Sunday, October 26, 2014

Haylee Quinn Henderson born this morning!

We are pleased to announce that our daughter Haylee was born this morning at 5:52 am.  Shawna started having contractions yesterday morning, and after 20+ hours gave birth to Haylee.  Shawna toughed it out like a champ!

After some kangaroo care, Haylee clocked in at 19 inches and 8 lbs, 2.2 oz, a healthy girl.  Mother and daughter are both trying to get some rest and nutrition now.  Haylee's first name is derived from her great grandmother Ruby Lee and her middle name from her Aunt Ginny.
Wyatt quickly realized yesterday morning that all his worst fears were about to be realized, and he clung fiercely to the life he's known.  He's worried that mom and dad will now be solely focused on his baby sister, as I've warned him for months, but I'm sure he'll come around when he meets her shortly and sees how beautiful she is.



Sunday, August 17, 2014

My Night Watching Wyatt

On Monday nights I come home from work a little early so Shawna can go to yoga.  I wrote this entry after watching Wyatt for 2 hours last week and can only imagine that this is what it must be like most of the time for single parents.

I came home from work at 5:30 to see Shawna off and take charge of Wyatt.  The evening started off on a good note.  Wyatt had been kind of fussy and had a few falls during the day, but he was very happy for Daddy to be home.  He gave me a big hug and patted my back before saying goodbye to Mama.  Wyatt had a late lunch that day, so I let him play for a while before fixing dinner.  We played ball, he had his soft soccer ball and I had the 42 inch beach ball.  We took turns throwing them to each other and playing chase.  Then I let Wyatt play on his own for a while as I watched from the couch.  He kept on climbing in his big duplo box to try and get up on the window sill.

By 6:15, he was hungry so I started prepping dinner while he waited relatively patiently at the kitchen gate (by prepping dinner, I mean heating up leftover pizza).  Wyatt had pizza and fruit, with some cake for dessert.  Bozeman and Casy were both very impatient about getting their meals, either by barking or biting my feet.  Eventually everyone was fed and me and Wyatt had time to sit down and enjoy dinner.  By the end of the meal, he was pretty messy with a combination of pizza, juice, and cake covering him, so it was straight to the bath.

To change things up a bit, I played some music while Wyatt was in the bath.  Wyatt was into it and started grooving in the bath tub.  I let him play for a long time, evidently too long judging by what happened next.  I was checking the music on the laptop and looked back into the tub to see 2 turds floating in the water.  I could hardly believe that those giant turds came from a 15-month old baby butt.  From here, the evening went into disaster recovery mode.  I fished out the turds with my hands and toilet paper, flushed them, and started draining all the scattered poop fragments.  It was of course a difficult task to keep Wyatt from playing with them while they circled the drain.

At that point, I switched to shower mode and started hosing him and the tub down.  When he was thoroughly rinsed, I brought over the soap and scrubbed any part of him that I thought would have had significant fecal exposure.  Moments later he was dry and deposited outside the bathroom to play while I finished cleaning up.  I had scarcely begun to wash the bath toys when I realized it was a little too quiet out there.  I looked and saw that the kitchen gate was still open from dinner.  I ran to the kitchen to find Wyatt scavenging the pet food cabinet, trying to get into Bozeman's treats (I guess Wyatt wanted to try one of Bozeman's cookies for himself).  I removed him from the kitchen and closed the gate, thinking he must now be barred from all forbidden areas.  As I returned to cleaning the bathtub, Wyatt stumbled back into the bathroom carrying the dog food bowl.  I took the dog food bowl and freed up his hands to grab the hand soap and stick the spigot in his mouth.

After finally finishing the bathroom cleaning and rinsing the soap out of Wyatt's mouth, I thought that nothing else could go wrong this evening, but I underestimated our son's penchant for mischief.  All this time he had still been running around naked since his bath, and he managed to squeeze out a little pee on the laminate floor.  I narrowly avoided stepping in it, but it was clear that Wyatt's footprints had already been through it.  After mopping up the pee and dressing Wyatt, I had just enough time left in the evening to ponder how much I should tell Shawna when she got home.

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Happy New Year from the Hendersons!

It has been a great year for us.  The year was dominated by one major event...the birth of our son Wyatt.  Shawna worked through 9 months of pregnancy and 22 hours of labor to surprise us with a baby boy.  His name is Wyatt and we've become very attached to him.  His birth was a miraculous and triumphant entry into the world.  If you've never seen the miracle of birth first-hand, it looked something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwSKkKrUzUk#t=2m06.  Incidentally, that is one of his favorite songs (but he still cries when his mom sings it to him).
Wyatt's first concert - The Avett Brothers!
Over the past 8 months, Wyatt has experienced many firsts in his life.  In fact, pretty much everything he does is a first.  Among them are live music, swimming, hiking, paddle boating, disc golf, dressing like a Lego man, crawling, tasting anything and everything he can get his mouth around, and assisted standing and walking.  He is a wild little man and we can see that we are going to have our hands full for the next 18 years or so.  Some of his favorite things to do are sing songs with mom and dad, jump up and down, and pull adults' hair from the roots while riding on their shoulders.

Shawna has made a graceful transition from managing 20+ wild children in the classroom to managing one wild child in our home.  After nine years of teaching, she was ready to become a stay at home mom for the foreseeable future.  She and Wyatt go to weekly library classes, where there are stories, songs, bubbles, toys, and a big parachute.  They attend a post-natal yoga class, where Wyatt has awed the instructor with his downward dog pose.  And throughout all this, Shawna has managed to keep up with her photography skills and had several photographs exhibited in a local art show, though the subject of her photographs has recently shifted from nature-centric to baby-centric.  Shawna has also learned how to make 80% of items we used to buy from a store, including cleaning supplies, diapers, baby wipes, Halloween costumes, baby carriers, etc.  If Shawna keeps up at this rate, we will probably be living off the grid in a remote log cabin soon.

Wyatt's first swim (and dunk!)
As for myself, it has been an excellent year.  The whole family is happy that I've finished my Software Engineering Master's degree and have more free time at home.  I even found time to try my hand at homebrewing, though I'm hoping the second batch goes better that the first.  Getting to know Wyatt has provided for the most fun and busy 8 months of my life.  Though since he was born, I quickly found that I am no longer man of the house.  Seriously though, Shawna is an amazing wife and I don't know how she cares for myself and Wyatt at the same time.  I was worried that Wyatt would not bond with me as quickly as his mom, due to my lack of mammary glands, but that was not the case.  He quickly showed that he knew when he was with daddy, as he always makes an extra effort to pee or defecate while I'm changing him, and he even managed to spit up on my face when I kissed him once.  He makes fonder gestures towards his mom, like crying when she leaves the room, but there are still times that he wants daddy to hold him.

Brotherly fun in the bath
The next biggest event for us this year has been the flooding of our house on the night before Halloween.  Due to some shoddy craftsmanship, water was able to flow unhindered into our house (animals too, as we think that this is how a snake got into our house several months ago, ask Shawna for the details of that encounter).  It was a frightening and surreal experience to have 2 inches of standing water in the house and little hope of insurance covering it, but we have pulled through and our house is back in good working order again.  Fortunately, Wyatt was unfazed by this incident.  It didn't bother Bozeman much either, but Casy was rather unnerved when we took her with us to our friends' house for the night.  She stayed in her crate all night, but the next morning, she was covered in cat litter and made a mess of the car on the way home.

Bozeman and Casy have handled the introduction of a new sibling like champs.  They quickly took to Wyatt and consider themselves to be his protectors, always wanting to know where he is and what he is doing.  Casy has managed to avoid most of Wyatt's attempted tail pulls.  Bozeman takes any time when Wyatt gets too close as an opportunity to lick his face with reckless abandon.  Wyatt doesn't seem to mind Bozeman's germs though, as he will gladly put Bozeman's toys in his mouth, and Bozeman does the same with Wyatt's toys.  Over all, nobody can deny that it has been a great year, and we look forward to what 2014 has to offer.  Happy New Year to all our friends and family!


Love,
Marty, Shawna, Wyatt, Bozeman, and Casy