Today is my last day of maternity leave. I head back to my full Wednesday tomorrow. I don't feel ready, but such is life... I am enjoying my vacation.
My dad is here this week, and Anne and Lazarus are really enjoying him!
The fall colors are at their peak right now, and even though I am sad about the early nights, the colors are beautiful.
My kids have never done Halloween before but this year Anne has decided to go trick or treating. We put together a super cute bat costume for her from her closet, a wee bit of Goodwill shopping, and a quick hand sew.
My two big kids are getting flu shots today, then we are going to the Carpinito pumpkin patch for our last October hurrah.
Three years ago today I we lost our second baby.
Shopping for a space heater online for my out back mini studio. The tiny space heater which came with the house isn'y going to cut it now.
Jared and I have written over 400 letters to registered voters to remind them about next week's election. Today I deliver them to the post office.
I have gotten back to running, just a mile or so at a time.
That's a few updates from our corner of the world.
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Sunday, October 28, 2018
House Year
It was a year ago yesterday that we got the keys to our house. After a two-month wait to close, we didn't know if we were going to get it. And then it was ours, and Jared and his parents did a shocking amount of work on it in the month before we moved in. What a whirlwind! Good thing we didn't have a new baby at that same time, too. The work has continued over the year and is far from done.
To recap, here is what has happened so far:
Chimney demoed
Flooring replaced underneath
Wood floors sanded and refinished
70s mirror demoed
Sheetrock on living room wall
Sheetrock on several ceilings
All of that floated, taped, and painted
Both bedrooms painted
Five doors demoed and replaced and painted
Two outdoor sets of step demoed and replaced and water sealed
Baseboards and interior door trim demoed, painted, and replaced
New heating vents
Insulation of heating ducts under the house
Foundation stabilized
Kitchen cabinets painted
Gutters and downspouts on garage replaced
Storage room painted and furnished to resemble teaching studio
Sand box dug
Plants put into yard
Planter box built
Curtains made for kitchen and laundry and three closet openings
Curtains put in eight windows
Random screws and junk taken out of the walls and trim
Moved in
Offloaded lots of stuff
Got rugs and furniture from Craigslist and elsewhere (six rugs, rug pads, sleeper sofa, baby tub, bathroom shelving, five sound panels, wooden table and three chairs, kids outdoor plastic table and four chairs, chest of drawers...)
Built pot rack
Fixed the floor of the bathroom closet
Put sliders or felt or tennis balls on the feet of all the furniture
Some exterior window frames painted
Back sidewalk dug out
I probably missed a few things there. LOTS more to do. It was a fixer. And we bought it for its potential, not its current usefulness. Onward!
To recap, here is what has happened so far:
Chimney demoed
Flooring replaced underneath
Wood floors sanded and refinished
70s mirror demoed
Sheetrock on living room wall
Sheetrock on several ceilings
All of that floated, taped, and painted
Both bedrooms painted
Five doors demoed and replaced and painted
Two outdoor sets of step demoed and replaced and water sealed
Baseboards and interior door trim demoed, painted, and replaced
New heating vents
Insulation of heating ducts under the house
Foundation stabilized
Kitchen cabinets painted
Gutters and downspouts on garage replaced
Storage room painted and furnished to resemble teaching studio
Sand box dug
Plants put into yard
Planter box built
Curtains made for kitchen and laundry and three closet openings
Curtains put in eight windows
Random screws and junk taken out of the walls and trim
Moved in
Offloaded lots of stuff
Got rugs and furniture from Craigslist and elsewhere (six rugs, rug pads, sleeper sofa, baby tub, bathroom shelving, five sound panels, wooden table and three chairs, kids outdoor plastic table and four chairs, chest of drawers...)
Built pot rack
Fixed the floor of the bathroom closet
Put sliders or felt or tennis balls on the feet of all the furniture
Some exterior window frames painted
Back sidewalk dug out
I probably missed a few things there. LOTS more to do. It was a fixer. And we bought it for its potential, not its current usefulness. Onward!
Monday, October 15, 2018
October Baby
We have a new daughter! Anne has been praying for a sister pretty much since her brother was born. And for the third time we decided not to find out the baby's sex ahead of time. I've guessed boy all three times, but ESPECIALLY this time, so I was in total shock after the birth that she was a girl! We are all delighted, of course!
I didn't think I'd make it to my due date, since I never have before, and the week before my due date, I pretty much tried to wrap up my lessons in a way that my students would be prepared to work without me for a few weeks. But then there was no baby yet... The day *after* my due date, in the morning, I could feel things shifting around inside of me, and I knew it was my last day of teaching for the week, so I tried to sit very still most of the day. And after my teaching was done I took the kids out for a long walk around the neighborhood in the double stroller. And my labor started slowly and quietly....
...She arrived in the wee hours of Saturday morning, October 6th, and we named her Laurel Ruth. We came to her name from a short list we'd had for a while, just in time to be released from the hospital Sunday. Laurel is, of course, a beautiful flower, and I thought it would be nice to have a nature name. And it also makes me think of the victor's wreaths mentioned in the New Testament. Ruth is my grandmother's middle name, which I also share.
We made it through Phase 0.5 where Jared's parents took care of the kids day and night while we were at the hospital. Now we have made it through Phase 1, which was the week neither Jared nor I taught. Today we start Phase 2, where Jared teaches for two weeks and I work toward stabilizing our new family system. I will pop out of seclusion twice on Thursdays for 30 minutes for my part of violin group classes in our living room.
After that we will have two weeks of Phase 3 where we have a relative in town to help and I teach two full days each week...
And then Phase 4, which is the normal schedule and seems totally impossible from my vantage point right now.
For those of you who actually like all the medical stuff, read on after the pictures. For those of you who'd rather not know, stop now.
*******
Friday morning, after the slow quiet labor had gone all night, *mostly* sleep-through-able, and just a few minutes after I finished my Bible study discussion online (a real God-send this year, for sure!) my water broke, but still things were pretty slow. We started getting childcare lined up (Jeff to pick up Anne from school... Jared's parents to start driving from Oregon...) and called the midwives. They said I could come in to get checked. So we made it over to the hospital late afternoon.
The midwife on call (whom I had seen the most this pregnancy! and really liked!) said there was meconium in the fluid, which meant potential distress for the baby, so I should go across the hall to Labor and Delivery to check in right away. And still, I was experiencing VERY sporadic and mild contractions. Nothing much to write home about. And showing up at the hospital, predictably, slowed everything down.
Since this was VBAC, the hospital required me to have an IV line ready at all times and to be on continuous fetal monitoring. Thankfully, they have a wireless (albeit bulky and annoying to carry around) system, so I was able to wear the monitors and walk the halls as much as I wanted. The IV line was more of a problem. Although I was very intentional about drinking as much water as possible, the first two nurses couldn't get a line in on their three collective tries, so they had to call the anesthesiologist. And even HE failed on the first try. Second try worked, and predictably, later in the evening, they decided they needed a second line for me, so they called the anesthesiologist again, and it was a different person on call. He managed on the first try. So I had really irritating needles hanging out the back of both hands which were now cold and swollen and pretty much useless. My fantastic nurse put heat packs on them, thankfully. Plus I had four more bruises on my arms from my time as a pincushion.
Jared and I walked the halls of Labor and Delivery for a while, and I was still experiencing VERY manageable and frankly, boring, labor. Midwife decided to check me despite the broken water, and I was a 5. Which is theoretically active labor. But it seemed like I had barely labored at all in terms of pain and frequency. Fine! I'll take it!
The nurse suggested some exercises to get things going. So I did those for 45 minutes and walked the halls some more. And the midwife checked me and I was a 7. Which is theoretically transition. Which is the time when people loose their heads and throw up and all that. And I was totally fine, and rarely uncomfortable and it seemed like nothing was happening. The midwife suggested trying to knock the rest of the water out of the sack, so she tried that.
The nurse suggested I get in the tub. I sat in there for two hours, and frankly got bored out of my skull. Jared and I were both exhausted because it was quite late at night now. He was sitting on the sofa, and I was in this fancy spa jacuzzi just hanging out waiting for something to happen. They added some pitocin to my line to see if that could help things move along. It was my choice. They said I could just keep going as I was at that point, but if I were in labor longer than X amount of time at the hospital, because of the meconium in the fluid, they'd have to keep the baby for 48 hours. Didn't seem like the best plan for anyone in our family.
Eventually the nurse came in and said that the baby's heart rate was going down during contractions, so I should get out of the tub so that they could do something quickly if they needed to. Finally, after another half hour or so, the pitocin seemed to kick in, and things started to get pretty intense and increasingly painful. And I got the shakes. Because of the meconium issue, they had to get extra medical personnel in the room for the delivery to check the baby right away. And it's a good thing they were there, because the baby's heart rate went WAY down, and they were rotating me around between contractions trying to get the placenta to deliver more oxygen, and they put me on an oxygen mask, and when I started pushing, it wasn't going as quickly as it needed to. It took about 30 seconds for the lead doctor who showed up to get on her scrubs while simultaneously informing me that the baby was in danger and we were going to try a vacuum extraction, and we had basically one shot at that, and if it didn't work, we were going straight to the OR for a C-section. After making it this far and already having pushed the baby partway out, I was NOT up for surgery. If that had been suggested before I'd labored, I might have gone for it... I was at the point where for the last 30 minutes I pretty much had to repeatedly yell with all my might into the oxygen mask that I was about to die, and was wondering what ever possessed me to give birth, all while not caring how many random people were seeing me nude at my lowest moment (while the amazing nurse and midwife kept telling me I was doing a good job). Anyway, thankfully!!! the vacuum extraction worked (and I gave as much assistance as I could muster!) and in less than a minute, out popped a baby girl at 2:22 am. I did not die. Although I felt like I would. The cause for her heart rate problems became clear, as the cord was tangled all around her. We had planned on delayed cord clamping and having the midwife ask Jared if he'd like to cut the cord, but let me tell you that doctor was going to town with scissors cutting cord off every part of the baby at high speed. The baby was immediately inspected... and was totally fine, thank God! So she spent the next almost hour lounging on me nursing, and then after that, she got diapered and swaddled, and Jared got to spend an hour holding her in the rocking chair, happily awake and alert. The midwife said unmedicated babies are so much more alert after birth, and I can tell you there is not a lot of reason to skip the epidural except for that sort of thing.
She was 7 lbs. 13 oz. and 20.25 inches long - my biggest baby for sure. And I outgrew more clothes than ever before, as well.
Birth, it turns out, has been a shockingly violent experience for me. Not violent in terms of being attacked, but violent and relentless, like the ocean pounding on the rocks, like suffocating, like nearly dying of natural causes. I like to read these sort of hippie home-birth, birth-is-beautiful, I-caught-my-own-baby types of things, but sadly that has not been my experience at all...
The first few days of recovery were tough. I was so swollen it was hard to sit down or stand up, and I felt ridiculously weak and anemic, like I might pass out if I stood up longer than three minutes. But Thursday I turned a corner and felt up to walking around the block in the glorious sunshine. We are definitely on the upswing, and Anne and Lazarus are getting used to having a newborn sister quite admirably. There is a lot of nursing going on between my two little ones, and lots of diaper changing between the two of them. And Lazarus is too little to be consistently gentle with her, so there is a lot of monitoring going on. Sleeping at night, though, is far better than it was during the last few months of pregnancy, so that is wonderful!
I didn't think I'd make it to my due date, since I never have before, and the week before my due date, I pretty much tried to wrap up my lessons in a way that my students would be prepared to work without me for a few weeks. But then there was no baby yet... The day *after* my due date, in the morning, I could feel things shifting around inside of me, and I knew it was my last day of teaching for the week, so I tried to sit very still most of the day. And after my teaching was done I took the kids out for a long walk around the neighborhood in the double stroller. And my labor started slowly and quietly....
...She arrived in the wee hours of Saturday morning, October 6th, and we named her Laurel Ruth. We came to her name from a short list we'd had for a while, just in time to be released from the hospital Sunday. Laurel is, of course, a beautiful flower, and I thought it would be nice to have a nature name. And it also makes me think of the victor's wreaths mentioned in the New Testament. Ruth is my grandmother's middle name, which I also share.
We made it through Phase 0.5 where Jared's parents took care of the kids day and night while we were at the hospital. Now we have made it through Phase 1, which was the week neither Jared nor I taught. Today we start Phase 2, where Jared teaches for two weeks and I work toward stabilizing our new family system. I will pop out of seclusion twice on Thursdays for 30 minutes for my part of violin group classes in our living room.
After that we will have two weeks of Phase 3 where we have a relative in town to help and I teach two full days each week...
And then Phase 4, which is the normal schedule and seems totally impossible from my vantage point right now.
For those of you who actually like all the medical stuff, read on after the pictures. For those of you who'd rather not know, stop now.
 |
| Jared and his dad constructed new steps for the mini-studio before coming to pick us up at the hospital on Sunday. Impressive! |
 |
| Laurel came home in the same monkey suit Anne and Lazarus came home in. |
 |
| She looks a lot like baby Anne. |
 |
| First outting as Ballance Party of 5 - Carpinito farm market |
*******
Friday morning, after the slow quiet labor had gone all night, *mostly* sleep-through-able, and just a few minutes after I finished my Bible study discussion online (a real God-send this year, for sure!) my water broke, but still things were pretty slow. We started getting childcare lined up (Jeff to pick up Anne from school... Jared's parents to start driving from Oregon...) and called the midwives. They said I could come in to get checked. So we made it over to the hospital late afternoon.
The midwife on call (whom I had seen the most this pregnancy! and really liked!) said there was meconium in the fluid, which meant potential distress for the baby, so I should go across the hall to Labor and Delivery to check in right away. And still, I was experiencing VERY sporadic and mild contractions. Nothing much to write home about. And showing up at the hospital, predictably, slowed everything down.
Since this was VBAC, the hospital required me to have an IV line ready at all times and to be on continuous fetal monitoring. Thankfully, they have a wireless (albeit bulky and annoying to carry around) system, so I was able to wear the monitors and walk the halls as much as I wanted. The IV line was more of a problem. Although I was very intentional about drinking as much water as possible, the first two nurses couldn't get a line in on their three collective tries, so they had to call the anesthesiologist. And even HE failed on the first try. Second try worked, and predictably, later in the evening, they decided they needed a second line for me, so they called the anesthesiologist again, and it was a different person on call. He managed on the first try. So I had really irritating needles hanging out the back of both hands which were now cold and swollen and pretty much useless. My fantastic nurse put heat packs on them, thankfully. Plus I had four more bruises on my arms from my time as a pincushion.
Jared and I walked the halls of Labor and Delivery for a while, and I was still experiencing VERY manageable and frankly, boring, labor. Midwife decided to check me despite the broken water, and I was a 5. Which is theoretically active labor. But it seemed like I had barely labored at all in terms of pain and frequency. Fine! I'll take it!
The nurse suggested some exercises to get things going. So I did those for 45 minutes and walked the halls some more. And the midwife checked me and I was a 7. Which is theoretically transition. Which is the time when people loose their heads and throw up and all that. And I was totally fine, and rarely uncomfortable and it seemed like nothing was happening. The midwife suggested trying to knock the rest of the water out of the sack, so she tried that.
The nurse suggested I get in the tub. I sat in there for two hours, and frankly got bored out of my skull. Jared and I were both exhausted because it was quite late at night now. He was sitting on the sofa, and I was in this fancy spa jacuzzi just hanging out waiting for something to happen. They added some pitocin to my line to see if that could help things move along. It was my choice. They said I could just keep going as I was at that point, but if I were in labor longer than X amount of time at the hospital, because of the meconium in the fluid, they'd have to keep the baby for 48 hours. Didn't seem like the best plan for anyone in our family.
Eventually the nurse came in and said that the baby's heart rate was going down during contractions, so I should get out of the tub so that they could do something quickly if they needed to. Finally, after another half hour or so, the pitocin seemed to kick in, and things started to get pretty intense and increasingly painful. And I got the shakes. Because of the meconium issue, they had to get extra medical personnel in the room for the delivery to check the baby right away. And it's a good thing they were there, because the baby's heart rate went WAY down, and they were rotating me around between contractions trying to get the placenta to deliver more oxygen, and they put me on an oxygen mask, and when I started pushing, it wasn't going as quickly as it needed to. It took about 30 seconds for the lead doctor who showed up to get on her scrubs while simultaneously informing me that the baby was in danger and we were going to try a vacuum extraction, and we had basically one shot at that, and if it didn't work, we were going straight to the OR for a C-section. After making it this far and already having pushed the baby partway out, I was NOT up for surgery. If that had been suggested before I'd labored, I might have gone for it... I was at the point where for the last 30 minutes I pretty much had to repeatedly yell with all my might into the oxygen mask that I was about to die, and was wondering what ever possessed me to give birth, all while not caring how many random people were seeing me nude at my lowest moment (while the amazing nurse and midwife kept telling me I was doing a good job). Anyway, thankfully!!! the vacuum extraction worked (and I gave as much assistance as I could muster!) and in less than a minute, out popped a baby girl at 2:22 am. I did not die. Although I felt like I would. The cause for her heart rate problems became clear, as the cord was tangled all around her. We had planned on delayed cord clamping and having the midwife ask Jared if he'd like to cut the cord, but let me tell you that doctor was going to town with scissors cutting cord off every part of the baby at high speed. The baby was immediately inspected... and was totally fine, thank God! So she spent the next almost hour lounging on me nursing, and then after that, she got diapered and swaddled, and Jared got to spend an hour holding her in the rocking chair, happily awake and alert. The midwife said unmedicated babies are so much more alert after birth, and I can tell you there is not a lot of reason to skip the epidural except for that sort of thing.
She was 7 lbs. 13 oz. and 20.25 inches long - my biggest baby for sure. And I outgrew more clothes than ever before, as well.
Birth, it turns out, has been a shockingly violent experience for me. Not violent in terms of being attacked, but violent and relentless, like the ocean pounding on the rocks, like suffocating, like nearly dying of natural causes. I like to read these sort of hippie home-birth, birth-is-beautiful, I-caught-my-own-baby types of things, but sadly that has not been my experience at all...
The first few days of recovery were tough. I was so swollen it was hard to sit down or stand up, and I felt ridiculously weak and anemic, like I might pass out if I stood up longer than three minutes. But Thursday I turned a corner and felt up to walking around the block in the glorious sunshine. We are definitely on the upswing, and Anne and Lazarus are getting used to having a newborn sister quite admirably. There is a lot of nursing going on between my two little ones, and lots of diaper changing between the two of them. And Lazarus is too little to be consistently gentle with her, so there is a lot of monitoring going on. Sleeping at night, though, is far better than it was during the last few months of pregnancy, so that is wonderful!
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