From Wit’s End

“…That will turn my life around
Change that will put my feet on the ground
Change that will make everything okay.“

…but meanwhile, here’s the latest Facebook archive.

…of a recursive blog post. This is about the latest Facebook archive page posted here, and also about testing to see if I can automatically post to Facebook by just writing on this blog. Confused yet?

…six words I would have never thought belonged consecutively in a sentence five years ago.

I poured all the bags and drawers of my legos, sorted meticulously by color and shape years ago and left in the closet, all into one big plastic box for Jack. It will help spark some creativity probably, but alas for the entropy! Rachel said, “Don’t worry, he’ll probably want to organize them when he’s seven or eight.” Ouch! Five or six years of utter Lego disorganization. The things I do for my son…

…or a “ca-pitter”, as he calls it.

She slept through the night for the first time last night!

I got an unusual call this morning on my cellphone for Rachel’s Dad, who was visiting Baby Nora for the first time with Rachel’s Mom and little brother Nik. I handed the phone off to my father-in-law with nary a second thought.

A minute later, he was freaking out. Their house burned down last night. That’s the sort of sentence that you can’t help but read at least twice, but it is true. The rest of the morning was spent trying to get as much information from a distance as possible. Rachel’s sister Beka was on the scene fairly quickly, and they also got a good bit of support from their church and neighbors. Over time, we found out that the fire started with some creosote in the chimney, even though they hadn’t had a fire in their wood stove for about three days. Also, both dogs survived and were found, though both are shaken and one got burned on his face pretty badly.

We were thankful that we could love them through the worst of the shock today. We were in the middle of making Rachel’s Family’s traditional Valentine’s day breakfast when the news came in: Peanut butter french toast in the shape of hearts, pineapple rings, bacon, and parfaits made with frosted flakes, cherry pie filling, and vanilla ice cream. Rachel and I roused ourselves from our melancholy after a while and finished preparing these things, and we sat down to “breakfast” at around 11:30am. By the end of the meal, Rachel’s folks were beginning to make wry comments about the situation, and everyone was feeling a little better with food in their stomachs. Rachel’s sister Jennifer took them clothes shopping, and we had dinner at her house this evening with a few mutual friends from church.

All in all, it was a very surreal day but it ended tolerably well. Indeed, the whole situation could have been a lot worse. In their house, the wood stove had been at the foot of the stairs to the second floor, where Rachel’s little brother Nik usually slept. If they had been home when this happened, it would have been highly likely that someone would gotten seriously hurt or even killed. As it is now, we all have a lot to be thankful for. Rachel’s family got many offers for a place to stay from families in their church, and her dad’s work associates will be putting together a collection for them. They’ve often talked about building a house on a more scenic part of their property, and now Rachel’s Mom can get the new kitchen that she wanted but couldn’t do without the old kitchen long enough to get. You never want something like this to happen, but the love that can flow in the aftermath of such a tragedy is truly a wonderful sight to behold.

This was my first day back to work after Nora was born. I went to an associate’s desk to catch up, and he asked me if I had heard about the All Hands meeting that was held the other day. Another one? Yep. This one outlined the NAFTA-wide austerity measures that the corporation will be rolling out starting March 1st:

• an across the board 5% cut in pay for everyone,
• a termination of 401k matching for the rest of the year,
• and the company is telling everyone when to take their vacation days. If one’s PTO gets used up, then the mandatory days off will be unpaid leave.

So that was nice to hear on my first day back. I was kind of thankful that I had only come in for a half day.

In the afternoon, I drove Rachel and Baby Nora to Baby Nora’s first doctor’s appointment. Jack fell asleep in the car, of course. Instead of wake him up, I carried his entire car seat into the doctor’s office, propped it back against the wall with some seat cushions, and let him sleep comfortably while I filled out Baby Nora’s doctor paperwork, fiddled around on my iPhone, and generally tried to not reel from the bad news of the morning. I pulled my health insurance card out of my wallet so that the office assistant could make a copy of it, and then stuck it in my pocket when they gave it back. Jack slept the whole time Rachel and Nora were with the doctor, and also while I carried him back to the car. He only just stirred as I was pulling out of the medical center parking garage.

When we came home we all assumed our newly-typical positions. Rachel nursed Nora on the couch, Jack was playing in his room, and I sat down to the computer. I think I may have thought about buying something online, but when I felt for my wallet, it wasn’t there. I got a little frantic, and after a while Rachel called the doctor’s office. They hadn’t seen a wallet. When it occurred to me that I could possibly have dropped it in the parking garage somehow, I decided to drive back to the medical park (Yes, without my driver’s license. I did the speed limit the whole way.) I checked the parking garage floor, walked into the doctor’s office, searched to no avail, and the office lady called the medical park security officer, and I filed a report with her. I went home feeling pretty bad (but still doing the speed limit), and I decided there was nothing else to do but cancel all my cards and figure out how to get a new driver’s license. Thankfully, there is a DMV office open in Lexington on Saturday, and my Mom offered to drive me over there the next and take Jack with so that Rachel could feed Nora undisturbed.

So yes, it was a pretty bad day.

I was trying out the new facial recognition feature on iPhoto, and practically fell out of my chair giggling when I saw this:

Rachel’s folks sent these flowers. Check out the Bible verse for a laugh.

Wow, that was fast! She only took about five minutes to go from seven to ten cm dilation. And she only had to push twice!

Baby Nora was born at 12:11pm.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

The contractions are more regular (about every 2.5 minutes) and more intense now. Rachel is starting to do her Lamaze breathing.

She is also eating a red popsicle.

Contractions are about two or three minutes apart now, and Rachel is actually finding it more comfortable to stand up.

Contractions are about four minutes apart, and Rachel is as cool as a cucumber. The only thing bothering at the moment is that the Fox News Channel keeps going back to covering today’s free breakfast promotion at Denny’s.

Per grandmotherly request, the time is now shown on each post. I was pleasantly surprised that I found the WordPress syntax to make that change, and I was pleasantly unsurprised that it was so easy to do it on the iPhone. (Enter gushing Apple fanboy statement here. )

Which is different from last time, when things were so weird and fast that the doula never saw us.

The internal sensors were put in and are showing some mild contractions, but Rachel isn’t feeling very much yet. She is laying quietly and watching TV.

He said Rachel’s platelets were at 128, so that’s good. The next thing they’ll do is give her some Pitocin and make Rachel’s water break.

We have arrived at Lexington Medical Center, and Rachel has changed onto her hospital gown. The room is a lot bigger than last time.

…and “D” is for daughter!

The doctor scheduled our induction for 5am. [journalist voice] And we will be covering it live and exclusively right here, so tune in bright and early. [end journalist voice]

Since I’ve been refreshing this site, I noticed that all the banner pictures are at least a year old, so I just added six more from late 2008. If you want to see them, you’ll just have to reload the site over and over again until they all come up through the banner randomizer. Why? Because it’s fun, and it boosts my website-hit-driven ego, that’s why.

Rejoice! I have retroactively applied logical categories and emotional tags on all the posts for this blog. At this moment, here are the top three of each:

Categories:
1. Reality – 120 posts
2. Thoughts – 89 posts
3. Family – 83 posts

Tags:
1. hooray! – 25 posts
2. funny – 23 posts
3. cool – 15 posts

May we continue to cheer for reality, have funny thoughts, and enjoy our cool family.

No news is good news from Rachel’s doctor.  We weren’t told a number, but we weren’t told that she had to be induced, either.   So she’s going in for another blood test on Friday.

On a completely unrelated note, this is our 400th post on this blog!  That’s an average of about 50 posts a year, which is a fairly respectable average rate of almost weekly.  That said, my posting rate is sure to spike in the “Nora future” near future.

The results from Rachel’s blood test from last Friday are in: her platelet count was at 126. She had her blood sampled again today. The doctor’s office will call her with the results again tomorrow. If they have moved down again significantly, then she will probably be induced this week. Stay tuned…

Rachel had her blood taken this past Monday, so that the doctor could monitor her platelet count.  Since low platelets were a symptom of the complications that she had during Jack’s delivery, this number will apparently be a useful gauge of when it may be necessary to take action this time.

She heard about the results of this blood test today: her platelet count was at 140 on Monday.  The doctor told her that he would have her induced if that number went below 100.  He wants her to get the same blood-work done again tomorrow, so that we can keep good tabs on this number.  As an engineer, I can appreciate it when these things can be quantified.

We woke up to gloomy rain coming from the sky and doomy news coming from the radio this morning. Jack is almost potty trained, but not quite, and managed to sol his underwear this morning. Poopy.

I came home at lunch to pick up something and found a nice dogpile that Katdog left in the kitchen. Poopy.

I got home from work in the evening, and Rachel told me that Jack had gotten his pants dirty two more times that afternoon. Poopy.

Trying to help out a little bit after dinner, I advanced the laundry from hamper to washer and another load from washer to dryer. When I pulled the laundry out of the dryer at about ten o’clock, I found brown streaks all over the clothes and the inside of the dryer. Poopy?

It turns out that when I had moved the laundry from the washer to the dryer, some of it fell on the floor. When I picked it up to put it in the dryer, I accidentally picked up a pair of Jack’s soiled pants that Rachel had hurriedly left there in the afternoon. Poopy!

I told Rachel about it, and we figured out what happened. She graciously offered to clean out the dryer with bleach water, and I reloaded the spoiked laundry back into the washer with an extra soak cycle. We finally got to turn out the lights at eleven o’clock. I can’t say for sure, but hopefully tomorrow won’t be quite so… Poopy.