Where The Plan Broke Down

Posted on by Jordan

Now that things have settled down to a somewhat predictable, if very different than before, life with a baby in the house, I thought I would take a minute to go over some parts of my “go to the hospital” plan that didn’t work so well, and maybe a few that did.

Before that I suppose I should give a quick rundown of events leading up to the birth of Hannah. Tuesday December 18th, Heather and I both went to work as normal. About 4:30 that afternoon, she called me to ask that I come straight to her office and take her to the hospital. This meant that we simply asked Heather’s mom, Pam, to pick up the bags we had packed for this very event. It also meant that the first of a few mistaken assumptions on my part were exposed.

Assumption one: I will be the one to pickup the bags. We had attached a list to the bags, detailing daily use items such as a toothbrush that would need to be added at the last minute. The list only contained items for Heather, because I only needed a couple extra things added. Namely, toothbrush, deodorant, kindle, nexus tablet, charger for all three devices.

Assumption two: Because I would be picking up the bags, I could pull on the sweatshirt that wouldn’t fit in the backpack. Warm clothing for me has the unfortunate habit of taking up an enormous amount of space in a bag, so I decided to just wear the clothing at least until we got to our room.

Packed items that I overdid:

Granola bars: A few of these were nice, given that Pam and I were acting as backup nurses basically all night, and couldn’t really leave the room. What we didn’t need were two entire boxes of bars.

Distraction items for Heather: We had movies, music, massage lotion, books… you name it, we had it. None of it got used during labor. Heather did watch a movie or two in the postpartum room.

Distraction items for Jordan: I had made a point of loading up my kindle with a bunch of books, and had queued up a nice backlog of interesting articles on my RSS feed. The reality was that pre Hannah I needed to be attentive to Heather (even when she didn’t need anything per say, she just wanted to feel like she wasn’t going through things alone). Post Hannah I was too tired to think about pleasure reading.

Vending machine money: This seemed like a great idea, but I already had granola bars, and if I had time to go down the hall to a vending area I had time to hit up the cafeteria and get real food.

Unexpected wins:

My tablet. I purchased A Nexus 7, expecting to read and maybe play a few games on it while at the hospital. What I ended up using it for was for communication. E-mail, Facebook and Skype all worked surprising well, and were a much greater priority than I expected them to be.

A blanket. Yes, the nurses brought plenty of blankets into our room… or they probably would have been plenty if the “cot for dad” built into the wall wasn’t built into “floor to ceiling windows on 3 sides” alcove, and Hannah didn’t come right before a blizzard. The blanket was theoretically for Heather I think… I can’t actually remember what I packed it for. Given that I didn’t have a sweatshirt, a nice soft fleece style blanket was a lifesaver.

I think that covers the majority of the adjustments / reflections I had regarding the items we packed for the hospital.

-Jordan

Movember

Posted on by Jordan

I really don’t know who’s idea it was, but there is this idea that November is mens health awareness month, so people should grow mustaches to raise awareness.

My guess is it was a clever way to give legitimacy to “no-shave November”

Whatever the case may be, my coworkers thought a contest was in order. Not content with just a mustache contest, each participant had to agree to grow the style he drew from a hat of styles.

A day or two into this contest, I had the idea that I would take a picture every day, and then make some sort of animation of the results.

Two problems arose out of that. One, I forgot to take the picture several days, and two, making the animation turns out to be a huge headache. I will throw the sad results of my attempt at the end of the post.

Not so sad were the contest results, where I won both the overall, and “participants only” voting with this:

I split the prize for winning with Heather, mostly because she felt she was suffering more for this contest than I was 🙂

-Jordan

(and as promised, the .gif)

 

Practice Run

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What did we do this weekend?

As always, that is the easiest question to spin into a blog topic. Had the weekend gone as planned, there wouldn’t have been a lot to say, other than that our friends from church had a nice baby shower for Heather, and that we don’t really have anything else on the calendar until the baby gets here.

As it happened, Heather wasn’t feeling great Saturday morning, but figured she could power through a little discomfort if she just laid down for a few minutes. An hour later, she threw up, and we thought maybe that was going to be the turning point to her feeling better, so she composed herself and headed to the shower.

When she got home several hours later, I learned that she had thrown up three or four more times, and was feeling much worse. Given that every day of pregnancy is uncharted for us, and she didn’t seem to be getting better, I contacted our doctor. Her advice was to take Heather in to the hospital “just so they can check on her”

We grabbed a few things and headed out the door. Once at the hospital I don’t actually know how much time they spent thinking about her symptoms before deciding to send her to the maternity area as I was parking the car. On the bright side, Heathers mom had been a guest at the shower, and was able to accompany us to the hospital, so I didn’t have to abandon Heather while finding a place to legally leave our vehicle.

I made it inside just in time to accompany Heather down to the maturity area, where they immediately hooked up monitors for her vitals and the baby, followed by an IV running at what the nurse described as a quick pace. Once all of that was in place the nurse told us they had been seeing a lot of the flu that  weekend, and that Heather should be fine once she got hydrated.

Four hours and two liters of IV fluid later, the nurse recommended that we spend the night, because Heather was still dehydrated. This meant that I needed to take Heather’s mom back to our place, and pickup a few overnight items for myself and Heather.

Once back in the hospital room, I discovered a few things: First, that the cot the nurse had so helpfully provided wasn’t very comfortable, Second that I was too tired to really care, and finally, that the monitor tracking our child somehow got turned up making the dominant sound in the room her heartbeat.

It was an interesting experience. I hope it’s the last time I ever fall asleep listening to her heartbeat, but at the same time it was rather reassuring.

By morning, Heather was feeling much better, and the doctor came in to look her over and gave us the all-clear to head home. We decided it was a good practice run for our “real” trip to the hospital coming up soon, given that we now know exactly where we need to go, and what items we should have brought (or a few more anyway).

 

-Jordan

 

Quick Hits

Posted on by Jordan

Five weeks left in the “Baby N” countdown…

Heather has a cold, and is starting to feel uncomfortably large. I think we both are a little worried that the remaining five weeks are going to feel very long.

I confiscated my first cell phone tonight! (Yay Scouting?)

I was in Nebraska last weekend looking for deer, but didn’t manage to cross paths with anything worth shooting at.

Meanwhile, Heather was in Florida participating in a wedding. To make a long story short, she did just fine, but wouldn’t advise unnecessary trips this late in the pregnancy game. The important part is, I suppose, that she and the baby are home safe, it was a beautiful wedding, and she really enjoyed herself while she was there.

-Jordan

Pumpkins (2012 Edition)

Posted on by Jordan

It’s been a surprisingly busy weekend here!

Friday night, Heather and I went with some friends to a special worship event put on by a church in the area. The theme was vaguely bluegrass, but it appears that just giving an electric guitar player a banjo doesn’t alter the style of the music as much as one might have expected. That being said, it was a fun evening, and they had a great worship team.

Saturday morning, Heather headed down to the capital to participate in the annual breast cancer awareness walk. She had a great time, and was happy to discover that her friends from the office were more than happy to set a pace that accommodates someone 32 weeks pregnant.

At the same time, I headed out to the building our church is slowly working to clean up for a new location. The good news with that project is that the demolition is nearly done, and the city has nearly figured out all the kinks in the permit issuance process. I still managed to get completely covered in cobwebs and dust in no time! It appears that we are going to clean by simply hauling dust out one shirt load at a time 🙂

Heather and I then met up to head to the Habitat “restore” to see about getting some flooring to use in building a photography studio style backdrop she had seen online. We found something that might work, along with some other odds and ends Heather thought might be useful.

When we got home, we proceeded to spend the next few hours cleaning up (this line may make a new low in mundane things I typed into the blog… ah well)

Some friends came over that night to carve pumpkins, and brought their newly born daughter!

Heather was happy to take breaks from carving to entertain her, and by the time the night was done I had managed to rock her to sleep in my arms for a while (the baby, not Heather)

As a small tangent we discovered that, for larger cuts, a “keyhole saw” is wildly superior to a knife! I also had rigged a handle onto a jigsaw blade, and we found it surprisingly easy to maneuver around the tight corners of our designs. The end results were something everyone was proud of, and I think that’s all we can ask for 🙂

Sunday nearly kept pace with how our weekend stared. After church, Heather had back-to-back photo sessions for friends, and then spent the evening working on her “Initials project” (more on that in an upcoming post!) I wasn’t quite as busy, but built stands for the backdrop we shopped for on Saturday, and finished prepping a bench thing we have such that it can be recovered.

I keep saying that the impending approach of the baby is going to slow our weekend pace down… so far it hasn’t, but there is still time I suppose 🙂

 

-Jordan

Around The House

Posted on by Jordan

There has been a remarkable lack of blog-worthy stuff going on around here as of late.

I have a project in-flight down in the garage, but that will have to wait until it wraps up.

Heather has been busy sorting through a wave of hand-me-down clothes for both her and “Baby N.” (“Baby N,”  by the way, whom has not been born and already has more clothes than I do… this is probably not a good trend)

We reorganized the closet in our office! It doesn’t get much more exciting than that does it?

On the other hand, we probably need to rest up, as nearly every weekend through the end of November has something scheduled, so surely I can manage a post or two out of that! 🙂

 

-Jordan

Zombies? And Other News

Posted on by Jordan

This past week was noteworthy in a few ways, but the headline event was the RRV “Zombaree ” that my Scout Troop attended.

I will continue with my policy of avoiding posting pictures of random other people on here, but you can find pictures of myself and the troop scattered in here, and a deep link to our troop and the bridge that they made here (hopefully that works)

The guys had a lot of fun at the camporee, ahem, zombaree although one could be forgiven if they forgot it was a zombie event… there was a notable lack of zombies. The weather couldn’t have been better and it’s hard to complain about camping on a perfect fall weekend.

I got to pretend to be scoutmaster for the camp out due to a parental shuffle that left the actual scoutmaster at home. I was luck in that the majority of the weekend was being run by the district guys, and we had enough of the veteran scouts in our troop to comfortably lead the troop without too much input.

It’s surprisingly hard to find that balance between letting a bad plan flounder and taking over when your job is very much not to take over. I can’t say that I did a great job of it, but I probably ended up on the side of letting things fall apart instead of jumping in, so maybe it was a change for the guys.

Other notables:

Heather is 28 weeks along! This is apparently a milestone in that if the baby were to come today, odds would be in her favor to make it. Obviously we would like her to wait another three months, but it’s nice to know shes making progress in there 🙂

Also, 28 weeks is when the mom-to-be gets to drink… “glucose-up”… or some near literally named sugar concoction in order to determine if she has pregnancy induced diabetes. We had lots of good news there, Heather isn’t diabetic, and she survived the sugar drink without a massively upset tummy (A frequent problem with her and sugar)

So to recap, no close encounters with the undead, nice weekend, healthy baby, healthy mom.

I think it’s been a good week!

-Jordan

Fall Is Near

Posted on by Jordan

I don’t quite know how it always manages to surprise me but it appears fall is here.

I know, it’s marked on the calendar, but I never pay attention to those dates, and they are generally wrong anyhow!

I headed out to Boone for another shooting competition (my 3rd ever) bright and early Saturday morning only to discover that my morning would be filled with numb fingers and some shivering between stages. Had I not forgotten about aiming on the last stage I would have been really happy with the trip, but the “missed target” time penalties really hurt.

Later in the day I got to listen to the Huskers on the radio and work in the garage on another project. I won’t be posting pictures of that one until I know it’s not going to be a total disaster… but it was something do to anyway 🙂

Sunday Heather and I headed to the International Food Festival. We did that event two years ago and, despite what that post said, we both remembered the food as being weird and not very good.

This year it was even more crowded, to the point where we often couldn’t continue down the street without waiting for the mob to unbind itself. The food was good this year, perhaps because we were less adventurous, but that does make for a better experience if somewhat less culturally exciting.

The previous week we attended the Latin American Festival, an event with slightly less food, and considerably more dancing. I didn’t take any pictures, but it was a fun event. We have some friends who are from Puerto Rico, and were excited to show us some of the items in the Puerto Rican area of the event.

As I mentioned at the top of the post, fall is unmistakeably here, so it’s probably good that we enjoyed being outside over the past few weekends. Between the encroaching cold, and Heather’s gradually reducing mobility our opportunities to enjoy being out and about are probably diminished for the near future.

-Jordan

99 Days…

Posted on by Jordan

If our baby hits her dates, she will be here in 99 days.

It’s a distressingly long, and short, time all in one!

Heather and I went to the Hospital to take our “accelerated” baby class a few days ago.

It was overwhelming to say the least. I was expecting to have too much information thrown at me, and maybe even to walk out concerned that I might not remember something critical.

As it turns out, those things weren’t an issue at all. Despite the quantity of information we felt it was fairly easy to absorb, and the instructors were very effective.

What I didn’t expect was to not know what to do with the information presented. After the fourth or fifth “raw from the delivery room” clip the nurse showed us I looked at Heather and thought “What did I get you into!?”

Heather seems to have been less intimidated by the presentation than I was… probably a good thing given her role in the process 🙂

While what we learned was generally speaking helpful and reassuring, the majority of it isn’t anything I will bother to recount here…

With one exception: Cold Sores

The nurse running the class was adamant that we understand that people with cold active sores not be allowed anywhere near infants. I don’t know if I had heard this before and forgotten, but apparently cold sores sometimes kill babies. That topic was one of the only times truly dire outcomes were discussed.

Beyond that downer piece of news, the class really did build up our comfort level and confidence that we will manage the birth of our child. It did thoroughly drive home the idea that the birthing process is in no way glamorous or dignified.

 

Sorry if this post ended up being somewhat rambling… I wanted to get the thoughts down before it went too long. Also, there would be a picture but, the obvious picture would be of Heather… and she isn’t really in the mood to have a pregnancy highlighting picture taken these days so, just imagine 😉

 

-Jordan

 

A Week At Home

Posted on by Jordan

This past week, like many weeks this summer, we didn’t go out of town. To be honest I have really enjoyed it. Once the baby comes we may feel like we don’t have a choice in the matter, and maybe I won’t feel the same way, but for now it is really relaxing.

This is not to say we were bored!

Heather and a neighbor who is also expecting around the same time attended some sort of baby themed open house at the hospital where both of them will be giving birth.

I shot in my second ever pistol match. Not particularly well, but I had fun.

Heather and I walked over to the mall to listen to the  Dueling Piano act that was playing in the little amphitheater area there.

It was a really nice way to spend Sunday evening!

The only other thing of note this week is that the construction across the street demonstrated what it looks like when you hit a water main:

We were only without water for a few hours, so I can’t complain too much 🙂

-Jordan