Baby Elliot comes to town

In October Elliot Orson was born. I had no idea what to expect with a second child. Maybe I was wrong, but I just assumed that I would be a champ at dealing with two. I was nervous about Sawyer's reaction, but I thought everything else would be a breeze. I was way wrong. It is 5 weeks later and I'm still a disaster!

Elliot's Birthday
Elliot was born on October 17. We had my families Sunday dinner the night before and I had been having contractions on and off for a week and a half. They would always stop in the middle of the night and they were never quite consistent. That Sunday night though on the drive home they were bothering me enough that I didn't know if I could make the drive all the way. I thought they might stop though so I told myself if they got stronger and harder by 10, I would go in. We had some friends come to say hi that night too, Paige and Jared. While they were there, I decided I needed to call my mom and have her come up and watch Sawyer. Jake didn't believe me and kept guffawing at the idea of going in that night. My parents got to our house a little after 10:30 and then we went in. As we were leaving, Jake was still telling me he didn't think we were going to have him yet. That made me super nervous that they would send me home. Then we got there, checked and the nurse called the doctor to see if they wanted me to stay or not. Luckily they let me stay, but to my embarrassment, Jake was right and my contractions stopped an hour after we got there. But, they let me stay and by 6:00am they started me on pitocin. I was going to try having him naturally, but didn't make it...barely! I was doing okay about 11:30 and then they came to check how things were going. I was just put on the max amount of pitocin and so things started to get pretty intense. I asked how long they thought it could be and the nurse told me it would be fast, but fast could still mean 2 hours. I didn't want to hurt like that for a full 2 hours so I got the epidural. The anesthesiologist literally walked out the door when they checked me again and said I was at 9.5 and going to start pushing. I wasn't even numb yet. My right side was pretty dead, but my left I felt everything. The doctor came in and right before I pushed the anesthesiologist gave me a quick shot of litocaine in my left side. As Elliot came I slowly numbed and as the doctor was stitching me up, both legs were completely numb for the next 3 hours. On the plus side, I was numbed enough for it not to hurt horribly bad while they unwrapped the cord from poor little Elliot. Elliot was healthy and beautiful. 7lbs even and 20 inches (a whole inch shorter than Sawyer when he was born) He had lots of hair and was so dark! 

Sawyer and Elliot
The weeks proceeding Elliot's birth, I was trying to prepare Sawyer as much as possible. Sawyer knew that the room next to his was Elliot's and all the stuff in it was for Elliot. We talked about Elliot in mommy's belly. We talked about Elliot coming to live at our house. We introduced him to his new baby cousin and talked about how that was going to be like Elliot. We talked about Elliot being small and Sawyer big. He was definitely getting sick of hearing about Elliot. He wouldn't look at other babies and he would say, "no baby at our house!" Then the week before Elliot was born we went over to my mother's house. While there my cousin Mandy and her three kids came over...one of them is a baby Ellie. She is almost one and is getting quite big, but Sawyer has known her as baby Ellie for a very long time. I'm guessing that he put names and babies together because he was so mean to poor Ellie that whole night. He sat on her, punched her several times and kicked her. My whole night was trying to keep him far away from her. Then when we were getting ready to go home, Sawyer was so happy. He was saying "Bye Ellie!" over and over and over again. Needless to say, I suddenly got very worried about what Sawyer would do when his brother came. And gratefully, I was very pleasantly surprised at his reaction.
Sawyer came to the hospital minutes before Elliot was born. He sat on my lap as the nurses got everything ready and then went out of the room for a few minutes until Elliot was there. He immediately fell in love with his brother. It was his baby. He loved saying, "my baby Elliot! out of mommy's body!" Which is strange that he put that together because I don't recall actually talking to him about that. Maybe I did though. Anyway, he kept wanting to hold him. This continued for the next week or so. He would bring toys, blankets, binki's, and any number of other things to share with Elliot. He even tried sharing food, but after a couple attempts, we got it in his head that Elliot is too small and doesn't have teeth. He loves reading to Elliot. He loves giving him "doggy kisses" and tucking him into his bed. He wants to wrestle Elliot SO much. He gets very disappointed and hurt when I won't let him. He doesn't quite understand that he can't.
The other morning, Sawyer asked for some ice water. So, I ran upstairs for a minute to get him some. I hurry down because I hear Elliot shrieking and Sawyer runs up to me with a great big smile and says, "Mommy I hit Elliot!" I can only think that he was trying to play because otherwise he wouldn't have been so enthusiastic about telling me. When I went to pick up Elliot I got sick to my stomach because of how bad Sawyer had hit him. He was black and swollen from the middle of his forehead to the bottom of his lips and from his ear to the middle of his tiny nose. Since then I've been a bit leery to leave them even for a second in the same room, but Sawyer has been really sweet to him since. And thankfully babies have super human healing powers and his face was looking almost 100% 4 days later. (which was also great because it was his Aunt Tay's wedding and we had to get pictures taken!)

About Elliot
Elliot is a sweet, round headed, tummy loving, cuddly baby, but he cries a lot while awake...which is most of the night. :( It's interesting because Sawyer has always been a TERRIBLE sleeper, but I'm realizing that Elliot is worse. Sawyer was at least a normal non-sleeper at this age, and his bad sleeping started about 3 months. The poor boy has reflux though, so I really can't blame him for not sleeping.
He's an interesting little baby. I look at him and he never looks like the same baby. I don't actually know who he looks like because his face changes so much from minute to minute.
He is a daddy's boy. For the first few weeks I could never even calm him down (it's still hard) but Jake would pick him up and he'd immediately be calm.
He's a very alert and focused baby. Even in the hospital he was already zoning in and focusing on people.