!

Anyways, I love to see Mack getting bigger and getting teeth ...... but, it also makes me sad that he is growing up so quickly. I can't believe he is already 6 months old. I sure do love our stinker!