At 7 months Avery likes to cruise around holding on to furniture, eat whenever we eat, try to feed herself, and ride around on Asher’s shoulders (with help). She is very ticklish, silly, a messy eater, and a very curious explorer. We can make her laugh by jumping around like  fools, making silly faces, playing peekaboo, bouncing her, dancing,  and chasing Asher around the kitchen. She is also starting to do baby sign language for milk and more.  This first picture is my favorite of her, I just love that sweet smile!

How can our little Avery already be half a year old? It seems impossible! She is such a delight and we had such an exciting holiday season with her. She has started to eat some solids, so far she loves sweet potatoes, bananas, and pears. She is not a big fan of green beans. She is sitting up on her own, although she might tumble over if big brother walks in the room and distracts her. This week while we were at the library Asher and a little girl put on a big puppet show for Avery and she loved it. She squealed with laughter and clapped her hands. Asher is definitely her BFF.

Sarah woke up at about 12:30am on Monday morning with contractions that felt a little worse than her usual Braxton-Hicks stomach crunches. She let me sleep about another hour, then we both tried to decide if we should start making some middle-of-the-night phone calls. We ended up calling Sarah’s folks at about 1:45 so they could come to our house and stay with Asher while we checked into the hospital. My lovely wife then proceeded to take a shower and put on makeup while having contractions about 4-5 minutes apart.

This is the part were we slightly miscalculated the timing of the whole ‘contractions hurt’ thing… It took Sarah’s parent’s (John and Lalla) a little longer to get to our house than we had anticipated. By the time they arrived around 2:35am, Sarah was in a significant amount of discomfort. They barely got in the front door before we were rushing out the back. I love that Baylor Frisco is so close to our house, however, your wife being in labor is the ONE time you have an excuse to drive like it’s the last lap of the Indy 500. I think it took about 12 seconds to get to there… wish it was further. It’s funny that the ride home is the exact opposite. You drive about 15mph like a granny when the newborn is in the car. The trips cancel each other out, right officer?

We got to the “hospital” around 2:45am and were all checked in by 3. I put hospital in quotes because it’s more like a 5-star resort than a hospital. We are thinking of our stay here like a vacation – it will cost about the same and our room, the food, and the staff are nicer than any hotel we could afford. Not to mention they give out free drugs! By the time they hooked Sarah up to all the machines and monitors, she was in a LOT of pain during contractions which were now about 2 1/2 minutes apart. It took almost another hour for the blood work to come back and the epidural dude to come, but Sarah handled it like champ. Neither of us have ANY idea how anyone could do it naturally… that is just crazy amazing. The eppy meds kicked in about 4:15am and Sarah was feeling great!

She started pushing at 5:00am and Avy popped out 23 minutes later!!

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