New baby

For the next while I'll just be writing on Zach's log.

hospitals and flooring

Elena's odds are to stay in the hospital until the doc's decide to induce so this could be days or weeks who knows. Not that easy to be a single parent. I've been doing it for about a week now and it is tough. I feel like all I do is work, go to the hospial, tend to Olivia and sleep. Thats it. I spent most of my vacation sitting around the hospital waiting and waiting for tests or doctors or midwives to spend a few seconds with us and off they go.

My parents came up today and watched Olivia while I worked. Dad finished up the flooring and picked up the carpet and we drug it to the basement. Its heavy.

We went back to see Elena after work and got there about 9 and stayed for a half hour. Olivia really seemed to like it but she was tired and not feeling the best. Speaking of sleep, I think I'm going to call it a night.

bed rest in hospital

Elena has spent the last day on bed rest in the hospital. We went in Friday morning and they kept her last night and are going to keep her tonight. It looks like the baby is going to come out sooner rather than later and every day counts. She had the steroid shots about a week ago so thats a good help for baby's lungs. We're really hoping that they'll be far enough along so he can stay in the Eisenburg building where Elena is and not transferred to St. Mary's across town like with Olivia.

Olivia and I have been keeping the house going. My dad came up on Thursday and we worked on the basement flooring. We put in some OSB panels with plastic cones on the bottom to get the carpet off the floor and help with moisture. Hopefully this will keep the basement warmer and the new carpet will be softer and ligher to brighten up the basement. We got most of it done except the hardest row. This stuff is neat in that it is tounge and groove and just pushes together.

I hear Olivia messing around in the kitchen so better end this post.

bed rest

Elena came home today from the hospital. She's on bed rest til birth so this is bound to be fun.
Olivia and I went to her room around 11:30 and left around 3:30. Guess how many doctors/specialists/tests/midwives we had? Yea, its a nice round number. Finally Elena said "Lets just go." On the answering machine when we came home was a fresh message from the midwife saying that she just missed us. Super.

I spent the evening hoping for a good Orange bowl of USC vs OU. Number 1 vs 2. great game, eh?
nopers. was a major blowout like 55-19. USC just showed up and didn't stop. Oh well.
So I ripped up all the carpet in the basement and scraped up the pad. I'm going to order some carpet tomorrow for it so we can use the basement more. Right now its all in a pile that I'm going to have fun tomorrow hauling out.

Today

Over the new years weekend we went to decorah and stayed with my parents. We went to Pauls for new years party. We had pizza and played a lot of 500.
Elena noticed that her legs were getting puffy and her wrists. We wanted to go back to rochester on saturday after the Iowa football game but there was a lot of freezing rain.
The Iowa game was awsome. We watched the first half and it was a close game like 14-13. Then Elena called up to Roch and talked with a midwife and they asked her to come in. But the roads were all ice but we could make it to the Decorah hospital. I set the VCR and off we went. We stayed at the hospital around 3 hours and they ran tests and didn't find anything major but wanted to get checked out at roch when we could get there. We went to my parents and I put in the second half of the game.
It was one of the greatest games I've ever seen. Back and forth the defenses bashed each other all over the field. Iowa has the worst running game in division I so that didn't help. Iowa got up by 12 by the fourth quarter but LSU came roaring back and took the lead with like 45 seconds to go.
Iowa get the kickoff around the 25 and drives to midfield. As time runs out Drew Tate threw a bomb to Warren Holloway a fifth year senior who had never scored a TD before. He caught it about the 15 and barreled his way into the endzone to take the hawks up by 5. Just awsome. Finish the year at 10-2. Co-big ten champs. Kirk Ferentz the coach is second to none.
Anywho, we stayed the night and found out that Olivia was running out of diapers. Uh-oh. So Dad and I run to wal-mart. We meet up with Bill Post there and talk a bit. He was named football coach of the year for getting second place last year losing to perennial champs Harlan.
We get the diapers and head home. We take the rout past the fish hatchery and as we climb that first gravel hill we start to slide and spin ourselves into the ditch. We get out and survey the problem and decide to back down the hill in 4wd low and see how it goes. At the bottom of the hill Dad turned to the road and got back on. Luckily we didn't scrape up with the barbed wire fence. So we turned around and went back home through town.
We drive back to Roch and I drop Elena off at the hospital. Olivia and I go to Menards to buy some guttering stuff to help with the drainage in the basement. They were running an 11% off sale and I had a bunch of store credit so I got about 150 dollars worth of stuff for 15. So that was good. We went out to the car and I saw that we had been in there for an hour and a half and I was thinking that Elena would have been waiting for us and be miffed. We parked and went in and found her all strapped up to monitors and not looking happy.
She's going to be on bed rest for the rest of the pregnancy. This is not so good. I'm on vacation this week so we're fine for daycare but the next few weeks could get hairy for Olivia. Her pressures were high, distolic around 90-100. We stayed there for a while and talked about stuff. The resident I'm told is a 3rd year and she's updated through a doctor who's been there for a while. The midwives assured us that they would stay in touch because thats who we want to go through but with the pressures high it doesn't look good. She'll probably get the steroid shot to help the baby's lungs develop in case of a premature birth. She's further along than with Olivia by about a week now and every day counts. Baby seems to be doing good.
I am so tired of hospitals and if we have to do the same with this kid and Olivia I don't know how we'll do it. I work so many evenings past daycare hours I just don't know.

The death toll for the earthquake tsunami is around 150k. Its just a mess over there. There is more destruction than anyone can deal with. These people have no insurance or good medical help or water or anything. They are still pulling people out of the mess.

earthquake

Three days ago there was an earthquake in the indian ocean that was rated at I think a 9.0. India, Sri Lanka and that whole coastline was just devestated by the tsunamis. At latest count the dead was 115,000 and the homeless and hungry must be even more. International aid is coming in to help bury the bodies and bring food. One thing that they are very worried about is the chance of disease with all the bodies laying there. Fresh water is another major concern. There are many pictures of bodies lying on the sand and of bulletin boards with pictures of kids from parents looking for them. The houses they lived in were not very sturdy and there were miles of just wreckage that couldn't stand up to the waves. They say that a good portion of the killed were children out on the beaches playing in the waves then the big one came and wiped everything out.

There have been theorists talking about if this could happen on the west coast and from what I've read that a long time ago (don't remember when, could have been as near as 300 years ago) there was an earthquake there that was just massive. Who knows. I'm sure that in the news there will be lots of "earthquake experts" out there spewing theories.

Christmas '04

The week before Christmas, Frank was on vacation so I had to work a bunch of hours so I was glad for 1600 on Friday. We were out of the store in really good time. Eric had all the lights turned off, I mean all the lights, just before 4 so people got the hint. We were really busy. Lots of people had those last minute home improvements for company.

I came home and we had our celebration. Olivia opened some books and that was it for her. She couldn't focus on any new presents because there were new books to look at!!! We then went to Decorah and stayed with my parents and crashed. Saturday, Olivia sledded for the first time. Man it was the best. I found our old orange plastic sleds up in the barn. I sat her on there and drug her around on the flat in front of the house. She giggled and laughed so we went down those small hills in front of the house and she just was awsome. She just was a giggle worm. So then we got very brave and sledded down the way up to the meadow the same track that Matt Weis built for us way back when. She just loved it so much. She giggled and giggled and laughed loudly. Oh it was great.

Mark and Dana got me a video game cartrige with mrs pac-man, galaga, xevious, pole position, and another game where you are a mouse. Its spiffy. Just plug it into the A/V jacks and away you go.

Olivia got lots of toys and stuff. She would rip at the present and tear a bit off. Then insist on handing that shred to someone. Then she would shred off another bit and hand it off and so on.
She seemed to enjoy her stuff. She got a leapfrog reading system.

On sunday we went to cho-sun and had some good food.

Olivia has a habit now of spitting out her food. She'll chew at it for a while then just spit it out. argh.