We Are Half Way! SHE is Well On Her Way To Join Us!

This past week Lady Hiva's pregnancy passed it's 20th week mark! That means she is more than halfway through her pregnancy. That is longer than 3 siblings have made it in their pregnancy terms. By the end of next week the baby will have passed another sibling--the only two who made it farther was Vaitafe at 28 weeks and Tau'aho at 39 weeks (which was a miracle...one that we would love to be repeated).

For the most part, Lady Hiva's pregnancy has gone well. She did have a 'scare' a few weeks ago but we were so happy that when we rushed into the hospital it was determined that she had just done too much and re-agitated the stitches from the cerclage. We had prepared ourselves for the worst news so this was welcomed information. Since then she has been taking it easy. Much to her horror, I bought her a wheelchair that we take everywhere with us. I push her and Lucky Dragon sits on her lap. It has been good. It beats staying in the house. Since then, we have been pregnancy drama free! We hope to keep it that way.

Our next milestone we look forward to is 24 weeks when the medical world starts to view the baby as viable outside of the mother. We know very well that we want the baby to make it at least to 30 weeks, but one milestone at a time!

We found out at the visit this week that we are having a GIRL! Lady Hiva and I are happy to have any gender, it is more important to have a baby that is healthy. Although if this is the last pregnancy Lady Hiva will have, it will be fun to have a girl and a boy. However, none of our baby girls have made it far enough to live. We shall see. We have plenty friends and family offering prayers, positive thoughts and cheers for us and we are so thankful.

We told Lucky Dragon that we were having a girl. For the last several weeks we have talked about whether it was going to be a girl or boy. For a long time he seemed ambivalent to the whole situation. Yet, this last week he started to say he wanted a boy. When Lady Hiva told him that the baby was a girl he paused then angrily said, "I SAID A BOY!" and turned away to not talk to us for several minutes.

He has since come around to the idea and is seeming happy. I guess it is good we have several more months to get him used to the idea! haha.

Now we know we are having a girl, it is hard to not be excited. For a long time we were almost treating it like a medical issue that you just face the facts. It is a protection to the emotions that we have felt so many times. We even went to choose some material to make some quilts. I finished two quilt tops in  two days. That was fun to do. I like having a reason to be creative. Although, I had given Lady Hiva a shot--something I have to do weekly to keep her hormones high in hopes it will trick her body into not going into labor as it normally does. She was nervous about this at first, but is resigned to the fact now! haha.

I had just given her a shot and was making her a rice heat pack. I needed some more rice and went to pull it off the top shelf of the pantry that lines our dining room. I forgot all about the ceiling fan and when I stood on the chair the fan hit me twice and cut my bald head open twice! It hurt so bad and when I stepped down Lady Hiva gasped at the blood. So on I went sewing dabbing the running blood with paper towels every once in awhile...haha.(pictures withheld due to gruesome nature...)

So here we are going into some unpredictable time during a pregnancy! Thank you all for your contributions and support. We will keep you posted.

Quilting to Pass the Time

It has been great to be back in the same country as Lady Hiva. We are both thankful nothing serious happened with her pregnancy while I was gone. She now looks like she has one of those plastic kid balls you can buy at the grocery store shoved under her shirt—kind of cute!

To pass some time—and use some fabric we had around—we decided to make some quilts. The first quilt we made from all our t-shirts as we have traveled the world. We were starting to get quite a collection and we seldom wear them all. We laid them out in a pattern we liked, bought a sewing machine and went to work.

The remnants of the shirts

Laid out, ready to sew

I tried to make it ‘fun’ by having the pattern include different sizes of material. This is NOT recommended. Unless you have several similar sized blocks you can pattern them together. T-shirt material stretches and as we were sewing the squares took on their own shapes. Needless to say, our quilt turned out….well…unique! We had fun though.

We put it on some quilting frames ($4 of pine 1x2s that were bungee corded to some kitchen chairs) and we quilted while watching General Conference. Both of us have sore finger tips now. But we have a quilt to enjoy.

The second quilt we made for baby Tau’aho. Lady Hiva’s mum had given her a bathrobe a year ago. It was soft fleece. The thing is, Lady never uses a bathrobe so it had been stuffed in a drawer. We I was packing up our stuff Lady said she felt guilty to have it thrown away. I told her we could make a quilt out of it.

So we cut the back out of the robe and sewed together some bright colored blocks for the other side. Lady free handed the design in the middle to join them and ‘Voila!’ we had a blanket! It turned out cute.

As we went along we were learning, we have a lists of “what not to do” and “what to do” for the next quilts we attempt.