Just a Quick One

I have always been a fan of zip lines. I’ve seen lines that take you across the rainforest, from building to building and from house to house. I have never seen one that takes you across the ocean. I was so impressed with this, I had to stop my regular morning web surf to post this. Next time I’m in Haiti, I’m definitely doing this.

Keepin’ it Goin’ & Poor Thanksgiving

I can’t say that it has been easy, but I wanted to let you know that I did workout yesterday and I did run today.  I decided to keep a regular update of my exercising status going in hopes that it would motivate me to actually go exercise on the days that I really don’t feel like doing it.  If I have to write more than a couple of times a week that I did not workout, feel free to flame me in the comments section of this well-written blog.  I will print them out and read them the next time I’m feeling like being lame.

Thanksgiving break is here!  If Thanksgiving were a person, it would be the red-headed adopted stepchild of the holiday season.  (No offense to any red-headed, adopted, or stepchild readers.  If you’re all three at once, sorry, but it does suck to be you.)  Everyone gets so pumped about Halloween.  As soon as the costumes get put up, the Christmas lights come out.  I have a rule in my house…no Christmas lights until Thanksgiving is over.   I even try to avoid stores that look like Santa vomited a cornucopia of Christmas cheer the day after Halloween.  I noticed that Starbucks is catching some flack  for breaking out the Christmas blend so early.  I hope they catch all kinds of hell for blowing off the National Day of Thanks to make a few extra dollars on an already bloated holiday.  On the other side of the coin, there are stores like Nordstrom’s.  They have signs outside the stores telling customers that they don’t plan to decorate before Friday.  They read, “Enjoy the day as we will — with our family and friends. Then, when Friday, November 25 rolls around, feel free to stop by for a bit of good cheer.”  Now there’s a store that deserves my Christmas money.  Too bad I couldn’t afford a package of underwear in there.

Five Hours for Nothing

Our first game turned out to be a wash, literally. We took an hour and a half bus ride to the opposing teams stadium to be greeted by a pretty serious lightning storm. We sat on a bus for two hours while the water rose in the parking lot to just inches below the bottom step of the entrance to our school bus. The lightning knocks out a transformer that supplies power to the stadium. Finally, the call is made that we can go home…an hour and a half back. As we are leaving, we learn that the drill team’s chartered bus has lost a/c and defrosters so the driver can’t see. As a result, we pack all of our kids in like sardines so that we can get the drill team home. I think the team stayed to play the game when the lightning finally cleared. I heard we lost by a couple of touchdowns.

At least the bus drivers get paid by the hour. They weren’t complaining.

Going Home

We finally get to go home today.  The people here have been great, but you can only sit in a hospital room for so long before you start to feel disconnected from the outside world.  You just sit in this little room thinking about the new baby and mom recovering forgetting that there’s a whole world still going on out there.

Mom and baby are doing great.  Mom is doing really great.  She just got some Vicodin last night and has been sleeping ever since.

It’s kind of weird looking back at how much your life changes in just a matter of seconds.  I parked the car outside the hospital with one car seat in it.  Now there are two.  I remember having similar thoughts with the first one.

The nurse just came into discharge us.  Sorry for the abrupt close, but I’m going HOME!

Waiting…

“Dawg” went home and took his girls with him.  We had a great visit in every way.  It took them a long time to get here because they had to stop every hour for the first several hours.  Apparently, it’s difficult to get everyone to pee at the same time.

The night they arrived, my wife received a call from my brother who lives about an hour and a half away.  He says, “I think my wife’s water broke.”  They were on their way to the hospital; we decided to wait and see if they admitted her before we left our company.  A little while later, he calls back and sure enough, the baby is coming.  After talking to him about what we should do, we decided to go ahead and leave for his town to be sure that we did not miss anything.  You never know how long (or short) a labor will last.   By this time, it is early morning the next day and the county we have to drive through to get there is under a flash flood warning.  We drove VERY slowly and watched a car I was following barely make it out of a ditch after being pulled in by some extremely deep water.  (I changed lanes very quickly.)  After finally arriving a little shell shocked, we watched my sister-in-law grimace through some contractions before the “happy juice” was ordered and administered.  She was progressing slow enough that we felt safe heading to my brother’s house for a little shut eye.  After three or four hours, we got a call that we might want to start heading back to the hospital.  I sat in the waiting room using the space for its exact purpose.  Long story short…a new baby girl was born at 10:31.  We took pictures, held the new life, and said goodbye.  My pregnant wife had her own appointment to check on our unborn child.

All this time, our company waited at our house.  Great friends, indeed.

We all went to the waterpark the next day to get a little sunburned.  We constantly re-applied the lotion, but it didn’t seem to matter.

The wives and three oldest went to see R”atatouille” the next day while Dawg and I stayed home and played Wii.  They said the movie was “very cute” in case you were thinking about going to see it yourself.

We said goodbye to our good friends from Oklahoma until next year.  We owe them a couple of trips, but I heard talk from of our wives of some  big vacation plans without kids.  I’ll have to let you know how that pans out.

Now, my wife and I are just WAITING for the arrival of our own new addition.  Bags are packed, plans are made, furniture is built, diapers are out, and bottles are “re-nippled.”  We thought the new baby at least needed her own nipples for the bottles that we will be reusing.  This poor girl is getting everything else handed down.

Now, you can wait until my next post…