Our Baby Boy

Chelsey of MachC Photography posted our amazing pictures from our newborn session with Hayden when he was 6 days old. She did such a wonderful job and truly captured those breathtaking moments we had with our son during his first week home. Take a look at our gallery soon because the pictures will only be available for viewing until Saturday August 1st.

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We are all adjusting well and getting somewhat of a routine established. Tucker loves on Hayden constantly and is always sneaking in kisses! Hayden doesn't seem to mind it because we will catch him smiling as Tucker is licking his entire face!

Hayden has been doing well...although we've had a few hiccups along the way. When we were at the hospital his doctor noticed a heart murmur that didn't go away before he was discharged. I have no idea what I am talking about, but I will try. They did an ultrasound and x-ray and found that a valve hasn't closed off and his blood was pumping twice as hard through the valves. The doctor says that it happens to babies (mostly preemies), and they will grow out of it by 6 to 8 months. Last week at a check-up, Hayden had lost some weight so they did some test and found out that he is lactose intolerant. So if I want to continue to breastfeed we have to give him medicine twice a day until he grows out of it, which they predict will happen at about 8 to 12 weeks. It's not too bad, he is a trooper when I give it to him and is gaining weight like a champ!

He is developing quite the personality and is such a happy baby. This past week he has been fascinated with his tongue and loves to mock you. If you stick your tongue out at him he then sticks his out!

Chris and I are staying busy and are trying to stay cool in our Fairbanks heat wave. It has been over 80 degrees for days and they are saying that this is the driest July in Fairbanks history. This summer has flown by and proof of that is the fair is coming next week...that will surely bring the rain!

A Special Thank You

A special thank you goes out to my sister who flew in from Seattle to spend 10 days with Hayden and I (and the rest of the family!) She was such a big help in so many ways...words cannot describe my gratitude. She is a pediatric nurse so not only did she help take care of Hayden, but she also helped take care of me and show me the ropes! We had a wonderful time and we were really sad to see Auntie Amy leave, thank you Sis for everything, I love you very much. It looks like the Bunch's will be making frequent trips to Seattle in the future :)

Tucker has been adjusting to his new life, and is doing really good. He was a little scared of Hayden at first...he would get antsy when he cried. But he got over that quickly, and now only gets up in our face when Chris talks to Hayden.

My boys have enjoyed their nap time...yes even Tucker needs to nap on the coach! Tucker gets up with me when I feed Hayden, so he has been tired! Speaking of getting up in the night, I am so blessed with a good child....so far (knock on wood). Hayden has been great, and sleeps for 4 hours at a time. He is eating well, and as of Wednesday he already weighed 9lbs 11oz.

Grandpa and Grandma have enjoyed their new grandson, and as you can see we all can't smiling, even Hayden!

I think that Hayden looks JUST like his dad and I swear I was just the surrogate!!! I am glad that he got his dad's good looks, and who really wants a little boy to look like their mom ;)

We were fortunate enough to have Chelsey Mach spend the afternoon with us again and share her amazing talents with us. She took newborn pictures with us when Hayden was 6 days old. She posted a couple of sneak peak pictures on her blog...take a look at her beautiful work. www.machcphotography.com. She has two posts with our pictures on July 15th, scroll through her pages at the bottom to find them "Wordless Wednesday, Baby Love" and "On His Own Time". We can't wait to see the rest of her work, I will let you know when she posts our gallery.

It's a Boy!!

Hayden Michael Bunch was born on Monday July 6th at 6:03pm.

I am not sure if you can read his stats on the picture below, but he was quite the big boy! Thank goodness I wasn't all belly and was mostly all baby, I was a little worried there at the end when I was getting huge!! He was 9 pounds and 7 ounces, and 22 inches long...phew!! It was kind of funny because our doctor came in a few hours into labor to check on me and felt my belly to see how big she thought he was going to be and said he was about an 8 pound baby. Then when she pulled him out she was shocked to see how big he was!!!

The labor went well, it was long....but my husband was amazing through it all and seeing my little angel made it all worth it. Because Hayden was on Bunch time, our doctor decided he had been cooking long enough, and so we started induction on Sunday at 8:00pm. I had the second round at 1:00am, and contractions started about 5:00am. They continued to get stronger and stronger, but I wasn't dilating so they put me on Pitocin at 10:00am. Then Hayden still didn't want to come out quite yet, so the doctor broke my water at about 11:00am. Well the combination of Pitocin and breaking my water made my contractions unbelievable, so for an hour and a half I had contractions a minute apart that lasted a minute. My contractions beforehand were 40 on the monitor, but between 11:00am and 12:30pm, they were 90. At that point I decided I didn't want to continue like this for hours longer so I got an epidural (which was a good thing because I didn't deliver for another 5 and a half hours). It was smooth sailing after that, I told Chris that I thought it was cheating and fake labor because I could not feel an absolute thing!!! It was awesome, we napped, talked, watched TV, and hung out until about 5:00...we had a great afternoon together.

I then pushed for about 45 minutes, and out came this beautiful little guy.

The doctor said "daddy what is the sex," Chris looked down at me with the most amazing proud look and could barley even talk and then smiled the biggest grin I have ever seen on his face and told me that we had a boy. Those few seconds were worth the 10 months of waiting.

We stayed in the hospital for 2 more days and enjoyed all of our kind friends and family visiting with us and the opportunity to catch up on sleep and rest up for our new adventures. Here is a picture of our family (minus Tucker, who was at home waiting for us!) on the day we left the hospital.

I just wanted to share a picture of what I looked like a few days before Hayden's birth at 41 weeks. We took the boat up the Chena river to have dinner on the deck at the place where Chris and I got married. It was in celebration of my dad's birthday, which was on Tuesday....Hayden almost shared a birthday with my dad!