What A Journey

Tonight, to fight off the boredom, I went back into our blog archive and read the boys' story, from the day they were born until shortly after we brought them home. What a blast from the past! Here are some of the things that struck me:

• The boys were tiny. And by tiny, I mean TIIIIIIIIIINY. No two ways around it.
• Ridiculous as it might seem, I still feel a touch of guilt when I look back at the pictures of the boys right after they were born. They were so tiny, so helpless, so...not ready to be out in the world yet. I would have withstood twice as much pain as I was already in, if it had meant being able to keep them inside me just a while longer.
• And yet, despite that, here wasn't a single day that I posted anything negative about the boys' development in the NICU. Every single day was something positive. Really and truly, they did nothing but improve and never once had those backslide days that we were warned about. What a miracle!
• It's easy to forget just how much went into getting them ready to come home, and how much exhaustion we experienced.
• For example, I had pretty much forgotten the nights after we brought the boys home, when neither of them would sleep unless they were in their carseats and we took shifts sitting up with them all night in their nursery. Thank goodness for Hulu!
• Or as another example, I think I had repressed the memory of the nights we spent with the boys in the room-in rooms in the NICU. I shudder to remember those nights. If I never have to go through that again, it will be too soon. Needless to say, having the boys sleeping in a seperate room is a gooood thing...they're noisy little sleepers!
• We have it SO easy now! I don't think either Nathan or I have come close to the complete meltdowns that we had early on after bringing the boys home. And a big part of that, I believe, is the fact that the boys are still sleeping 7-9 hours every night, non-stop. It's heaven, I tell you. Heaven.
• There has been no greater adventure in my life than being Levi and Asher's mommy. And it's just beginning!

I just realized that I haven't posted any updates on Asher's hearing. Since writing that initial post, we've noticed Asher reacting to other things, but they usually have to be pretty loud. We're wondering if perhaps his ears are slightly plugged with wax, as both he and Levi produce a TON of wax on a daily basis. I did call their doctor and talked to the nurse, who asked if we'd be ok with the staff nurse, our friend Jacque, taking a look at him when we take the boys in for their Synagis appointment in a few days. Since another couple of days really isn't going to make any difference, we figured that would be just fine. So we'll keep you posted on that!

The only other thing I have to say:

Thank goodness my shift is over in an hour!

Thing One & Thing Two

The boys received these onesies back when they were born, and let me tell you, they looked HUGE compared to the boys back then. And now look at them!



Eat your heart out, Sr. Seuss!

As with the order of their birth, Levi is Thing One and Asher is Thing Two.

And Random

As you can tell by my second blog banner, I'm in denial about there being 4-5 inches of new snow outside.

Blech.

On A Slightly Lighter Note

Levi left, Asher right.

Levi being Spoonman.

Contentment

There is so much in our life that is up in the air these days, some of which I can't really write about yet. There's uncertainty about jobs, about the economy, about our new President, the list goes on. And yet, despite all of that, I am more content where I sit now than I ever remember being in my entire life.

When I found out that I was pregnant, I had a few days where I mourned my carefree lifestyle. Yes, we had planned to get pregnant, but I don't think I had really realized what becoming a parent meant. After all, I had graduated from high school, went to college, met Nathan, graduated from college, got married two weeks later, and moved back to Baker to be with Marla. Who then left us her house. And here we are. Thanks to my parents' love of traveling, I've been many different places, several of which aren't exactly on your list of "Top 10 Places to Visit Before You Die" and yet have turned out to be amazing adventures. And yet, in my entire life, I've lived in three places; Elgin Oregon (current pop. 1,654), Baker City Oregon (current pop. around 10,000) and Forest Grove Oregon. I felt I still had some wild oats to sow, that I wasn't quite ready to give up the fun I had in my college days. I feared that I would resent the restriction becoming a mother would put on me.

And yet....I don't miss any of it. I love being a mom to my sons, a wife to Nathan. More than I possibly could express, more than I possibly could have imagined.

As for the rest of the things going on in our life, I've discovered that I am happy to wait on God. Whatever he brings our way can only be a hundred times better than any plan Nathan and I could cook up. Not to say that we are sitting idly by waiting for something to drop into our laps, but we are content in the knowledge that if it is meant to be, God will open the door. And if it is not meant to be, that door will close and something even better will come along. What a great way to live life. What a weight off of my shoulders.

I've had several times in the past few months, especially since the election, when I've been tempted to allow myself to get pulled into the discontent, or better yet, the hatred that has seized so many people. On a daily basis, I am faced with people who bring their children along on drug runs, men who rape women, drunks driving down the street, abuse, addictions...it's a pestilence. I see people losing their jobs to downsizing, a government spending more than it has in centuries despite being ridiculously in debt.

And yet.....it brings me a sort of peace, if I allow myself to remember one thing.

God is coming.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and declare that I believe that we live in the End Times. Scoff if you will, but I just don't see where our world can go from here. We, as humans, can't make it better. Any attempt we've made on our own has failed, dismally. I could lie and say that I wish that weren't the case, but, yep, it would be a lie. I long for that day, the day when the end of all the pain, the hate, the evil in the world will begin.

You may argue that there are great leaps being made to improve our world. Tell me, why has drug use risen exponentially? Why are we treating human life as if it were our play thing? I saw a blurb on the news the other day about being able to design your baby. Have we become so full of ourselves that we think we have the choice, nay, the right to take creation into our own hands. It's sickening. Our world is broken. Humans are broken. And we can't fix ourselves. Only God can.

Call me a conservative, call me intolerant if you will, but I'm done being luke-warm.

Photoshop Happiness

I have never professed to be a Photoshop guru. In fact, if I were to step into the ring with this program, it would probably win 9 times out of 10.

(For those of you who don't live with a graphics/photo nerd like I do, Photoshop is a program where you can edit photos, create awesome graphics, etc.)

Seeing as how I am now, this very night, forcing my body back into the graveyard sleep schedule, I decided to dive head first into designing my own blog banner and background using said Photoshop.

Three hours, several mild expletives, and some very sore shoulders later, I now have designed my very first blog banner (which you see above) and an incredibly simple background using the same digital scrapbook goodies I downloaded from the Shabby Princess website. Overall, I'm pretty excited about how it turned out, especially since I had to re-size and place each individual letter in the title. Oh, and the fact that I taught myself primarily through the trial and error method, with one or two photoshop tutorials thrown in for good measure.

Speaking of the title, I'm pretty happy about that too! I've been beating my head against the wall trying to come up with a blog name that is a little more creative than just "The Labunski's", which always made me feel mildly blasé. And that, my friends, is a gross understatement. I'm pretty sure I'm relatively correct in using the term "degree" instead of "power". I'm not a math wiz, so I'm just going to pretend I'm right. Don't correct me on this one, it will just force me to start from scratch on the banner, and I really don't want to do that right now.

And now, since it is currently 3:32 am and my shoulders are beginning to mutiny, I believe I will retire to the recliner, where my book (6th in a series of 12 that I started back when I was on bedrest...yes, I'm a glutton for punishment) is calling my name. I hope you are all thoroughly enjoying your respective beds at this ungodly hour...I shall definitely be enjoying mine as soon as the boys wake up for their 7 am feeding, at which point Nathan will be taking over baby duties and I, feeling ill and like I've been run over by a Mac truck, will be able to snuggle into the warm spot he so recently vacated.

Wait. You're telling me that's still 3 1/2 hours away? Not cool man. Not cool at all.

Now I have to make myself feel better.

"Get out the way man! Can't you see I'm driving here?!"

Ha ha, hee hee, ho ho. Ahem. That worked. And no, that was not taking place while the vehicle was moving, so no freaking out. We were parked in the Best Buy parking lot in Nampa, ID during a feeding break for the boys and Asher was checking out the lights of the cars driving around the area. By the way, in case you have never had the pleasure of trying to feed your baby (or two babies) in a car, at night, while there are a bunch of lights going by, I highly recommend it. It's an exercise in patience, especially if your baby, like ours, is instantly hypnotized by lights. The last thing on the little punks' minds was food.


Did I say my book was calling my name? Oh yeah, that's right. Ok, I'm off. Night all!

Prayers for Asher

Don't worry, Asher isn't sick, or hurt, or anything. But this morning, when I got up, Nathan had the boys up on the kitchen bar in their bouncers while he was making breakfast. Asher was on the side closest to the hallway, so I walked up to his bouncer and started talking to him. His head was turned towards Nathan in the kitchen and no matter what I said or how loud I talked to him, he wouldn't turn towards me. That got me worried, so we started kind of testing the waters. So far, he has yet to turn towards our voices, startle at any loud noises, be soothed by our voices, or anything. But as soon as he catches sight of us, he's all smiles. So we're fairly worried about his hearing, especially since through all of that, Levi has been responding to everything.

So we need your prayers, big time. We plan on calling the local audiologist on Monday and getting him in for an appointment as soon as possible, since they do infant hearing screening. Both of the boys were screened while still in the NICU before they were released, and both passed, but that doesn't mean something couldn't have changed in the past few months.

We'll keep you posted. We took a day trip to Nampa this afternoon to go spend Nathan's birthday money and give ourselves a distraction from all of this, which was nice. It was fun to have that time in the car to just talk with Nathan and enjoy his company.