My Sister's Wedding: 11-5-11.

By Liv

My Sister had the most lovely wedding I've ever seen. The theme was appropriate for our Mexican heritage and for the time of year: Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead. The wedding venue was splashed with vibrant colors of mexican paper flowers and intricately decorated sugar skulls. Jessica's wedding dress was a one-of-a-kind mexican wedding dress with an amazing veil to top it off.

I've never been to a more personalized and intimate event in my life. Everyone was made to feel part of the couple's special day and that day ended with a private rock show at Columbia City Theater - headlining one of Jessica's best friends' bands as well as a special performance by the groom as lead guitarist when Hedwig and the Angry Inch played. Talk about a full day of festivities!

All our love to the newlyweds!

Slacker Moms: Easter 2011.

By Liv

As it turns out, it's much harder than I ever expected to be a Mom. All this cooking and cleaning is enough to make a girl crazy but add to that the expectation to both REMEMBER holidays and then actually plan and execute some type of special tradition on those holidays. How's a girl supposed to do all that?

Easter was largely forgotten until – say the day before. Luckily, Marlane had psychically forecasted my slackerness regarding Easter and she had sent me along with all the fixings for an Easter basket for Stella. Jess ran to the grocery store with just a few hours to spare and landed a few extra goodies for the girls, but to be honest, the only things in their baskets were a handful of jelly beans in plastic eggs, a stuffed animal and a helium balloon. How lame are we?

You know, when our Mom was alive, she would make up these ridiculous baskets overfilling with everything from expensive candies to clothes and jewelry for Jess and I. I'm talking Easter, Valentine's Day, even Christmas and our Birthdays. She did this every year until she passed away when I was 23. So the thought of Jess and I NOT recreating this for our daughters is a little absurd. We promised ourselves to make next Easter much more exciting, but in all actuality, the babies didn't even notice. Phew!

The funniest part of Easter was when we arrived 20 minutes late to the public Easter egg hunt. We were quickly informed by a very kind man that the hunt was over and all the candy had been claimed. When his two daughters saw that Stella and Seren's Easter baskets were completely empty, those two little girls were kind enough to share a handful of foil-covered chocolate eggs with Stella and Seren!

At this point, I'm sure you're wondering what kind of fun it is to just be GIVEN a handful of Easter candy for free - without even having to hunt for it. Well, as it turns out, it's NO FUN at all. So what were we to do? You guessed it – we took the girls to a ball field nearby and chucked all their chocolate eggs in the grass and taught them to pick them up and place them in their baskets.

Stella and Seren were so excited and overwhelmed with joy at this new game that they didn't even notice that we were continuously taking those chocolate eggs that they had been picking up so diligently and redistributing them on the grass. They did this repeated egg hunt for about 10 minutes until we decided they had had enough Easter hunting. It was cute, though, and I'm sure this will be the last year we will be able to pull that trick on them :)

Here are some photos of our little darlings. They were so fun on Easter and I'm so glad that we were able to spend the day with my Sister and her family.

 Wearing the Easter dress from Oma (Grandma) Marlane.

The story of how my niece arrived

On September 21st, I was having dinner with a dear friend when I received a frantic phone call from my sister. Jessica was only 31 weeks pregnant and had been having some strange pains, so she went to her midwife for a check-up. Soon, she was given some very disturbing and urgent news: she was dilated to 5cm and was being rushed to the nearest hospital. Jessica braced herself to give birth to her daughter 9 weeks early.

Luckily, she didn't have her daughter that night. As I hurriedly drove to Seattle with Stella, Jessica was at the hospital being put on all sorts of contraptions and IVs to monitor her contractions as the postnatal doctors attempted to stop or stall her labor as long as they could.

Because Jessica was so high risk to deliver her baby early, she was admitted and kept in the hospital on strict bed rest until her daughter was to be born.

While in the hospital, Jess even celebrated her 30th birthday! Chris rolled her in to the guest lounge a few doors from her hospital room and we had a large group of friends and family gather to eat cake and open gifts. I'm sure this was definitely not what Jess had in mind for her 30th birthday, but it ended up being a lot of fun.

At 34 weeks gestation, 3 weeks after being admitted in to the hospital, the specialists agreed that it was time to let Jessica's body do what it had been trying to do for weeks. After having her water bag popped, Jessica went directly in to hard labor.

I don't remember ever being so frightened in my life! With the help of Chris (Jessica's boyfriend), we talked Jessica through each contraction as she worked her hardest to wrap her mind around the pain that she was feeling. It seemed like only minutes passed (but I'm sure it felt like days to Jess) and the magical little girl was born.

I've never felt so much fear and joy and relief all at the same time. After such a long and agonizing stay in the hospital, my Sister had mustered up the strength within herself to bring her daughter in to this world completely naturally. I can't even imagine being forced to lay still in a hospital bed for three weeks and then minutes later, be doing the hardest physical work I've ever done in my life. I'm sure it took every ounce of her physical, emotional and spiritual strength to do what she did, and I'm so glad that she did.

Because of all of Jess's hard work, Seren Chapa McClurken was born on October 11th at 5:13pm. She weighed 5 pounds, 11 ounces — which is a wonderful weight even at 6 weeks early!

Seren has been in the NICU at the hospital since her birth and will be heading home as soon as she is able to eat on her own. Jessica and Chris are overjoyed with their daughter as are everyone in our family. We can't wait to hold and cuddle this beautiful little girl and tell her how much we have been waiting for her arrival.

Jess and Chris just before labor began


Getting cleaned up just after delivery


The beautiful baby girl


Jess and Seren meet


The new Daddy