Avin Michael

Our little precious Avin Michael was finally born after a week of little random, confusing, emotional contractions. He was 7lbs 8oz and 20 1/2 inches long and was born at 4:31am on Sunday.
His daddy caught him when he was born, under water in our room and his Aunt Danielle was the midwife. Of course labor was ridiculously painful but I could tell when I got in the tub that the hot water took the edge off.
Avin was born after only 5 hours of laboring and 3 minutes of pushing. Thank heavens for that! He is such a sweet little guy and I feel more bonded to him than I ever have with any of my babies this early on. I was so anxious for him to come that it made me that much more overcome with emotion for him to actually arrive.

Home Energy Conservation and Stuff

Avan at 20 weeks . . .sorry I wanted to delete some of these and just have the profile but I couldn't delete!

More on Avan toward the bottom. :)

I just posted on the yoga site and for some reason it won't copy and paste . . . but I want to share the information with you too. SO, here's the link. :)

www.livingyogautah.com/blog.html

I would have never thought of some of these ideas. I have to say I cleaned out under my fridge today and it was quite dusty!

I have more lovely things to post about Jayden and I's mental and emotional progress with physical therapy but that will have to wait. :)

There are only two more weeks tomorrow until Avan's due date. We're still undecided on the spelling of his name. I guess Justin doesn't like A-v-y-n and that's the only spelling I like much besides a-v-a-n, which he doesn't like. We'll see who gives in, but I'm sure one of us will cause it's probably really not that huge of a deal right!? It's still the same name.

I've heard from several energy work folk that Avan is a free spirited little guy - like myself, and I would say also like my dad - and that he's very comfy and happy in my tummy, in no hurry to get out. We'll see how all of that turns out but I have felt like he will be a little Earth loving boy and so a name meaning "lord of Earth" seems very appropriate. I am starting to think he could likely be a sagitarius, because they are very free spirited, so that means he would be born sometime after the 20th or 21st. We'll see!

How's that for a scatter brained post!

Lessons from Jayden

I have been having special life challenges lately . . . one of which is multiple daily physical therapy sessions with Jayden whenever he's at our house. This week he's not at our house but we went over to his mom's to show her how to do a few things and I'll be going over again tomorrow to do some more. Wednesday I will be joining her for an hour and a half physical therapy appointment with a new therapist. Basically, this is consuming a lot of my life and its a major challenge for a few reasons.



The most difficult thing for Justin and I is that Jayden seems to have very little self-motivation to get better. If we don't look he doesn't push himself, and every chance he gets he takes weight off of that left leg. He pretty much avoids pain at all costs (which is natural and would take considerable mental effort to overcome) despite his knowledge that his bone won't heal without weight on it and he won't miraculously be able to walk without the effort. It has been so hard to try everything and anything to help him find some self-motivation, some inner desire and strength and to have nothing work- so we continue to do all we can in therapy to force him to put weight in it and straighten it, which trust me, is no fun at all.


This is very complain-y so far but here comes a more productive part. :) Yesterday after church out of nowhere Jayden says, "Mom, do you know something that God can't do?" I said, "Hmmm, he can't forgive us if we don't repent." He said, "Yeah, and he can't make us choose what he wants us to."

That struck me so perfectly because I've been struggling so much with that same thing. It made me think of how often Heavenly Father wants us to make better choices that will bring us MORE JOY and MORE FREEDOM, but we don't want to put in the required effort. He sits on the sidelines lovingly and does everything he can to encourage us in the right direction and he allows us to feel and experience the consequences of our actions. I wish I could say it is now easy to watch Jaydens painfully slow progress, but at least his little wise spirit is helping me learn a little deeper lesson.