Cole Bath Time

Just a few pictures from Cole's first bath experience. He actually liked it more than we expected...!




 


 

The little liver that could...

This week has been chaotic but fun! We have been spending a part of each day at the hospital having Cole's bilirubin levels checked and the docs have been doing everything they can to keep us OUT of the hospital! We were already re-admitted on Saturday for more phototherapy, as his level was too high. We were given a "bili blanket" to take home and have had him on it as much as possible for the past 2 days. As of this morning, he is off the lights for 24 hours and we will see what his little liver will do by the morning! Keep your fingers crossed! This pic was on our way out of the hospital when we finally got to go home!




He is sooooo SMOOCHY! This is about an hour before he wakes up...for his night time party! So far he still thinks he is in utero and has stayed on that schedule! We are working on keeping him awake for a few minutes at a time during the day! So far, so good! At the rate we are going, he will be 5 by the time he sleeps through the night :-)










Sweet boy napping after staying awake for a whole 15 minutes during the day!! Yeah Cole!










Time with Daddy after a diaper change! Daddy is the expert diaper changer now and has been mastering using two wipes instead of three!

Wee Baby Is Here! (4wks early!)

Well, I must say that the past week has been the most chaotic of my life. Despite being away for 3.5 weeks for training, I came home to one of the biggest surprises ever! Sunday we flew the jets back from Las Vegas (direct) in a 10 hour trek across the US, Canada, and the Atlantic. The flight went fine and Jen greeted me when we shut down to a great welcome home.

Turns out someone else was getting a welcome home soon thereafter as well! Today Jen and I were able to welcome home our newest addition to our family - Coletrane Otto Wee! Born 30 September at 4:19AM, Cole weighed in at a hefty 5lb, 15oz and 19 inches long.

Cole was a bit of a surprise to say the least. You see, he decided to show up 4 weeks early, and less than 48hrs after I returned from Las Vegas from Green Flag. One minute we (Jen & I) were talking about our plans for the weekend, and the next Jen was in labor!

The delivery went incredibly well, and both Jen and Cole are doing fabulous. Things went soooo fast - Jen started having contractions at 1:30, which I thought were just practice Braxton-Hicks contractions, and had Cole less than 3 hours later! We literally got in the hospital and Cole was born less than 45 minutes afterwards! Not even enough time for any sort of drugs. Jen did amazing...and I, well, felt useless watching her do all the work. But we made it through together so I guess that's what matters.

Fortunately everything was alright despite the shortened pregnancy and quick labor. The only issue was that Cole had jaundice, so we had to stay in the hospital for 3 extra days while he was under lights to help him rid his system of the biliruben (sp?) in his body. All went well, although it took a while for the doctors to be sure that we could take him home, which leads us to getting home today.


We now just made it home and are starting to recover from the trials of the week (not to mention a broken heater when we arrived back to the house). We feel so blessed to have things go so well for us, and are praying for continued good times ahead. Hope you enjoy the pictures from the first few hours after the delivery!

T. Lohse Photos

Hello, been a while (over a month!) since our last post so we thought we'd share some of the pictures from our photo shoot with our friend Tara. These are over a month old, so the belly is a LOT bigger, but we wanted to share them with everyone. Had a great time getting our pictures taken and hope to have Tara take them again, as she is an excellent photographer. Makes you feel very comfortable! Well, we hope you enjoy these!

Belly Pics - what else?!

Okay, more pictures to send out of the ever growing belly. We spent this weekend doing a few baby type things, went to a Red Cross baby class, got some pictures taken of us by our friend Tara (who is an excellent photographer by the way), and hung out. We'll post the pictures we get from Tara once they arrive, but here's a few from our own camera...as you can see, Jen is looking fabulous. The good news on top of that is she's feeling about the same as well!

So, there's your bi-weekly installment of belly pictures to keep you in the loop. Other than that, we're getting ready for me to leave for TDY (temp duty) to Las Vegas on and off over the next 2 months. I go for 3 weeks till Aug 25th, then back to England till 9 Sep, then back to Vegas until the 27th. It'll be a lot of back and forth (and air miles!), but at least I'll get to see Jen in between training there.

Little niece Zoe is going in for her surgury this Friday so please pray for a quick and safe recovery. We're sure that she's in good hands, and once those doctors give her back to Tom and Dani, everything will be back to perfect. I like this picture...bored with this stuff already...hopefully our kid is half as cute. :)

Well, we hope that the end of July is going as well for everyone else as it is for us! Take care and we hope to hear updates from you all soon!

Chris & Jen

Rainy Trip to Ireland

Well we decided to head off to Ireland for one last trip before I leave on TDY's in Aug and Sept. We had heard great things about the country from our friends and Jen had been to Dublin last summer while I was deployed and had a great time. So, since we had the 4th of July off, we took an extra day the following Monday and spent 4 days exploring the SW portion of Ireland.

We landed in a tiny airport outside of Killarney and spent most of the first day exploring around that area. The town sits right outside a few lakes (one pictured below), and is interesting but full of tourists and big buses. After a half day there we explored the large park surrounding the lakes and mountains (small ones), driving the Ring of Kerry, and looking for our incredibly out of the way B&B. After almost hitting a van going the opposite direction on a road obviously not made wide enough for 2 cars and coming around a bend to see a random horse hanging out in the middle of the road, we finally found our first place. It was nice and the following day was spent driving up to our second location - Dingle Town in the Dingle peninsula. The driving alone was pretty spectacular, however, it rained nearly the entire time so it was hard to enjoy the great scenery except from the confines of our car or raincoats. Dingle was neat - interesting and eclectic - with lots of oddly fitting people, boisterous Irish singing in pubs at night, and sheep everywhere. We stayed in Dingle for the remaining nights and before we got on the plane we went back to the Killarney Lakes to hike around since we liked the area so much. Overall, it was a great trip!

Here's a few pictures from our time there:



One of the Lakes of Killarney...we hiked around on old trails that have been there for centuries.



A beach on the drive around the Dingle peninsula. As you can see, the clouds were very low, but most of that part of the country has beautiful cliff-type coastline.
This place, in Dingle, is a hardware shop by day, and pub by night. We went in and had a few pints just for posterity. Its funny to see a bunch of people drinking and laughing in a place with light bulbs, nails, caulk, and duct tape next to a bunch of booze.
This last picture was in the Gap of Dunloe, near the Lakes of Killarney. It was a great drive on a winding road between the mountains. We passed roughly 30-40 horse drawn carriages (for tourists) as we found our way through the area.

And that's about it. We'll put some more pictures up from the Ireland trip on our Picasa Web Album, which you can reach by clicking the link to the right of this page.

Cheers!

- Jen and Chris...

It's getting BIGGER!

Well the results are in and it's been determined that the belly is definately getting bigger. Just lately things have been seeming to really speed up and Jen has been gathering a more "round" appearance in the mid-section. Apparently she's past the point where people just think she's been drinking too much beer and into the obviously pregnant phase. Here's a couple of pictures to give you an idea of what we're talking about:

Hope everyone is doing well! We'll send out some more pictures as they come along!

Belly Competition

Well we thought we'd send out some more pictures from the belly at week 21.5. But to spice things up a bit, we are having a competition for who has the best belly. Jen's is coming along pretty well, so I think I need to get to it in the beer drinking to catch up.

Coming in 1st?! Ehh, it's a toss up for now, but give Chris a month or so and I'm sure he'll have a good lead.

Bruges - Beer, Boating, and Chocolate Boobies

Jen's parent's left recently and we had a wonderful time. It was great to have both sets of parents visit in a month's span of time. Kathy and Dave arrived for a 2 week visit, and spent the first week of their visit up in Edinburgh, right where we were a month ago with Jan and Dan. They really enjoyed the city, as we knew they would. When they returned from Edinburgh, we were able to spend the weekend recooping with the Ainge's (Dave's cousin is Adrian and they live in Malvern, UK), which was great. Had dinner at the house twice and were able to explore Bury with Dave, Kathy, Adrian, Gillian, and Blanch. Then Dave, Kathy, Jen, and I all packed up for a few days in Brugge or Bruges, depending on how you like to spell it (Brugge is the Flemmish version).




The city itself was beautiful, with amazing architecture. Many of the buildings are hundreds of years old, and canals surround and thread through the downtown area.








We walked around the city the majority of the time but rented bikes to cruise about the outskirts for an hour. This picture is from our biking expedition looking towards city center.













Also on the outskirts were 4 windmills from long ago.

And finally, the chocolate boobies. Not much else to say about that.

We had a great time going to Bruges with Kathy and Dave. We all liked walking around the city looking at all the interesting buildings, as well as the plethora of great restaurants and, of course, Belgian beer. Two nights in a row we went to a place that had more than 400 different types of beer.