Kalira Teal Halsey joins the family

Kalira joined our family early the morning of Saturday, April 28th, which was six days past her due date. I had a very good labor with Kali (approx. 14.5 hours) and she was born at 4:22am (coincidentally, she was DUE on 4/22 - she just got confused). She was a perfect, and very average, 7 lbs., 8 oz. and 20 in. long. Right when she was born, she came up to my chest and we sat like that for almost an hour before we weighed her, cleaned her up, or tested her Apgar scores. It was a wonderful and amazing hour. Brent and Nana (Annie) were in the room along with our fabulous midwife, Kala. Kala had brought in white Christmas lights for the delivery room along with small paper cups of lavender oils that gave the room a relaxing, spa-like quality (it was exactly the kind of atmosphere I love!). We celebrated with the traditional post-natal drink from the Bradley course which is orange juice. After our scary seizure event with Sabrina's birth, we decided to avoid the alcohol and stick with the recommended juice! Sabrina spent the night with Poppy over at their house and she came to meet her sister mid-morning on Saturday. She had a very serious reaction to Kalira when she first walked in and she immediately started telling us what to do. "She needs a blanket" "She needs a hat." When I told Sabrina that the baby had finally come out of my tummy, she looked at me and said "I think there's another one in there." HA! She's lucky I love her so much! Sabrina was very concerned that we didn't have a cake and "fire" (a.k.a. candles) for Kali right away. She is really into birthdays right now, so to hear that it was Kali's ACTUAL birthday and we didn't have cake and candles for her was pretty hard for Sabrina. We had to explain that you can't really have fire in hospitals, but she was unconvinced. To make up for it, we had a great birthday party WITH FIRE on Sunday afternoon when we brought Kalira home from the hospital (photos forthcoming). During our hospital stay we were lucky enough to have visits from Lea and Justin as well as Lee Carmichael (Cara, Casey and Cody made it as far as the parking lot, but the kids had other plans besides coming up to meet Kali!). Nana, Poppy and Sabrina made frequent visits and Sabrina got to know her way around that hospital like a pro. She told everybody who would listen that she was a big sister now. Here are our first albums of photos of Kalira's birth, right up to the point when we brought her home. (there are duplicates...oops...we didn't coordinate this very well) https://plus.google.com/photos/100534016372617912115/albums/5736837205219138785