Remember that Friends episode where the guys get into a bet about who know more about whom, and the girls end up betting their apartment over the lightning round? Whenever someone asks me what my favorite food is, I remember this part of that episode. (click to play):

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Yeah, so replace “Joey” with “Kit” and that’s what goes through me head. There’s nothing quite like a good sandwich. Sandwiches may be my favorite comfort food, with cold cereal running a close second.

I had a bunch of fresh veggies laying around and some decent hoagie rolls, and I got to thinking what the best way to combine them all would be. Then I remembered this:

George, we’re using the toaster more often for grilling our chicken, but tonight, sir, your little grilling wonder will be put to good use.

So, first, I coated a chicken breast liberally with some italian parmesan dressing we had in the fridge and grilled that sucker to 155, letting it glide on up to 160.

While that was grilling, I caramelized some onions, mushrooms, and bell peppers (which came from my garden!).

Then I sliced the roll in half and coated the insides with a conservative amount of mayo. The mayo forms a nice seal so the bread doesn’t get too soggy. Then I layered.

1. chicken down first, sliced, laying as flat as I can manage
2. layer of fresh spinach leaves
3. tomato slices (also from the garden!)
4. caramelized veggies
5. a layer of colby jack — all I had — pepper jack would have been awesome

Then I gave it a firm mush before I lightly coated the outside with a little olive oil, then down on the George Foreman Grill it went. I gently pressed it flat, and five minutes later I had this:

I didn’t wait enough time before I bit into it, and I burned the heck out of my mouth, but it was so worth it! Between the flavors of the food I selected, and the crisp toastiness of the bread, this was a seriously tasty sandwich. I’ll be looking for excuses to try this again before the week is out.

In no particular order, things from our first week with Joseph:
- Tucking Emy into bed tonight, I say, “I love Emy!” and with a huge grin and hug she squeezes me and announces, “LOVE ME!”
- Bennett and Emy have formed a partnership. On one hand it’s great to see them playing SO well together. On the other hand, they are playing so well together in all sorts of new and dangerous and messy ways:

- Reading 3rd Nephi with Christ visiting the Nephites, we’re discussing sacred vs. secret. Christopher is trying to understand the distinction and says, “Guys, was this sacred - having Joseph?” Yes. Yes, it was.
- Bennett can sign “B-E-N” and is trying to spell his name but it’s usually B-E-N-T-T-N-E-B or some such variation. Lots of Ns and Ts. Ben knows most of the ABCs in sign language and always asks us to sing that at circle time.
- Emy has decided Joseph will be an early reader:

- Moira has been signing the alphabet to Joseph. She’s also been singing to him a lot, it’s so sweet to hear.
- Tuesday morning we were in the sunroom and Moira, Bennett & Emiline went out to play in the yard. They were out there almost an hour (before the heat hit!) and we caught this picture of them:

- I’m 106lbs, trying to hold onto that weight! The goal is to stay above 100lbs.
- Kit ran to check in at the office before they took off this week for a big convention, Joseph was asleep, and I had four very awake kids so a nap was not an option. We put the time to good use:

- Joseph can lift his head and turn it side to side and push away from our chests when we are holding him. Impressive head control.
- Christopher & Moira both received thank you gifts from us for their extra special help this last month. They’ve done not just their chores but lots of extra things to help out around the house and are amazing at assisting me with Joseph and the younger kids. So we got them some special Big Brother/Big Sister gifts:
More on Christopher’s book later, he’s thrilled… yes, our kids get that excited over books. Educational books at that. This is what happens when you hide the tv, they have to get excited about something.
- Each month we’re going to take a picture of Joseph next to this little rhino a new friend gave us. Starting with one week (since I didn’t get a shot at birth with it!) then one month on through his first birthday:

That’s not the official shot, I’m saving the 12 for later. That’s just to show the rhino.
- Bennett has a little poster/worksheet thing he’s decided is his laptop. He carries it around, sets it up and pretends to type:

These are the things I don’t want to forget. I’ve had some moments that have emotionally caught me off guard but all in all? A pretty wonderful week. You know, beautiful and healthy new baby and four spectacular big siblings and a husband beyond compare. Not a bad week, I must say…

I’ll be posting more pictures in the gallery tonight.

Please take a moment and click on this link to make a difference. Read about Charles Fletcher, the founder of Spirit Horse Therapy. Then click on the link just below the story that says, “Must Read - YES, I vote for this story!”

(Kit says: I’m a visual guy — look for this:)

If Spirit Horse is selected, they will receive a grant making it possible for more children to receive their services completely free. Watch the movie, it made me cry.

You can read more about Spirit Horse on their website. You can see some pictures of Moira & Bennett riding at Spirit Horse over the last few years. Moira began riding when she was 2 years old, Bennett began riding when he was only 11 months adjusted age. We’ve seen amazing progress with both kids from their riding therapy and we want other children to benefit. Spirit Horse charges NOTHING for these services, it’s funded completely through grants and donations - so voting for them to get this grant from Reader’s Digest would make a life changing difference for even more kids.

I wish I could show you the joy on the kids’ faces when they are on the backs of “their ponies” - they look like they could fly. I know it makes a difference to our children and all the kids that work so hard day to day while dealing with their special challenges.

(And if you do vote for them, leave a comment or shoot me an email - we start the fall riding semester in a few weeks and it would be neat to tell them people were voting for them. hthaden at gmail dot com)

Moira on her pony, Snowflake.

Here is a movie from Bennett’s last day of spring semester.

I have no idea how much sway the voting will have on anything or how RDs ultimately decides, but it will count as your good deed for the day and the video will certainly make you smile. It always makes me feel good to know there are people like Charles in this world.

He had quite the audience, which I think explains his expression - who are all these people?? I don’t know if Joseph is use to his crowd of adoring fans. Hard to sleep when your admirers want to get right in your face and poke you and hold you and squeeze you.

Oh, and first bath because the babies don’t get bathed after birth, just wiped off. We waited a few days to give him a sponge bath. The hospital told me they bath the babies because of the risk of bodily fluid on the baby getting on the nurses - it’s to protect the staff, they told me. But then the baby is shocked by the water and their body temp goes down and they stick them under the warmers to bring the temp back up and then you have to fight with the nursery staff to get your baby back and the soap dries out their skin. One nurse said if they don’t bath the baby they have to wear gloves until the baby is washed - and it’s not convenient for them. But the vernix on the baby (the white stuff) actually protects their skin and is good for them and it rubs in gently over the first couple days and wiping the baby down with a soft blanket was enough to get Emy and Joseph clean and sweetly smelling of new baby. Not that baby shampoo doesn’t smell nice, but it doesn’t smell as nice as fresh baby skin - so, we wait on the bath.

August 3rd

August 13th

Guess what I did this morning? No, not running (I’m only a week postpartum, I’m not that crazy.) But I put on my running shoes and I went for a very slow walk. It felt wonderful. Funny, in that first shot I was technically in labor - 4cms dilated, contracting, on my way to church.

More later, off to nurse.

I had the moment today (I’ve had it with each of my kids, though it certainly struck the most brutally with Bennett’s pregnancy) - I looked down and realized I was alone. Joseph was no longer with me. (He was sound asleep next to me, but he was not with me.) And each time I’ve had that moment I am sad and I try to remember the feeling of that little body tucked up inside of me, kicking me and making me oh-so-uncomfortable. The memory fades too quickly. But it’s a strange sensation, the awareness that I am now alone in my own body.

Crawling into bed I looked down at sleeping Joseph and the love struck me with such force, it caught me off guard. That happens with each baby, too. You know you love them, but there are moments when you look at them and you almost have the wind knocked out of you - the depth of the love, the fierceness, there’s just no adequate way to describe how it feels to fall in love with your own child.

He’s not yet one week old and I cannot quite remember life before him. Hasn’t Joseph always been here, always been a part of our family, always been our son? Just as I cannot fathom how I lived 23 years without Kit in my life… we’ve had our kids close in age, and even when going on no sleep and a lot of insanity we’ve been eager to welcome each new child. And I don’t think we’ve really expressed why there was such an urgency for us, why we seemed to be in such a rush to have these children. We wanted them here. We wanted all of them, we didn’t want to miss anyone, didn’t want anyone to miss out on things. We wanted our children and we didn’t want to wait years between them because that would have meant more time we were missing children. Now they are here.

And the next thought that came to me that brought a huge smile to my face was,

“Now, let the wild rumpus BEGIN!!”

So, I’m trying with all my might to stay upbeat or at least not be downbeat. (Is that a word?) But it’s the evenings that are hard. When I was struggling with the PPD after Christopher, the sun would start to set around 5pm (winter baby) and I would be facing this eternal night of my depression on top of a baby miserable from an undiagnosed food issue that was making him scream, scream, scream in pain until at least 11pm, then pass out and sleep in little bursts all night. For about 45 minutes at a time he would sleep, then wake up and nurse and sob and nurse and sob and vomit and poop and start all over. ALL. NIGHT. LONG.

SO, when the sun would start to go down and I knew I was about to face that, again, I would burst into tears. Consistently, every night. It was hell on earth to be crazy in my own head while trying to care for this baby I desperately loved and not even trusting myself to be able to care for him alone. I couldn’t console him and it turns out it was my own breastmilk torturing him. It was just not pretty. I was insane. Truly, truly insane. It took a good six weeks for me to be able to laugh again (that was with the drugs, mind you) and it took well over six months for me to even feel semi-stable again. No wonder Kit felt prompted to quit his job and stay home with us. I would have been scared to leave me alone with the baby, too. I was scared to be alone with this little infant when I was failing at being his mother - at least in my own mind.

I’ve not had postpartum depression like that since. With Moira and Bennett they had me on antidepressants in the pregnancy to avoid such a crash. With Emy we were mindful of it and I had some depression postpartum but it was really triggered by the health challenges (recurring mastitis and thrush and bleeding nipples and such. Every time she would fuss and start crying to nurse I would burst into tears.)

I now believe a lot contributed to my depression after the first birth. A bad OB & an unpleasant hospital stay leading to a physically tough and painful recovery. Being separated from Christopher soon after birth and having to fight to have him brought back to me from the nursery (after they kept him a couple hours.) The early nighttime and lack of sunshine. Being relatively new in town with just two close friends - one out of town right then but back soon after and helping me keep going, the other also an absolute lifesaver when the PPD hit and she and her husband came to help us out the night I crashed. (Without those two friends helping us get through those first couple months, I don’t know how we would have held it together. They helped so very much and I realize that friends are crucial to postpartum survival.) A baby dealing with the food intolerance and reflux and misery. My rapid weight loss - I lost all my pregnancy weight and then some in the first week. (Thus our reason for cheering that I’m holding onto some weight now.) But the seasonal issue was something we really thought impacted me day to day - lack of sunshine is not good for me.

We’ve since tried to plan our pregnancies around the winter months. Even before our preemie and our fear of an RSV winter newborn, we knew it was best if I was not dealing with a newborn in the dark. Thus Moira in May, Bennett SHOULD have been born in May, and Emy & Joseph both in August. SUNNY months. I think it’s helping, to have some sunshine.

But still, when the sun begins to go down, seeing the sky darken now, the old fear and anxiety lingers. I feel the tension well up in my throat, my chest tightens. I wonder how the night will go, if I will get ANY rest or if it will be yet another marathon night of painful nursing and sobbing baby.

For the record - the nursing is painful. The cracks healed but I now have thrush - ouch, ouch, ouch. BUT this baby does not sob all night. He did one night cry for a couple hours, but since then he roots a bit and then latches on and nurses like a champ. So this is NOT like Christopher’s painful all night sobbing nursing thing.

Kit’s very aware of my mood in relation to sunshine and lights and how hard the evenings can be for me. We keep the kids’ routine and that helps. Lots of stories, scripture & prayer, snacks, cuddles, etc. The kids keep me going and that’s how I know I’m not depressed. During this pregnancy I was very much depressed at times, so much so that I could not bring myself to do anything. When the kids’ faces and requests to read stories and play with them was not enough to get me out of bed, then I knew something was seriously wrong and I had to get help. So I know that I’m still not there, that right now I am doing better than I was, because the real depression feels like it’s eating my will to move or speak or laugh. Right now, this is just me sometimes feeling sad. Anxious in the evening. But the kids can crawl into my lap and do something silly and I can laugh. I can still smile, and so long as they can make me smile then I know I’ll be okay.

I am trying to type with a baby bum resting on my arm and a warm, fuzzy head snuggled under my chin. It lets me lean down to sniff and snuggle as needed, it’s convenient.

We’ve enrolled Joseph in his first research study because we are all about experimenting on our kids. Some local graduate researchers are looking at social development and interaction in the first six months as they research autism. Studying “typically developing” kids to compare and see early markers - like that one study I’m not going to link to that showed 16 differences showing up as early as six months of age in children later diagnosed with autism. Anyway, it’s a neat study we want to support so we’re letting them have at Joseph. Poor science experiment baby.

Once a week from today through December they’ll be coming to our home and watching me play with him while videotaping us for 10 minutes. Today we chatted a bit, he rolled his eyes at me, I made fun of his lizard tongue, he sneezed, and a fun time was had by all.

At the end of the study they’ll take clips from each week and compile a video for us to keep to see how Joseph has changed week by week. He’s their youngest enrollee and I’m sure their cutest.

Kit harvested two bell peppers, a tomato and a cucumber from our garden. We have some green onions and herbs still holding on but I think the rest of the garden has gone belly up. Next year he has ambitious plans but the baby thing this year threw us off.

More later, I need to inhale some new baby scent and squish my little chubby boy.

More pictures are up in the gallery.

Nursed 2 hours last night, from about 7 to 9pm. Then slept two hours, then nursed every single hour since then. Always at a quarter past the hour, I kept thinking he could not possibly be hungry again but if I waited to see he would go from rooting to fussing to crying. YEP, seriously - every single hour. He was 8lbs 7ozs yesterday when our midwife weighed him so clearly he’s a happy eater.

In no particular order, I wish I had known in my first pregnancy:

- A midwife. Not that all midwives are equal by any stretch, but I wish we had interviewed some in California.
- I wish we had hired a doula, but I don’t think we had even heard of them yet. I LOVE OUR DOULA and I will not ever give birth again (if I give birth again) without our doula. With all of the benefits of a doula, what a tiny, tiny financial price to pay for the priceless peace of mind of having that support and lowering your risks of various interventions.
- The olive oil on the baby’s rear end trick to avoid the meconium mess.
- That it was worth paying out of pocket and doing more research to find a midwife to work with in order to avoid the OB/hospital. DId I mention midwife already??
- That even if I chose to be in a hospital, I was not a prisoner and I was free to tell them NO to anything and everything.
- Read “The Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth” & “Birthing from Within” and the Dr. Sear’s “Birth Book” or any Dr. Sears book!
- That breastfeeding is hard but very, very worth it. But it’s still hard. And even if I know how to breastfeed a baby, that doesn’t mean the next baby will know how to breastfeed, it’s a whole new ballgame with each baby.
- That postpartum hormones are powerful things.
- Lansinoh breast pads & Depends for postpartum.
- Birth centers. I cannot say that enough. Birth centers. I wish I had explored options more and not assumed that a hospital birth was my only alternative since it was all insurance covered. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN WORTH PAYING OUT OF POCKET, especially considering a birth center delivery including EVERYTHING from labs and prenatal care to delivery and center fee and postpartum visits are around $3500 in our part of town. That’s less than some people pay in co-pays & deductibles for a hospital birth.
- Pictures. I wish I had hired a photographer for our births before my sister was in town and I am so very thankful she’s in town now because wow - those pictures are incredible at capturing the experience.
- That postpartum is HARD and the only thing that matters in these first days is sanity & sleep. Everything else can wait.
- The crib was a waste of money. And babies do NOT need a lot of stuff.

- I wish I had known I could give birth without drugs and that I did not necessarily need a hospital. That I’m strong enough to cope with the pain and intensity, and that it would be something that I would actually enjoy - so much so that I would choose to do it again and again. I wish I had more faith in my body and its ability to handle the challenge of labor. I wish I had gone into pregnancy and birth with more faith in myself and my ability to cope and grow from the experience. But either way, I got to this point and I’m thankful.

I remember waking up the day after my birthday or after Christmas when I was a kid. The excitement and anticipation was over but as I slowly woke up I would remember my presents! And all the cool things that were still around that I got to look forward to playing with… now that I’m a grown up there aren’t the toys necessarily but still there’s always delicious leftover food to look forward to.

That’s what I feel like lately. I wake up and I’m groggy and I know something exciting has happened and then I realize - WAIT, I had Joseph! He’s here! I have five kids! All my kids are here and healthy (and probably half of them are already in my bed) and it’s like waking up the day after Christmas every single day!

It’s a good feeling.

I remember when I was pregnant with Christopher that I wondered how I could ever love another person as much as I loved Kit. Not that a love for spouse or child are comparable, but I was so in love with Kit that I just didn’t know how I could adore anyone on any level approaching that. Then I had Christopher and even with the PPD I fell very much in love with him and have loved him more and more and more every day since. Even on those days he made me bonkers.

Same thing, pregnant with Moira I did have the thought that I couldn’t love another child with quite the same adoration that I loved Christopher. Then she was in my arms and I started to slowly catch on - OH, you mean I’m going to love all of them this much?? Even writing that brings tears to my eyes…

So, I no longer fear that a new baby will be less loved. Bennett and Emy came along and entered the wild rumpus and there’s enough love… I’m confident that when they arrive and I see that face that I will love them as if I’ve known them forever. Because I believe that I have. I believe this little passel of monkeys was meant to be with us, that each one is our child forever and that years and years ago I began to get a hint of the joy that was to come with our sons and daughters. Before they began to arrive… but that’s a long other story.

My point is that there is plenty of love to go around. There are two beautiful aspects of this (well, at least two.) With each baby, the love just grows. You’ve all heard that cliche but it’s true. I heard it compared to a candle - each candle lit by another does not diminish the light of the first. It just provides even more light. There’s more and more love with each baby that comes. More chaos, and less sleep, but there is more love. You fall just as hard for baby number five as you do for baby number one.

Actually, that’s not true. You fall harder.

You do. When Moira came and I first let Christopher hold her, I fell in love with both of them. I loved Christopher even MORE because I saw him grow and I watched their relationship develop. Each child you welcome into your family makes you love your other children with a deeper and deeper appreciation because you see how each member of the family grows and stretches to welcome that new little one.

I won’t even get into how it alters your relationship with your spouse, because that’s a whole other post. You think you love your spouse on your wedding day? Just wait… just wait. And as hard as you may love them on the day you first see them smile at your new baby? You think you love them after that first little one comes, but then another comes and you love them more. I’ll have to save this for a new post. But Joseph’s birth day was… I’m staring at my computer at a loss for words.

It topped my wedding day. And that’s saying something. And I know Kit won’t be bothered by that because today I overheard him tell a friend that this birth experience is comparable only to the day we were in the temple together, being sealed as an eternal family. SO, I know he feels the same way…

Last night Joseph was being fussy. I nursed and nursed and nursed and then Kit took him. Sat next to our bed in the glider and held our son. I could see his profile in the dark room, backlit by a light by our sink. Just the outline of my husband, rocking my baby to sleep. And as exhausted as I was, as bone weary, I could not sleep. I lay there, trying to forever imprint that image in my mind. Wondering how I could ever love them more, love each of them, fully appreciate this life and these loved ones. Knowing, finally starting to realize, that I’m going to fall more and more and more in love with each of them every day.

Postpartum is hard, but there are also precious moments of peace and perspective…