Isabella sleeps in her big bed!

We can't believe this happened so easily, but it did. The actual night of the day that Evelyn was born (April 3rd) Uncle John asked Isabella which bed she wanted to sleep in. She said "pink room" and hasn't gone back to her crib since!

We are so happy that the transition has gone good so far. Evelyn is not sleeping in the crib, so we do not know if when she does that will bother Isabella. Isabella has only recently started realizing that she can get out of the bed on her own. Most mornings she just waits in her bed until someone comes to get her. She even still thinks it is kind of a special thing that she gets to sleep there. As we are winding down for the evening she'll sometimes whisper to me to "I want to sleep pink room", and obviously that is fine with us!

I'm happy we decided to just go with the double bed for her and skip the toddler bed. It is nice to be able to lay down with her and sing songs or read stories. And when she awakes in the middle of the night with her bad cough we can also lay down with her (Grandma has gotten to do this a few times in the last few nights).

The "pink room" itself is still not fully decorated. Not sure when we will get around to that, but there are a few things I'd like to add. I'll post pictures when it is completed.

Evelyn's First Doctor Appointment

Sorry we've been so behind on blogging, we've been getting a bit of flack for it, so hopefully we can be better. So much has been going on, but no time to write about it.

We took Evelyn to 2 week appointment on Friday 4/16. She is doing so wonderful. She has definitely put on weight, so we don't have to be too concerned that she's been sleeping too long at night. She's actually gone close to sleeping for 7 hours straight overnight, mostly she sleeps for around 5 hours. This was in the first two weeks. Things have changed since.... I started this blog a while ago.

Here are her 2 week stats:
Height: 21 inches (90th percentile)
Weight: 7 lbs 12.5 oz (30th percentile)
Head: 13 3/4 inches (45th percentile)

Since the first 2 week honeymoon period, Evelyn has been quite a bit more fussy. We ended up taking her to the doctor because she just seemed so uncomfortable. She stopped having as many dirty diapers and we can totally hear everything in her digestive tract. The doctor thought that it could be gas or acid reflux and gave us a few things to try. I was kind of hopeful that they were weren't, but really in the last few days she has probably been just as fussy. She goes through a completely fussy period between 8 and 11:30 at night where nothing - even eating - seems to calm her. I am still very hopeful that this will pass soon. We did find out that when we took her to the doctor on Tues 4/27 that she weighs 9lbs 2.5oz. I was pretty shocked that she put on so much weight. On a more positive note, last night after her late evening fussfest she slept from 11:30 to 7:30, it was crazy.

Evelyn's Home Visit

Last Thursday a nurse came to visit Evelyn to see how she was doing. She's doing great! When we left the hospital she was weighing 6 lbs 8 ounces, by Thursday she was 6lbs 14 ounces, already past her birth weight! So far she is a very good eater. The nurse also checked her levels for jaundice and she's doing fine there too.

Overall, Evelyn has been a very very good baby. She seems to be quite easy going. Her belly button cord has already fallen off which means we can switch from giving her a sponge bath and put her right in to her infant tub.


Isabella is being a pretty good big sister. Every once in a while she wants to hold the baby. And once when Evelyn was crying I'm pretty sure Isabella felt bad for her and said "Evie's crying". Isabella also likes to steal Evelyn's pacifiers from her.

Easter 2010

When I first saw this picture of Isabella doing an Easter Egg hunt in our backyard, I completely freaked out. I'm sure it looks worse than it was and Isabella wasn't even close to jumping off the ledge....

Needless to say, our Easter plans changed dramatically when Evelyn decided to make her arrival the day before Easter. We had planned on taking Isabella to an Easter egg hunt on Saturday and then dying eggs. Then on Sunday we were going to go to church and Grandpa Groves was coming for brunch and then we were going to go to the Iverson's in the afternoon for another egg hunt.

Uncle John and Aunt Kristy took care of Bella all day on Saturday. They took her to the Easter egg hunt, but unfortunately it was very crowded and Isabella's age range group was 1-5 year old so all she got was 1 hard boiled egg (I know, hard-boiled egg at an Easter egg hunt?).

Then afterwards they all came to visit us in the hospital.


On Sunday, Grandpa Groves still came to visit, but just came to the hospital instead.




In the afternoon Uncle John came to get Isabella and take her to Kristy's family Easter. She enjoyed playing with the younger kids there and then they came back to our place and did an Easter egg hunt with Isabella. With no competition, it looked like she had a lot more fun.




One other thing to note on Easter is that all Saturday night while I was in the hospital I was starving and looking forward to breakfast in which they were serving "Easter egg" I thought that since it was Easter, they might be having a special breakfast. When it arrived, I was sad to see that there was no food on my tray. "Easter egg" was a hard-boiled egg! I thought to take a picture of it, but to be fair it was after I devoured the bacon. No worries, the hospital has a nourishment area with bread, bagels, etc that I was sure to take advantage of. The next morning, I was thrilled to see much more food on my tray.

My Easter breakfast... that bread thing is a hotcross bun, (a dinner roll with frosting and those weird jelly things)


Next morning's breakfast was much better.

We ended up dying eggs with Grandma Linda later on in the week.

Introducing Evelyn Kathryn Kellbach to the world

Evelyn Kathryn Kellbach was born on Saturday, April 3rd at 11:46AM. She weighs 6lbs. 12oz. and is 20 inches long, almost identical to her older sister when she was born. Isabella weighed 6lbs. 12.5oz. and was 20 inches long. She has a full head of dark brown hair as you can see in the pictures below.

The name Evelyn comes from her great-grandma, Jeanne, who passed away last September. Her first name was Evelyn, but she went by Jeanne. We (Robin) thought about spelling the name Evelynne, she liked it because it was a bit different and also realized that it has the same number of letters as Isabella and vowels and consonants fall in the same places in the names. We used our NCAA brackets to determine how the spelling should be since we couldn't agree.
Kathryn is the name of her Grandma Groves and the middle name of her Aunt Nancy.

Robin will write a more detailed delivery story later, here is my brief account of what happened. Robin had a rough couple of nights, Thursday night she had to work at 11PM from home. Unfortunately things did not go smoothly and she did not get done until Friday morning at 9AM. Robin slept a little Friday morning and a little more Friday afternoon and was looking forward to bed on Friday night. We got to bed a little later than we would have liked and I was woken up at 2:07AM by Robin telling me that her water just broke. It actually took Robin telling me a second time that her water broke as after she said something the first time I guess I said "alright" and promptly laid back to sleep. I have a history of acting as if I am awake and totally with it in the middle of the night when I in fact am totally gone (at least this is what I am told as I really have no recollection of these so called incidents). We called John and Kristy at 2:15AM and asked them to come over so that we didn't leave Isabella alone. They were over in less than a half an hour and we ended up leaving around 3:15AM for the hospital. Robin had her first contraction on the car ride over to the hospital. Robin started pushing at 11:25AM and she gave birth 21 minutes later.
Things are going well with Evelyn and Robin. Below are a few pics.

Happy St. Patty's Day (1 day late)

Here is Isabella in her St. Patty's Day shirt. Grandma Linda pointed out that she might go kind of crazy wearing something that says "Lucky Charm" after her "Charms" incident the other week.


We've been enjoying the beautiful Spring weather we've been having outside.



Isabella and the neighbor dog, Rocky. He got excited when he saw she had a ball and came over and threw up in our yard....

Sometimes she's a strange one....

Why, oh, why is Isabella calling me by my first name?



Also, why did she decide she needed to put on her hat, mittens and boots to dance around inside when it I warm enough to go outside. I had to talk her out of putting on her snowpants! Not sure why she decided to take her regular pants off....

Isabella's new room

We weren't even close at making my self-imposed due date of 3/1 to have everything ready for the new baby. Still, we continue to make some progress. Isabella is eventually moving into a new room which used to be our office. We had been working on getting that ready. On last Sat. we finally finished cleaning it out. Sat. morning we took Isabella over to Uncle John and Aunt Kristy's house so we could work on the room uninterrupted. It was great to get stuff done and we can't thank John and Kristy enough for entertaining Isabella all morning. She had a blast.

Earlier this week, Jeff got the room ready to paint and primed it. Last night he stayed up late painting it bright pink! It is really bright and bold and I love it. Isabella liked it when she saw it today as well and is already calling it the "pink room".

Here are a couple dancing videos of Isabella.

This one is cute if you know the song. She sings along and stops when they are talking about the student crossing guard holding up her arms and everyone stopping. She also cracks us up when she looks at her reflection in the tv while she's dancing.



This one shows how she'll stop and do a somersault whenever Jeff tells her to.

Isabella and her blueberries

Isabella has been crazy about blueberries for as long as I can remember. I think she would eat a whole container if we let her, but that gets to be a pretty expensive habit. She's always asking for blueberries whether we have any in the house or not. I think I started taking this video because I like that she can say "blueberries". The video has a few parts worth explaining.

She always says she "needs" things rather than she "wants" things. I don't know if this is common in most children or not, but I think it is rather smart of her. When she tells me she "needs" something it sounds a lot more urgent than if she just "wants" something. I think I'm more apt to do stuff for her because the poor girl "needs" something.

"I need more"
"I need more blueberries"
"I need book"
"I need dance" (Ok, ok, you NEED to dance I'll turn the music on right away!!! )
"I need charms"

Which brings us back to the video. At the end she says she "needs charms" (Lucky Charms cereal) which it takes us a while to understand because it wasn't breakfast time, it was afternoon snack. I think I understood a little sooner than I let on, but I knew what was about to happen. Isabella had only been eating the marshmallows out of her lucky charms and not touching the cereal part. It was driving us a little crazy, but Jeff was getting especially annoyed for some reason. Then in a grand gesture that morning he took the whole box and threw them in the garbage and declared that "Lucky Charms were banned from the house". Yes, a bit dramatic and it may have scarred Isabella a little bit.

Isabella the Crab

Isabella was extremely crabby tonight. I think maybe it had to do with an injury she received at daycare. It sounds like she fell off the indoor slide and got some sort of mat burn.

Dora Tattoo

At Elliot's party last weekend Isabella got a Dora tattoo for us to apply sometime. She kept looking at it and saying sticker and would try to put it on herself as a sticker. We explained to her that it was a tattoo and it would go on her skin. We asked her where she wanted it and she pointed to her chest, still not understanding that it had to go on skin, not clothing. We decided to go ahead and put it on her arm and she was not thrilled with it. She kept pointing at it and saying "owie". She had sort of a love/hate relationship with it. She would get excited and point at it and say "Dora", but then she would also say "Owie".

Haircut

Due to basic laziness of never getting around to taking Isabella to get her haircut, I had Jeff grab the hair scissors the other night so I could give her bangs a trim, even though I don't know a thing about cutting hair. To my surprise, Jeff came down with the scissors, went over to Isabella and started to cut her bangs. About 1/2 way across he stopped and said, "hmmm, maybe you should be doing this". I finished it off, probably doing a worse job than he did. It is obviously choppy and not straight, but overall, I think it is pretty darn cute. We can see her eyes and it buys us more time before we have to take her out to get a "real" haircut.