Cinco’s Birth Story

It’s Cinco’s birth day! We are so excited!

Last night, we enjoyed our final night as a family of 6 by snuggling together in our bed to watch The Floor is Lava on Netflix. It was so great to spend that time together with my crew!

For starters, this birth story is already unlike my previous four! We were able to sleep in our own bed last night rather than head to the hospital the night before the induction. It was lovely to get about 3 whole hours of sleep in my own bed (LOL!) and shower at home before heading to the hospital.

I called L&D at 5:30 AM as instructed, and they asked me to arrive between 6:45-7:00 AM. We are packed and ready to go! My mom (Mona) and her sister (Aunt Jo) will be staying with the kids while we’re in the hospital. We are so thrilled to have them here with us! It’s been a L-O-N-G 103 days of quarantine for the kid, hubs, and I! I’m so glad the kids will have my mom and aunt here to love on them!

We have about 45 minutes until we head to the hospital. There’s so much more to come! 💙

9:15 AM | We arrived at the hospital a little after 7:00 AM, got through the admission process, and settled into our room. My nurse, Jocelyn, has been awesome. She got me hooked up to the IV (only 2 tries!) and was able to get the Pitocin started around 8:20 AM. Dr. French broke my water around 9:00 AM and said I was at 3cm. Got a way to go! My kiddos usually take a good 12 or so hours to debut once the Pit is started, so we’ll see just how late it’ll be before Cinco arrives!

Big mama is ready to meet my sweet babe!

12:18 PM | Not much to report! I moved from the bed to the birthing ball and am now settled into a rocking chair. My nurse Jocelyn was placed on another case, and Whitney took over for me. She’s been great! We’ve got my Pitocin up to 10 and I’m still just feeling increasingly mild to moderate contractions. I plan to wait for them to get a bit worse and frequent before pulling the trigger on the epidural. Baby Cinco is handling everything great! 

1:17 PM | Still not much to report. Contractions are still pretty mild, so they’ve bumped me up to 14 on the Pitocin. I’m hopeful I’ll be feeling ready for that epidural soon because that would = PROGRESS! And I’m ready for some progress... and a Jimmy John’s sandwich! 🤣

2:45 PM | Contractions started to increase so I asked for the epidural. The anesthesiologist was next door and was able to come right over once my IV fluids were in. The epidural was probably the most painful one I’ve ever had, but it eventually kicked in and made my life much more enjoyable! Lol!

My nurse, Whitney, checked me after the epidural took effect and said I was at 4cm, 80% effaced, and 0 station. We’ve still got some work to do!

Hubs and I were able to FaceTime with my mom, aunt, and the kids before their quiet time at 2:30 PM, and it was so great to see them! I miss them bunches and can’t wait to bring home baby Cinco tomorrow. 💙

5:15 PM | Making progress! Moved up to 6cm. Waiting and praying for a safe arrival SOON!

5:50 PM | 9cm!!

10:45 PM | He’s here! So sorry for the lack of updates, but as you can imagine, we’ve been a bit busy! I won’t have an official birth announcement to share until tomorrow as hubs and I are still trying to finalize his name, and we’d like to discuss it with the kids in the morning to make our decision before making anything public. Thank you for being patient with us as we try to soak up every precious moment of this experience for the VERY LAST TIME! 💙

Baby Cinco

June 24, 2020

7:07 PM

8 lbs. 8 oz. • 20 3/4 in.

The One with the Office: Part 1

Seems these days there's not much going on around here (I believe we're one of TWO families still in quarantine in our state?), so we keep uncovering projects to keep us busy.

This project was NOT on the docket pre-baby's arrival. I'm not even sure it was even in the realm of possibility at any point in time. Ever.

Regardless, it is LONG overdue.

So we have this office off the main family room. It has a door. I LOVE the door. The door can be closed to hide a multitude of sins. And y'all, there are many multitudes of sins to be hidden in this room!

To be honest, it started as a workout space. It was the home of our treadmill, bench, and weights. We even had the foam floor tiles protecting the carpet.

But it was also kind of an office. It's where the modem and router and printers all lived together in harmony.

And then, because we decided to use our morning room as a morning room and no longer as a homeschool classroom, it also needed to become the staging area for our homeschool books and supplies.

So, if you're following along, it's a gym/office/classroom room. Essentially, another room in our home with no identity.

We were okay with it. The kids pretty much trashed it on the regular. I'd get fed up when I would attempt to get something from the printer after tripping over 1,302 things, and force them in there to clean up: art supplies, papers, craft projects, toys, books... you name it, and it was likely in this room!

I tried to ignore it. That closed door really gave me a lovely sense of joy and allowed my OCD to stay at rest.

Until one day... one of the (cheap) bookshelves BROKE! All of the stuff on that bookshelf had to find a new home. And by new home, I meant piling it up on the desk, or spilling it into the family room on the sofa table, or just tossing it on the floor anywhere.

It was bad. Real bad.

I'm not sure you believe me. Wanna see just how bad it was??

WARNING: It was BAD.

See?? I told you! You can see the blank wall space to the left... that's where to broken bookshelf once resided. And all the stuff that was on that bookshelf? Now on the desk...

...and on/below/around/(insert preposition here) the sofa table in the family room:

I tried cleaning things up a bit, knowing I probably needed to sort through all.the.things. at some point. It started to look a little better, but this wasn't even .087% of what was in that room!

See? Even with all the stuff you saw in the family room above, there was still ALL THIS STUFF in the office. And it ALL would need to come out. But my 9-months-pregnant self was just NOT feeling it. Not even a little bit. So I called in the only reinforcements I was able to call: hubs and the kids.

I excused myself upstairs to take a LONG, hot bath, binged watched a few too many episodes of Home Town, and left hubs and the kids to do all the work. Check out the awesome job they did!

Now, you may be wondering why we felt inclined to empty the ENTIRE room. That's an easy one! Of course we decided to paint the room (our favorite house color: Repose Gray!), but that's not all! We also decided the office needed its own set of built-ins: bookshelves, cabinets, and a desk!

Yep. Not even planned, but here we go!

I started by sketching out the design I wanted for the space. The built-ins would run along the back wall. I wanted the back of the built-ins to be white, so that wall would be painted a semi-gloss white while the other three walls would be gray.

I wanted an open space in the center for a desk, cabinets and drawers for storage, countertops for the printers, and LOTS and LOTS of bookshelves for all.the.books.

It didn't take me too long to put two coats of paint up on these walls since the room is quite smaller than the loft. Hubs has the joyous job of trimming the paint up to the ceilings since 1) I'm terrible at it and 2) I probably shouldn't be on a ladder whilst 9 months pregnant.

It's kind of hard to tell with the terrible lighting, but the back wall is white!

I thought about replacing the faux wood blinds with a custom Roman Shade from Home Depot, but I didn't want to wait 4 weeks for it to get here from Vietnam! 😂

We picked up two unfinished 24" base cabinets, and two unfinished 18" drawer units from Lowe's, and I got to work painting and sanding.

This project spilled over into our dining room since we didn't have the space to work inside the office, and I didn't want this mess in the family room.

Only 3 coats of paint and they are ready for door and drawer pulls!

In the meantime, hubs and I discussed the design of the built-in bookshelves, and ultimately decided we wanted the countertops and desktop to be stained just to break up the white and add a little visual interest. I set up in the garage and got to work staining three 2' x 4' boards Minwax Aged Barrel, the same as we used upstairs in the loft and laundry room. A few coats of stain followed by a few coats of poly, and they were ready!

We also modified our design a bit once we realized our 35" high cabinets would make for a VERY tall desk! We dropped the center desktop board down in our design to about 28" to make it more user-friendly.

So far, the cabinets are all painted, and the countertops and desktops are stained and ready to be installed!

Hubs also added front legs to the desktop. She's looking so pretty! I can't wait to start on the bookshelves! Oh, and have a baby in 15 days. Is it too soon to start packing my hospital bag? 😜

Stay tuned for Part 2 when I share the amazing transformation that will (hopefully) take place over the next several days!

The One with the Custom DIY Bookshelves: Part 2

Finally! Part 2 of our custom DIY bookshelves! If you missed Part 1, be sure to check it out!

As I previously shared, this was the state of chaos in our upstairs "play area" -- the room with absolutely no purpose and no idea what it wanted to be when it grew up. Just take a moment and let it all sink in...

After some major demo, fresh paint, and a little hard labor, we replaced the mess above with these beautiful built-in cabinets. I mean, really. They're SO pretty!!

But alas, our work was far from finished. There was much more work to be done! And by "work," I mean paint. There was a LOT of painting to be done! I don't have any pictures of me crawling around on the floor, 8 months pregnant, painting and sanding and cleaning and repeating this process for all.the.boards., but you can use your imagination. It was... interesting. But I got it done! And then it was time for hubs to get to work!

Through the magic of time-lapse (okay, just regular ol' photos), you can see below the incredible work hubs put into these built-in bookshelves! I didn't take a ton of pics of the details of the process (you can find that by checking out this incredible series of posts from Jeni at Roots & Wings Furniture!), but here's how it looked when he was *almost* finished with the shelves.

So much space, right? I LOVE it! After all the shelves were in, we did some touch-up painting on the white shelves with the help of some painter's tape since the back wall is Repose Gray. Once that was finished, it was time for the vertical trim pieces, the crown moulding up top, and the baseboard along the bottom! Oh, and caulk. LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of caulk! 😳

And here she is! Look at all of that space! We have so much room! There's another project we started work on last week that will involve sorting through all of the homeschool books downstairs (that's right -- this pic below doesn't even include our homeschool books!), so I'm certain we'll have more to add to these shelves in the coming weeks. The cabinets are the perfect storage location for all the kids' board/card games.

I couldn't be more thrilled with how beautifully this project turned out! TBH, it actually looks even nicer now than it did when I took this pic last week. I have since purchased a bunch of these white metal bookends to help the kids organize their books and keep them vertical (for mommy's OCD health). They did a really great job!

Oh -- do you remember the rest of the room? Here's a grungy "before" pic to jog your memory...

It got a little update, too!

For starters, I replaced our faux wood blinds with these gorgeous cordless custom Roman Shades in Bellingham Greystone from Home Depot! They took FOREVER to get here (all the way from Vietnam, promptly followed by a mandatory garage quarantine for several days), but they are absolutely perfect for this play-area-turned-loft space!

Between the windows, we added a custom 2" x 24" shelf I stained to match the shelves in the laundry room. I added a galvanized clock and a few decor items, and am just smitten with this wall!

While we'd LOVE to update the furniture in the loft, it just wasn't in the budget. So, I purchased a slipcover from Amazon, and added some extra pillows we weren't using that came with our main living room furniture set, and called it done... for now. 😏 I still plan to add some sort of artwork above the couch, and buy a new lamp--and of course remove the can of paint from the floor next to the end table. LOL.

But overall, this new "grown up" loft is FINISHED! I am so thrilled and honestly absolutely LOVE this space now! It's so lovely to sit in here with a book and a cup of sweet tea, with lots of light pouring in through the windows, while I relax and contemplate giving birth in 16 days.

OH WAIT!

That's not right at all!

We're deep into the throes of ANOTHER project with built-in bookshelves, cabinets, drawers, AND a desk in our downstairs office! No time to contemplate labor... I've got more painting to do!

The One with Cinco's Baby Shower

Y'all! My beautiful daughter took it upon herself to schedule, plan, and throw a baby shower for her littlest brother! My heart is so full!

Due to our strict quarantine, we knew the baby shower could only include the six of us. As much as I've longed to celebrate Cinco with our extended family and friends, that just wasn't an option. This is one of many things the COVID-19 pandemic has taken from this experience of being pregnant for the final time. But we are oh so very blessed to be healthy and have each other to love on during this season!

We picked June 3rd as the date and LO got to work! She picked out the color scheme and decorations, planned and prepared the food, made the cake--complete with homemade buttercream and homemade marshmallow fondant!-- and even planned games as well!

Here's a pic of my beauty with her incredible (and delicious!) cake creation.

She made a white cake with homemade buttercream using one of our favorite recipes, then whipped up marshmallow fondant (SOOOOOO GOOD!) to cover the cake. She also made adorable baby booties accented with gold on top! She was so proud of her creation and she worked so hard on it--with ZERO help from me! It really was delicious! I may or may not have just eaten a second slice before writing this post. 😉

She put up a few balloons and fun decorations around the house.

LO and Daddy also grabbed a few beautiful flowers from the front yard. And another pic of that beautiful, delicious cake!

Check out all of the yummy food LO made!

It wouldn't be a meal in our home without Hawaiian Rolls. YUM.

LO also made chocolate-dipped pretzels and strawberries.

No meal planned by one of my kids would be complete without Cheetos!

Such a great meal! And delicious party punch, too!

Let's eat!

Cheeeeeeeeese!

E had a big ol' mouthful of food but I took his pic anyway. 

This guy ate a ton of food... including about half a can of Pringles!

After dinner, our party planner extraordinairre needed a few minutes of downtime to relax. She admitted to me that she had no idea how much work went into planning a party! Bless.

Oh! I can't forget this cute little four-legged party guest! Sweet Lucy!

The kids and I enjoyed some fun snaps before playing charades.

Cake time! This cake was really SO delicious, y'all! And the best part? LO enjoyed making it, and even offered to make Chase's next birthday cake! I may have less baking in my future, which I am willing to embrace because, well, #FIVEKIDS! 😜

We had such a great time together celebrating Cinco! Here's to 36 weeks down... and only 3 more weeks to go until we meet our sweet boy!