Quick doctor’s visit Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Our regularly scheduled visit came along this morning and it was a quick one.  We met the fourth doctor in the practice, and she was nice.  We’d be pleased to find any of the doctors in the delivery room – we’d prefer her regular doctor, but any of them would do in an pinch.

The doc measured Susan’s belly, and then ran the doppler over her so we could all hear the heartbeat.  The doctor then informed us that at this point the baby would be healthy if she were to be born at any point from now.

With that, we scheduled a visit for two weeks away and headed out.  Not much to it!

Long days… Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Its been a really long couple of days…

Susan has been learning to deal with a pretty decent sized companion living inside her and grappling with the concept that this companion will be getting bigger in addition to sticking with the current living conditions for up to six more weeks.  She’s been woken up in the middle of the morning with feet reducing her lung space, or been treated to mid-afternoon rotations away from the much preferred head-down position.

I, on the other hand, have been quite active with work.  I got on a conference call at 5p on Sunday night, left for a hockey game two hours later, then rejoined the call 20 minutes after the game, only to hang up at 1:45a.  I headed to work a little later than normal this morning to make up for it, though.  As a commitment to my wife, I took off from work a little early, came home and made dinner in 40 minutes, so we could eat together before I headed out to the training class that will keep me busy in the evenings for the next several weeks.  It wasn’t a romantic dinner, but it was nice to know we were eating in (saving money!) and eating together.  My goal is to keep this up all week.  The coming weeks will be easier, though, because she’ll be able to start the cooking when she is in good condition.

Training was good and it’s amazing opportunity – there is a lot of money being committed for me and my coworkers, so its a great feeling.  The classes are going to be very helpful in improving our skill sets.  Unfortunately, after the class, I had another hour or so of work to accomplish, hence my still being up at this hour.

Hopefully things will calm down through the afternoon tomorrow and when I get home from class that evening, I’ll be able to crawl straight into bed with my wife.

On the olive curing front, there isn’t a great deal of an update.  I’ve noticed that approximately 50% of the olives are now a dark green color, and they are slightly softer.  The dark ones seem to not float on the surface, so I think that the weighing down of the light ones is a key to this process.  I haven’t dared to taste any of them, light or dark, just yet… I’m going to give them still more time.  Its been 11 days, so its just beyond the minimum soak time now.

Feeling better. Sunday, October 28, 2007

The antibiotics are taking care of the infection quite efficiently at this point and I’m starting to feel a little bit more like normal.  As normal as pregnancy gets, anyway.  I will definitely be going to the office tomorrow morning.  This is my last week of work and, yep, I’m still freaked out by that fact.  Don’t get me wrong, it’ll be so nice to have some quiet time before Olivia gets here, but it’s very hard to wrap my brain around not earning a paycheck.  Bizarre.

We had family up this past week.  My parents ran up on Thursday and Friday to keep an eye on me while Ian was at work.  It was lovely to see them, even if it wasn’t the most pleasant of reasons for them to come up.  I’m just not much of a host when sick.  Sandy, Amy, Garrett, and Garrett’s mother, Susan, came up on Saturday before the Preds game.  We hung around the house, watched movies, and had a lovely time relaxing before the puck drop.  I didn’t go to the game even with the lure of great seats.  I was absolutely worn out at that point and the idea of stadium chairs and screaming fans wasn’t very appealing.  It was apparently a great game (Preds won) and I can’t wait until have enough steam to actually go and enjoy myself again.

In other news, our friends Graham and Virginia announced that they’re going to have a baby this coming June/July.  We’re both extremely excited for them.  Babies (when not trouncing your intestines and other internal organs) are rather fun.

Doctor’s visit Thursday, October 25, 2007

I’ve accused Susan of liking her doctor too much because every time she tells us we’re going onto a 2 week schedule of visits, something comes up the very next week!

This time it was false labor. She had a little bit of textbook false labor on Saturday afternoon and in speaking with the nurse on Monday, she was told that next time the on-call doctor needs to be notified.

Today, though, wasn’t nearly as clear cut as Saturday. Starting yesterday, she was experiencing some cramping and GI distress. Around 2am, she vomited once and continued to feel really bad. In fact, after sitting in the bathroom for an hour or so, she spent most of the night in the recliner. Once the alarm started going off, it was pretty clear she wasn’t going to work. To be on the safe side, I stayed home to keep track of her.

Around 9a, she phoned the doctor’s office and they asked her to come in right away. When we arrived, they hooked her up to the fetal monitor for almost an hour. It was very nice getting to listen to Olivia’s heartbeat filling the room, and when they turned it off, it seemed all too quiet. The doctor reviewed the chart and stated all was well. She then did a quick examination, determining that her cervix was still closed.

They did two tests – one for pre-term labor, just like last time, and one for general health. The general health test showed a very minor bacterial infection that they are going to treat with antibiotics. The pre-term labor test went to the lab STAT, so we hope to know within the next hour or so the results of that one.

I took a 15 second video with my camera phone and I’ve posted it on the right side. Its less for the visual aspect and more for the aural, as you can hear the baby’s heartbeat.  EDIT – Something is wrong with the video and the sound is missing… I’m looking into it.

Susan’s parents are on their way up for a short visit and to make me a little more comfortable with the idea of going to work tomorrow.

We’ll post again if anything changes with the test… we really don’t expect a positive return, but you never know. We just need this little Olive of ours to sit tight for two and a half more weeks, then she’ll be full term.

Words Wednesday, October 24, 2007

I’m not sure if I ever want to hear the words “breasts” and “nipples” so many times in a two hour stretch ever again.

We went to breastfeeding class tonight, so those words were basically unavoidable. However, the frequency of their use was mildly disconcerting.

It was a good experience. The nurse teaching the class has been a lactation nurse for six years and a post-partum nurse for 23. We watched a pair of 5 minute videos and she gave us tons of information via a presentation. She showed us a number of different feeding methods and there was a baby doll to practice positioning with as well.

In other news, Olivia is getting quite large and making things quite uncomfortable for Susan. When she decides to shift her little knees from one side to the other, is quite a noticeable event – and with noticeable visual change comes noticeable pain. I am still providing support by freaking the baby out when I lay my hand on Susan’s belly. When I reach out to feel the movement, two thirds of the time the movement halts.

We’re looking forward to the weekend – my sister, her fiance and my mother will be visiting us ahead of the hockey game. We may also be going out to a Halloween party on Saturday night, getting in a little bit of socializing outside of the family realm.

Susan’s last day at work is quickly approaching… after next Friday, she’ll be an unemployed young lady. Her friends Laurie and Julia are quite excited to have someone else out of work so they can see someone other than their spouses or families. I think Susan is excited about seeing the two of them, as well. I’m sure she’ll feel quite strange not waking up to go to work each day, but it is the best thing for her at this point.

On less happy, but more practical news, I’ve begun digging through the process of creating wills, directives, and custodial documents. I have a program that does “interviews” and creates all sorts of legal documents for you, so its been relatively easy. Normally Susan shies away from these sorts of discussions (she still doesn’t like discussing my life insurance!), but when I brought it up tonight, she was quite supportive. Its never nice considering the idea that you’ll die, but eventually, it will happen, so its better to be prepared. We don’t have a tremendous number of possessions, but we certainly do have a child, so we need to get things squared away so we know she’ll be taken care of. We’ve talked about how (and who would be) best to provide for her, so now we’ve just got to speak to those people so we can make sure they agree with our decisions.

Oh – and at my work things are going quite nicely. I’ve been a part of a hand picked group that is working on the stability of our core applications, and while the hours have been long, we’ve recently made quite a name for ourselves by harnessing some great new technologies and techniques. Its always interesting and motivating to be getting praise from VPs and Directors that are outside of your chain of command. Our hard work even earned us a day off today, so we could recuperate a bit. We’ve been on the phone after 10p every day since Saturday, sometimes through the wee hours of the morning. To say we’re becoming a tight knit group is a bit of an understatement!

Olive curing progress… Tuesday, October 23, 2007

It’s slow.

The new pictures start with this one on flickr and go for about 5 more.  The “smashed” and “cut” olives are leeching well, I believe, based on the fact that the water they rest in during the day smells of olives when I drain it each night.  The “untouched” batch, however, has basically no odor.  In all three batches, though, you’ll find a few different shades of green.  Some are still the fresh off the tree (or, rather, out of the box) green, and some are a softer green.  There are also a few that a darker – overly bruised or rotting maybe?

I still haven’t dared to taste any of them yet, fearing the worst still.  I’ve read way too many articles and recipes about just how bitter they are off the tree, so I’m going to wait until at least the 7th, if not the 10th day before I begin taste testing.

At this point I’m simply emptying the buckets into a colander resting in the tub each night, and then putting fresh water back in the bucket.  Starting last night, I am using a dinner plate in each of the buckets to weigh down the floating olives.  The vast majority of the olives will rest in the bottom of the bucket, but some (and it seems like the same ones each time) will float at the top.  Again, I’ve read that I want to keep them submerged, but I don’t know if that was so they’d leech better or to keep them from general exposure.  Since I’m putting the lids on my 5 gallon buckets, I’m not sure if exposure is really an issue for me, but just in case, they are getting weighed down.

As I expected, I’ve gotten about 5 or so hits on the blog because of the olive curing posts.  if you’ve found it because of these, go ahead and expect to see more.  Once I’ve established that the recipes work, I’ll even create a page dedicated to the process for easy reference.  In my research, its been tough to find a good spot with information about the leeching and such, so maybe I can provide that a bit…

Oh – if you’re bored and feel like browsing pictures, you can take a look at our list of sets on flickr and go to town.  Its now just under 7,000 photos and over 10,000 views.

31 Weeks Ultrasound… finally! Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Yeah, so I finally got my act together and scanned some of the ultrasound photos we’ve been sitting on for the past few weeks.  These are from the 31 week visit wherein the docs checked Olivia’s general growth.

We’ve got more than the 4 photos I scanned, but because some are difficult for even me to make out and still more are straight-on face shots with an evil eye, I didn’t scan them all.

You can find the whole set of four photos here.

Interesting blog statistics Saturday, October 20, 2007

Just as a quick post…

• We’ve had over 12,000 visits to the blog.  This is since we started in April of this year which is an average of 2,000 visits a month!
• We’ve posted 219 entires (not including this one) since we start on April 1.  Additionally, we have two “pages” – About Us and our Disney Trip Journal.
• We’ve had a total of 522 comments (including our own) on our posts.  That’s 2.4 comments per post.  The very first comment was from Susan’s mom.
• The spam filter on the blog has blocked over 1,500 spam comments.
• Our busiest week for visits was the week of July 27 when we had 645 visits.
• The best day ever was 193 visits… but I don’t know what day that was.

Thanks, everybody, for your interest.  It is stunning to log in each day and see the number of visits on a given day.

Our active home… Friday, October 19, 2007

We’ve been fairly active the past two days, some planned, some not.

First and foremost, the storms that brought tornadoes to dozens of places across the country last night brought high winds to Nashville. After losing a tree to a wind storm last time, I woke up this morning looking for any damage that might have been dealt to us.

Amusingly, though, I woke up and looked out the window into the front yard, but never considered the back yard. I just happened to walk out the back door and found this giant chunk of tree lying in the yard. We were quite lucky in the fact that the position of the tree kept it from causing any damage.

Because it leaned out over the fence line, when it dropped, it landed squarely in the yard. Additionally, because of its height (length?), it didn’t manage to hit the fence next to the street. Now, thankful for the lack of damage, we’re again in a position of having a giant piece of tree in our yard!  You can see more photos as part of this set.

So that was the unplanned part of our activity – as for the planned portion, I’ve decided to take on the task of curing olives. I found a place in California that sells fresh olives by way of Alton Brown’s website. Alton is from the food TV show Good Eats, among others.

I never realized that olives were so (relatively) easy to cure, so I decided I’d give it a go. After borrowing some buckets from my dad, I ordered a 10 pound box of olives! The box showed up Thursday afternoon, so as soon as I got home I began processing them.

The processing involved removing the last few stems and leaves, in addition to preparing them for their (at least) week long soak. There are a couple of different schools of thought for the soak when using only water. (Green olives are apparently traditionally processed with lye!) One school is to “bash” the olive with a mallet or wooden spoon in order to crack the skin. The other is to slice the olive lengthwise two or three times. Both of these methods will allow the acidic taste to leech out of the olives, as, apparently, they are ridiculously bitter otherwise.

I decided to make one third of the olives with a slice, one third with a smash (the exact pressure decision was tough), and the final third with no adulteration. I then filled each of the buckets with about a gallon of water and sealed the lid. I’ll have to change the water at least daily for at least the next seven days. After seven days, I’ll begin to taste test the olives.  There are more photos in this set and I’ll be adding to that as this goes along.

I changed the water once this afternoon (some recipes say to change three times daily, but I’m basically planning on one.) and I did notice a slight difference between the buckets.  The cut and the smash buckets have an olive smell to them, whereas the untouched bucket had no odor.  Also, the water in the buckets with an odor was discolored, where the other wasn’t.

Once they are suitably soaked (I hope I’ll know!), then I begin the brining process. I’ve got three different recipes for that as well.

While I didn’t time this on purpose, it is amusing that I may be able to pass out olives for our Olive’s birthday!

Expect to see plenty more of the olive curing process… and I sort of wonder just how many hits we’ll get on the blog because of this!

Baby shower photos Friday, October 19, 2007

I don’t recall if we’ve provided the links for the baby shower photos, but here are two…

Here are the photos from Kim’s camera.

And here are the photos from our camera.

A little review. Friday, October 19, 2007

This past Wednesday, we had dinner at the Rosepepper with our friends Jay and Stephanie and their 4 month old, Thane.  He is the super cute little guy that caused me to have a reality-check breakdown in Baptist hospital after he was born (remember the horrible picture where I am pale, sweating, and hyperventilating in a small alcove on the birthing floor?).  He is beautiful.  I mean truly beautiful with his big blue eyes and chubby, pink cheeks.  I held him (not even a death grip hold) and it was good.

While at the Rosepepper, we sat out on the patio.  I was eaten up by mosquitoes.  Apparently, pregnant women are delicious as I was the only one swarmed.  My feet and hands are covered in itchy, little bites.  Beyond this, the dinner was excellent.  It was Jay and Steph’s first time.  Jay got the spicy huevos rancheros plate (hot pork with two fried eggs on top-”don’t fear the huevos”).  He left the plate entirely empty so I think it’s safe to say he liked it.  Steph had the grilled fish tacos and enjoyed them as well.  Ian had his tacos cabron with lime.  I tried the chicken, cheese, and mushroom quesedilla.  Yum!

We almost came home with a kitten.  Well, “almost” meaning I wanted to bring a stray kitten to whom I fed what leftovers we had.  She was a little calico that looked eerily like my favorite pet from childhood, Sox.  Same tricolor pattern with gray, peach, and white.  I really wanted that kitten.  I wasn’t the only one as the waitress informed me that multiple people (including the staff there) have attempted to coax/catch the kitten to take it home.  Zee kitteh iz haveeng nun of eet.

I have no idea why I just tried to type in a fake french accent.

After dinner, we headed en masse to our house where Ian and Jay played the Xbox 360 and Steph and I played with Thane.  He demonstrated his mad-roll-over-skills.  He is also quite good at standing as long as he is brought into that postion.  He is wonder baby.

I want Olivia now.

Awesome search criteria Wednesday, October 17, 2007

This data is as of 8a this morning, and its obvious that we serve up a lot of requests for ultrasound photos – this is almost a daily occurrence.

We also end up being a review site for an awesome mouse trap – this is basically at least once a week.

Mr Bento (my lunchbox) tends to show up nearly every other day.

Susan’s trials through morning sickness medicines tends to generate a bit of traffic, especially the Reglen.

However, the special treat for today? “Susan and Ian have 15 children” That’s awesome.

(Edit: When I pasted the search criteria in, something went wrong… as such, I’ve deleted it.)

Isn’t it December, yet? Tuesday, October 16, 2007

I have settled into the waiting game.  I’m ready for Olivia now, but she has some baking time left.  According to the doc, she will gain 1/2 a pound a week from here out.  She was 3 lbs. 12 oz. at the last appointment so she should be around 7 lbs at her due date.  I think I can handle that.  She should also be somewhere around 20 inches in length, which I can also handle.

What I can’t handle is how antsy I am for her to be here.  I’m ready to be a mommy, rather than a pregnant woman.  Grr.  And as ready as I am, I think Ian is even more so.  He talks to Olivia all the time.  It’s pretty amusing/endearing to see him conversing with her via my bellybutton.

We still have some sprucing up to do around the house and we need to get everything in its proper place in the nursery, but for the most part we’re ready.  Tonight, I’m going to start putting together the bag we will take to the hospital for the big day (or night).  We have her going home outfit washed and put together.  I can’t put what I’ll be wearing home in there as it would leave me essentially naked now.  (I’m packing maternity pants for the outfit because I think the vision of myself walking out of there in my old jeans is quite delusional).

I have another doctor’s appointment this afternoon.  No U/S this time so it should be short and sweet.  All that’s left to do is count down the days til I’m out of work.

Old friend “found” Friday, October 12, 2007

A friend of mine (someone I’ve known literally since birth)  and I reconnected via Linked In (a social network for business contacts) recently.  I say this because I know my family will be excited to know: Tiffany!

She’s living in San Diego working in the BioTech field.  She and I had seen one another several years ago while she was coming through Atlanta.  We had breakfast, caught up briefly and exchanged a handful of emails.  Once she finished school, though, we lost touch until a week or so ago.

She went to school here in Nashville for four years, so she knows just how much we’re enjoying being here.  She’s got a blog if anyone would like to read… and I’ll add it to our blogroll list on the right column.

Maybe fate will conspire to bring us together again sometime in the near future, because it’d be great to get to see her again soon!

Cartwheels & friends’ babies Thursday, October 11, 2007

Little miss Olivia did a cartwheel this morning, freaking Susan out at 5a.  She woke me from a chilly sleep with an exclamation of “crap!”  She said the baby had hiccups, but her head was upright!  She is pretty confident, though, that she almost immediately flipped over to return to the head down position.   Susan now knows what this movement feels like, plus the daily hiccup check will let her know the position.

Also – we learned of a few babies arriving:  a former co-worker of mine, Andrew & Laurie had their little boy Gavin on the 9th.  He was a big boy – 8lbs and 20 inches!  We also found out that our friends Cortney and Jeremy have had their little boy Jake!  We haven’t heard directly from them, but all seems well from the photos.  Susan has been mesmerized with looking at photos of little Jake because it is getting her so excited about Olivia coming this December!  On top of wishing for her very own, he is a really cute kid!

Still no ultrasound photos… I’m lazy!