It's time!

Born Monday July 12, 8:44 pm weighing 9 pounds 4 ounces! 21.5 inches long, he takes after daddy.

So here's the story. Sunday night Hubby and I are playing computer games and I started feeling a little icky. I hadn't had any of the usual signs that labor was coming, so I assumed I was just feeling off. We went to bed and I couldn't sleep at all. I laid there until 3 or 4am and was getting more and more uncomfortable. Finally I got up and tried to watch some TV, but by 6am I was starting to realize that these pains were actually contractions so I woke up Hubby to time them for me. They were 2-3 minutes apart by 8am, so we headed to the hospital.

TMI ahead

At the hospital they reviewed my file and sent me to pee in a cup. When I was seen by the nurse, she attempted to reach for my throat through my girly parts and then told be to go home. Apparently you have to be dilated to stay. She told be to come back when they were 1 minute long and 1 minute apart. So we go home and Hubby goes to work while I sit and squirm in pain. By noon I'm going insane and can't handle the pain, so Hubby comes home and starts timing again. We go back to the hospital at 1 and get the throat grabbing treatment once again and they get ready to drug me up and send me home once again. I get a shot of morphine and they tell me to hang out for 20 minutes until it kicks in, the go home for 2-3 hours. Yeah, so the morphine? It doesn't kick in. Aparently I am immune! An hour and a half later they decide it's best to admit me. A nurse comes in and takes my blood while I am still hanging out in the triage area, and then I lay there a while longer. Finally a nurse from the maternity ward comes to get me and I slowly make my way to my room. The reason it took so long is because they went out of their way to get me into one of the two tub rooms. I will be forever grateful for this shortly.

I asked for drugs and they laughed. Apparently you have to be more dilated than I was to get drugged. I began sensing a theme. I am not very dilated! I waddled over to the tub and Hubby filled it with the hottest water I could handle. I spent the next 3 hours there, and I'm pretty sure I asked for drugs every 10 minutes or so. Around 5 I thought I was going to die so the nurse brought me the laughing gas, and guess what? I'm immune to that too! It just made me feel nauseous and dizzy. Finally at 6:30 they agreed to consider drugs. But I had to get the nether regions checked out again before they would give me anything. Yeah, so I was at 4cm and they wanted me to be at 5 before I could get anything. So we tried all these awkward positions in the shower until I couldn't handle it, which was fairly quickly, and went back into the newly filled tub.

Now the nurses switch over, and my helpful awesome nurse gets traded in for awkward nurse. Awkward nurse 'forgets' that I want drugs. I send hubby to ask AGAIN. She tells me to wait because I am progressing slowly. I fight her. When I said before that I thought I was going to die, at this point I knew I was was going to die. At 8pm she finally agrees to check me again to see if I am at 5cm yet. So she checks and tells me that I am fully dilated and she needs to go get my Dr. Um... 6cm in and hour and a half!

My Dr. is awesome and I love her. She comes in and confirms that, yes, I am fully dilated and it's time to get things started. Woo!

Oh, she says, but it's too late for drugs.

I looked her in the eye and said, I HATE YOU.

She laughed.

To be continued.....

7 Months preggo

And I get laid off. Yup, they laid off a pregnant woman! So my last day was April 30, which was super disappointing because it meant I couldn't finish out the school year with my kids. I was really lucky in that I had some amazing youth leaders that were willing to step up and take over, but I really wanted to be the one to do it!

I went into the EI office to figure out what my next step should be, because the church assured me that I could start my mat leave up to 11 weeks early. Which would have been okay, except for the fact that it means I have to go back to work 11 weeks early! I was given a different story when I went to the EI office which sounded too good to be true involving going on unemployment first and then Mat leave. Turns out, I still have to go back to work 11 weeks early, and the person I talked to was a crazy. Fast forward a couple months, 2 bills for benefits I received but apparently shouldn't have, 10 phone calls to discover that I WAS entitled to those benefits, 1 more bill and one more phone call to sort out the crazies later... I still have to go back to work in May.

Now the dilemma is what to do come May! Do I go back to work and put my 8 month old in day care? Part time? Full Time? Do I stay at home until he's a year and forfeit the income? Oh, wait. Can't do that cause we are now an extra 50 000 in debt. (more on that later).

What to do, what to do?

First thing first

April 2009 my job was cut in half. Yup, it sucked. Hubby and I decided that it was a sign we should start a family. So we started trying. Summer came and went and no + signs on the stick. I was offered a second job at an amazing photography studio that would be ridiculous to pass up, so I took it. I was still working at the church, only I was working 20+ hours instead of 60.

Fast forward to October. Pee on the stick, and it's a +! So at this point we are living in a 400 sqft basement suite. Yes it was a 2 bedroom, but it was not big enough to house a baby and all the STUFF that comes with it. We start looking for a townhouse that we can purchase with the down payment we had been putting away when I was still working full time with a pretty good salary. I had been obsessing over houses and townhouses online for months already so I had a pretty good idea what we were going to be looking at. We contacted a realtor on Friday, and had an accepted offer by Tuesday. I'm a fairly decisive person. We knew exactly what we were looking for so we thought it would take waaaay longer to find something to meet our expectations. 3 level, 3 bedrooms, 2+ bathrooms, rec room on lowest level, bedrooms on 3 floor. Not picky at all.

So the house we chose was HILARIOUS! This old lady had been living there for 30 years, and it looked like it. Observe:

This is the kitchen, and yes, she hand painted the black dots on the while squares of linoleum.
This is the 'powder room'. Please note the playing card wall paper covering every square inch of the room. *Not shown in this picture is the decorative wall plate (also playing card themed) on the wall beside the toilet, and the mug (you guessed it, playing cards!) on the counter.* Love the old lady toilet seat.
The living room overlooking the dining room. In the dining room you can see the awkwardly placed pictures in frames, and the lovely zebra painted wall hanging (Which she left for us...how nice). What you can't see is the spoon collection. There were at least 20 plaques of spoons covering the lower portion of all walls.

The living room. Let me draw your attention to the doll on a swing hanging from the ceiling in the upper right corner. These were all over the house. It was creepy. The wall behind the could was a really neat textured wall paper that we considered keeping until we moved the couch and saw that her cat had used it as a scratching post.
This is our amazingly HUGE master bedroom. We LOVE how big it is. What we did not love was the faux bamboo wallpaper on the two walls you can see. Again, it wouldn't have been too bad if it weren't 100 years old with rips and stains. The other two walls were white, and had a hand painted border of multicolored diamonds with dots in the middle. No two diamonds were the same. Oh, and all the bedrooms had curtains that matched the bedspread AAAAND the light switch cover! They were precious.

That's all you get for now! We've done massive renovations, and one of these days I'll post the before and after photos!

Testing

So it's been months since my last post, and a lot has changed. Small things like having a baby, buying a house and getting laid off. No biggie. I'm afraid I'm going to forget all the details so I'm going to make a renewed attempt at blogging. At the very least I'll have a place to put up pictures for my family. So here goes!

Guilty Pleasures

Watching TV shows about teenage romance.

Listening to early Britney Spears with my BOSS at work.

Motivation

It's hard finding the motivation to catalog something that doesn't seem to be worth recording. I started this blog for two reasons. The first being the desire to write and remember. I used to enjoy writing, especially when it enabled me to 'verbalize' things in a way I'm not always able. My mind goes so much faster than my mouth... and that's saying something. Taking the time to process my thoughts into coherent sentences before putting them out there is helpful. It's an outlet.

The second reason started as a means to avoid anonymity. I was a lurker. I would follow other blogs religiously, taking in every detail of these strangers lives. Not once had I opened myself up to that same vulnerability. And thus, the Rambling began.

Today, I read about at least 20 other people's lives. They weren't all sensational. In fact, the majority of them are fairly mundane. YOUR mundane is interesting to ME. But I'm having a hard time being interested in my mundane.

I am, however, making an effort. For my Seeeester. She makes every ordinary obligation into an adventure.

Changes

Things have changed quite a bit in the last 6 months. Some of them have been pretty great, and others... not so much.

In April I got the news that my position was being cut in half at the end of June. While part of me jumped for joy at the though of a relaxing summer, the half that pays the bills was not impressed. I can't say I jumped into the job hunt, but I kept my eyes open. A very appealing opportunity presented itself, and I found myself getting excited at the possibility of returning somewhere that felt like home. Apparently 'home' didn't feel the same way. Being a girl was not in the job description.

Don't fear! Far better things have come my way. I LOVE my second job.