The many faces of Mike

As I am on maternity leave and spend 99.9% of my time with my little man I find myself taking pictures...LOT'S of pictures. Below are a few of the many faces of Mr. Michael.

Sleepy: Fortunately this one appears a lot. He consistently takes a nice long nap in the morning and a few shorter naps in the afternoon and evening and then generally wakes up 1-2 times per night to eat. While I would love more sleep, I definitely can't complain too much about his sleeping patterns.



Happy: These moments are definitely my favorites. He will coo, gurgle and then give me the biggest smile. Every morning after he wakes up and eats the two of us (three of us if Brad happens to still be home) will lay in bed and "talk" to each other. His stories are always punctuated by giant smiles. Definitely a great way to start the day.


(this by the way is his first time in the bumbo chair...while I don't think he quite has the head control for it yet, he definitely didn't mind it).

Woo Lip: We fondly refer to this expression as the "woo lip." Once it comes he makes a pitiful "wooooo" sound and you can almost see the gears in his head trying to decide whether or not to whimper, wail or calm down. As a side note to the woo lip almost every time I see it I am reminded of my own childhood where my dad used to say "if you stick out that lip any further I'll sit on it."

Mad: This is what happens when the woo lip progresses.

Professional Pics

When Michael was 10 days old we had a photographer come to our house to capture his tiny, newborn-ness. Below are a few of the pictures that came out of it...

Food Coma

Christmas 2009

This year we were extremely lucky to get to spend Christmas with family and friends. My family trekked across the country to spend the holidays with us here in Saint Louis. While it was a great Christmas it was definitely overshadowed by the new addition to the family. I think he was the only gift any of us needed.




Here is Mike snuggling with Sam. I don't think Sammy even flinched while we were doing this little photo shoot. Such a good dog :)

Christmas morning, guess Mike wasn't quite awake yet.

On the rocking horse that Grandpa Mike made.

Michael Quinn

Our little man was born on December 9, 2009 at 9:33am. He tipped the scales at 8lb 6oz and was 20.75 inches long.

The 17.5 hours up to his arrival went something like this...

My water broke on 12-8-09 at about 4:15 pm. Yes, I was at work. Not my fondest moment of work, but not as bad as I thought it would be either. Needless to say I told me boss I had to leave immediately and was on the way to the elevators before anyone seemed to really grasp what was going on. I called Brad on my way to the car and he answered the phone with "is it time?" I replied it was and told him I would meet him at home then we could go to the hospital together (I wasn't having contractions yet so I wasn't too worried about the 15 minute drive home). We got to the hospital around 5:30pm and I was 3 cm dilated and completely effaced. The contractions started around 6pm. At this point they were 9 minutes apart. I got an epidural around 10:30 and kept making good progress until 2am. At 4am they checked me again and no progress had been made so the doctor decided to start me on some pitocin to get the contractions going again. By 6am I was 10 cm and ready to go. The doctor decided to let me "labor down" for a while and we finally started pushing around 7am. I pushed for 90 minutes and had very little progress. At this point my doctor decided to try to use forceps. His exact words being "I am confident that with 1, maybe 2 contractions this baby will be out". Now after 16 hours in labor and 90 minutes of pushing, this sounded like heaven. So they prepared to use the forceps. Now apparently doctors don't use forceps very often anymore because everyone and their dog wanted to watch this process. Besides Brad and myself there were 13 other people in the delivery room at this point...13!!!! Well 4 contractions later we still had no baby :( at which point my doctor looks at me again and says "I really think our only option is a c-section." This was the moment they had told us about in baby class where you always expect it to happen to someone else. Well it happened to me. So a c-section it was (so glad I spent the last 16.5 hours in labor to have it end in a c-section). So exactly 8 minutes and 40 seconds after they made the first incision my beautiful baby boy was screaming his lungs out.

New to this...

So now that I have a baby I feel I need to enter the big bad world of blogging. How else am I going to tell the world about every smile, coo and gurggle :)

So bear with us and if nothing else there should be some cute pictures!