Geitra, Neil, and Amelia were thrilled to welcome our twin boys Gabriel and Adrian to the family on January 22nd this year. They arrived about a month early, and although they were small, they were blessed with good health and quickly gained strength. As a result, we were able to welcome them home just a few days after they were born. Our lives just haven’t been the same since–for one thing, we are B-U-S-Y! It took us a bit longer to find our new rhythm with the boys than it did when Amelia was born, but they both hung in there with us and waited patiently (usually) while we figured things out. Luckily, we had a lot of help from our parents, our friends, and our church family during the first few months. Bottle feeding was especially difficult, since their feeding reflexes were immature, but eventually we got them to start packing on the weight once their pediatrician suggested a special formula designed for preemies.  By the time they were six months old, the boys would hoover down about 80 ounces of formula a day, which works out to a big Costco-size can of powder every six days — and does not bode well for how much these two are going to eat once they hit middle school. They’ve been making the transition to solid foods for the past few months and have been doing quite well — in fact, both of them have turned into little Cheerio junkies!

Regardless of the future in which they eat us out of house and home, life with these two little men is joyful. Gabriel just started to fully crawl today, as a matter of fact, and Adrian is still “combat-crawling” on his belly like he’s pulling himself through the mud on an obstacle course. Gabe has learned from Maggie, and often carries something in his mouth while on the move.  Adrian has a regular circuit through the kitchen, and always checks to see if Mom remembered to pick up the dog dishes. They can also sit up by themselves, and they’re starting to pull themselves up on various bits of furniture. In short, they’re pretty mobile…and they take full advantage of it whenever they get the chance. Gabriel seems to be a bit more of a thoughtful explorer, sometimes finding an interesting toy and just sitting to play with it for a while. Adrian, meanwhile, loves crawling over, under, around, and through anything he can — highchairs, exersaucers, his brother…it doesn’t matter to him! They love it when you join them on the floor, rewarding you with two of the cutest smiles in the world — all the cuter for the veritable explosion of baby teeth both of them have coming in right now.  And following an example we set with Amelia, they are in a early music, movement, and socialization class called Kindermusik.  We manage to squeeze that in when Amelia is at preschool.

Speaking of the Big Sister of the house, Amelia is doing very well. She’s three-and-a-half now, and continues growing into a wonderful little girl who loves abundantly, spreading joy to anyone she meets with her beautiful smile and enthusiastic hugs.  We  introduced Amelia to a small daycare for several days a week during spring and summer — that way, she got a good amount of attention during the day while Mommy was home focusing on the boys. She adjusted well and started drawing shapes and tracing letters, and she really enjoyed bringing home the various crafts and pictures she made each week. She carried that forward into her first full year of preschool at our church — for which she also successfully completed the HUGE milestone of potty training!  Her favorite pastimes include everything from Little People to Tinkerbell and her fairy friends, and from watching movies about Space Shuttle astronauts with her Daddy to cooking dinner or baking cookies with Mommy. She absolutely adores her little brothers–she loves to play and cuddle with them, and shares some of her favorite toys and buddies with both of them quite freely.  Amelia is also a tremendous help around the house — fetching socks, refilling diapers, picking up toys, and doting on her brothers. She’s learned how to feed the boys by helping them with their bottles and giving them finger food (which she samples liberally herself). Amelia is also thrilled to be singing in the Little Angels choir at church, and she’ll have her public performance debut when she sings in the Christmas pageant this year!

As for Geitra and Neil, life doesn’t completely revolve around Amelia and the boys. Geitra is still involved in various activities at our church, including singing in the choir and participating on the curriculum committee for the children’s Sunday school program. She also enjoys participating in a Mothers of Preschoolers (MOPS) group at another local church. Neil is still working hard with Booz Allen Hamilton, where he manages a 20-person team doing systems engineering work in support of national defense systems. He also got a bunch of various “fix it” projects done around the house this past year, and still managed to read a decent number of books despite the number of pages he could read per day plummeting after the boys’ arrival on the scene.

Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t note the passing of Geitra’s Grandmother Bittinger this past year. As we join her family in mourning the loss, we are reminded time and again of the importance of family by all the help and support we’ve received from ours in the past year and a half as we prepared for the twins’ arrival (and the barely-controlled chaos once they were here), potty-training Amelia, and all kinds of other things. We are abundantly blessed by our family and friends, and we wish each and every one of you a joyous Christmas season and a happy and healthy New Year.

All our love,

Geitra, Neil, Amelia, Gabriel, and Adrian

P.S. Adrian stood up for the first time on December 22nd, and Gabriel learned how to do it from him the next day…watch out world, here they come!

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Merry Christmas once again! Yes, we realize that it’s only ten months since we published our last Christmas letter (OK “Valentine’s day letter” was more like it), but after last year’s debacle we resolved to do much better this year. We didn’t quite make our goal of getting our cards mailed right after Thanksgiving, but at least we got them out before Christmas actually happened!

OK, first things first. As some of you know already, we’re expecting our next child in early 2009. Well…make that children. Yes, you read that correctly—Geitra is pregnant with twin boys, with a due date of February, 2009, and Neil is getting used to the never-thought-he’d-use-it phrase “father of three.” Getting this news certainly made the second half of the year a bit more interesting! We’ve been busy getting the nursery ready for the boys, and heading to appointment after appointment to make sure they are both healthy. Overall, things have been going fairly well so far, although Geitra was put on “not so strict” bed rest to see if one of the boys can put on a little bit more weight before the birth. You can follow news about the boys on our blog—we’ve been posting some of the ultrasound pictures, and we’ll definitely post pictures after they arrive!

So how is “big sister” handling all of this? Well, Amelia’s been absolutely wonderful this year. Even more than last year, 2008 has been a year of amazing discoveries about our little girl. For instance, her vocabulary is outstanding, to the point where she almost seems like a word magnet—point something out to her and tell her what it is, and that’s all it takes…from that point on, she’s got it locked in her mind. She can count from one to ten and sometimes up to 13 or so, and she’s learning her ABCs as well—she’s up to “L” all by herself! She is also getting quite adept at making her wishes known, asking for certain bedtime stories, certain foods, and whatnot. The best part about that is that she usually wants Mommy, Daddy, or Maggie to be with her to play or to give her hugs and kisses. Those moments make the odd little crying fit here or there (she is two after all) seem like a very small price to pay indeed.

One of the other highlights for us this year was celebrating our tenth anniversary. Neil and Geitra celebrated by taking a nine-day cruise in the Caribbean on the Caribbean Princess while Amelia stayed at home under the loving care of her grandparents. Nana Snider and Farmor Mickelson took care of Amelia during the first week of our trip, and then Nana went back to Ohio while Farfar came down to help out. Amelia had a wonderful time with her grandparents, who did everything from taking her to her swim lessons to playing the park. In the meantime, Neil and Geitra visited Bermuda, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, and Grand Turk and also enjoyed all the amenities the cruise ship had to offer—from visits to the spa to movies under the stars. It was a great time to reconnect with each other, knowing that our little one was well taken care of. We can’t thank our parents enough for taking the time to do this—especially since there were some unexpected surprises the first couple of days. First, a severe storm hit Virginia the first day we were at sea, leaving our moms without power for about twelve hours. Ever resourceful, Nana Snider cooked Amelia’s dinner on the grill out back and dug out the crank-powered radio she had given us as a gift a few years ago. In the meantime, Farmor Mickelson made her way home in the pouring rain from a visit with friends courtesy of AAA after our car broke down on her—twice—due to a stuck thermostat. Despite it all, they had a wonderful time with their granddaughter—and we definitely made the most of what is likely our last vacation without kids along for years to come!

As for the rest of the year, it’s been very busy. Geitra continued her variety of activities with Amelia (including more swim classes and gymnastics), a couple of moms’ groups, and church events through the better part of the year until the pregnancy really forced her to slow down—grudgingly—in the past couple of months. She also had an opportunity to take a week of vacation in Los Cabos, Mexico, with our good friend (and Amelia’s godmother) Kate, while Neil stayed home and had a week to play the doting father for Amelia. A grand time was had by all in both places. Speaking of work, Booz Allen has continued to treat Neil well while keeping him very busy. The contract he is supporting has had its ups and downs, but there are usually opportunities for growth and new business even when things are in turmoil—the trick is identifying them and capitalizing on them.

And what of the four-legged member of the family? Well, Maggie is doing fairly well. She has continued to adjust to Amelia and her friends, and they have some nice play times together. Unfortunately, we got a little bit of bad news a couple of months ago when we took Maggie in for an eye exam…it turns out that she has some significant vision loss in one eye as a result of contracting Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever from a tick bite at some point. Luckily, the disease responds well to antibiotics and we caught it much earlier than many people do…in fact, our regular vet doesn’t even test for it. Maggie might even recover some vision in the bad eye as she gets better. But the bottom line is that she’s still in pretty good health overall, and she’ll continue to be a great playmate for Amelia and sooner or later the twins!

So, that brings us nearly to the end of 2008. Thanks again for coming to read our holiday letter on the website, and keep your eye on our ever-evolving gallery for pictures of the kids. We wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

With Love—Neil, Geitra, and Amelia (and two players to be announced later…)

Here are some pictures of our lovely little girl for you to enjoy!

It’s so wonderful that these lovely phrases were the first two she’s put together…here’s to hoping that she’ll soon be a regular motor-mouth!

A special thank-you to our good friend, Darryl Donley, for taking the wonderful pictures of Amelia while visiting us one evening. They look great, Darryl!

Neil has written a tutorial on how we created this announcement, in case you have a similar project you’d like to pursue.

When she was born, Amelia had a little bit of trouble breathing as regularly and as deeply as the nursing staff would have liked. As the nurses worked through getting her washed, weighed, and measured, they kept trying to get her to breathe a little more deeply. Eventually, they put a small sensor on one of her feet which provided an oxygen readout and an estimate of Amelia’s red blood cell count. Apparently, her oxygen levels looked pretty good but her red blood cell count was low.

About this time, we also noticed a bit of a contusion on the back of Amelia’s head – she had a fairly large buildup of fluid, probably blood, in between her skin and her skull that was about two inches long and one inch wide. Somewhere around this point, nurses from the NICU were called to come up and examine Amelia, and shortly thereafter, the neonatal night physician. They discussed their concerns with us and said that they wanted to take her down to NICU for observation. The doctor noted that the contusion was somewhat common and probably nothing to worry about, but coupled with the extra work Amelia was doing to breathe and the low red blood cell count, the NICU was the best place for her to be in order to be closely monitored. So they bundled her up in her little hospital blanket and hat, gave us some time together for pictures, and then I followed the nurses as they went down to admit Amelia to the NICU while Geitra stayed in her room to recover a bit more.

My first thoughts on getting into one of the NICU wards was, “My God, how do these people work here?” The ward had about 10 or 12 different bays, with tons of monitoring equipment, IV pumps, isolettes, open warmers, and other critical equipment all around. Amelia’s ward probably had about eight other babies there, and oh my goodness, were they tiny. Some nurses were doing little body massages for the preemies through gloves built into the warmers; others were feeding their patients; and still others were just taking care of different record-keeping and monitoring duties. Into this scene of incredibly dedicated people doing what has to be some of the hardest work in the hospital our baby girl was admitted.

It was kind of tough to keep my mind on everything that I was being told at this point – hours the unit was open, the fact that they may need to put Amelia on oxygen and/or antibiotics depending on what the doctor wants to do, and the invitation to come back down to visit her pretty much whenever we wanted. It was even tougher to have to turn around and leave my new baby girl behind and go back upstairs to make sure Geitra was doing OK, and was informed about what was going on – I mean, we’d been parents for all of about two hours now, and here we had our first medical emergency and had been separated from our daughter. We just had to trust that the hospital staff knew what was best.

I went back upstairs to Geitra’s room, where we spent an hour or so together before they were able to move her to a private post-partum room for the two nights we’d be staying at the hospital for her recovery. I let her know what the situation was downstairs in the NICU for Amelia, and after a little bit the NICU night doctor came upstairs to let us know that they had gone ahead and ordered a CAT scan for Amelia to take a close look at the contusion on her skull and make sure it wasn’t anything dangerous. As far as they could tell, it wasn’t – but they also found a small subarachnoid hemorrhage (bleeding between the inside of her skull and her brain) with the scan. The doctor noted that this would need to be confirmed later in the day by the pediatric radiologist, but that this was probably also a fairly common occurrence – just not often recognized since newborns aren’t routinely CAT scanned – that should resolve itself normally.

After the discussion with the doctor and getting Geitra settled in to her new room, I went back down to the NICU to see Amelia again. By this time, they had gotten her hooked up to an EKG, a temperature sensor for the warmer, an IV for nutrients, and an oxygen cannula to help ease the effort to breathe. It was nerve-wracking to see her little body hooked up to so much equipment, but she seemed pretty calm over all. I spent some time talking to her nurse and the doctor to understand exactly what her situation was, and then was able to sit down in a rocking chair and hold her for about half an hour. Wires, tubes, and all – it was amazing to really hold my baby girl for the first time.

I finally got back upstairs to Geitra at about 4:30AM or so, and we talked just a little bit about how Amelia was doing before we collapsed to get a couple hours’ worth of sleep. Her nurse woke us up around 7AM to get her vital signs and everything, and we prepared to head down to the NICU together. We got there around 8:30AM, and were pleased to discover that Amelia had already made some improvement – they had dialed back on the oxygen they were giving her to be the same as normal room air, so all they were really doing was giving her a little extra pressure. The contusion on the back of her head was also starting to shrink. We spoke with the nurses a bit, and took turns holding her for an hour, snapping pictures as we went. After that, we needed to let her get some rest—but started our pattern of visiting Amelia every three hours or so in order for her to start nursing and get weaned off of the nutritional IV.

Things progressed quickly over the next couple of days. A pediatric neurologist did an assessment of Amelia on Wednesday, looking at the CAT scans and doing a physical exam, and assured us that she will probably have no long-term impacts from any of the symptoms she exhibited after her birth. He ordered a follow-up CAT scan for Friday morning to make sure that the intracranial bleed wasn’t getting any larger—this meant that Geitra would be going home one day earlier than Amelia was likely to be released from the NICU, but having the assurance of the follow-up scan was a good thing.

Amelia’s oxygen cannula had been removed late in the day on Tuesday, and the NICU staff moved her to a closed isolette (think “incubator” and you’ll have the right image) to give her some additional privacy. This also allowed the nurses to make sure Amelia was controlling her own body temperature. Amelia was introduced to her Nana and Papa Snider (Geitra’s parents) on Wednesday as well when they came to visit the hospital, and she was successfully taken off of her IV and moved to a “step down” ward late that evening. In this ward, normally used for patients that would be leaving NICU soon, Amelia was just resting in an open-air bassinette like she would have been using in a normal hospital nursery. The Sniders visited her again on Thursday before they headed back home to Ohio, and Geitra was discharged Thursday evening with a promise that Amelia should be able to come home on Friday assuming her CAT scan results were good.

Friday went quickly and slowly, all at the same time. We got to the NICU around 8AM, but had to wait until 8:30AM to get in and see Amelia. The nurse who was taking care of her that day was hyper-efficient, and was already calling Radiology in order to get the CAT scan taken care of as soon as possible. She was quite successful, since Amelia was being wheeled down to radiology before 10AM. The scans were done, and the neurologist came down to look at the results around 11AM – and happily, he declared that the internal bleed was already starting to dissipate and that Amelia could go home as soon as the NICU doctor did a final exam. That took a little bit, since the doctor was busy with more-urgent cases, and then got called away to an emergency delivery while she was writing up the final notes in Amelia’s chart. By about 3PM, we started changing Amelia into her “going home” clothes and putting her into her car seat for the very first time.

The drive home went well, with Amelia sleeping quietly in her car seat for most of the trip. It was wonderful to finally introduce her to her new home, her nursery, and her dog – yes, Maggie was quite gentle when we introduced them to each other! We treasure the “first of the firsts” we had together that day – and we look forward to all the “firsts” to come.

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This video is approximately 10 minutes long, and is about 34MB in size. Please note that you will need QuickTime 7 to play this movie.