Happy Monday! We thought a quick update would be warranted since we had another "baby appointment" this morning. We got two thumbs up from our midwife - weight is good (both me and the baby), size appropriate, baby’s heartbeat is strong and clear at 130-135 bpm and we’re otherwise on track at 17 and a half weeks! Yay! We also made our 20-week ultrasound appointment for February 21st, so we have that to look forward to! We’ll be sure to keep you updated…
Monthly Archive for January, 2005
*NOTE: Since we do not yet have a child to fill our lives with excitement and interesting things to write about, you must all be subjected to similar stories involving our DOG.
It was a dark and stormy night… oh wait, no, it was this past Friday afternoon. I was at Bill’s house helping him load up the tools and supplies we’d need to work on his cabin in Northwoods, NE of Cougar, Washington. We packed the back of his pickup truck with all the necessities, including very long pieces of lumber that stuck out of the back of the canopy window, leaving just enough room for Beau to sit for the hour and a half drive. With everything loaded except the dog, I collected Beau and tossed him in his spot. Since the lumber stuck out of the canopy, the window would not close, so I strung two bungee cords in an ‘X’ across the opening in a vain attempt to discourage the dog from jumping out. Beau has never ridden in an ‘open’ environment in a car, but he has also never expressed any desire to jump from a moving vehicle!
And so goes the story. We headed away from the house, slowly, since Old Germantown Road is very narrow and full of sharp switchbacks. In the first minute of the ride I probably looked back on Beau from the cab two or three times and all was well. Bill and I were busy talking until the road was about the intersect with Germantown Road proper. I once again look back at Beau quickly, and then turned my head to face the front again… wait… Did I see Beau? I looked back again, and sure enough, no Beau! Oh my God… last week my husband tried to die on me, and now my dog has attempted suicide by jumping out of this moving truck!!!
I tried to remember the last place I had looked back to check on him, but couldn’t exactly remember. We turned the truck around and started to backtrack to the house. I was sure that we’d find his mangled, badly injured little body lying on the side of the road. We drove all the way back to the house, thinking that maybe he’d made his way back there. Nope… worse than a mangled dog, we didn’t find ANY dog! We drove away from the house again, and roughly where I last remembered looking at Beau in the back of the truck, I got out to walk on foot while Bill drove to the top of the road again. (I had also called Patrick and Chad at this point, to encourage them to head our way to help us look for the suicide attempting dog) So I’m calling Beau’s name and whistling for him, but no doggy was to be found. I started thinking, ok, he’s got his collar on, and that has his county ID tag and rabies tag, and he’s microchipped, so if someone picks him up they’ll be able to track us down, right? Boy, am I glad we sprung for that microchip!
At just about that point, Bill’s truck came round the bend, and I give him the shoulder shrug and a disappointed and confused look - and then I see Beau’s black and white head and pink tongue peeking over the dashboard. Bill had found him! Where the hell was he?!?! Bill said he was just sitting on the side of the road as if simply waiting for our imminent return. Needless to say, he got to sit at my feet in the cab for the rest of the ride. He wasn’t hurt, thank goodness, but he was rather sheepish and very mellow for the rest of the weekend (very out of character if you know Beau). I think he gave himself a good scare (and me!) and I don’t plan on putting him in anything but a hermetically sealed truck ever again!
The end.
P.S. I’m SO grateful that my two recent stories have had happy endings… let’s just hope that doesn’t change, eh?
I feel as though I have calmed down sufficiently to tell our Tale of Terror that occurred this past Friday evening. Patrick and I were having a lovely and uneventful evening after having decided to stay home and watch a couple of rented DVD’s. After roughly four hours of movies (the content and names of which I do not recall), we headed upstairs to proceed with our pre-bedtime rituals (tooth brushing, face washing, etc.). I was a step ahead of Patrick and had gotten into bed and was applying lotion to my hands while Patrick proceeded with his twice-weekly injection of Enbrel that he takes for psoriatic arthritis. This is a procedure he has successfully completed for the past year or so. Our peaceful evening quickly took a turn at this point. Out of my peripheral vision, I see 200lbs of man falling straight back onto the bedroom floor, head first. Did that just happen? Ohmigod! I turn my head only to see my husband lying flat out on his back, not moving, staring wide eyed at the ceiling, chest heaving violently as he seemed to wheeze and gasp for air. I have not moved a muscle at this point, except to turn my head toward him and inhale sharply. I tried to cry out his name, but what came out was some slurred and incomprehensible sound resembling nothing close to his name. I tried again with the same result as I leapt from the bed to kneel at his side. I finally get his name out successfully, but there is no response from him. His eyes stared wide and vacant right through me. At this point I cannot seem to process what is happening. All I am experiencing is shear terror and desperation. After shaking him and getting no response, I am at least content that he is obviously breathing, so I fly across the room to the phone beside the bed. I fumbled at least a half dozen times trying to dial 9-1-1 and finally the line was ringing. “Do you need police or fire?” comes the detached voice. I respond with a flurry of frantic connected words describing what has happened (or rather what I have observed, since I had NO idea what was going on or why) – all while thoughts raced through my head… What if he DIES right here in front of me?… How am I going to raise this child alone?… What if he turns out a vegetable because I don’t remember CPR training from my life guarding days?… What if…. What if… What if…. Patrick stopped breathing. I thought my heart would stop instantly and I would just lie down and die right beside him. I tell the woman he has stopped breathing, while she is asking if the front door is unlocked for the paramedics. Door, what door? My husband has stopped breathing!!! Maybe three more seconds pass and as though waking startled from a dream, Patrick suddenly comes back to life, puts a hand on my leg, recognizes the utter terror in my eyes, and says, “what’s wrong babe? Are you ok? What’s going on?” The woman on the other end of the phone is asking if he’s conscious and talking and is still insisting I go unlock the damn door! She is simultaneously instructing me not to let Patrick get up off the floor as he may have injured himself when he fell back on his head… and as she’s telling me this, Patrick is making his way to his knees. I finally hang up with the 9-1-1 lady and help a very pale, almost literally green looking, Patrick to the bed to sit. As I do so, there is a knock at the front door. I run downstairs to let the paramedics in and show them the way to the bedroom. Trembling and sweating (literally in physical shock at this point) I try to describe to the medics what has happened while they go about checking his vital signs, etc. Blood pressure – fine. Blood sugar – fine. Reflexes and pupil dilation – fine. Back of his head – fine. Literally everything checked out fine… until they asked him how old he was. He shrugged his shoulders. Date? Blank stare. Who’s the president? Nothing. So the medics decide maybe he’s not quite as well as he appeared. They insist on taking him for an ambulance ride to the ER to make sure that everything is really ok. They load Patrick up while I throw some clothes on and rush to my car to follow the ambulance. (At this point I woke Heather and Barney up with a panicked call at 12:30pm to let them know what was happening… and promised to call them back when we had some answers) In Room 10 at the St. Vincent’s emergency room, the nurses and resident MD do all the same tests all over again and take what seemed like a gallon of blood from Patrick’s right arm. Lot’s of waiting. An EKG is ordered and we wait our turn. While waiting, some of the fog had cleared from Patrick’s mind and he was recalling the events leading up to his blackout. He remembered choosing the spot in his stomach to administer the injection, inserted the injection but “hit something kinda chunky” which hurt and made him instantly nauseous. Instead of pulling the needle out and doing the injection somewhere else, he just pushed the needle in and administered the contents of the vial. He remembered completing the shot, though it was far more painful than usual, and as he removed the needle and set it on the counter, his vision tunneled… then black. EKG, normal. Diagnosis: Vasovagal Syncope. In layman’s terms: he fainted. So, at the end of this ordeal, I felt as though I had aged a minimum of 15 years in the span of 5 minutes. I had experienced genuine, life-altering terror like nothing my 26 years had yet shown me. I had had visions of a husbandless life, and a fatherless child. I had realized just how desperately in love with Patrick I truly am. You cannot adequately describe the utter terror and fear experienced when you are convinced that you are witnessing the last breaths of the man you love. It’s something I never wanted to know, and never hope to feel again. The experience has left a deep emotional mark on my psyche, while all Patrick has is a bump on his head. Fortunately, everything has turned out fine… he simply fainted. Thank goodness for small miracles.
I’m sure everyone is sick of me posting that I’ve added new photos… but it’s been happening in a very irregular way and least of all in order of event or date. So please be patient with me as I’ve added photos to both Lindsay’s birthday gallery AND the January gallery with our trip to Washington. I’m afraid that if I don’t let you know there are new pictures, you won’t go and look… so enjoy!
I just realized that Heather has posted the photos that they took during Linsday’s party and I thought I’d link to them here so that you can view those too! Enjoy!
So I would like to think that Lindsay’s first birthday party was a success! Many thanks to the eager attendees who were great sports while I played CD’s full of children’s songs and nursery rhymes! After about three songs, the contents of those CD’s are enough to make a grown person want to jump off a bridge. But music aside, the company was great, the food was good, and Linsday was spoiled rotten! She ended the evening with enough clothing to outfit a toddler army for the next six months and several books that mommy will have memorized in no time from reading them to her night after night after night… I’ve posted the digital photos that Patrick and I took over the course of the evening, with more photos to follow tomorrow hopefully. I know Lindsay won’t remember any of her first birthday experience, but all of us grown ups will, and we’ll have the pictures and tales to share with her someday! Congrats to Lindsay on successfully completing her first year of life… only 99 more to go, and counting!
I finally found all the cables and attachments I needed to download the photos off of our prehistoric digital camera (thinking there would be multiple pictures from our trip to NW Washington). In actuality, there were only three! I have yet to finish using the remaining photos on my film camera in order to get those processed and posted to the site - hopefully after the weekend since Lindsay’s first birthday party is at our house tomorrow! Yipee! Anyway, the 3 photos were added to the new January 2005 gallery (even though the photos were taken on New Years Eve - so shoot me!).
Two new photos have been posted in "The Whislers" photo gallery. We had our second ultrasound appointment this morning. We were thrilled to easily recognize arms, legs, hands, feet, fingers, toes, and even the baby’s jaw opening and closing. It’s a very surreal experience to see this little human life in black and white on the screen… especially when you see it moving, twitching and kicking it’s legs - yet you feel absolutely nothing going on in there?!?! It’s a little freaky! According to fellow moms and the literature, I should be feeling some movements in the very near future - and I can’t wait! We probably won’t have another ultrasound until March sometime, so this is the last of these photos for a while. 
WOW! It’s hard to believe we’re already half way through the first decade of the 21st century! Seems like the Y2K madness was just yesterday… Well, it sure looks like 2005 has many challenges, changes, pleasures, and excitements in store for us - and I welcome them all.
To bring in the New Year, Patrick and I headed off to Port Angeles, Washington for the weekend with Heather, Barney, Lindsay, Chad, and Gail (my mom). As many of you will know, my family lived in P.A. in the early 80’s for four years while my dad was stationed at the town’s Coast Guard base. During our stay, my parents aquired a couple parcels of raw property which has allowed us to maintain a connection to the area.
We headed up Thursday the 30th and met Heather, Barney and Lindsay at the hotel. On Friday we did some of the typical tourist activities and showed Chad (who had never been to P.A.) some of the sights. We made our traditional stop for breakfast at The Oak Table which was wonderful as always. We also ventured to the Dungeness Recreation Area which offered a brisk yet beautiful hike out to the Spit. That evening we hung out in the hotel room to bring in the New Year by drinking heavily (at least Patrick and Chad did anyway) and playing poker. 2005 arrived with little incident, except a few "drunk dials" Patrick made to his sisters and mother!
Saturday morning we boarded the ferry to Victoria, B.C. to spend the night with a dear family friend who owns a B&B there. We arrived in Canada only to discover that the country is CLOSED on New Year’s Day… as if that’s an actual holiday or something!?!?! After driving around aimlessly for a while, Heather and Barney decided that it was probably in their best interest (and Lindsay’s in particular) to head home to Bellingham. We said our goodbyes and they were off. As for Patrick, Chad, Gail and myself, we drove "up island" for some sightseeing, climbed to the top of Mt.Douglas, ate lunch, etc. After a lovely dinner and some visiting with Shelagh (friend and owner/operator of the B&B) we retired for the evening.
Sunday morning we were greeted with the smell of frying bacon (which, even to a vegetarian like me, caused my mouth to salivate uncontrollably). Breakfast was huge and delicious, followed by a quick escape to try to make the 10:30am ferry. No luck, it was full! To make a long story short, we had to drive up North further to take a different ferry, only to then make our way South into the States. This afforded us the chance to meet Heather, Barney and Linsay once again for a meal at one of our favorite cafe’s in Fairhaven, WA. After a few potty stops and some hellish traffic, we finally arrived home around 9pm last night - pooped and ready to sleep in our own beds! It was a wonderful weekend and a great mini-getaway had by all! I hope to have some pictures up soon.
….So into 2005 we go! Full steam ahead!