Justin Roberts Concert

Last Sat. we went to the Family Museum in Bettendorf, Iowa for a concert for Bella's favorite band, Justin Roberts Ok... so it might be her favorite band because it is about the only music we ever play for her, but there is a reason - it is children's music that doesn't get annoying to listen to. The songs are cleverly written and the tunes are good. We've posted videos before of Bella dancing to his music before.

The event was a concert with other bands for the afternoon, so our plan was early lunch, nap in the car for Bella. (1 hour drive to get there) We were planning to meet our friends Jesse and Michelle there (Michelle's kids got sick and couldn't make it though - big bummer!). Bella slept in the car, but Evelyn hates her carseat and screamed the entire way. We pulled over twice to comfort her, but that would only help for a few minutes. We went to Jesse's house and picked up her and Elliot and headed to the museum. Bella enjoyed playing with Elliot and doing some of the activities they had at the museum while the other bands were playing. She really liked the water stations they had out back - it was a good thing I brought her a change of clothes since she got soaked.


Looking at a recycling truck is always fun!


Look at Bella sticking out her tongue as Elliot helps her fill up her pail of water
Justin Roberts and the band had some difficulties setting up, so their show started about a 1/2 hour late (4pm) and most kids were getting pretty tired and hot. (Elliot had skipped his nap). The second song played was Pop Fly which is Bella's favorite and the look on her face when he started playing it was pretty funny. She must have started putting together what a concert was and who was playing. From there on out she started dancing to all the songs. Sort of half dancing - half running around. She kept going and going and going that after a while I began to wonder if she was getting delirious. It was pretty hot out and her cheeks were getting really rosy. But, she stopped for water and was fine. She fell down and skinned her knee which ended the dancing for the day which was good.

Waiting for the concert to start


This girl is the Queen Bee...

Dancing action shots.....

And videos of her - couldn't decide which ones I liked best so I just posted them all. The last one is where she falls and the dancing ends for the day.








Evelyn hung out in the moby wrap for most of the day, which is what she basically does every single day. Jeff had her in it first and two different people approached him and asked him about it - they were intrigued. Evelyn cried the whole way home again - poor girl.

I noticed that Justin Roberts is playing soon in Powell, Oh - where Grandma Linda and Grandpa Jack live - really strange - of all the places! Bella will be so jealous!
http://tinyurl.com/yas9koy

Mother's Day Weekend

My first Mother's Day weekend with 2 children was actually quite difficult, to say the least. Isabella got sick the week before and needed to stay home from daycare on Thursday and Friday. She had quite the fever and drainage from one of her ears, so I took her to the doctor on Friday. He prescribed an antibiotic for her and said we could start it in a couple days if she wasn't feeling better. Friday night all hell broke loose. Isabella woke up around 11pm and I tried to comfort her back to sleep. She ended up screaming and it didn't get any better from there. She had an all out tantrum and we could not console her at all. She was delirious/hysterical and screaming/biting/hitting. We'd never seen her like this. It lasted quite a while before we decided Jeff would take her in the car and drive her around. Isabella eventually calmed down on the drive, which is good because we had discussions of driving her to the emergency room if she couldn't calm down. Her tantrum lasted over and hour and a half. After she was somewhat calm (she wasn't screaming at the top of her lungs) Bella kept asking for her teddy so Jeff drove home and picked up teddy. Bella was wide awake and wanted to keep driving so they drove to Walgreens to go ahead and fill her prescription (we had to figure it was her ear that was bothering her). Jeff gave her the antibiotic (in the Walgreens parking lot) and slept in her bed with her that night. We had two more minor tantrums Saturday morning before another huge one that afternoon. Bella woke up from her nap screaming and crying uncontrollably. Once again we were unable to console her and she kept trying to bite and hit us. Jeff restrained her after she bit me (I still have a purple teethmarks from it), but she continued screaming for over two hours. We even called the Dr. to ask him what to do, he didn't have any ideas for me, but said we could take her to the ER but he doubted they would find anything. After 2+ hours Bella was able to finally calm down, this tantrum was worse than the one the previous evening.



It was kind of a sad end to my mom's visit from Florida. All day on Sat. we were walking around in a daze, not sure when Bella would erupt again. Luckily, on Mother's Day, things seemed to be getting back to normal. Bella and I took Grandma to the airport. Bella was really sad to see Grandma go and wanted to get on the plane with her. On the way home, Bella fell asleep, it was only 9:30 in the morning (sleep would be all messed up for her over the next few days). She looked like a mess when we got home, she had just eaten some mini-cookies, tried to take off her shoes and discovered she can unsnap her own pants.



Since there were no tantrums on Mother's Day and I got to be with my own mother on Mother's Day (even though she was leaving) I couldn't really ask for much more.

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.