Here's to you!

Happy Fathers Day STEPHEN! We love you and are so lucky to have you as our daddy/husband. Stephen is an amazing dad! He is great at playing with Katie and running around with her. Stephen has gotten quite good at playing with baby dolls, twirling with Katie in her tu-tu, and playing in her kitchen as well as all of the other many games they play. He is such a great daddy to his little girls. He loves them unconditionally and is a great example to them in his testimony of the gospel as well! So this Fathers day I say here's to you honey!!



Happy Fathers Day DAD! I love my dad more than I can say! He is by far THE most caring, compassionate, and SELFLESS man I have ever known. He has always worked so hard to provide for me and my brothers and sister. He always puts others before himself....ALWAYS! He is loving to my mom and I always loved watching my dad surprise my mom with little things simply to make her day brighter. I have many happy memories of my dad! My dad is also one of the funniest men you could meet. He cracks jokes and teases others in a way that only he can. He is also a great teacher. Whether he is teaching gospel doctrine or inmates in the prison he has a special gift of being able to touch others through his words. He is an example to me and to my children in more ways than I can count. On top of all of this he is a great Grandpa and I don't know how Katie is going to get along without him around everyday! I am so very very thankful to have such an excellent father! So here's to you dad!




Happy Fathers day GRANDPA SMITH! Yet another great man! He is such an active man who is a great example of the importance of staying both physically and spiritually fit. I have a great father-in-law who has always made me feel like I am apart of the family. He did a great job raising his children and I am thankful to him for the great example that he is to my husband. Stephen truly looks up to his dad in many aspects. He is a great grandpa too! He gets down on the ground and really plays with the kids. I wish we lived closer so my girls could know him better! So Happy Fathers day Pat and here's to you!


My girls and I are very blessed to have such great men in our life not to mention both of my amazing brothers and my many brother-in-laws! Thank you for all you do! So to all the husbands, fathers, and grandpas I say Happy Fathers Day and Here's to You!!

Introducing Annie Michelle Smith!

My beautiful Girl!


One happy family...with one tired and drugged up mommy!


In the nursery making sure everything is ok


My little sweetie


Stephen and I in the hospital the day I delivered


Weight: 7 pounds 12 ounces
Length: 20 inches
TIme: 10:40 pm
Date: May 30th

Well it has almost been a week since our little Annie made her grand entrance into our life! She is such a sweet little girl and she has been such a welcome blessing in our family already! I have had very little time and this was the first real chance I have had to post anything on the blog. We decided on the name Annie (even though it has the lowest number of votes on the poll) because she is named after both her Daddy and Me! My middle name is Ann and Stephen's middle name is Michael so we changed michael into a girl version and came up with michelle (i know it is kind of a stretch) but at any rate she is named using both of our middle names which we thought was kind of special!

Birth Story
Disclaimer: This contains more information than anyone would ever want to know so read at your own risk! I am really writing this all out because I use this blog as a journal.

I went in on May 30th at 6 am to be induced. I was induced because Stephen started classes for school on June 2nd in Florida. When I went in I was dilated to a three already but Annie was not down very far in the birth canal. It was a long day for all of us. By about 9:30 am I was hooked up to pitosin and was feeling the contractions. I really started to get into some serious pain by about 11:30 and I wanted the drugs! While I was laboring there were only three of us in labor at the hospital at the same time. The nurses had told me that all the other women had already received their epidurals so when I wanted mine the anesthesiologist would be there pretty darn quick! Silly me I believed them and so I waited to ask for the epidural until I was really ready for it and the anesthesiologist still took about 30-40 minutes or so to show up. Which may not sound very long but when you are in that kind of pain it is a VERY long time! Getting the epidural went well I had a great nurse who really helped me through the contractions so that I could sit still long enough to get the epidural into me. Almost immediately after getting the epidural I could feel the contractions dissipating however I started to lose my hearing and the room started to go white and spin and I broke out in a sweat. I told the nurses that I felt weird and tried to explain to them what was happening and as it turns out I was fainting. Which I guess is quite common after getting an epidural for some people to faint. so they gave me some kind of medication to get my blood pressure back up which had fallen really low. After that got all sorted out I felt great! No contractions and everything was going well. When I got checked after all of this I was dilated to an 8 and Stephen and I thought the baby would be here pretty soon. We were wrong! Throughout the rest of the day as I labored I could sometimes feel the contractions and sometimes I would feel no pain at all. My epidural always worked to some degree but especially toward the end of the delivery I could feel some degree of the contractions which made me quite a bit uncomfortable. By the time I was dilated to a 10 the baby was still very high in the birth canal. I had spoken to the doctor about my previous delivery with Katie and how nervous I was about having the same kind of situation. She had agreed with me that if she needed to use forceps or the vacuum to get the baby out that she would opt for a c-section for me instead. This was comforting because even though I didn't want a c-section I would have chosen one over the fear of hurting the baby. Once I was to a 10 I pushed for a little while but because the baby was so high in the birth canal my pushing wasn't doing a whole lot. She also discovered (to my great sadness) that Annie was posterior. She then tried to turn her around inside of me. This was really painful and I had an epidural that I know was taking away quite a bit of the pain and it still hurt like crazy. It was also pretty frightening and this was when Stephen had to sit down because he started to feel like he was going to faint. After a couple approaches of trying to turn Annie so she could come down the birth canal faster and easier the doctor decided that i should just relax and that we would wait for the baby to come down in the birth canal further and hopefully she would turn around by herself before I would try to push again. This took hours! In the mean time they kept a really close eye on the babies heart rate and at some point she started to show some distress. The doctor then placed a fetal monitor on her head so they could keep better track of her. :( They also decided to place some special liquid back into my uterus to try and ease the baby's stress. This worked really well and eventually they decided it was time to push again. Thankfully Annie had turned herself around into the correct position during that waiting period and because my epidural was only mostly working I was able to feel the contractions and the baby's progress so my pushing improved considerably. After a few pushes they could see her head and the doctor was called back into the room. I really felt like I had to push and they kept telling me to wait because once the baby's head was out they discovered why she was distressed the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck. The doctor cut the cord off from her neck and Annie made one small sound telling all of us that she could still breathe. After she was born she had a difficult time breathing so they took her to the nursery for observation and to help clean out her lungs for about 2 hours after she was born. She rally wasn't that bad off they just wanted to make sure she was ok because she was under stress for awhile. She was finally born at 10:40 pm! Over all the delivery went really well and both Annie and I are doing great now!