Halloween 2013

 The kids and Chris went to our usual pumpkin place that has fun things to do for free and a great selection of pumpkins in all shapes and sizes.

 Thea and I stayed home.  I waffled over this decision for awhile but eventually decided that we both would be better off at home this year.

 They came home with a load of pumpkins ready to be carved. We made plans and when the time was right we got to work. I really enjoyed this year because the boys are old enough to work on their own pumpkins and do some real carving with some handy dandy tools.

 I thought they all turned out great. The boys were determined to win the jack-o-lantern contest again this year at the ward Halloween party. (Turns out no one in the family won anything. I kinda think better no one than just one!)

 I took the opportunity to try out a find on Pinterest: Candy Corn Cookies

 Made out of colored sugar cookie dough, were pretty simple and tasted delicious!

 I couldn't not make these cuties either, though I confess to buying the donuts, not making them.

I don't think Chris has dressed up for so many Halloweens since he was child, but as bishop, he feels some social obligation!

 The ward Halloween party was great fun by all reports. The donut eating contest was a new addition to the festivities.

 Sage's preschool class dressed up and it was so adorable to see the kids in their costumes!  (I especially loved the peacock costume on the little blond girl and the parrot costume down in front:) Getting everyone to pose for pictures and all the parents trying to get a turn up front to take pictures is quite a task!

Trick or Treating happened without me and Thea as well.  It was rainy but the kids had a blast anyway. Free candy is hard to ruin!

 These pictures perfectly reflect the kids thoughts about their Halloween Haul.
Noah is thrilled and likes to get a lot of loot.

 Ian is mildly pleased and since he has not got a sweet tooth in his whole mouth he will end up giving most of his candy away.

 And Sage is a happy girl who got what she got and is happy with it:)

While I only got to participate on the periphery of activities outside the home I enjoyed the usual excitement of one of the kid's favorite holidays. Thea and I are looking forward to being more involved next year!

Daddy-Daughter Date

While I was out of commission, at home with Thea, Chris took on all the driving duties.

One day, after picking up Sage from preschool, he took her to get a cookie at little bakery in "downtown" Greendale. She was totally charmed by the pink chairs, the little water jug and the cookies. 

Being with her daddy totally capped the occasion!

Old World Wisconsin

 I knew Chris had a scheduled layoff week so when the permission slip came home for a field trip to Old World Wisconsin, I signed him up to chaperone!

 This is a place where they have set up many small mini farms that are modeled after the farms the immigrants from Europe developed. This area saw a lot of German, Polish, Norwegian, and Swedish influences.

It was a little wet but they learned lots of interesting things.

 And even got to do a tug of war with a team of oxen!

Can't wait to go myself someday!

Raingutter Regata

Noah was super excited to be invited to the scouts Raingutter Regata even though he wasn't yet a member of the pack.

It did take some urging on Chris' part to get him to work on this boat but he finally decided on a theme and made a pretty snazzy looking ship! 

He practiced in the tub-no hands allowed!

 The competition was pretty fierce!

And while he only won one heat, Noah had a great time and is definitely looking forward to scouts!

An After Birth Story: Leah

And yes, it is probably going to be as graphic and unpleasant as the title suggests.  Watch out!

So my beautiful baby was born and she was perfect.  This was a huge relief to me.  The last weeks and even months of my pregnancies are spent with the nagging thoughts and fears about all the things that could be wrong with my baby. Maybe because of my overall education has made me more qualified to be a parent of a child with special needs. Or maybe college anatomy just really drove home how miraculous it truly is that any baby is born without any number of problems or special needs.  We would deal with any needs that the baby might have had but I could never not hope that those challenges wouldn't be my child's challenges. And when she came out perfect I couldn't help feel like we had tempted fate and again beaten the odds.

Things continued to happen in the usual way.  They took the baby to clean her, weigh and measure, diaper, cloth and wrap her.  The afterbirth was delivered with relative ease and quickness, especially in comparison to the last time.  The doctor ordered more pitocin to help my uterus do the after delivery things and left. The helpers cleaned up their areas and returned the room to it's pre-birth state.

My nurse was very attentive and helpful.  Luckily for me she was very attentive.  After some time, I have no idea how much, she noticed that I was still bleeding a lot and there were a lot of clots.    More time passed and the bleeding continued apace. The nurse became more concerned and called the doctor back. She ordered a second bag of pitocin and a shot in the thigh of something else that would slow the bleeding. I have to admit that I was more perturbed by the idea of a shot in the thigh than I was concerned at this point.  It is well documented that I don't like needles.  Luckily, I was pleasantly surprised that the medication in the epidural was still effective enough that I didn't even feel it!  More time passed and the blood continued to come.  The doctor had been waiting and watching to see if either or these things would be effective. After gauging how much blood I had lost and the continued blood flow she filled me in on her thought process.

Hindsight allows more insight to the events and situation that I wasn't really taking in at that point.  One such insight was how calm and assured the doctor, and even the nurse, were.  I did not become alarmed or even overly worried about my situation till later, despite her catalog of procedural efforts we would take to try and improve my situation.  After seeing how much blood I had lost she explained that it was worrisome that the medicine had not been sufficient to slow things down and perhaps there was tissue from the placenta still in the uterus. She ordered a blood draw to ascertain how much I had lost and to type me in case I needed a transfusion. She told me she would try and clean out the uterus herself and if that didn't produce a change than I would have to have a D&C. I still wasn't too worried.  I remember thinking that it would be fine.  Things wouldn't progress to the D&C point.  Thankfully, oh thankfully, the medicine from the epidural had not worn off when she manually tried to scrape out the uterus.  Several times. And thankfully she was a woman with nice, small woman hands. We waited some more to see if her efforts would change anything.  They did not.

While we waited the lab tech showed up to do the blood draw.  After completing that she put a new band on my wrist and declared me ready for a transfusion should the need arise.  Despite all that had gone before this was the first red flag in my brain that perhaps my situation was more serious than I had thought. The doctor also ordered another shot of something else to the thigh.  It didn't make any difference either.  Eventually we reached the point where the doctor said something to the effect that all their efforts had failed to produce results and she thought we should do a D&C, all the while looking me in the eye in such a way as to make it clear she was really dictating the next course of action not asking my permission.  That look was flag number two in my brain.

In short order I was wheeled down the hall to the OR,  moved onto the table where they do C-sections and strung up like a side of beef.  Having lost all dignity, as usual, during labor and delivery, I was surprised by how much worse this felt loss-of-dignity-wise. The epidural was still in place and used to administer more pain medication so I knew that it probably wouldn't hurt but I was very relieved when they gave me some feel-good-relax-and-sleep stuff through the mask.  While technically conscious, I was really pretty much unaware of the loss of whatever dignity might have been left as they scraped out my insides.

Afterwards, I came back to myself with a bout of nausea.  I was wheeled back to my room still hooked to monitors, feeling sick and not entirely with it. I felt pitiful. The doctor talked to me about the effects of the blood loss I had experienced but it didn't mean a whole lot to me until after I came home from the hospital.

Normally, in this hospital, after the delivery of my baby I would have been moved to a postpartum room.  They elected to have me stay in the L&D room that night so that I would have one on one nursing care till morning. That next morning I was moved to a recovery room and Thea and I stayed there until we were released from the hospital, having experienced way more than I had planned.       

A Birth Story: Thea Elise

So this post (and the next to be written) talks about bodily fluids, blood and a baby being born.  All the minute details are for my own record, since I have a horrible memory.  Consequently, it may be more than anyone else wanted to know.  Read, skim or just enjoy the pictures!

 (Picture taken 7 days before birthday)

That Wednesday morning, October 9th,  I mustered up the energy to take Sage to a friend's house for a playgroup. I slept through the previous playgroup and felt like a horrible mom so this was restitution.  We moms spent a pleasant morning in conversation while the little girls played so well together.

I might have missed a morning nap but it was worth it to get out of the house.  I was, however, looking forward to the afternoon nap that I was planning for Sage and myself.  We made it home and ate a small lunch, went to the bathroom and were making our way to Sage's room for a story, song and nap.  Sage went in search of a book and I went to her room to wait for her.

As I bent slightly to sit it happened.  My water broke!  I was completely taken by surprise because a) I had resigned myself to having the baby a few days after my due date like Sage and b) my water did not break when I went into labor with Sage.

But it gushed.  I started to finish sitting but realized better to make a mess on the hardwood that would wipe clean easy enough.  Then I realized that perhaps the bathroom was a better location.  I quickly shuffled there and called to Sage to get my phone, quickly. It was about 1:15. 

"Why?" she asked.
 "I need to call daddy." I replied.

I called Chris and told him my water had broken.

"Really?" he asked.  I assured him I was in all seriousness and that the puddle made it a sure thing.

Sage went into her room somewhere in there and screamed.  I asked what was wrong and she let it be known that she was upset that I had gotten her chair wet and left a puddle on the floor. I handed her a towel and asked her to clean up the puddle on the floor.  She complied most readily and came back to report that she had wiped up my pee off the floor.  I tried to explain about amniotic fluid but I think it mostly got lost in translation.  All this time I was waiting for Chris to come home so I could take care of the continuous leaking and get ready to go without my little audience.

I also called my doctor's office somewhere in there and reported that my water had broken.  They asked about contractions, which I wasn't really having, and was told that unless things changed I should come to the office so they could "verify" that my water had broken.  (I realize that it is not always straightforward but I always chuckle when they say things like that because this wasn't something I could mistake!)

 Chris made it home and I managed to clean myself up a bit and start the process of getting ready to go have a baby.  I know most people have everything in place and just need to jump in the car and go.  But I really felt no urgency since I wasn't having serious contractions (this was a bit of a change from my previous experiences and I wasn't sure what to make of it) so Chris and I discussed what would be the best arrangements for our kids and those who had volunteered to take care of them when the time came.  A few phone calls and texts later we had made arrangements for the kids and Chris had cleaned the kitchen.

 We dropped off Sage and I drove us to the doctor's office.  I had started to have some contractions but they were so few and far between and so slight that they were easily ignored.  I promise I wasn't a hazard on the road!

After waiting a bit in the waiting room-again, not really an issue since the contractions were so non-I saw a doctor (one I hadn't before met but later came to appreciate a lot)  with an unpronounceable name.  She verified that my water had broken, found I was about 4 cm dilated and about 70% effaced, and we discussed the potential need for pitocin since I wasn't really having strong, regular contractions by this point, about an hour and half to two hours after my water had broken. She sent me down to the L&D floor to check in.

We went down, checked in and waited and waited.  We were waiting to see if labor would pick up on it's own.  After about 3 hours the contractions were still about 10 minutes apart but strong enough that I was ready for the epidural.  It was a very effective epidural.  I have experienced a range in effectiveness and this one matched my first, which meant that once it kicked in I could not feel anything of my contractions.  I didn't know when I was having one at all.  They checked me again and found that I was still at  4-4.5 cm and 70%. That was a big disappointment to me so when the doctor came in and asked about the pitocin I was ready to get on that train.  (I had previously been pretty anti-pitocin since all reports were that it made things hurt more with harder and faster contractions.  The really strong epidural made me brave and I figured even if I could feel them through the epidural surely it wouldn't be that bad. Shortening the time of labor was also a strong motivator.)

They hooked up the pitocin and almost immediately I started to feel sick and nauseated.  Soon thereafter I could feel the contractions through the epidural.  And then it started to hurt bad.  The nurse told me I could push the button for a little extra medicine in the epidural but if I had to push it twice or three times they would need to call the anesthesiologist and have him come in to give more meds. After I pushed it twice we called him in.  He told me he would give me a little but not too much since it could arrest labor.  I told him I would take all I could get.

 About 40 minutes had passed since the pitocin had been started and the nurse came to check me again.  I was at 8 cm and almost completely effaced.  Later we found out that she called the doctor at this point.  She was on another floor with another patient when she got the call.  She told me that she ran all the way to the elevator and came down as quickly as she could "because I know how things can go with you ladies who have had several babies before...it just takes a whiff of pitocin..."

 After being checked I had 2-3 contractions before I had that "I have to push" feeling.  I called Chris and pushed the call button.  They politely inquired what I needed and I told them I had to push.  Within a minute they had rushed in and were setting up to deliver.  The doctor arrived and got her gown.  I resisted the urge to push through one contraction while they were getting ready and then on the next I pushed.  Out she came! I was given the signal to pause-and really I wanted to know if they had ever delivered a child because, seriously, when you have the urge to push, you have to push!!-because the cord was around her neck a couple of times.  That was quickly remedied and she slid the rest of the way out.  One push is my all time best:)

Thea was delivered at 8:03 pm, a little less than 7 hours after my water broke. (Thanks to the pitocin I we went from virtually no progress to a baby in 53 minutes!)

 She weighed 8 lbs 4.5 oz and had fair hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes. She was perfect! 

That was the end of her birth story but, unfortunately, my story continues.  

     

Finding Your Passion

With school out for the summer, we signed the kids up for a few community rec activities.  Over the years, some have been more successful than others.  This year was better than last.  We have now established that Sage LOVES to dance.  Check out a few pictures and a little video from her "Tutus and Tumbling" class. 

Leah said that I had to include the one of her lying down because it was reminiscent of Leah playing rec soccer in her younger days..

 

Two years ago, Noah and Ian tried T-ball. They hated it. Who doesn't like batting practice and running around the bases?  Baseball is hugely popular here, but not with my kids.  

Noah tried soccer last summer. I think he mostly enjoyed it, but anything that involves running around in the sun and getting hot and sweaty is not his idea of a good time. He declined to participate this year. 

Every year, since each child turned three, we have signed the kids up for swimming lessons.  We figure that they don't have to like it, but they are going to learn how to swim well enough to not drown.   

All his life Noah has always loved to play in the kiddie pool but swimming lessons came with a heavy dose of fearful respect for the water.

Well, this year Noah really got into it. He was excited about the skills he was learning and said things like "I love swimming", and "swimming is so fun."  I even caught him overfilling the bathtub once and bobbing for washcloths.  No more fear of putting his head underwater!

Ian, on the other hand, maintains his fearful respect of the water but has made huge strides in being brave and trusting his teachers to not let him drown.

So what is Ian's passion?  I have no idea.  He has shown no interest in sports.  Maybe music?  Science?  Art?  We'll see what he is willing to do next year.