Raya Catherine Hemmah : Introducing Raya Catherine Hemmah

Our little Princess arrived last Friday night on 5/9/2014. She is perfect and we are so in love. She was born with the chubbieset cutest baby cheeks I have ever seen. They're still pretty chubby but they've gone down as she has lost some weight since being born.

The name:
Everyone asks us how we decided on her name. It was just one of the names we saw when we were searching and we both liked it. We only found about 5 girl names we liked (that other friends/family hadn't already named their kids). Out of the final 3 we narrowed it down to Ivy and Raya because Avery is starting to be pretty popular and we didn't want a "fad" name. We both loved Raya so that's how we chose. Pretty simple. Her middle name is Catherine - named after her Grandma Cathy. Both of the kiddo's have my parents name as their middle name. It was the way Jake and I chose to incorporate my family into their names. The kids have Jake's family last name and my parents middle name. So, it all works out perfectly. :)

How it all went down:
I was tucking Easton into bed on Friday night and just didn't feel right. Then Easton said he needed to get up and go potty so we got up and walked in the hall - then I felt something - called for Jake to take Easton potty and just then my water broke! It was 8:00pm and we were shocked! I ran to the bathroom shouting that my water just broke and of course Easton came running after me saying, "I want to see your broken water bottle!!" Then he looked at me and said, "Why did you pee your pants, Mom?" I then called the clinic and the on-call nurse was crazy! She was talking a million miles an hour, "oh my gosh, this is so exciting, how do you know your water broke, how far apart are your contractions, oh my gosh, oh my gosh this is exciting... etc... etc..." Then I finally got her to calm down so she could call the doctor. We packed our bags and called Mary and Eddie and they drove down quick to watch Easton while we went to the hospital. We were at the hospital by 8:45. It was all such a whirl-wind! Once I got to the hospital they put us in a room to get ready for the c-section. Of course the doctor was busy delivering another baby so I had to wait until he was done. In the meantime - Jake was able to watch the entire hockey game while we waiting (it worked out perfectly because we don't have cable at home)! We were wheeled off to the OR at 11:30pm and Miss Raya was born 11:57pm. She weighed in at 8lbs 2oz and 19.5 inches long. The nurses couldn't believe I had that big of a baby in me!

Our experience at Fairview Ridges was much better this time around. All of the nurses were great and we were able to get more sleep this time so I'm sure that helped a lot too! :)

A fun little tid-bit of information about birth-dates:

Easton's due date was March 14th and was born on March 9th
Raya's (scheduled) due date was May 14th and was born on May 9th

Easton absolutely loves being a big brother and is obsessed with his baby sister. He will still call her "baby sister" 99% of the time. If you ask him what his sister's name is he will tell you, "Avery." haha He has always wanted us to name her Avery and when we told him a few weeks ago that we were going to name the baby, Raya he told us he didn't like that name and wanted to call her Avery. So, here he is... still calling her Avery! haha He's coming around though. He loves to hold her and touch her. He is struggling a little bit with me not being able to hold him though and I can hold her. We've had some rough moments, which I expected, but overall he's adjusting very well!

We're not sure who she looks like quite yet. Looking back at the pictures of when I was born there's a pretty strong resemblance. But we'll have to wait and see.
Below are a couple of pictures - I will post more later: