William: Bringer of Snow

We've decided this will be his Cherokee name :) We had to drive through a snowstorm to get him home from the hospital! Here are some pictures from the next day (predicted to be a dusting to one inch and turned out to be DFW's largest recorded snowfall in a 24 hour period of a whopping 12 inches!) and Rachel playing with her Daddy in the snow. She had so much fun throwing snowballs and playing in the "ice"...couldn't get her to say snow :P

All bundled up and ready to play

Rachel doesn't really have any snow clothes, so we improvised....lots of layers and Mama's wool socks pulled up over her tennis shoes!
Trying to build a snowman...unfortunately her attention got diverted and she never came back to it. Hopefully we'll get more snow next year and she'll be more into creating instead of destroying!

These girls from two houses down came over when they saw Rachel. They were too cute, telling the boys across the street to stop throwing snowballs and being a bad influence on "the baby". Which is funny because she immediately started throwing snowballs at anyone who came close enough!

Welcome Baby William!

Obviously, we're a bit busy at the moment, so this will be pretty short (well, short for me anyway). But I wanted to get some pictures posted for everyone of our new little one.

The newest member of our family, William Mitchell, was born Tuesday, February 9th at 2:14pm and came in at 8lbs 8oz and 21" long. His birth was such a different experience than Rachel's. Hers was very long and drawn out as she decided to come out with her arm up next to her head...from beginning to end, I was in the delivery room for about 30 hours.

William was much more ready to come into the world! We went in the night before to begin inducement around 10pm (sonogram showed he could be as much as 9 1/2 lbs and as I wanted to avoid a C-section if possible, and he wouldn't be getting any smaller, we went with this option). At 8am they began pitocin, Dr. broke my waters around 9:00am, and I got my epidural at 11am (much better experience this time seeing as how I knew what to expect). At noon I was only 3cm, so Joshua went to get some lunch and got back about 45 minutes later. He went down for a nap at 1pm and I settled in to watch Days of Our Lives, napping on and off, seeing as how I was still only at 4cm. All of a sudden about five 'til 2:00, three nurses come rushing in, talking amongst themselves and running around doing stuff. One of them checks me and announces I'm at 9cm! Apparently there was a spike in the baby's heartbeat that alerted them along with some big contractions (of which I was blissfully unaware). When we heard them say "Get the doctor's kit" we knew baby was on his way! In a matter of minutes the doctor was there; I pushed through three contractions for a total of about ten minutes and Pop! William made his entrance! :) Nothing like having a baby to get you out of that post-nap grogginess!

We're taking our time getting used to our "new normal" with two kiddos. It's a work in progress, but I can already kinda see how things will go once Joshua goes back to work. Here are some pictures from the hospital and our first day at home.