Birthing Alice

 After waiting and waiting to go into labor my water broke about 3:30 in the morning on October 2nd. I was obviously sleeping. I felt a strong cramp and then a slight gush of fluid. I wasn't sure if I peed in my underwear or if my water broke. After going to the bathroom, I was sure that my water had broke. We called Jen and Trav to let them know we would drop the kids off and quickly packed my hospital bag(yes, we procrastinated that until the last minute, literally). We were out the door about ten minutes later since earlier my doctor had given me strict instructions that if my water broke I better be ready to walk out the door. On the way to the hospital I had my first contraction around 4:00 am. By the time we got to the hospital I was having contractions about four minutes apart. My fluid was leaking all over, nothing could contain it! It was pretty gross. When I got checked in the nurse checked my cervix and told me that I was dilated to a 6. She continued to ask more administrative questions while I breathed through each contraction. They were painful but very manageable with deep breathing. When she was done she allowed me to get in the shower. I really couldn't have asked for a better nurse and she was all about natural child birth so she was very helpful. I felt like I had a doula. As soon as I got in the shower my contractions got much closer together. The nurse stopped in before she was going to leave the room and asked how I was doing. I told her that my contractions had gotten a lot closer. She asked if I had any pressure or desire to push. I told her that I felt like I could go to the bathroom. We decided that I better get out after being in there for about five minutes. After getting dried off and back in bed the nurse checked me again and told me that I was now at a 9. They called the doctor and luckily she was already in the hospital for something else cause after three contractions I was ready to push.  After four more contractions I was holding my baby at 5:57 am. It all happened so fast. Doing it natural was not as hard as I was expecting but with that being said I didn't really have an empowering feeling after it either. I was surprised when Andrew said he preferred the natural child birth as compared  to the ones with an epidural especially since he wasn't that keen on my choice to do it natural. I think the part that I enjoyed the most was to experience first hand the physiology of the birthing experience instead of just reading about it.  Might sound kind of weird but I love learning about how the body works. We are all doing well. The kids just adore their new sister. They are a little stir crazy but hopefully we can hold them over tell Grandma and Grandpa get here to entertain them. We want to thank all of you for your thoughts and kind words!

New Editor

So I've obviously been terrible at keeping up with the blog. I was getting annoyed at how long it took to upload pictures. Recently my SIL told me that there was a new editor that made it much more easy. Well as you can see from my post below it was totally easy to upload pictures, however I could not type any text. Maybe the way to do it is type the text and then select the picture. Is this what you do? Anyway sorry for the mantra of pictures below.  I want my kids to love the outdoors and being active so when I woke up and we didn't have any plan I decided to take them to the state park for a hike. I must say it was a pretty fun day for just being me with the kids. 

Roxborough State Park

Christmas Eve

We had the most memorable Christmas Eve with Andrew's family this year.

This is Tom and he is the man! His cooking is so dang good and he treated us to a five course meal. He even had pallet cleansers of fine cheeses and fruit. Thank you so much Tom for all your hard work.While Tom was working his butt off the other men were doing what they do best, nothing!

The woods crafted the meal that the kids would eat first so we didn't even have to worry about them. Something we need to remember for next year.

Here is the family sucking in their guts after our delicious meal.Thank you Johanna and Tom for opening up your house and providing an awesome meal.

After dinner Andrew read the Christmas story from Luke 2.

The little boys were too busy swapping milk to listen to the story. Maybe the will get it next year.

Here are the Cottle grandkids in there Christmas Pj's from Grandma Cottle. She is amazing and makes or buys jammies for all the kids. Thank you Grandma Cottle you are the bomb!

Jane was so happy and look so cute!

Here are a few pictures from the evening

We finished up the night by listening to Travis read Twas the Night Before Christmas. Then we all went home and fell quickly asleep so Santa would come.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year!

So here is our attempt to catch up on the blog while sending out our e-card. We know every year we say, "next year we will send out a real card" and never do so we aren't making any promises. However, this year we've been ripping off addresses off the cards we received so we can actually have a mailing list for next year, so we will see. It has been nice to hear from you and see your beautiful families. This has be an awesome year for us with Sarah not being pregnant and tied down with breast feeding. We both took advantage and got into running. We both completed a half marathon and Andrew went on to do the whole thing on Labor Day.


After barely training because he was too busy traveling to Alaska, Germany and London, Andrew met his goal by running it in under 4 hours. If you squint you can make his time on the sign.Sarah was so proud of him and couldn't help but get choked up at every runner crossing the finish line. Maybe one day it will be her. A day later we headed off to Cancun to celebrate our five year wedding anniversary. We had the most amazing time and hope that it is not too long before we can go back.
We enjoyed stuffing ourselves silly with all the food we could ever ask for and chill by the pool and beach.
In October, Joint Juice was running a deal that Andrew got addicted too and Sarah loved every minute of it. Needless to say these were all free plus we got over $700 in free groceries. We took advantage and got some food storage. The end of the deal brought us to Halloween. It was a blast for both the kids. Reynolds loved dressing up as his new obsession, Elmo. Jane ALWAYS loves to dress up so she was a natural as a beautiful fairy.

In September Jane stared a ballet and tap class. They preformed the nut cracker for there Christmas performance and it couldn't have been more precious to watch.The kids are growing and changing all the time. Jane loves to do anything where she is learning or crafting. Her latest thing is playing games on the PBS website. She would spend hours playing games if we let her.
Reynolds is our little ball of energy and jokester. He loves anything that has to do with sports, skateboarding or wrestling. It has been so fun to watch him change into his own little person this year.

We hope that this finds each of you well this time of season. We are so grateful for our knowledge of the Savior and our testimonies of the Gospel. We are so grateful to each of you in our lives!

Is Anybody Out There?

Does anybody actually come to this abandoned blog anymore? I've been a real slacker and was thinking about updating the blog so stay tuned.

In the meantime, I hope you're all have a great Christmas season!

Now that summer is officially over I guess I can write a little bit about my travels. Sarah has been bugging me for at least a month to write this post and now I am finally doing it. For someone who has done very little travel in their life, this summer I spent a lot of nights in hotels in foreign lands. First came my trip to Anchorage, although this was my second trip up there this year. At the end of July I left for Munich, Germany and spent nearly 3 weeks site-seeing (and doing hardly any work!). Then the last week of August I also got to go to London for a week. This was a lot of fun for me, but I am glad to be back at home with my wife and kids.

Munich was pretty awesome, except for the fact that I don't speak any freaking German. Somehow I got by. Munich is a beautiful city and I really enjoyed my time there. Lucky for me I was there long enough that I had two full weekends to explore. The subway made life extremely easy and I was able to get around quite easily. Some of the highlights for me were running through the English Garden, walking around the Olympic Park (Munich hosted the '72 Summer Games), and visiting the concentration camp at Dachau. That last one was a pretty heavy experience, but something I wouldn't trade for anything. It really puts life in perspective and makes me thankful for what I have and hopeful that mankind has learned from our past.

The English Garden was pretty sweet. I went for an epic run throughout the park and along the river. It was so much fun and super mellow. There were people from all over the world taking in the park and all that it offers, including river surfing!

If you are ever in Munich I highly suggest taking a stroll through the garden and taking some time to relax and enjoy the beautiful park. Even go for a swim! As they say, when in Rome do as the Romans. You can even go nude if you want, if thats your thing.

For me the Olympic Park was awesome. Some people might not get that psyched on it, but being a sports nut like myself I was super hyped to see the Olympic stadium where Steve Prefontaine ran and felt like I was a part of history being there. The whole place is kind of turned into a fair of sorts now, but I certainly enjoyed checking out the grounds, see the Olympic Tower, and imagining what it was like to be there 37 years ago watching the games.

That tall building off in the distance is where I was working while in Munich. Here you can see the Olympic stadium where all the action is! I'm a total sports geek.

I also went and checked out some old palace. The place was huge. Unfortunately I am cheap and refused to pay money to actually go inside and see whatever it is they charge you to see. The outside was impressive enough for me so thats what I took some photos of.

My last weekend in Munich I ventured out to the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau. This was a pretty intense experience and taking it all in really blew me away. Its just sad that human beings have the ability to be so cruel to one another. Its hard to even verbalize the range of feelings and emotions I felt that day. But I will say this, the place made me want to cry. Imagining what life in that camp must have been like was too much.

This is the gate to the camp. Apparently they all read "Arbeit Macht Frei" or "Work Shall Set You Free". To me that is just sickening, basically trying to fool all these people into working their butts off in hopes of one day being freed, only to lose their life. The nazis were truly sick people. I ran out of memory while I was here and didn't take very many pics. But it was truly an experience I will never forget.

A few days later I would leave to return home, but only temporarily as I was off to London for a week. This was really fun for me as I have wanted to visit London my whole life for some odd reason that I am not really sure of. Anyway, London was great and thankfully I could communicate just fine with everyone! I even played a game of football (or soccer) with the locals, holding my own if I do say so myself, haha. I saw a lot of the big touristy sites: Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, The London Eye, The Tower Bridge. It was pretty awesome. Since I have spent most of my life west of the Mississippi I have never been exposed much to real old architecture. London is full of it. Heck, the building directly across from our office was used by Benjamin Franklin apparently. It was older than the USA, by many hundreds of years!

Okay, I am getting tired of writing. Maybe I will post some pics of London later. I had a lot of fun though.