First Bath

Toby was in need of his first bath.  So I ran some warm water in the kids bathroom, stripped him down and started wiping him down.  I forgot how wiggly and squirmy babies are when wet!  Of course, Jenna was being my big helper!

 

 Toby didn't seem to mind his arms and torso getting washed.

 However when I got to his bottom, he thought I needed a little poo on the towel.  No, I am not meaning the yellow fluffy bear whose best friends are Piglet, Tigger, and Christopher Robin. 

After he poo'ed on the towel and wash cloth, I realized I handn't washed behind his ears or his neck, so we got a new towel and wash cloth and went at it a second round.  When finished, I took him into his room and put a diaper and clean sleeper on.  As I was zipping him up, he spit up.  Round 2 will commense shortly and have no camera and no helpers.  Maybe it will go better....

Big Sister Luvin'

To say Toby has two big sister's that adore him would be an underststement.  Jenna wants to be a helper and a part of everything we do with Toby.   She loves holding him and asks to every night as soon as she gets home.  She gives him lots of hugs and kisses and tries to figure out why he is crying.  She even likes helping change his diaper!  I hope her enthusiam and love keeps up.  It is precious!

 

 

 

Shelby is somewhat less interested in Toby. She likes holding him, but not for very long.  She says Toby is "heavy" and after a short time usually says something such as "get him off me."  She does a good job helping and seems to take the most interest in him when he is sitting in his Fischer Price elephant chair. 

Hospital Visitors

In the afternoon, we were blessed with more visitors.  Ivan, Angel, Kaity and Kent stopped by for a visit.  Kaity and Kent both held Toby, as did Angel and Ivan.  Angel was pointing out some very neat things about our children and their similarities.  All the girls (Kaity, Jenna, and Shelby) were 7 lb babies and around 20 inches.  The boys (Kent and Toby) were both over 9 pound babies with identical head circumferences and 22 inches long. 

 Angel pointed out that Kaity looks like the Hofmann family and I think that Jenna and Shelby do too (Angel thinks Jenna looks like me). Kent looks like his Papoo (Angel's dad) and she thinks that Toby looks like his Poppy Bob (my dad). The only thing Toby is missing to look like my dad is the dark brown/almost black hair.   

My parents made a trip north to meet their first Grandson.  They tried to get a photo of the five of them.  I was sitting at a much different angle, so of course no one was looking at me, but that's okay.  We had a nice visit with them as well.

 Poppy wanted a picture of him and his Grandson on his phone so I got one with my camera, too.  Poppy brought Toby a bear.  I wanted to name him Grizzly, I forget what Poppy wanted to name him.  He was just proud because he took all 5 of his grandchildren a stuffed animal in the hospital when they were born.

Mawmaw Jo made a counted cross stitch picture for Toby, complete with all his stats. 

 At this point the girls had went back home with Grandma and Grandpa Hofmann, so we still haven't gotten a family photo of the 5 of us.  But here is a picture of Lance, Toby and Christa!

Shortly after my parents left, Ruby and her daughters stopped by and visited.  We go to church with Ruby and her husband Michael.  They have daughters Casey (10) and Kendall (6?).  She was one of the two from church that threw us the baby shower.  As we were visiting with them, Scott and Elizabeth (preacher and his wife) stopped by to visit and say hello.  We had a fellowship lunch at church Sunday with a Hawaiian Luau theme so evening service was moved up allowing some of our church family to visit too. 

Monday morning they asked if we were ready to go home.  As anyone who has ever been in the hospital can attest, there is no way to get any rest in the hospital.  I was ready to go home if for no other reason than the hopes of getting 2 hours of consecutive sleep!  We started the process about 9 am of getting to go home and were finally headed out the door by 2 pm. 

We decided to stop by Babies 'R Us and return the un-needed carseat (did you know carseats have an expiration date? We were flirting with ours and weren't sure they were going to let us use our infant carier dated in 2008.) So we stopped to return the carseat and to pick up my prescriptions. I didn't know Lance went through the drive-thru the second time to pick up and pay for the scripts before I was asleep and we were almost home. 

Hofmann Family of Five

For some reason, all three of our children have decided that they needed to start their entrance into the world at an hour which most people go to bed and make their entrance sometime before noon the next day.   As if, they weren't going to sleep deprive mom and dad the first few weeks and months enough anyway!

Toby was born at 5:23 and we were finally situated and settled into our final recovery room at 1pm.  Needless to say we were exausted!  Saturday afternoon Lance and I discussed having Stan and Janet bring the kids to meet Toby.  I decided that I was not feeling up to company and was not moving around enough to be able to / want to have Jenna and Shelby for company.

 So we asked Stan and Janet to bring them to the hospital about 10am Sunday to let Christa recover some, take a much needed shower, and to let the girls meet him before anyone else had a chance to come by.  A good plan in theory, however, it didn't work quite as planned.  The doctors wanted to do Toby's check and came to take him about 9:45.  So Jenna and Shelby come in and baby brother isn't in the room.  He arrived about 10 mintues later and Daddy introduced them. 

 

 Jenna was very excited about holding her little brother.  

 Shelby was not so sure what to think. 

 Then the nurse came in and said that the doctor wanted to perform the circumcision.  If we wanted it done that she was going to do it in the next 15 mintues or she was leaving.  I suggested to Lance to take the the kids and his parents out to lunch and when they got back then maybe we would get to relax and have some real family time.  So they headed off to McDonalds (girl's choice) and I ordered myself lunch.  I decided to get Toby dressed as we had expected we would have several visitors for the day. 

 Stan and Janet dropped the girls off so we had some time for just Lance, Christa, Jenna, Shelby, and Toby.  It was a nice and enjoyable couple of hours to watch everyone interact. 

 Jenna held Toby some more, Shelby climbed into bed with Mommy (self photo).

 Then Shelby found the glider.  She had lots of fun in that chair!

Toby Wyatt Hofmann



We knew the time to meet our son was drawing near.  I had Lance take a few final pregnancy pictures just to document the final size of the belly. 

until I look at these pictures, I didn not realize how BIG that belly had gotten! 

 The rest of this blog post is going to be our birth story, so if that sort of thing is weird/gross consider this your warning to stop reading.  Otherwise, here is the story of how we met our son.

After the doctor had stripped my membrane she told me to spend some time walking and to make sure everything was ready because we wold likely meet our son in the next 48 hours. 

So, I needed to get an oil change in my company vehicle and have very limited options on where that can be done in Terre Haute.  One option is Sears.  Off to Sears I went.  I walked around for 45 minutes while the auto was serviced and on to the office I went.  I has a meeting at 1:30 with my boss, my boss's boss, and some regional leadership folks about quarterly updates for our office.  I really wanted to hear what they had to say and finish off a few tidbits that were still hanging out.

I left the office right at 4:30 (quitting time) and picked up the girls from daycare.  We did our normal evening activities of dinner, family time, bath, and bed (somewhere around 8 pm is the goal).  The girls went to bed, so did Lance and I.  A little before 9 pm, my water broke. 

Lance called his parents, who were already in the plan to stay over at our house with the girls, telling them they needed to head our way as were were going to leave to go have a baby.  Lance hopped in the shower, I stripped the bed and put the sheets in the washer, and grabbed those few last minute items.  Stan and Janet showed up and we got on the road about 9:20 pm.  We got to Union Hospital shortly after 10:00 pm.

Since my water had already broke, we skipped triage and went straight to a labor and delivery room.  There I continued to labor with back labor....which was absolutely miserable.  I continued to make progress through the late night hours and everything was going great.  I was checked a few times and was finally told we had made it to 10cm.  That magic place where they let you start pushing.  So we rearrange everyone and Christa starts to push.  The doctor checks me and says, we are not actually to 10 cm because there is still cervix stopping his head from entering the birth canal. 

Lots of things start to happen at this point.  I end up getting an epidural.  This was not really in the plan but they figured the baby was in PO position.  I asked what that meant and was told that he was likely face up instead of face down like he should be...which was causing additional issues. 

Then to make matters worse, every time I would have a contraction, the baby's heart rate would drop.  This was of no major concern at first, but caused Lance, myself, Dr Coutinho, resident baby doctor, and our nurse to stare at the monitor for what seemed like hours.  At first, it was just to make sure he didn't end up in a danger zone and at the end turned out to make sure his heart rate got back up out of the danger zone.  I know at one point his heart rate dropped down into the low 70s.  It's now somewhere around 5:00 am.

Given the distress the baby was in, the doctor made the call to deliver baby via emergency cesarean section.  She re-assured me baby would be out within 15 minutes and he would be fine.  So that's exactly what happened. I got moved to a operating room, covered in special soap and had a c-section. 

Toby Wyatt Hofmann was born at 5:23 am.  Doctor Coutinho said "that baby just keeps coming.  That is a BIG baby."  The anesthesiologist told Lance to stand up and look (as he was on my half of the curtain).  He said the head, shoulders and belly was out, they were ready to pull out the feet.  The nurses did their normal routine of checking baby out.  All the while everyone is interested to find out what this baby weighed.  His head circumference was 36.5cm (big head) and he weighed in at 9 lbs 8 ounces. 

I told Lance to go take some pictures of baby and to make sure he was in fact a boy!  Daddy reassured me he was a boy and that he looked perfect.  All 10 fingers, all 10 toes, and slighthly more than peach fuzz for hair.  His birth may not have happened the way we had hoped, but we still had a healthy baby and that's all that is important.

One more thing, he has an even birthday 7/20/13 to make the entire Hofmann family have boys born on even days and girls born on odd days for 3 generations.