Category: Groftzoo Updates

Molly’s Birth Story

Well, she’s 8 months old now, it’s about time I got this posted.

November 3rd – I woke up and noticed throughout the morning that my usual braxton hicks contractions were different. They had a sharper, more painful quality to them.  They didn’t seem to be coming any closer, and I didn’t feel like timing them to see it they were.  I figured that if they really started to grab my attention I would start timing them.  But the contractions were persistent, even if they weren’t all that painful, so in the early afternoon I called Carol, my midwife, to let her know what was going on – that the contractions had changed, and I really thought that labor would begin in earnest in the middle of the night.  She told me to keep her posted and I went about my day.

I picked the kids up from school as usual and found that being in the car made the contractions not only stronger, but settle into a timeable pattern.  While I was driving they were about 6-7 minutes apart, still light enough to talk through.  At about 4pm I told Posy that things were probably started and I canceled our dinner plans.  Jay was already home from work and had started getting the pool set up.  I called a friend and asked if the kids could come to their house for dinner to give us some down time and see how things developed.  By 5:30pm, when we were supposed to have friends over for dinner, the contractions were good and strong and I knew for sure we were on our way.

But my labors have a way of hesitating, so I wasn’t sure I wanted Carol to come over just yet.  But since she had missed Lily’s birth, she convinced me to let her come over then and check me and just be there with us for a while.

My labor built very slowly through the evening.  At some point the kids came back home and were put to bed in their own rooms.  I labored on the birth ball a lot and paced when I felt like it.  Around 9:30pm, Carol siad she would like me to try laying on my left side for a while to see if that helped the labor or at least let me get some rest.  I had wanted to keep moving to keep the power in the contractions, but I agreed with her that some rest would be a good idea.

Wow.  Once I was on my left side there was no rest to be had.  Jay laid down with me and dozed, but my contractions took off like crazy.  They immediately went to about 3 minutes apart and took all my concentration.  Sometime around 11, I decided that if I had this lovely pool all ready to go to help ease my pain, I might as well use it.

I got into the pool and Jay supported me from outside of it. I labored in there until past midnight and eventually started pushing. But the water was on the hotter end of birth pool temperatures (probably 101-102) and I was working hard, so I got very hot and uncomfortable.  It finally started to make me a bit dizzy.  Jay said that seemed to alarm Carol when I said I was dizzy. She told me to get out of the pool and finish pushing the baby out on the floor or bed.  But as soon as I turned over to move and get out, Molly moved down a bunch.  It was too late to go anywhere.

So I knelt, facing the wall of the pool and pushed like crazy.  I kind of roared as she came out.  The position I was in made it very hard for the the midwife to catch her, so Molly popped out, almost all at once, just into the water.  As soon as she was out the midwife could reach her and she pulled her up out of the water while I turned over.  Pushing had only lasted about 15 minutes once I got serious about it.  She was born a little after midnight on November 4th.

Molly was retracting some and snorting, so we moved out of the pool right away and they cut the cord and gave her some oxygen.  Immediately upon receiving the oxygen though she recovered and started to breath properly.  She was a teeny little thing at only 6 lbs, 12 oz, 19 inches long.

Summer Update 2010

Well, I promised again that I would start to keep things up to date and it never happened.  Time to write has been non-existent the whole year!  But it is summer now, and I am taking a deep breath and sitting down for at least a few moments before I take the kids for a swim.  I am not going to attempt to rewind and get you all caught up, this update is strictly where we are now and what is going on this week.  I don’t want to overwhelm either you as a reader or myself as a writer by trying to catch up on all the doings not recently chronicled.

So here we are, 3rd week of July and in the very thick of summer.  And BOY is it summer.  Today was honestly the first day that even walking outside made me just want to turn around and run for A/C.  But it did.  Standing around and talking after mass nearly made me melt, and then we still had to go to the store on the way home.  That made me downright grouchy.  But we made it.

So this week is a big week for us, we celebrate our 20th anniversary!  We went out to dinner last night and even left the baby (big first there!) and had a nice time reminiscing and list our favorite and not-so-favorite moments of the last 20 years.  Only God could have brought us through all the garbage we have lived through and still stayed together.  Overall, it has been a very happy 20 years.  🙂

The kids are enjoying their summer.  I deliberately underscheduled us for summer and am so glad I did.  We needed this down time and the summer provided its own busyness.  If I had scheduled stuff too we would have been on the go all the time.  Ben, Max, and Tessa have been seeing a friend or two when they can and swimming the rest of the time.  I can’t tell you how much I love having a swimming pool during the summer.  It is just heaven to always have something for the kids to do.

We haven’t done any official swimming lessons but I have worked with the kids myself.  That is going well.  Lily can swim and is learning how to come up for a breath,  Max is a complete fish now and only uses a floatie to jump off the diving board.  Even Molly is in on the action.  When we sit her on the top step she will scooch her butt to the edge, take a deep breath and lean/fall in and kick her way to me or Jay.  She loves the pool and gets excited just seeing it.

Paisley has moved out again, after living at home the last 7 months.  James has graduated and is preparing to start community college and is working part time.  Posy is busy as a bee with her little circle of friends.

All in all, summer has been just what we needed – a slowing down from the incredibly hectic pace of the last school year.

We are gearing up to start again, but with two fewer schools to deal with, things should be at least a little calmer.

At least a girl can hope…

What Bird?

Yesterday as I was sitting at the computer doing bills and balancing the checkbook I heard a commotion in the bathroom.  Max was at school and Lily and Molly were asleep, so it could only be the cat, Oscar. It wouldn’t be that unusual for him to knock something over trying to get a drink in the sink, but the noise continued.  Several things had been knocked over by the time I went to investigate.

When I went into the bathroom, I saw a small bird on the floor and the cat, who had apparently been trying to get the bird out of hiding, about to pounce.  In this rare moment of quiet in the house, I really didn’t have time to chase down a bird. I needed to get some work done.  So I grabbed the cat and closed the bird safely in the bathroom.  And promptly forgot about it.

Later in the day, when the kids and Jay were all home, Ben went to use the bathroom and was surprised to find the bird, calmly sitting on the floor.  Jay came to the rescue and carefully moved the bird to a safe spot outside, and our little wildlife excitement was over.

But today brought a funny little sample of how our family communicates, sometimes poorly, but we always seem to know what we mean.  While Paisley was preening in the bathroom she came upon a little something left by the bird… poop.  She puzzled over how or why or even if it was in fact bird poop on the bathroom counter, because she had not been around during the excitement of the previous day, and finally asked Ben, “Why is there bird poop in the bathroom?” To which he replied, “The bird pooped in the bathroom?”

We don’t have a bird, so this response didn’t make much sense to Paisley.  So she asked Jay, “Why is there bird poop in the bathroom?” And he said…

Wait for it…

“The bird pooped in the bathroom?”

“WHAT BIRD?” Paisley wanted to know.  So we let her in on the whole situation, which really wasn’t a big deal.  But we all had a good laugh over the somewhat nonsensical answer that two family members gave her when she was trying to find out what happened.

Mass Hysteria

Last week Sunday mass went very well.  The kids were slightly less squirrelly than usual and I actually heard the homily.

I should have known that couldn’t last.

This week was an adventure.

It began as we started to get out of the car in the parking lot.  It was a cold, rainy Sunday and none of my kids brought coats.

So we got inside, only a little damp, and got seated.  Mass began and Molly decided it was time to fill her diaper.  Loudly.  So I made my first trip back to the bathroom, luggage in tow, and changed the baby who had miraculously not soiled her beautiful outfit. (Yet.)  Back up the aisle, seated again, I fought with Lily who was in rare form (in a bad way) and was making me wonder exactly how to discipline her in a very quiet way in mass.  I seemed to alternate telling her to GET DOWN (from climbing the pew in front of us) with GET UP HERE (as she tried to slink away under the pew to get behind us) throughout the whole mass.

Then at one point she decided mass was over and just LEFT and started to walk out.  I chased her down and brought her back.

Soon after, during the consecration, Tessa turned to Lily and said, “That is Jesus’s blood.”  Lily said, “JESUS’S BUTT? That’s not Jesus’s butt!  It’s Jesus’s BLOOD!”

While all of this was going on Molly was nursing on and off and crabbing about life in general and sucking her fingers.  Which is all par for the course UNTIL she gagged herself with her two fingers and threw up all over me.  And I mean ALL over.  There were puddles on the pew and on the floor and – and this is the grossest part – in my bra, and it just kept coming.  I was soaked.  SOAKED, I tell you.  Thankfully I had two blankets with me, one cotton afghan and one receiving blanket.  So I wiped up everything I could with the afghan and covered myself up with the receiving blanket and back we went to the bathroom.  Just for reference, we sit in the front, the bathroom is in the back.  So I make my way, luggage, baby, puke, and all, back to the bathroom.

I changed Molly and wiped myself off as well as I could and got back to mass, which was thankfully only a moment or two from being over.  I zipped up my jacket over my wet shirt, because we were not going home, we had a breakfast over in the hall to attend, and I was not going to miss it just because I smelled like sour milk.

And breakfast was lovely anyway.

2010

Is it Twenty-ten or Two thousand ten?

Either way it is a new year and time to put in an update around here.  As is my custom, I have slacked off entirely on writing for a while – some four months to be exact, which is a bit of a record slack off around here.  But I have lots of lovely (and a few not so lovely) excuses.

1. Molly Catherine was born at home, in the water, on November 4th.

2. Molly is a handful.  She started out with a bang by sending us to the NICU for her first day with some heart arrhythmias that needed to be figured out.  Thankfully all was well.  But she has kept us hopping by being very vocal about her needs.  I suppose one has to be vocal, being an 8th child.  But she is beautiful and healthy and is now settling nicely into life outside the womb.

3. Besides taking care of a newborn, we have 4 schools to contend with this year.  I may have mentioned it before on the blog, I’m too lazy to go back and check right now, but this has been just as much work as I thought it would be.  And then some.

4. And this one is the doozy: When Molly was just a month old, I was involved in an accident that resulted in a fatality.  We are all physically fine, and I was not at fault, but it has been a lot to grapple with and I didn’t feel that those details belonged on the internet.

And now, as a reminder list to me and to give you a teaser of what may be to come look for posts on a few of these things:

And plenty of other stuff, I am sure.

To Clean a Shower

Twice now I have bought some super-high-powered, fairly expenseive (in my mind anyway) cleaner to get my disgusting shower really clean and twice now someone has knocked it down and broken the nozzle and made it unusable.

So I found a bottle of Tilex in the kids bathroom (that, incidentally was bought so long ago that it is covered with soap scum.  Is it just me or is that a little ironic?) and dumped it out to replace with one of the broken-nozzle cleaners.  Done.  Spray shower.  Leave to sit and let the nasty chemicals do their work.

Later on, I walk into the bathroom and see my reflction in the mirror.  Two big, white bleach spots on one of my favorite maternity shirts – one of the few that is actually long enough to cover my entire basketball sized belly.

Argh!  I can’t win.

A Sad Day

I have been enjoying Lily’s misuse of pronouns lately. There are few things so cute as their exploration of language and playing with the proper words. Mostly she has just been replacing the word “I” with “my” with adorable results.

For example, when I told her yesterday that I was taking her to Nana’s house, she replied, “My love Nana! Oh yes, my do!”

Another one that has been common for her is that when she wants to show something to me she will grab my hand and lead me to it saying “Show me, show me, show me…” all the way there.

But today she brought me a book and said, “See the spiders? Let me show you!”

One more stage of babyhood left behind.

A Monday Success List

“Things to Do” is so depressing. Today we are going with “Things Done!”

1. Ate breakfast, make iced tea
2. Bible study
3. Start load of wash, start load in dryer
4. Give bowl to Max BEFORE he threw up
5. (And I get major points for this one!!!) pile up things in garage so that the VAN ACTUALLY FITS! Now granted, there isn’t enough room for anyone but the driver to get in and out, but at least it is in the shade. I can pull it into the driveway to load up kids.
6. Sit on couch like a zombie for 20 minutes
7. Reboot laundry, it’s now 8:30am
8. Load/start dishwasher
9. wash other pots and pans, put them away
10. Bleach sink, wipe of counters and stove, ignore nasty floor
11. Make bed, pretend that makes my room clean
12. Clean out puke bowl, watch a little Zaboomafoo with Max
13. Shower and get dressed, FINALLY
14. Reboot laundry, fold 2 loads
15. Snack time, hummus and pretzel chips with a side of Iced Tea
16. Move boxes in from garage (4 of them) and fold up table, now you can access all sides of van when in the garage.
17. Go to grocery, remember as I am checking out that shopping while hungry was probably NOT a good idea. My Amy’s Organic Burritos are bagged with my Hershey’s Chocolate. I won’t even tell you what the marshmallows got bagged with.
18. Reboot laundry
19. Hang picture
20. Eat lunch
21. Make a kid empty the D/W, I pile dishes on counter, run James to a friend’s house (and the van was so nice and cool after being in the shade!)
22. Put Lily down for a nap
23. Take a nap myself
24. Awaken to disgusting virus problem*
25. Start more laundry – I had stopped for the day, but am restarting now. How can it be almost 4pm?
26. Try to disentangle my registration for CPST course so I can pay and be official (it worked!)
27. Get mail – put on new blender blade
28. Hand out popsicles
29. Move last (Please???) load to dryer, fold two more loads of clothes

And here – at 4:53pm – is where I am going to stop today’s list. Not because I am done or anything, but things are about to get much more busy as we move into evening. Still to come: Make dinner, clean up kitchen, take kids swimming (except the sick one!), shower everyone off, feed bedtime snacks, put away a few stacks of clothes (maybe…), brush all teeth, put everyone in bed (which is a major process in and of itself!), and stay up until Posy gets home.

*Just a note: I left out various stomach virus related details from the list because they were too gross for even me (and that is saying something!) and I left out the several times I sat down to update this list and blew a few minutes on Facebook or whatnot. Also not mentioned, taking Lily potty about 150 times. But so far today she has stayed dry.