Macey Charlotte

Macey Charlotte was born at 6:00pm on Thursday, December 15th, 2011. She's an amazing addition to our family and we're truly blessed to have her in our lives!!

We're also very fortunate to say her labor story was pretty similar to Evie's: pretty smooth sailing.

I finished my last day of work on Tuesday after being sick the day before. On Wednesday Kyle and I had a great day together, what would be the last day before Macey was born. Evie was at daycare so we drove around running errands, looking for house rentals, having a lunch date at an Indian restaurant, taking an afternoon nap, and going for a walk around the neighborhood to try to bring on labor. I felt great that day which was a little discouraging because I didn't think labor was going to happen anytime soon.

On Thursday morning we all woke up as normal, and started the day around 6:30am. By 7:00am I started feeling contractions which were already about 6 minutes apart. We got Evie fed and dressed ad Kyle took her to daycare. By the time he returned, contractions were getting a bit closer, and by 9:10am we were on our way to the hospital after consulting with my doctor. Contractions were a few minutes apart now.

At the hospital I started at 3 cm. Things seemed slow-going at first. At 1:00pm I was 4 cm, then 6cm by 3:30pm. At 4:00pm I had had enough and got the epidural. (Proud to have made it to 6cm though, my goal was 5cm like with Evie.) By 5:30pm I was at 7cm and shortly thereafter the doctor broke my water. 15 minutes later I had progressed to 10cm and started pushing. I pushed 3 times and 8 minutes later she was born at 6pm on the dot. It was a much more painful pushing process than with Evie, so I'm SO glad it didn't last longer! :)

Macey was born 8 lb 3.2 oz, 20.5 inches long. And 2 days early! Woo hoo!

Many thanks goes out to our amazing friends, Rena and Jeff, who picked up Evie from daycare, brought her to the hospital Thursday evening, stayed with her at our house that night, then took her to daycare Friday morning. Evie was a trooper through the whole thing. She was a little timid at the hospital when Kyle introduced her to Macey, but she quickly got over that and wanted to hold her. And then of course was focused only on having the hospital's Jello. (Whatever works...)

Thanks also goes out to Kyle's Mom who flew in Friday evening and helped SO MUCH with the girls. Evie had such a blast with Grandma for 4 days! Kyle stayed at home Friday night while Macey and I stayed one more night at the hospital. We all were home by Saturday afternoon.

Just after delivery.

Our first picture as a new family!

Proud big sister.

She loves her swing!

Evie LOVES to hold and help out with Macey. It's awesome!

Overall Macey has been amazing. She's been a great eater from the start and as of the second day at home she goes for 4-4 1/2 hours at night, which has meant that for most nights I only have to get up once! It's also been great that we get to spend so much time together as a family. We have almost 3 weeks together before Evie goes to Preschool and before Kyle starts subbing, which has been SO helpful for me to heal and get some rest, and for us to get used to our new "normal". Kyle is an AMAZING Daddy! He takes everything in stride, creates so much fun for Evie (they're building an igloo in the backyard right now), continues to cook everything for us, and of course is adorable with Macey too. I feel so blessed to have the awesome family that I have!

We look forward to watching Macey and Evie grow up together, but for now I'm cherishing this newborn stage: trying to soak up how little she is cuz I know it won't last long!!

Baby H

We're all set for Baby Hornickel to arrive! Should be any day now. (We're hoping for sooner rather than later, of course...)

Here's the baby's room:

A before shot: THANK YOU KYLE for doing all of the hard work on this room. As you can see the before was HORENDOUS! Even the closet doors and ceiling fan blades were painted these obnoxious colors...


And the beautiful after shots!! It turned out so well! Evie picked out the purple and I made the wall hangings. Who knew accordian folding could turn out as a nice wall decoration!





And some belly shots:

End of September at 28 weeks


End of November at 37 weeks

Christmas Prep

Christmas preparations have been so much fun this year! Evie's at such a great age so for the first time she's been involved with all of the processes: picking out the tree, decorating it, helping make Christmas cookies, and a slight interest in Santa.


We've had a ton of snow already this winter. Evie, Daddy and Louie LOVE to play in it!


Helping me make Christmas cookies. The decorating process was interesting... much more frosting licking than anything... :)


Our tradition is to watch Elf each year before Christmas. We thought it'd be a good one for Evie: turns out, there's a couple not-so-kid-friendly scenes in that one... oops. But she enjoyed her hot cocoa nonetheless.


Evie-no-pants helping to decorate the tree.




Watching Charlie Brown's Christmas (with a hot cocoa mustache, of course).


Santa came to my work! Evie was mortified and didn't want to get near him at all. But once she was about 6 feet away, she told him what she wanted. :)


Evie's FAVORITE game right now! Every night she asks Daddy to bounce on the big blue ball.

Fall Fun

We've had fun this fall!


While Kyle was in WI for a month in October, Evie and I went to a pumpkin farm with our friends Tricia and Rachael. Rachael and Evie had a really great time picking out pumpkins, going in the petting zoo, riding ponies, jumping in the bouncy castle, and running around the hay maze.


We had a good time painting and carving the punkins too!


Miss Bumblebee, ready for trick-or-treating.


This was our first encounter with Santa, at the Downtown Littleton tree lighting night. As Santa came down Main Street on his (pick-up truck) sleigh, the tree lights light up. Then at the end they threw the "switch" for a huge Christmas Tree. Evie was more excited about the Santa hats that people were wearing than Santa himself, but it was a good time with our friends Jeff and Rena. (Just ignore the random girl behind us in the photo...)

Random adorable pics:

Dr. Hornickel putting "bandaids" (address labels really) on Daddy.


With Baby Aaliyah


I mean how cute is that. She's actually sleeping like that!

Evie's Arthritis

We are so happy to announce that Evie is in a full remission!

On August 14th she took her final dose of Methotrexate and is doing SO well. Hopefully that's it and the arthritis will never come back, though we fully realize it could return at some point. The relief though is knowing that we know which medicine combo works for her and we know the signs to watch for, so IF it should come back we can quickly treat it before it becomes an issue.

Every 6 months for the next 12 years she'll have to go to the eye specialist to watch for an eye disease called uveitis, but so far she hasn't had any issues with her eyes and her vision is at 20/20.

While it was a rough year and a half dealing with the disease and figuring out the best treatment for Evie, we've been very fortunate for her to be in remission so soon. Other kids aren't as lucky and it breaks my heart to see those with much worse cases. We'll still stay involved with the JRA Family network we've become a part of, and will hopefully always have our Evie's Elves team for the Jingle Bell walk in December. The Arthritis Foundation has truly helped us along the way, and we're blessed to have access to the doctors and specialists that are here in Denver.

When I think back to even last Christmas, Evie is a completely different little girl in regards to her activity level. She LOVES to jump and climb and dance and run, all of the things that were painful for her last year. It's just such a relief to watch her be a normal little girl!

Summer fun in WI

(Also a bit behind on this post...)

In July we drove back to WI for our annual summer visit. As always we had a great time with family and friends.

Highlights included going to the Milwaukee zoo with our grad school friends and their kids: Jeremy, Jenny and Matt with their daughters Annie and Hattie, and Dex with her daughters Delaney and Kelsey. It was so great to reconnect with such great friends and to have the girls play together.

We also spent time with the Johnson clan (always a great time with the cousins) and got to swim in the lake by Grandma and Grandpa Hornickel's house. It was Evie's first time swimming in a lake and we were blown away by her bravery! She followed cousin Charlie right off the end of the dock and had a blast! We ended up going swimming just about every day we spent in Lake Mills. I'm so glad she loves the water so much and is a pretty good swimmer already. Here's a video of one of her jumps:

Baby Hornickel

After slacking on the posts for too many months, it's about time I post that we're having a baby!! Another baby GIRL!!!

I'm due on December 17th which puts me at 28 weeks this week. The pregnancy has been going well as of late, though the first trimester was pretty rough. I was much sicker than with Evie: throwing up pretty frequently, lots of nausia, and was pretty exhuasted. But starting with the 2nd trimester things got MUCH much better.

I can't believe I'm already in the 3rd trimester! Baby looks healthy and is measuring right on. She's been pretty active for the past month or so, and I'm to the point where I just want to meet her!

Evie has grown to love talking about her baby sister. She wants to share all of her toys and her blankets, and even her bed. (We'll see if that all changes once baby sister is actually here... :) Louie seems to know what's going on too. He's been laying on the couch with me so his head rests on my belly. Most times the baby will kick him, but he doesn't seem to care. He's used to Evie playing with him anyways, so a little baby kick is nothing to him.

Daddy and Evie have gotten to feel her move a couple of times as well which is always fun. Usually Kyle's touch will calm her which means he doesn't feel her kick as often, but I'm just hoping that soothing touch will come in handy when she's born. :)

We're still working on her name, but Evie decided early on that we should call her brocolli. Or chicken nuggets.

Ultrasound pics from 21 weeks. She's got Evie's cute little button nose!!

Belly shot from 21 weeks. I'm definitely much bigger now, will have to get some more pics taken.

We can't wait for the new addition to our family and are excited for this next chapter to start.