Tuesday, November 27, 2007

First bath, Mom's Birthday and Looking Good in Stripes!

Running a little behind on getting photos up to the site. Hopefully when the new computer is here we can do this easier in the little nap breaks.

We took these photos during Joaquin's first bath. He was one week and two days old.

He did really well and unfortunately it's the photos and video that upset him. He was really very patient and a good baby up until I pressed my luck and started taking photos.

I was fine until you took a picture!






Click on the play button to see video of an upset baby bird.




After the bath. Still. Happy. Warm.
Dressed in his favorite outfit: Male Nurse!




Click on the play button to see how happy he was after the bath!


These photos are from a day earlier, too.
Joaquin was 1 week 1 day old.






From Friday, November 23rd. Mami turns 35!
And has to carry her baby to eat cake and open presents. Ha!



Sunday, November 25, 2007

One week old birthday.


Hanging out in the Ergo Baby Carrier. So happy!

We had a friend come over on Saturday to help fix my broken laptop and she brought her camera along. She was able to get a few nice photos of Joaquín that I wanted to share. In fact, this is the first day we dressed him up in an outfit other than a white side-snap shirt and white sweat pants. He was looking like a male nurse the first week of his life. Heheh.

So our baby turned a week old and also lost his umbilical cord, too. What a big day for him! Awww... he's all grown up. ;-)

We are doing really well so far. The help of mom and Lisa has been tremendous and we have been spending lots of nights and days together.

Joaquín is continuing to be a champion nursing baby. He loves to eat and we ask him to Open Wide, Baby Bird! and he is really good at cooperating. He has decided he is a fan of his swing and his infant seat. We also have a swing that the infant seat snaps into making it very mobile around the house, too.

He also loves the Ergo Baby Carrier and is strapped onto my chest at least once a day to wander around and let me have the use of both arms. He even worked for three hours with Douglas one night. We really don't want him to become an engineer, but he seemed to enjoy the design work a lot.

In my Co-Sleeper in Mami and Papi's room. I love to be swaddled and no one swaddles as well as Papi does!





Look at me in Puppy Wear!






Mami and Joaquín



Thursday, November 22, 2007

Catching up on photo posting!!

My laptop is still on the fritz, but I was able to pull a few of the best photos from the last few days and post them to share with everyone.

Our little Baby Bird is so adorable and we are having fun figuring him out.

Right now his days and nights are mixed up and so nights are quite hard. Luckily Grandma is here and knows how to help out at all the right moments. Including laundry and feeding me moments.

Enjoy these photos of our Baby Joaquin.

At the hospital. 2 days old. Our Anniversary!




Going Home! Wearing his Thanksgiving outfit from Grandpa and with his handmade blanket from Stephani, Stacey's mom. 2 days old.







Hanging out with Mami and getting burped. 3 days old.






Papi is attacking my feet!! 3 days old.




This is how we spend most of our days. On the bed after eating. Look who came to visit... the cats! Strangely Milo seems to know how to use a Boppy by instinct!




I love to smile when I pass gas! Look at my dimple!

Monday, November 19, 2007

I love my Grandparents!

Look who stopped by yesterday to take care of our little baby bird.







We are going home today after our last round of visits and perhaps even a shower. I am nervous about that part, actually.

So far, so good. We love getting to know our beautiful boy and are looking forward to starting our life at home with him.

Oh... and Happy Anniversary to us. It's our 2nd Wedding Anniversary today! What a special present to take our baby home on our anniversary. That beats any gift!

I hope to resolve some really awful computer issues soon, too. Right now it's very hard for me to get online because my laptop is falling apart.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Our son is here....

We are so happy and blessed to introduce

Joaquín Alonso Sutton Rivera

Born today, November 17, 2007
12:37 p.m.
7 lbs. 8 ozs.
19" inches

Much more to tell about the labor and delivery but the happy news is that he is here and he is so healthy and so adorable and we love him so much.

Hard to tell from these photos but he has dark black hair! And his Papi's nose!

Four hours old.


Look who has a dimple!

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Today is our baby's Due Date!

Wow. It's almost 9pm on our due date. And neither of us are surprised we are just twiddling our thumbs waiting. Well, that's not totally true. Douglas went to work and is teaching a private lesson right now and I finally started feeling something that seems like it could be significant and a sign of things to come.

In fact, I invented a new word today. Cramptractions. I started having cramps last night in the middle of the night - enough to wake me up and make me restless. They continued during the day and I started to realize they do come and go and sometimes when they go they are totally gone. Like I understand a contraction does. So. Well. I have been having about 18 hours of Cramptractions thus far.

Yeah! Hehehe.

Enough that I went out for Starbucks and to get a manicure and ran out of steam and got a bit worried about the cramps. I wanted to be back at home. It seemed that driving around may not be a great idea.

For all I know, it could be gas. I bet I just have gas.

I took another belly photo in honor of 40 weeks and hitting our due date. I do appear to be falling over backwards, huh?

You can see the whole run of them from the pregnancy here.



Wednesday, November 14, 2007

My Ultimate LOLcat.

Not baby related all - unless you want to count that he is fervently kicking me while I type this - but it's clear my Ultimate LOLcat has been found.

Enjoy...




And for those new to the LOLcat world. Here are some previous Invisible ones to give you an idea of what came before.










Sunday, November 11, 2007

5 things I didn't expect ...

Not things I expected at all when I was pregnant. Strange truths from behind the empire-waisted, tie-backed maternity shirts.

  1. The Waddle. You can resist it all you want. One day. You get the waddle. I refused to admit I would waddle. I fought the waddle. I even practiced my tango walk once or twice for Douglas to show him I wasn't going waddle. But it was all for naught. I waddle now. I have to move side to side in order to make forward motion. And I really don't know why. It's funny looking, it's a cliche, it's inevitable. I give up. Hopefully my tango walk will return. Some day.
  2. I like Babies 'R Us. It's better than Target. It's like Target on Steroids. It's the perfect place to waste time, to shop around and to realize you need everything and nothing that is within these doors. I even know where stuff is in the BRU. Yeah, it goes by BRU around our house now.
  3. Maternity Pants Are Just As Horrible As Regular Pants. For girls with short legs, that is. Do people really exist that can buy pants off the rack without shortening 3 inches from them? Thank goodness I spent the entire portion of my pregnancy that needed maternity pants in cropped pants. Or floods based on how they looked on me. Now that it's November and I am honest-to-God living in one pair of ancient, non-maternity yoga type pants. I wash them every other day. They are the only pair of long pants that fit me. They were black 3 weeks ago. Now they are a nice shade of kinda-black....and really stretched out. Heh.
  4. Maternity Pants Are Better Than Sliced Bread. Assuming I can find something in the right length, the fact that you don't have to waste a mili-second of time unbuttoning or unzipping is perhaps the most under-estimated bliss ever. I don't know how I will be able to return to the Land of Needing Two Hands to Pull Down My Pants. It's so comfy here is Stretch Waistband World.
  5. The Belly is Hard. The Belly Doesn't Bend. Why didn't I know this? Why did I think getting out of bed would be just as easy as before?? It's like being a turtle trapped on your back. Help me. Please! I have to catch a heel on the side of the bed and hoist myself up. At my massage on Saturday I almost fell off the table. She got me about halfway up to sitting and let me go... I started to tip to the right. NOT GOOD. I cannot stop myself, I cannot bend. Luckily she caught me before I went overboard. It would have been a big mess of me. Naked. On the floor. Ack.

Saturday, November 10, 2007

The Nursery is complete. It's a Nest. Or a Sanctuary.

Late one sleepless night - before we knew if it was a baby boy or a baby girl - I had an ah-ha! moment about the nursery. When we were in Honduras the summer of 2006 we bought a few souvenirs and hadn't found homes for them yet. Two tree bark works of art from the Mosquito Coast that I had taken to be professionally framed - and then put in a closet - and two wooden carvings of birds - a Macaw and a Toucan.

All of the items came from Macaw Mountain Bird Park in Copán Ruinas. A place that we are looking forward to taking our baby to visit when he is old enough to enjoy the birds himself.

So slowly, The Office transformed to The Nursery. And the theme is parrots and tropical birds. The amount of sweet, thoughtful items we have been given to put in the room is so touching. It really feels like we have made a nest or a sanctuary for our little baby. And now, because of all the parrot talk, we have started to call him El Guacamaya. It's a joke - mostly. It's not the manliest of nicknames. But it's fun to use your Michael Buffer boxing announcer voice and set the stage for Baby Boy "El Guacamaya" Rivera.

Don't forget to click on the photos to see them larger.









This is a detail of the quilt above the crib. It was the first nursery item I bought once we decided to do the parrot theme. This was from eBay.



Someone in our family has clothes in three closets. He had to squeeze down to the lower bar so the baby outfits could have some room. It's still the office filing system, too.





These photos were taken at Macaw Mountain. Except for the bottom one... those are cookies from one of the baby showers.



Here you can see one of the tree bark artworks. The other is above the light switch as you come into the room. The pillows in the chair were made by mom (grandma!) and the macaw puppet is a special gift from one of our very close tango friends. We were blown away by how sweet he is! Michelle outdid herself with this gift.





Maternity Photo Shoot. Such wonderful keepsakes!

After seeing stunning photos from Rachael at Metropolitian Images we decided we needed to get on the ball and do these, too. After all, we had some great snapshots from the pregnancy, but nothing was going to be as timeless as the work of a pro.

Rachael came over on a Friday afternoon and we spent a few short hours getting over 100 excellent shots. Narrowing these down is going to be almost impossible. But let's give it a shot!

I am 35 weeks 6 days pregnant in these.



















Now the next series are my favorites. But they need a little explanation...

Douglas used my lip liner one night to draw on The Belly. Because when I breathed in and out I could make the belly button move like a little mouth. So he drew the mustache and we made The Belly sing. We were cracking ourselves up for a long time that night!

For the photoshoot, I wanted to do the same thing. But take it just a little further. I love these shots! They are really goofy and really us.