783 Days

Hi! I promise I haven't forgotten about the rest of our Halloween pictures, I've just been incredibly busy over the past several days. The first week of October flew by and then our Saturday looked like this:

6:45am- Jon and I wake up and start getting ready.
7:00am- Wake the kids up and start getting them ready and fed.
8:30am- Leave the house and drive out to Snead's Farm for family pictures with DeAnna McCasland.
9:30am- Family pictures.

She should be mailing out the CD tomorrow, but here is the sneak peak that she posted on Facebook!

10:00am- Drive back home.
1:15pm- I drive back out to Fredericksburg (probably less than five miles from where were were at that morning) to get my hair done for the USMC ball.
2:00pm- Jon takes Arianna to Nutcracker rehearsal while I get my hair done.
3:00pm- I get home and start getting ready for the ball.
3:15pm- Jon calls me and informs me that Arianna's dance class ran late (of course, on the one day that we really didn't have any time to spare) and that he can't find his ID. I was done getting ready so I started looking for it.
3:30pm- Jon and the girls get home and he starts getting ready while I continue to look for the ID.
4:00pm- Jon is ready and now we are both looking for the ID.
4:30pm- We finally give up on the ID leave to drop the girls off with Uncle Bob and Aunt JoAnn.
5:00pm- Cocktail hour for the ball begins.
6:00pm- We arrive at the ball (we hate being late lol) just in time for the ceremony.

We had a really good time at the ball and it was great to have a kid free night out. Unfortunately, I don't have a ton of pictures. We didn't have very good seats so I wasn't able to get pictures of the ceremony and after that we were talking with friends and just have a good time so I didn't think to take many. I suppose I really should have just brought one of our point and shoot cameras and that would have made it easier to snap pictures throughout the night. We did get a professional picture taken though, like we do every year, so as soon as we get those back I will scan one in and post it.

Anyway, everything that was written above was JUST on Saturday, haha. The beginning of this week started out just as busy. Jon had to leave for Philly for a couple of days so after we left the ball, we picked Lucy up from Bob and JoAnn's and came back home. We left Arianna overnight because last time we visited them, she said that she wanted to spend the night. I picked her up after church on Sunday and had to take her straight to Nutcracker rehearsal.

Normally the craziness would have ended there, BUT that's just not how we (well, *I*) do things. You see, I've been on call for about two weeks now to photograph my friend Sarah's homebirth (with twins)! She had been having contractions for several weeks, but they always seemed to taper off in the evenings and she went to bed still pregnant. She reached 38 weeks on Monday and that afternoon evening, she asked me to come over around 10pm because her contractions were pretty close together and the midwife was on her way. I had talked to her earlier that day and she thought that it might be the day so I had already packed the girls an overnight bag to grab just in case so I loaded everything up in the car, put the girls (who had just fallen asleep) in, and drove over to my friend Dawn's house to drop them off.

I'm not going to write out the entire birth story here because it's pretty long. I arrived at Sarah's house at 10pm, the first baby (Una) was born a little after 7am on Tuesday the 8th, and the second (Inanna, who was breech) came a little after noon. Both are healthy and beautiful and I'm so proud of Sarah! She handled her labor beautifully and is such an inspiration. It's definitely one of the most amazing things I have ever witnessed!

These are all SFW (safe for work) pictures from the birth. Most were taken during early labor and then there are some of the babies.

The midwife arrived about an hour after I did and discussed a few options with Sarah since her contractions were consistent, but still not incredibly strong.

Talking things over with Tony.

I realized after I posted them on Facebook that most of these are of Sarah and her husband which makes me happy. I met with them a couple of weeks ago just to kind of discuss her birth plan and talk about how she wanted me to do her pictures. At that time, he expressed being a little bit nervous about being a birth partner since this was his first time. Let's just say that if there were any kind of grading scale for birth partners, he would have passed with flying colors! He was so encouraging and attentive to his wife and it reminded me a lot of how much Jon was there for me during Lucy's birth (which of course made me nostalgic and sad that almost a year has passed since my birth). All women deserve to be loved and supported as much as Sarah and I were during birth :)

Laboring in the birth pool.


Sarah's sister Diana massaging her back during a contraction.


Welcome, Una!






Welcome, Inanna!






Big brother checking out his youngest sibling.

Congratulations to Sarah, Tony, and their son Johnny!

So now that the birth is over and done with, things should be fairly calm around here until we leave for AZ. I'm going to work on editing photos and will get the rest of the Halloween pictures up before we leave. I also need to work on Sarah's birth photos and video (I had my Macbook set up and Photo Booth running almost the entire time so I have about 10 hours of video to go through). Busy busy!