Birth Announcements and Blessing Info

Here is a look at Oliver's birth announcement for any of you that may not have seen it. I had fun sending these out when Ayden was born and decided I wanted to make sure to do them for all of my babies in the future. I was able to make it myself online and insert pictures from Oliver's newborn photo shoot. I think they turned out pretty great!


Also, for anyone who might want to come, we are holding Oliver's blessing on Sunday, July 11th at 9:00 am at our ward meeting house up here in Kaysville. If you want to come just let me know and I will get you directions. The more people the better! We would love to see all of you!

Oliver Michael Decker

I have been job shadowing with Rachael from Rachael Tyler photography these last few months and aside from having a blast learning everything I can from her and being blown away by her gorgeous photographs, I have enjoyed getting to know her and become friends. Being the sweet gal she is, she offered to take some newborn photos of Oliver for me since I don't have a studio space or nearly the amount of cute props and backdrops as she does...plus I wanted to make sure the pictures were adorable and knew she would do a great job.
We did the shoot when Oliver was only 4 days old and he was anything but enjoyable during the shoot. He cried most of the time, and even made a mess of one of her blankets when we stripped him down. In the end though she still ended up getting some beautiful shots and I am happy to be able to show off my sweet baby boy to the world! So anyhow, here they are!

Our Little Oliver's Arrival!

On Sunday, May 23rd I woke up early to the happy surprise (or at least I thought it was happy) of contractions. I was 38 weeks along in my pregnancy and I had been praying for weeks to have the baby, so I was thrilled to know I would have him in less than 24 hrs if I was lucky....

By 5 that afternoon I headed to the hospital and within an hour or two was admitted and given my epidural. Unfortunately there were a couple of hiccups in the process (at one point my contractions stopped and I had to be given pitocin) we had a healthy new baby boy at 3:10 am on Monday, May 24th. He weighed 6 lbs 12 oz and measured at 20 inches in length. He had a decent amount of golden-coppery hair, crazy long fingers and toes, a squashed little button nose, and the cutest little cry ever. He was just perfect.

We had picked out a few names prior to his birth but when ha was finally here with us neither of them seemed to fit him just right. We had joked about that happening since that was what had happened when we'd had Ayden...so we were prepared not to make a decision right away. After some discussion and pondering we decided on the name Oliver Michael Decker - we fell in love with the name Oliver for him, and chose Michael as his middle name in honor of his Grandpa George (my daddy).

Anyway, so here are some pictures of his arrival into this world. Enjoy!

Watching my contractions on the the monitor

Sleepy daddy....couldn't be because it was 2 am or anything could it? :)

Not the greatest picture of me...I sort of look high (I kind of felt that way too), but it just shows how supportive and amazing Jonathan was during the whole process

My perfect new little boy

He threw quite the fit when he arrived but we were so happy we couldn't have cared less

Proud papa with his new baby boy

Opportunity Of A Lifetime!

As a lot of you probably know I have been trying to blindly make my way into the photography business and have been lucky enough to have some opportunities to do work for friends and family, but I haven't felt like I've had the general knowledge and experience I could potentially have. After hearing about a particular photographer from my friend Laura I looked at her work and fell in love with her artistry and style and decided I'd be daring and ask her if I could job shadow with her and learn anything she had to teach.

Thankfully she said yes and I've attended several of her photo shoots since. Its been an amazing opportunity and she has been an awesome mentor, not to mention lots of fun to work with. She even let me shoot some pics with my camera at the wedding reception I attended with her (using her lenses of course cause mine kind of sucks). Most recently she was nice enough to take some photos of our newest little addition Oliver, and they turned out just incredible! I can't wait to get the edits so I can post them on here! In the mean time you can see them on her blog: http://rachaeltylerphotography.blogspot.com/2010/06/olivernewborn.html

Anyway, here are a few of the pics I took at the wedding reception I attended with her!

Mother's Day!

Today was Mother's Day and of course was full of love and fun, thoughtful gifts. I personally had an incredibly rough start to my day...mostly due to the fact that I had been in labor on Thursday night and had hoped at that time to have found myself with a two day old baby by the time mother's day rolled around. As it happened, things didn't go as I'd hoped and as a result I found myself still very pregnant and now very emotional and moody this morning. Poor Jonathan had to lay low for most of the morning just not to get snapped at. Sorry baby.

Anyhow, on a much happier note we had been wanting so badly to get a real video camera since the only way we'd had to record video was pretty much using our cell phones and its so fun to be able to look back on videos...so much to my surprise I was greeted this morning by this shiny new video camera! Its going to be so great to be able to get better videos of Ayden, and of our new little guy when he arrives. It was a perfect gift. :)

My Dad was so sweet and bought me this awesome book on motherhood. Thanks Daddy :)

Ok so another reason I was so unstable this morning was due to the stress and lack of sleep brought on by my propensity to want to pull off these fun gift ideas for my own mom when I don't really have the time to do them. We had decided that the kids were going to chip in and get her a weeping cherry tree for her front yard since she loves the pink blossoms so much in the spring. Sadly, the blossoms have already come and gone for the year, so I decided it would be fun to make her tree "blossom" with some paper flowers. Then as an add on I thought it would be fun to hang cherries from the ends of the strands of blossoms with loving thoughts from each child written on them for her to read.

I am so glad I had Katie to help me out with putting these together or I may not have finished before just giving up and going to bed. Even between the two of us we were up till 1am gluing, cutting, and assembling all of the strands and cherries. I even used real twigs from our trees for the cherry stems (and yes I know weeping cherries don't actually produce fruit...it was just a play on words). As far as I can tell it was a big hit and although we may have been groggy this morning, it was worth it.

On one side of each cherry was the name of one of her kids and on the back was a special thought or compliment quoted by them about her.

New Name

Just so you all know - I changed the name of our blog just a little bit. I'm not sure if that affects if you can get to it from your page or not but I hope it didn't foil anyone's attempts to check up on us. Love you all!

Playing at the Park

On Thursday the weather was fabulous so we took Ayden to Barnes Park up here in Kaysville to have some fun time outdoors. Because it was spring break for Davis school district the place was crawling with little kids, but Ayden had fun watching them all and occasionally joining them on the playground. We got to feed some geese and ducks (and even had the pleasure of seeing a few of them doing the uh...dance of love...) but mostly Ayden just wanted to run all over the place. He had lots of fun but got pretty frustrated when we wouldn't let him climb on the taller parts of the playground like the other kids. In any case it was great to be out in the sun and have some fun outdoors as a whole little family.

My handsome little guy

Ayden wasn't sure what to think of the geese since they were almost as big as he is

Playing on the playground

Smooches for mommy

One baby out, one baby in...at least the belly makes a good spot to rest Ayden on :)

My two favorite guys in the whole world