Baby Ben's first Christmas

I know Ben is only a month old but I thought it would be fun to wrap and buy presents for him anyways and from the pictures you can clearly see how excited he was.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!!

Christmas Party at the Jewels.

We all got together at my sister-in-laws to open gifts and visit with aunt Kim from California and my Neice Ashley came home from BYU. I love family especially the inlaws and it was good to see my little neice all grown up and having a blast in college. I remember when my husband and I were just dating umm like 13 years ago I always like to take his adorable neice with us, now she's all grown and such a beautiful young woman--Love you Ashley oh and she's quite the photographer. These memories are brought to you by her enjoy:

Ben's Trip To The ZOO.

--The Ladies

--our every expanding family* photo by Alina my neice

--what a handsome little monkey

There's Music in the Air

My little Mozarts had their Christmas performance and play. The play "Christmas at the OK Corral" was super adorable and Kiora was one of the narrators and both girls did great. Then after the play they changed clothes and had there very first violin concert. Kiora's teacher spotlighted her in the middle of the performance telling the audience how amazing she was and that she had just started two months ago and was already in the advanced class--all that hard work and practice has paid off and I'm so proud of my girls!

How did Ben like the performance? He slept through the whole thing, I guess that is to be expected of a 10 day old baby.

Something In The Turkey

Our Thanksgiving was delicious, so good in fact it put me into labor--yep we had our own little turkey Saturday afternoon at 1:29 pm. I went to the doctor on Wednesday and told her I was chickening out of the whole c-section idea and that if I went into labor before Dec 2, I wanted to try to have the baby without surgery. I was feeling some contractions on and off for several weeks, but Saturday around midnight they became very intense and were coming every two minutes.

I didn't want to wake up my husband so I took a bath and tried to deal with the pain as long as possible, and by 4 I was more than ready to go to the hospital. We arrived at the hospital around 5 a.m., and I was checked and an IV was put in and the nurse called my Doctor. After the Nurse left Tim looked at me said kinda puzzled "umm so I guess we are staying" awe I love this guy. The first thing I asked for of course was if they had wi-fi, then for an epidural lol.

We hadn't really picked out a name yet so we spent a few hours going over names. I actually knew my nurse so I was excited and of course got spoiled. I worked with her in the hospital on Med-surg before I moved to Phoenix. Dr. R came in a few times and we went over my previous labors of 36 hours, and all my complications, and we talked about having a low threshold for a C-section, and then she had to go check on a few other patients--there must have been something in the turkey because the hospital was over flowing with women in labor, and they didn't have enough rooms for everyone, but I luckily got the last recovery room.

My parents came in to talk to me and to get my poor starving husband some food. I felt a lot of pressure and had the nurse call my doctor, and she came in just in time for me to push. Three contractions and our handsome little man was here 6 lbs 11 oz --13 hours of labor, record time for me, and absolutely no complications.

My recovery was not so great. . . The next day I was able to take my little man home. Tim told me he felt like he was busting me out of prison because usually I'm in the hospital for at least 4 or 5 days--I think part of the reason I was able to go home so soon was because they needed the room.

We had named him Darius Vaughn--I was on drugs when I chose that name and after getting to know our little man I knew he was a Benjamin, and he's just perfect!!!!!