Happy Birthday Kaylee!

About ten years ago...

Ryan and I were taking Savannah to visit some family members. She was about six weeks old. We were in Ryan's truck and Savannah was in her car seat between us. We were stopped at a traffic light and both of us were staring at her in that lovestruck way that new parents are apt to do. Without looking away from her, I said "I'm ready for another one." I looked up and Ryan broke into the biggest grin I have ever seen. Our next baby came about in the usual way, but I will always believe that Kaylee's conception was in that smile. When you have two babies in one year, most people assume that one or the both of them were 'accidents'. Not so for us but I was surprised that it happened so quickly.

My pregnancy was uneventful. My ob-gyn was very impressed that I gained only 15 pounds. The fact that I had never lost the weight from my first pregnancy didn't seem to bother anyone but me. When I was 2 weeks overdue, the doc decided to induce me. I was really scared because Savannah's birth had been so traumatic for us both. I was anticipating a replay.

I arrived early on the morning of April 27. The nurses got the induction underway and I spent a few mildly uncomfortable hours as the contractions began. I was making pretty steady progress until after the epidural when I dilated from 4 to 9 centimeters in about 30 minutes. My mom and Ryan were with me and they were both a little surprised that I wasn't screaming in agony or begging one of them to kill me. The truth is, I felt absolutely nothing. The only issue I had was a constant fear that I was about to feel something. It never happened. I pushed for maybe a half hour and I watched Kaylee be born as if I were a spectator.

The nurses did whatever it is that they do to newborn babies, wrapped Kaylee in a pink blanket, handed her to me and wheeled us into a private room. Less than an hour after I had delivered, I was in a room with my baby. It was, without a doubt, my best birth experience of all three of my girls.

Quoted

If Truman said "The buck stops here," then Bush's mantra must be "Who wants this buck?"

- dday

San Diego - January 2008

Book Review

The Magician's Assistant

Parsifal is dead. That is the end of the story.

Let me give you a little piece of advice. If you open a book and the first sentence reads anything like that, just settle in for a heaping helping because you have found yourself a delicious book. This book was like the perfect piece of cake. It satisfied me completely and left me wanting more all at the same time. This is the kind of book that I really need to own because there were so many great sentences. I'm a big fan of the great sentence. I have to underline them. It's a sickness really...

Unfortunately, this book came from the library so I'm just gonna record the great ones here.

"I love my children, " she said. "No one will tell you otherwise, but just between the two of us I have to say I admire you for not having any. The ways they break your heart, Jesus, and it never stops. I mean it, it simply does not stop."

"But there was never a man she wanted to run to when she saw him, a man in whose neck she longed to bury her face and recount every detail of her day. There was never a man she felt could make every difference simply by holding her to his chest and saying her name."

"She had been mothering people in one way or another for forty-six years. Her energy for the project had faded."

"Dot didn't smoke, but pushed far enough, most anyone will have a cigarette."

It's a great story that feels really original. Anyone who reads with any regularity can tell you that,after a while, original stories feel few and far between. I wanted to give a brief description of the plot but when I typed it out, it seemed really ridiculous. Just trust me here...read it.

Quoted

"Stupidity carried beyond a certain point becomes a public menace."

- Ezra Pound

Happy Birthday Savannah!

10 years ago...

Nashville had just been hit by a tornado and I was eating Cadbury mini eggs by the pound while on 'bed-rest'. I was thirty seven weeks pregnant and it was not pretty. My blood pressure was through the roof and, in addition to the seventy pounds of actual weight I had gained (mostly due to Cadbury), I was also puffed up like a blowfish with severe edema. Did I mention that it wasn't pretty?

I had my weekly doctor's appointment Monday 4/21/98. Ryan was out of town and unexpectedly returned just as I was pulling out of the driveway. He rarely got to make it to a an appointment with me so he was really happy to make it in time. Once we got to the doctor's office, I had the usual checks and was planning on returning the following week just as I had been doing for the past two months. My doc had other plans. She asked me to go to the hospital for a fetal stress test. The receptionist asked me as we were leaving, "Is she going to deliver you today?" Ryan and I both laughed. "Of course not." I said. "She just wants me to have another stress test." I had already had that test done several weeks earlier and honestly, we were so naive, we just didn't realize that 37 weeks is considered full term and that my doc had no intention of letting my pregnancy progress any further.

We stopped by McDonalds on the way to the hospital. If I had known that I would not be eating again for four days, I would definitely have gotten the McFlurry. We arrived at the hospital, had the stress test and just as I was planning to leave I overheard the nurse on the phone with my doctor. They weren't planning on my leaving that hospital without a baby. It seems silly to say that after years of dreaming about having a baby and 37 weeks of being pregnant that I was completely unprepared for this moment. But it's true. I was planning to be pregnant for at least another month. (First babies are always late, right?)

The nurses got me set up in a room and begin an IV of Pitocin to start the labor and Magnesium to keep my blood pressure from killing me. The magnesium makes you really hot so the hospital room was like the Arctic which made me comfortable but everyone else not so much. Unfortunately, the nurses failed to mention that the magnesium would make labor much slower. So assuming the baby would arrive late Monday night, all my family assembled at the hospital. They paraded in and out of my room and as I was feeling hardly any contractions, we all had a pretty good time. Around 8PM, my doctor arrived and broke my water. Good time = OVER.

Over the next twelve hours, I stayed in fairly constant pain and made ridiculously little progress in my labor. The nurses finally gave me a shot of some delightful drug the next morning and I was able to get a couple hours of sleep. (Just prior to this when I was really exhausted and my judgement was clouded by pain, I had watched Ryan sleeping in the chair beside my bed and had carefully planned on ways to get my IV out and kill him with it. Let's just say I needed that shot, OK?)

A few hours later, I got the epidural. A few hours later, I started pushing. A few hours later, I was still pushing. I was really convinced, at this point, that we should all just go home and try this another day. Some strange man came into the room (Ryan told me later it was the anesthesiologist) and placed both hands on the top of my stomach and, literally, pushed Savannah into the world. 4:22PM on 4/22/98.

I would like to tell you that I held her and wept while whispering words of love into her tiny little ears. But actually, I just laid there praying for death. Savannah and I were both pretty exhausted and due to the magnesium meds that I was on, I had to be taken to a recovery unit and she was taken to the nursery.

I languished in that recovery room for the next 24 hours. No baby, no food, no TV and visitors for only 10 minutes per hour. Finally, late Wednesday night, they moved me to a room and brought Savannah to me. We'd had a rocky start but as soon as they handed her to me, it was all over. I don't think I put her down for the next two weeks. After a lifetime of babysitting, daycare work and obsessing over other people's babies, I finally had one all to myself.

Bored at Work Video

Charlie bit me!

Charlie is on his way to being my favorite youtube baby...EVAH!!!

Aunt Dot

My aunt Dorothy passed away in February.

My mother is the youngest of nine children. She has six brothers and two sisters. My aunt Peggy died in October of 2006 and now my mom is the only girl left.

My father called me at work to tell me that she had died. He wanted me to leave as fast as I could to get to the hospital to be with my mom. My aunt had been hospitalized for over a month but she had made what we considered to be a miraculous recovery and was even beginning to have some physical therapy in anticipation of being released. The kids were out of school that day for snow so my dad ended up babysitting when my mom was called to the hospital.

As I made the drive that day, I remembered one particular incident that made me laugh through my tears. Dorothy lived for many years in Denver, Colorado. At least once a year, my family would drive out there for vacation. Two days in the car each way. (There are at least three posts worth of material detailing the way my brother and I used to fight in that back seat during those long trips.) When we arrived, we basically spent two weeks watching the adults sit around my aunt's dining room table. They talked, laughed, drank a little and smoked a lot. We had a few cousins our age there so we were never really bored but we didn't normally do the family vacation kind of stuff on those trips. But on one particular visit, my dad decided that we needed to see the mountains. Anyone who has ever made a trip to Denver can tell you that 'seeing' the mountains is not really a problem, but my dad was convinced that we needed to drive up the friggin mountain to really experience it. ( He was going through a John Denver phase at the time, in his defense.) So we loaded up two cars and proceeded to drive up Mount Evans. I spent the whole drive anticipating my death. You would think that a mountain road would have plenty of guard rails and safety precautions. You would be wrong. When we finally (Thank You Jesus!) made it to the top, we parked the cars and got out to take in the view. My aunt Dorothy stumbled out of the car and noticed the two handicapped parking spaces. She opened her leather cigarette case (it had her initials stamped on it, btw)took out a cigarette and lit it. As she exhaled, she muttered, "What in the hell would an invalid be doing up here?" We laughed like we might never stop and, to this day, I cannot remember the view but I'll never forget our trip up that mountain.

I made it to the hospital in record time and found my mom, two of my uncles and my aunt's two sons waiting in a special room in the ICU. They were all still in that "stunned" phase and I realized that the grief had not even had time to manifest itself yet. My cousin Mark arrived just as they took us back to my aunt's room. As we stood in that room forming an semi-circle around her bed, I looked around and realized that this was the type of situation that our parents would have normally tried to shield us from. We had spent a lot of years at the "kiddie table" both literally and figuratively.

Our large family crowded the funeral home for two full days. I saw relatives I had not seen in a long time and that I probably won't see again until the next funeral. I spent much of my life being embarrassed of my big, loud family. Truth be told, there's quite a bit to be embarrassed of. Just the sheer number of aunts, uncles and cousins that are generated by a family of nine will virtually guarantee that a few nuts end up in the mix. We, perhaps, ended up with more than our fair share :) But with a lot of crazy comes an awful lot of love and laughter. And having witnessed their behavior through my aunt's illness and death, I know for sure that no one in my family dies alone.

See you on the mountaintop, Aunt Dot. Save me a parking spot, ok?