Solarica Is Here! (With a Name Change . . .)

Solarica Alica

October 23, 1:53 p.m.

7 lbs. 12 oz.

21.5 inches long

Everybody healthy despite the sleep deprivation.

5 days after her birth, her name changed to Elisabeth Kae, nickname Lissy. (Sorry Josh, we tried to warn you that it had to happen . . .)

That's the short version. You want more, just keep reading. It will get very long, so choose your own adventure.

She is so little! 7 lbs, 11.8 oz is small for our babies, and I'm not complaining one bit.

Only a few minutes old with her proud daddy.

Just brand new . . .

I should always pull back my hair when being pumped to swollen with IV fluids . . . Sigh. The point is I was REALLY happy when I saw my baby. I love the feeling right after the baby comes!

My man brought me flowers! They were so beautiful and made me feel loved.

Josh is so cute with Lissy. He is good at holding her and being soft with her. One time  he was sad, so he curled up with her in a chair. I asked him what he was doing and he said, "Lissy is making me happy." Oh, yes, and he is using her real name now, after initially being very disappointed about not naming her Solarica. He told us Elisabeth was a dumb name about 8 times the first morning. However, soon he said, "What's Solarica's real name again?" Poor kid, he really did think he had a winner of a name. Good thing he's a sweet loving boy.

Andrew always says, "Want hold it." He loves hold her, but oh, my, we have to be careful.

Nomination for cutest big brother ever. Andrew was so excited when Elisabeth first came home.

Noah is a super sweet big brother, too. He has made plans to take her down the slide at the park on his lap in the spring.  He also played "Protect Lissy" yesterday when he and Josh made shields.

Elisabeth with my dad. I planned to have pictures with other relatives that came to call, but I gave the camera to Gary  to do so when I left the room. Bless his heart, he didn't even take one picture. That's okay, Lissy, just know that people came to visit you. Grandpa drove all that way and back in one night just to meet you!

Thus begins the battle of trying to capture a good photo of my baby.  I  had this problem with other babies, too. I take pictures of them, and it just doesn't look like them. Looking through the pictures of Noah, it seems like I don't even have one that really shows what he looked like. I fear the same thing is happening with Elisabeth. But here are my efforts thus far . . .

Looking up at Daddy

All swaddled up, her favorite way to sleep.

The Birth

(Title should serve as a warning to those who don't want to know anything about it. :) ) This time the most dramatic thing about the birth didn't end up to be the birth itself. Thank heaven! After having four babies, what I have learned about childbirth is, there are no pre-labor signs that definitively mean anything. At all. Contractions, even consistent ones that keep you up at night - can happen for a couple of months. Dilating - You can walk around dilated for quite some time. You can be a 3+ at 37 weeks and then go overdue. Effacing? Same story. I knew all that coming into this pregnancy. Now I have a couple more non-signs to add. I felt TONS of pressure from the baby from 36 weeks on. Enough pressure that I literally could not stand up straight. Pressure that I've never felt outside of the delivery room before. I was freaked out that the baby would come early because I was not ready. Due to a series of unfortunate events, my room and my kids' rooms were torn up, with absolutely no place to put any of their clothes. It seemed like every attempt I made to get things looking great around here was met with some strange obstacle. However, after about 2 weeks of the pressure, I had things looking okay enough that I could live with it, and didn't care too much about the rest.

I woke up at 38 weeks with what felt like extreme back labor, packed my bags for the hospital, and wondered if I'd be able to make it to one last soccer game before baby girl made her arrival. I made it to both. And to the store that day. And to a birthday dinner with Gary on Monday. (He got someone to watch the kids and took me to eat Lebanese and Moroccan food. Delicious!) I thought we might be going straight to the hospital after dinner, since I had a contraction every 10 minutes on the way there. But they went away. And two days later the pressure went away. After feeling like I was in labor for 2 weeks, I felt soooo much better. But I was still pregnant. Uh, oh. Why uh-oh? Because I had scheduled an induction for 39.2 weeks, and I didn't really want to be induced. I'd never done it before. It was scheduled to try to avoid having a gargantuan baby like Andrew, which sounded like a good idea, but I never thought I would make it to that date. Why would I think that? I felt like I was in labor (and I had done it 3 times past, so was crazy enough to think I knew what it felt like). 

I was nervous and scared. For reasons that are all complicated and won't describe more here, I was an emotional wreck. It wasn't supposed to happen that way! I wanted my little boys to see their new sister in the hospital before they got whisked away, but an induction would mean they would be long gone. When I realized this, I totally lost it. I couldn't really answer my boys, either, when they kept asking, "Mommy, why are you crying?" However, I felt really blessed. Right as I was coming unglued, one of my friends called to see how I was doing. She is extremely health-conscious and I trust that she wouldn't do anything she hadn't researched and felt really good about. Because of various things, she has been induced four times. What a perfect person to call! Talking to her, and to another trusted friend of mine that has been through it, made me feel a ton better. I felt like Heavenly Father sent me those people at just the right moment, and that He was trying to tell me to go through with it.

So I did it. Gary and I dropped our kids off, had dinner together alone, and had the evening all by ourselves to put together furniture, sort clothing, vacuum the horrible white styrofoam that had overtaken our house, and talk about the next day. We didn't get to bed until 1 a.m., and were expecting not to get a call from the hospital until later in the day. So, we were surprised to be awoken at 6 a.m. by the phone ringing. We were going right away! (After I got totally ready - one plus to knowing what's coming.) A blessing before we left really helped, but I was still nervous. I asked the nurses and doctor a million questions about what was normal and how things were going. While we waited for things to get going, Gary read a baby name website, and we discussed names. Since it was Sunday, and our religion was listed on our admitting form, we were asked if we wanted someone to bring us the sacrament. I didn't know that it would be possible, but we jumped at the chance. I was expecting it to be nice, but as I sat there in a hospital bed, getting ready to bring a new life into the world, feeling the discomforts of labor, the words of the sacrament hymn immediately brought tears to my eyes. Thinking of the Savior's sacrifice at that moment was overwhelming, and I suddenly realized where any strength I had was coming from. It was an amazing, humbling experience.

When I started feeling a ton of pain, I actually started to calm down. This was familiar territory. From then on out, I knew what I was doing. I was a 4 when I got the epidural, but the pain was pretty intense. It turned out the reason why was because things went pretty fast after that. Elisabeth made her appearance about an hour and 20 minutes later. I have to say, getting out a small baby was soooo much easier than my past experiences! I couldn't believe how little effort and pain it took comparatively. Awesome! You would think I would get used to it, but I never do . . . one minute there was just a fat tummy, and then suddenly, there was a real baby, a little person! Once she was with us, all of the nervousness from earlier completely vanished. We were so happy. We marveled over how tiny and beautiful she was. She really looks like a girl.  I know this should be obvious, but I expected her face to look like my boys, you know, like a general baby-face. But she really looks like a precious little girl.

I have been trying to give her as many hugs and kisses and snuggles as possible. Having a new baby is overwhelming, but seeing tiny feet crossed or baby cheeks sleeping on little hands takes away so much of the stress. I love to just hold her and look at her, or rub my cheek against her soft little skin. I felt much yuckier initially than I did with the last couple of kids, but have generally felt better since coming home. I'm not going to lie and say that means I've felt good, but you know, there's that checklist of crud you get to go through before you feel "normal" again. 

The Name

So, you knew we weren't really going to name her Solarica. Right? Josh decided on Alicia as the middle name not too long ago, which is a pretty name, but actually a byproduct of a Diego phase. Gary and I always came to the hospital with a list of options in the past, and decided the name within a day. However this time, it turned out we hadn't done enough prep as a couple, and it actually took us a couple days after we came home from the hospital to decide. I always wondered how this could happen, but now I know. Enough exhaustion will do it every time. Gary has a grandmother named Elizabeth, and my grandmother's mother is Elizabeth. Also, both of us have about  a million Elizabeths in our family history. Gary said his grandma was pretty awesome. She was a teacher in St. George, and Jeffery R. Holland said that she was one of the best teachers he had. Elisabeth is the Dutch and German way of spelling it, and Gary has a lot of Dutch blood in him. We decided on Lissy as a nickname because it's cute but not overly common. We do want to call her Elisabeth, especially when she is older, but with a 4-syllable name she's going to be called something, so we thought we would be in charge of what it is. As much as possible. Yes, once again, it's in the Bible, but runners-up were not. We could just as easily have kids named Ryan, Cameron, Andrew, and Paige. (Yeah, Andrew was the only option there.) However, I do like that her name has a rich heritage of righteous women that have held it. Kae is Gary's mom's middle name. We really wanted to name our baby after her, and since Elisabeth is a long name, we thought Kae was perfect to go with it.

The Boys

How are the boys with her? They love her. They think she is so cute and constantly ask if they can hold her. She is going to be one lucky little girl. However, having life's routine completely disrupted and much less time with mom is hard for everyone. They've all had their moments in the last two weeks. Andrew has had the hardest time, and is doing his best to make us forget his previous life as a good-natured boy. Oh, well, though, it's one of the things that happens. (Going down the check-list . . .)  Experience tells me they will all be okay, and soon we will get a new routine and they will forget what life was like without a little sister.

So . . . we have a new baby. We have four kids. We have a little girl. So much to tell (for example, I left out the part about the Asian nurse who kept saying, "Oh, you very numb. So numb, legs like noodle"), but I've been telling for quite long enough now. How do I end a post with so much in my head and my heart . . . I guess just press publish then go kiss my baby.