Baby boy . . .

and his sister . . . who started gymnastics today, and LOVED it! What a great way to burn some energy every week during these long winter days.

And what do you know, even a picture of the mommy, that doesn't happen too often on this blog!

Why the Y?

Lenetta reminded me that I never posted about why we put the Y in Jaymes' name. We have tons of girl names that we love, but it was really hard to come up with a boy name! It was important to us that he be named after a saint, and I also liked the idea of a biblical name. Monte shot down a couple of names I liked - Matthew and Andrew. I've really liked the name James for a quite a while, but Monte wasn't so sure about it because he feared people would eventually call him Jim. Most of you know that Jim most definitely would not be good with our last name! (Please don't put our last name in the comments, thank you!) Monte has always loved the name Jay, but I have always vetoed that name. So, just to humor him, I decided to look up the name Jay in the baby name book one night, and it said, "short for Jaymes". We instantly both fell in love with both the name and the spelling. We figured as he got older, if he ever got a nickname it could be "Jay". I think Monte will eventually call him Jay, too, but we'll see. Right now he's Jaymes, except I call him "precious Jaymesy baby", I just can't get enough of him! :) Since scaring us half to death last weekend, and his stay in the hospital, I've hardly put him down. Boy, do I love that boy!

5 months old already!

A long night

Jaymes was doing really good with his acid reflux, but the last week things have seemed to have gotten worse. He didn't seem upset or too bothered, but he was spitting up a lot. We put him to bed at 5:30 yesterday evening, and then put Isabella to bed at 7:00. We were looking forward to a very relaxing Saturday night, but the type of evening we actually had was anything but relaxing! Around 7:30 we heard him coughing/gagging on the monitor, when we went in there he was laying in a HUGE pool of spit up. Since it was completely soaked through his pj's and onesie we started running his bath. All of the sudden he started choking, then his eyes rolled in the back of his head, and he quit breathing! This has happened before. Just like before, I totally panicked, and Monte remained insanely calm while he quickly flipped him over and hit his back until he came to. I quickly called the neighbor to just come over and sit while Isabella slept. And we took off for the over 20 mile drive to the hospital. We decided to take him to the big hospital in the town we doctor in, instead of the little hospital in our town, since it doesn't have the best reputation. It seemed like hours before we got there, as Jaymes had several episodes of choking, spitting up, and not breathing on the way there. They had a TERRIBLE time trying to take his blood in the ER. They couldn't find any veins on him, and poked him about 8 different times. They would stick the needle in, then blindly keep it in there like they were fishing around. Monte and I were getting really upset, as Jaymes would scream his lungs out in pain. Now I know how Mary felt, watching her Son suffer. It was pure torture, I finally had to leave the room. They wanted to put the needle in his head to draw blood, but I said no. They finally got some blood out of his arm, and decided to do a heel prick and squeeze out as much blood as they could out of his heel. I also had to leave the room when they put a catheter in him to get a urine sample. Even through all of that, when they weren't prodding and poking him, he just kept cooing at the nurses and giving them huge smiles. While we were in the ER, he continued to choke and gag, until the only thing coming up was pure bile. All of his labs came back okay, and they decided it was a bad attack of his acid reflux combined with the stomach flu that is rampant around here right now. They decided to keep him overnight for observation. They got us up to a room around 11:00, and Monte went home to relieve our neighbor from babysitting duty. The on call doctor came in around midnight, and Jaymes was so exhausted he slept through the entire, thorough exam. He was dehydrated, so the dr. ordered some IV fluids, but when they hooked them up they discovered the IV port that the ER nurses had such a hard time putting in was really swollen, and no longer in his vein. They also could not find any where to put a new IV, and asked me if I would be opposed to them putting an IV in his head. I said yes! So they called the Dr. and he said if Jaymes was able to keep down his milk the next time he ate, he wouldn't have to get the IV. Thank goodness he kept everything down the rest of the day today! I spent the rest of the night holding, rocking, loving him, and watching all the monitors he was hooked up to. Monte and Isabella came this morning to take us home, Jaymes and I were both so glad to get home. I layed him on the floor when we got home, and he just kept laughing and smiling, like he was so happy to be home. Isabella told him all day how much she loves him, and how sorry she is that he had to go through all that. Please pray for my precious little baby, I don't know how many more scares like this we can handle! The ER doctor said if he continues to have bad acid reflux flares, he might have to have surgery.

Christmas (with lots of pictures)

We celebrated Christmas a couple of weeks ago with my entire family. I hadn't been to my parents in over 7 months!! That's the longest I've ever been away from "home"!

It was also the weekend of my newest nephew's baptism. The three 4 year old cousins had a blast together!

My mom gave them matching outfits.

We came back to our house in awful weather, the roads were really icy. It should have taken us 4 hours to get home but it took 5 and a half. Jaymes travelled really well, thank goodness! We were home for one day, when we travelled again in the opposite direction to Monte's parents. We were there for 5 days over Christmas. Monte and I even got to go on a dinner and movie date to celebrate our 8th anniversary while we were there. Before opening presents on Christmas Eve, the grandkids acted out the Christmas story. You'll notice that baby Jesus has quite the modern "manger"! :)

My sweet boy decked out for Christmas. He slept most of the day, and was in bed for the night at his usual time of 5:30, he ended up being in this outfit for about 45 minutes. I was kind of sad because this is the first year we didn't go to Mass on Christmas Eve. We sent Isabella with the rest of the family on Christmas Eve, but Monte and I opted to go on Christmas morning instead, since Jaymes was in bed by the time the Christmas Eve Mass started. I'm a huge believer in a routine for babies, so I wanted Jaymes to stick to his normal early bed time, because I knew the next day would not be pretty otherwise.

Santa made a visit to Grandma and Grandpa's house on Christmas Eve, Isabella was not impressed . . .

A Barbie house! She plays with Barbies just like I used to - Barbie and Ken are the Mommy and Daddy, and they are always having babies!

Jaymes got his first John Deere tractor!

Ready for Church.

Dora Mega Blocks.

We ended the holidays with a big blizzard over New Year's. The interstate was even closed for 3 days. Our winters are so awful, we had to get a new snowblower this year, we didn't know how bad it would be when we moved here, and we got a 5 horse power snowblower, which just didn't cut it. At one point I looked out the window, and saw all the neighbors helping Monte out (he's in the front), we have the best neighbors!