Kieran and I are home from the hospital after a relatively uneventful delivery. I showed up at the hospital at 8:30 on Monday morning for my c-section and after some standard blood pressure checks and fetal monitoring, they put me in a gown and directed me to the operating room. I was a little nervous about the spinal anesthesia (giant needles in my spine are not my idea of a good time) but it wasn't too terribly painful, and my legs went numb literally in a matter of seconds. The drapes went up in front of my face and I could feel so little that when they told me the baby was about to be born, I didn't even realize they had started. They showed him to me briefly in his purple and bloody glory and took him off to the warmer to check him out before taking him to the nursery. I was left alone to be sewn back up and cry hysterically, half because I was happy, half because I was a little delirious from the drugs. To my credit, I didn't throw up while they were rearranging my internal organs.
After a couple days of heavy narcotics and hospital food, we were discharged a day early and sent home to begin our life as the parents of an infant and a toddler. Fortunately Miss Kaitlyn is entranced with her little brother and keeps helping him find his pacifier and throw away his dirty diapers. I suspect she thinks he's a new toy for her, but a pretty boring one... he's been asleep all but an hour or two since he got home.
Katie's grandma Maxine took her to daycare for a half day today to keep her in her routine, so Kieran and I are hanging out at home chatting with Brad online (he went back to work today) and watching Simpsons reruns on Tivo. I'm feeling pretty good with my bottle of Percocet. |
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Aug. 16th, 2005 @ 12:48 pm
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I haven't updated in a very long time, partially due to lack of time, partially due to lack of material. But now I'm home on bedrest until my scheduled C-section on Monday so I have pretty much nothing but time. My heart is having a hard time with the pregnancy so I won the prize of laying on the couch (and getting paid, thanks short-term disability) for two weeks. After Kieran is born on Monday, around 10:30 am, I win 8 paid weeks off, and 2 unpaid weeks. I won't be back to work until Halloween. Last night, Brad recommended that I wear a fake pregnant belly as my Halloween costume and see what my boss thought about that. I'd probably get fired before I had a chance to explain the joke.
In other news, my dad was in a motorcycle accident a couple weeks ago and is still in the hospital, although finally out of intensive care. That same week, Brad's grandma died. We're due for some good news at this point. |
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Jan. 25th, 2005 @ 08:59 pm
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My darling husband is on an LJ kick lately and has been pressuring me to update. His life is a lot more exciting than mine, apparently, with a lot of wacky adventures getting Mexican food and working downtown.
Kaitlyn is a year old next month. She consumes my every waking moment. In late August of this year she will only have the opportunity to consume half my waking moments because she'll have a new brother or sister. I'm only about nine weeks pregnant but I've already outgrown all my regular pants, which means I probably won't fit through regular-size doorways by this summer.
Work is extremely busy all the time. If you work in finance you know what Sarbanes Oxley is and you understand my woes. If you don't, just feel sorry for all finance people. Supposedly, things will get better around April. Maybe I'll win the lottery and be able to pursue my true love, making 3d models of furniture (in Orlando). |
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Nov. 5th, 2004 @ 12:21 am
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I'm always thinking about things to write about in LJ during the day when I'm at work but since my work internet allows me to access approximately three sites total, I end up forgetting by the time I get home. Considering that all I do all day is reconcile accounts, I'm not sure what it is I think about writing, but it seems important at the time.
At work today, someone congratulated me on my new permanent position. I guess they know something I don't know because I'm still a rotational accountant to the best of my knowledge. I had this five-year plan worked out that I was going to pass the CPA and get an MBA before Katie was in kindergarten. My long-term plan is to work from home. Brad got a new job (making more than me, ass) so he should really support my efforts to sit at home on the couch in my pajamas all day.
Katie is crawling all over the place, pulling up, standing holding onto things and generally causing more trouble than I can keep up with. My desk at work is plastered with pictures of her and anybody that stops to look at them will get an earful. I love being a mom so much, and I love her so much, that I think about not having any more kids. How could I possibly love another one as much as I love her? It really isn't fair to bring another child into the world and then favor his/her older sister, which I feel is pretty much inevitable. Maybe I'm wrong but that seems like a pretty big risk to take. |
Not much happening in Brandyville these days. Went to the beach for a week, that was fun. Got a bad sunburn. Katie was scared of the ocean.
I bought a new laptop, Dell Inspiron 5150, 3.06 ghz with some assorted bells and whistles. I got Dell's base 256 megs of ram with intentions to put in a gig of aftermarket ram. Hopefully it will arrive soon but it's not even scheduled to ship until early next week. It's going to replace my very dead desktop and be my grad school laptop for next fall.
Work's fine, extended family is fine, Brad is fine. He got a new job so we accelerated our house search a bit. It looks like Jordan, Minnesota, will be our lucky winner. It's 18 miles from work but where else can you get a 3 bedroom home built in this century for $220,000? I'm excited about it. |
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Brad took Katie to daycare this morning and it's throwing off my whole routine. I keep getting up to check on her and she's not even here. I wonder how people forget their kids in hot cars and leave them there for 10 hours.
We had a thrilling weekend, painting our bedroom on Friday night, shopping at the new IKEA on Saturday (WOW!) along with every other person in the metro, and then taking the new lightrail system downtown on Sunday with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) davef3138 and his family to eat Pizza Luce and be tourists. Next weekend, we're going up to Ely so Brad can see the Dorothy Molter Museum and the Blueberry Festival and get a real taste of Ely's redneck lifestyle. Plus, Katie can bask in the doting of her Grandma and Grandpa LeRoy.
New department today. I am neutral about it. It's my last rotation. I'm going to decorate my cubicle with some IKEA novelties. Did I mention I love IKEA?
Jul. 19th, 2004 @ 07:32 am
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I got a little surprise yesterday when Katie was chewing on my hand and she bit me. I pulled back in shock because, to the best of my knowledge, she doesn't have any teeth. After a fair struggle to get her tongue and lips out of the way, there was a tiny baby tooth on the bottom, and another one trying its best to break through on the top. It seems early for teething and she hasn't been upset, but if I can skip the miserable part of teething, I won't complain. Personally, I'd be pissed if something was trying to grow through my skin.
We're also working on sitting up. On the floor, without help or support, she can sit up for about... oh, ten seconds. We're looking forward to sitting-up-time because then we can use restaurant high chairs instead of lugging around that 5000-pound baby carrier everywhere. My arm hurts just looking at it.
Tomorrow is my last day in this department, then I start my last rotation before taking a permament position. I'm more excited about the raise than anything else. I have a grad school information session at St. Thomas on the 28th. I'd really rather go to law school but I have annual caps on tuition reimbursement and the Hamline evening law program is $20,000 a year. Affordable MBA it is!
Jul. 8th, 2004 @ 07:48 am
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Katie rolled over!
Then she did it again! And again! And bonked her head on her bouncy chair.
My excitement is only slightly weighed down by a sudden need to invest in baby gates. GO KATIE!
Jun. 15th, 2004 @ 06:19 pm
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If my GODDAMN COLLEGE STUDENT NEIGHBORS don't turn down their UNGODLY LOUD BASS I am going to walk over there and show them just how angry a suburban accountant mommy can get faced with a headache, a cough that won't let her sleep and GODDAMN BROKEN INTERNET PIECE OF SHIT CRAP @*(#@*(&@#*#@*))@*#()*&@(*#() I AM SO ANGRY GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Jun. 5th, 2004 @ 12:46 am
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Our bigger-car-shopping efforts of that past week went from minivan, to small SUV, to Durango in the span of three days. So we're going to South Dakota this weekend to pick up our new (new to us, at least) Durango. Hopefully it will fit all of Katie's piles of stuff. It's warrantied through 2007, so at least we can buy it and not worry about repairs for quite awhile. I dread the drive to South Dakota.
I was driving the kiddo to daycare this morning and I braked for a family of geese, a (presumably) mommy goose and about six little baby geese. The person behind me, who saw me stopped from five hundred feet back, pulled up behind me and blared their horn, flipped me off, then sped around me to flip me off again. That's a fine lesson to teach your children, angry suburbanite in the silver minivan.
May. 13th, 2004 @ 08:15 pm
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My poor baby girl has her first cold, one day before she's going to start daycare. She will be staying home with Daddy tomorrow and if she's still sick, she'll be going up to Ely to stay with (retired) Grandpa Cliff until she's better. I was dreading leaving her for 8 hours at daycare and now I have to ship her off to Grandma for several days. How depressing.
May. 2nd, 2004 @ 11:35 am
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trypnotic: my co-workers are thinking of opening up a restaurant that serves only carbs
trypnotic: our first specialty will be a pasta sandwich
Apr. 29th, 2004 @ 11:35 am
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I go back to work on Monday after 10 weeks off. How depressing.
We've been looking at buying a house. It's equally depressing. All single family homes are $250,000. Single family homes that I look at and say "hey, that's a nice house" are $400,000. We can afford a townhouse once Katie is out of infant daycare, and I wouldn't mind a townhouse, but my income won't go up as fast as the 20%+ value increases each year on single family homes so it seems like we'll be stuck in townhouses forever.
Katie is doing well, she's all smiles and giggles these days. She has said "hi" on 5 separate occasions. She's really just copying the sound but I like to pretend she's a little baby genius. Her grandma concurs.
Apr. 29th, 2004 @ 10:13 am
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We moved into our new apartment yesterday - 2 bedroom, 2 bath, 2 story rental townhouse. We hired movers to move us out of the old place and a huge crew of people came to help us move into the new one. We have twice the space as our last apartment for a very good value. There are some quirks to the apartment like a complete lack of medicine cabinet and no kitchen drawer wide enough for our silverware tray, but I'm willing to let stuff go in the interest of having lots of room for our piles of baby stuff. Unpacking will probably be a long process, since we don't have a lot of spare time.
Mar. 21st, 2004 @ 05:36 pm
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( breastfeeding )
Mar. 1st, 2004 @ 09:45 am
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| » Kaitlyn Leigh Johnston, born at 8:36 am on Monday, February 23rd |
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After 72 hours of labor and an eventual C-section, Katie has been born. I'm pretty sure she's the cutest baby ever.
( Picture! )
They say that you forget about labor pretty much as soon as you see the baby, and I think that's true. It was a pretty bad experience but there is no question it was worth it.
I hope to be home from the hospital by Friday at the latest.
Feb. 25th, 2004 @ 11:17 am
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I think I'm going to die. But I can't go back to the hospital until my near-death occurs at 2 minute intervals for 2 hours.
Feb. 22nd, 2004 @ 12:55 pm
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| » A fabulous evening in labor and delivery |
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We're home after a 16-hour stay in labor and delivery that can only be described as my own personal hell. We went in with contractions 4 minutes apart to get assessed, and they showed up on the monitor like clockwork - every 240 seconds, new contraction starts, lasts for 60 seconds. They admitted me to labor and delivery and decided (they decided, despite my complete confusion) that I was having trouble breathing because I was breathing too fast. Um... yeah... I'm in LABOR. It hurts. Ever hear of Lamaze? So I had to have an IV, be strapped to three monitors, and have both hands incapacitated by wires. Going to the bathroom required the help of both Brad and a nurse. I couldn't even roll over in bed. My contractions moved up to every 2 minutes, and since contractions are timed from the start of one to the start of the next, they pretty much didn't stop. They offered the epidural repeatedly since I was making progress, but I wasn't too excited about having MORE wires, so I held off. Around midnight they offered me a sleeping pill, which I took. I woke up at 7 am with my contractions back down to 5 minutes apart (incidentally, the normal threshold where you go to the hospital) and they sent me home. They told me to come back when I was in excrutiating, constant pain. That'll be a fun drive to the hospital.
To say I'm a little agitated would be a slight understatement. I know the pregnant woman who gets sent home from the hospital over and over is a standard joke, but how the hell I went from 2 minute contractions and offers of painkillers to being home the next morning is beyond me.
Feb. 22nd, 2004 @ 09:38 am
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So our doctor, who has always been very "babies come when they're ready, due dates are an estimate, etc" changed her tune today when the baby was estimated at over 9 pounds. Her "wait til 42 weeks to induce" policy got changed to inducing next Thursday. She said we may want to just skip the induction and go straight for a scheduled C-section since the complications of a 10 pound baby are more than we want to deal with. So I changed my last day at work from next Thursday to yesterday. I've got a lot to get done and a lot of resting to do in the next week.
I suppose it's a little late to panic, she has to come out somehow!
Feb. 20th, 2004 @ 09:50 am
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I told work this week that next Thursday (the 26th) will be my last day, baby or no baby. The process of getting ready in the morning, driving to work in a car I barely fit in and walking a quarter mile to the office from the parking lot has become insurmountably difficult. I'm due on the 24th, but I suspect she will be pretty late, so at least I will have a few days at home between working and our scheduled induction.
I have either another cold or a resurgence of the last cold, which has resulted in me being sick for 18 consecutive days. This week's version of my cold is a lot more mild than last week's, so I haven't missed work or anything, but I'm still battling sniffles all day. Fortunately the temperature has improved quite a bit this week... it was 40 yesterday, and we had days at -40 just 3 weeks ago. It's amazing what a difference 80 degrees makes.
Feb. 19th, 2004 @ 06:38 am
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