together at last.

Unexpectedly Lee and I ended up having to move back to Utah about three weeks before Kevin finished up his internship in Denver.  I decided to stay with my parents until Kevin got back so I'd have some company and help with the little Lee-sy.  Even when the company and help (which was Fantastic. Who knows of high school boys that always want to hold and take care of babies?? My amazing brothers did.) it was still hard.  I have so much more empathy for those who, for whatever reason, find themselves as single parents.  We (I) missed having Kevin around a LOT, for myself and for Lee.  Needless to say, when we reunited in Island Park, ID it was a great reunion indeed.

Reunited and doing what they both love best.

saturday summertime in the park.

Photography is a hobby of both Kevin and myself, though Kevin much prefers nature photography, he is fantastic at portraiture photography as well, as for me, just give me people. :)
Saturday Kevin and I had a great time snapping some pics of my brother Scott and his family and some of our family as well. 

 Here's some of the pictures we got of our little family.

We are loving life and truly feel that we're "living the dream ".

HAPPY SUMMER!

"He Lives In You." Me. Us.

I just returned from a Tanner family reunion with my dad’s family.  I LOVE Tanner gatherings.  With my dad being 1 of 13 children our family is So large that big gatherings only happen once every 2 years.  Someone just figured out at this last reunion that there are now 103 or 106 great-grandchildren with 6 on the way!

As usual after a family get-together I was reminded again how family is really the most important thing in life, and how wonderful it is to have people who care deeply about you.  How evident it is to me that such an important social unit is meant to be FOREVER . 

The theme of this year’s reunion was “He Lives In You” from the Broadway version of The Lion King.  The song is a reminder to Simba that his father never really left him, that what he taught and who he was lives on within him, Simba.   

In reference to the theme, we were remembering and celebrating the fantastic person that my Grandpa, William Coats Tanner Jr. was and is.  What a posterity he has left behind! As we shared stories and reminisced about Grandpa I realized just how true that statement was, He really Does live in all of us Tanners, in one way or another we are so much like him.  And his legacy of Choosing who you want to be and especially Choosing to be Happy has had Eternal impact on each of us in my opinion.  

Check out the song:He Lives In You.

With all this in mind I was re-watching Elder Nelson’s talk in the LDS General Conference from April of this year and one part really stood out to me, probably because of my recent train of thought;

"Under God’s great plan of happiness, families can be sealed in temples and be prepared to return to dwell in His holy presence forever. That is eternal life! It fulfills the deepest longings of the human soul—the natural yearning for endless association with beloved members of one’s family."

-Elder Nelson, “Thanks Be To God”, LDS General Conference, April 2012

And I couldn’t help but think that even more than my Grandpa Tanner we ALL have a Heavenly Father who lives in each of us.  Who wants us to know and follow all the council that He has given us to make sure that we become like Him so that we can Live WITH Him forever.

my happy bottle-fed baby.

Bottle "tree" that I LOVE.

The past few weeks have been quite the journey for me and baby Lee.  Finally when he was nine weeks old, (just two weeks ago now) after copious amounts of deliberation, I started feeding Lee bottles.  I thought the struggle with nursing would go away after Lee got bigger and stronger.  The struggle he had at the beginning is very normal for premature babies like him.  Not to say that knowing that made it any easier for me.  We tried EVERYTHING at first.  I spoke with three separate lactation specialists and tried anything and everything they suggested; a syringe, an SNS (or tube feeding) and finally a shield, which is the only thing that worked at all in the end.  The last lactation specialist I saw explained that many babies who are born even a few (in our case four) weeks premature haven’t developed the strength needed to suck as hard as they need to feed well.  She explained that I shouldn’t expect him to be at that level until he had reached his actual due date at the end of May.  

 

Of course sweet Lee’s due date came and went and still, he would not eat without the shield.  It was manageable, especially compared to how he had been before but it still made me feel uptight every feeding and stranded at our house.  The shield made it practically impossible to feed using a cover, that in combination with the fact that Lee generally cried at the beginning and end of every feeding, and always sometimes in-between made it very difficult to feed him outside of our home. 

I thought several times about just “giving up” and trying a bottle but I’d determined before he was ever born that I would absolutely nurse him and the material I read and the nursing class I went to all taught that it was basically ALWAYS possible for ANYONE to nurse a baby if they stuck with it enough.  I studied all the benefits of breast milk vs. formula and since I was going to be a stay-at-home mom, I didn’t see any reason that could possibly deter me from my decision to nurse.  So, even the thought of feeding with a bottle made me have a guilty pit in my stomach. 

Finally one Sunday night, we were over at my brother Scott’s house and Jenna and I were feeding our babies.  Lee was really struggling and crying as usual and Jenna finally said, “you know Michelle, that really isn’t normal.” I told her of my frustration with nursing and how I kept waiting for it to be that special bonding experience that so many talked about.  I told her how I had come to dread every time feedings rolled around, which is frequently with a newborn.  I hadn’t even realized quite how much it had all been weighing on me until I started to talk to her about it.  And Jenna said, “just try a bottle Michelle, there’s nothing wrong with that; you and Lee should both be happy.”  Jenna gave me just the validation I needed and that night, I started feeding Lee bottles and he’s been bottle-fed ever since. 

At first I thought I would continue to use breast milk but after just one night of pumping after every feeding (yes Lee is still waking up ever 3 to 4 hours) I realized that it just wasn’t manageable (for me) to continue on that way.  Lee is basically completely formula fed now and we are both happier than ever.  

 I still feel guilty sometimes but I’ve begun to realize that all my guilt comes from my worries about what Others may think of my decision, not what I feel deep down is best for me and Lee.  So, I’m trying to push away those feelings whenever they come cropping up again. 

Again I’ve had the opportunity to learn to be less quick to judge others’ decisions and circumstances. I’ve learned first-hand that not every baby is cut out for nursing and that it’s OKAY.  Man, someday, I’m going to stop needing to learn things the hard way.  (hopefully)

To any of you who may feel as I have sometimes, with my decision to bottle-feed my baby, that people may be judging you, maybe they are (I did), but they don’t know and it doesn’t matter. No one will ever know exactly what is right for you and your family but You and God. How grateful I am that we have a Heavenly Father, God, who cares so intimately about the happiness of each of us that He’ll bless a struggling first-time mom with peace about bottle feeding as many times as she needs.

Tornado Scare.

View from our bedroom.

Last week Kevin offered to watch Lee until he fell asleep after I fed him at 10 pm, even though he has to leave about 6 am for his internship every morning.  Of course the one night I can sleep I was barely starting to drift off to sleep when Kevin laid Lee down and came to bed. A few minutes later we woke with a start to the sound of an awful and loud siren.  At first I thought it was a fire truck or something but the siren’s wails persisted. Kevin pulled up a weather alert on the Internet and found that there were tornado warning sirens.  A big storm had been in the forecast for that evening but all we’d had was a lot of thunder and lightning. Well soon after the siren the wind started hurling quarter-sized hail at our sliding glass door in our bedroom, the hail finally stopped only t be followed by pouring rain. After only an hour and a half, though it felt like much longer, things had mostly died down and the rain was just a drizzle.  By far the scariest storm I’ve ever seen and thanks but no thanks, I do not want to repeat anything like that again. So much for getting a few extra hours of sleep... But honestly, it made me so grateful that I haven't had to deal with many natural disasters personally.

life: postpartum.

I have so many thoughts and feelings and they just weren’t coming together in the way I hoped so, a list will have to do.

 

·     * Lee Daken is the most wonderful blessing and miracle Kevin and I have experienced to date. 

·      *The process of delivery is a beautiful miracle.

·     * The incredible women who place babies for adoption to give them a better life are some of the strongest and  most selfless people in the world.

·     * A mother's-love is one of the most powerful things I have ever felt.

·     * Babies are so incredibly close to God.

·     * Each birth of a child is a miracle.

 

·      The desire and longing to be a mother doesn’t make me super-human in dealing with the physical strain of a new baby that doesn’t sleep at night very much.

·      Trying to meet the simple needs of an infant can be absolutely exhausting.

·      Spending all day everyday trying to meet the simple needs of baby Lee has brought the greatest happiness I’ve experienced as well as the greatest physical strain.

·      I don’t know how you couldn’t be absolutely obsessed with your children.

 

·        * I can’t watch or hold our sweet Lee enough.

·     * I don’t know how to properly thank our Heavenly Father for the much-desired blessing of being a mother.

·    *  My heart aches for those I love still waiting to be wives and mothers.

·     * I feel like I can relate to Alma the younger in his feelings after he repented and received forgiveness in my feelings during our trial of faith with infertility and since Lee was born;

Alma 36:20 “And oh, what joy, and what marvelous light I did behold; yea, my soul was filled with joy as exceeding as was my pain!”

 

* There is so much physical and emotional change that comes with having a baby. 

  *   Having a baby really changes a body physically. Those changes, though maybe not permanent, are really hard emotionally while they last.

*It is really emotionally straining when you don’t know how to help your baby. (i.e. when Lee had Jaundice or when his circumcision site was bleeding and we had to take him to the E.R. or when he wouldn’t eat at first and I tried everything with the aide of 3 different lactation specialists before I had any success.)  

      PS, Everything is fine now, all that happened in the first week of Lee’s life.

In his Billibed.

 

*     It takes no time at all to feel genuine and sometimes painful concern for your children. (I can’t imagine what it will be like when they have emotional hardships too.)

*     Nothing but continuously praying for strength and guidance could get me through being a new mom and having absolutely no idea what I’m doing really.

*      Motherhood has brought me a strong sense of need for the Atonement of our Savior.

*      Being a mother is the most wonderful occupation in the world for me.

 

·     * A good dad/husband makes all the difference for a tired mom/wife. Kevin has been my lifesaver.

·     * My own mother is an absolute SUPERSTAR, I can’t imagine how she managed to raise 6 of us with a husband that had very demanding callings in our church that required him to be out of the home most evenings and Sundays basically the whole time we were all growing up.

·    *  My Momma saved me the first few weeks of Lee’s life and we BOTH miss her like crazy now that we’re away in Colorado for the summer.

Me and Lee on our first outing.

The whole family.

 

·     * I can only imagine how hard it must be for our Heavenly Father to let us suffer to become like Him and to let Christ suffer so that we are able to return to Him someday.

·    *  My mind can easily go crazy wanting some semblance of order and activity in my life while my physical body is just not ready for it yet.                                                          

 

*      Family truly is the most important thing in the world, in whatever type or size of family we find ourselves.

*      Our waiting and struggle has affected every aspect of being parents now, we are different people and parents than we ever could have been if we hadn’t gone through that particular trial first.  

 

*      I STILL don’t understand God’s timing but I daily have to keep reminding myself that God knows truly what’s best for us and that I have to put my trust in Him.

*      As the sons of Mosiah learned from reflecting on their mission experiences in retrospect, I know that God fulfills ALL His promises and hears ALL our prayers.

Alma 25:17 “…the Lord had granted unto them according to their prayers, and that he had also verified his word unto them in every particular.”

"You Are Special".

Kevin was already in Colorado for his summer internship on Mother's Day and Lee and I were still in Utah.  But when we arrived I was treated to the BEST ICE CREAM EVER.  Cotton candy is one of my all time favorite ice cream flavors and Blue Bell really nailed it, best cotton candy ice cream I've had so far.  Go Kevin. 

amazing!

even the colors are super pleasing

my custom "you are special" plate

 We also have a tradition in my family (the Tanner's) to have whoever is being celebrated (whether for a birthday, Mother's Day, Father's Day, etc...) use a red "You Are Special" plate.  I don't have one personally so Kevin decided to make our own rather than buy one of the original red plates.  I LOVE it, Kevin decided to do it in Hungarian too which it especially pleasing to me.  So thank you to my amazing husband to make me feel special that day and everyday.