Run With The Fishes

Some Birth Statistics
Date: August 5th, 1998
Time: 10:47 am
Weight: 7 lb 4oz
Length: 20 1/2 inches

Zoey’s arrival

This was written just a few weeks after Zoey was born. I think Zoey had decided that she wasn’t going to come out and greet us until we gave her a little push. I had been having Braxton Hicks contractions off and on for 2 weeks. Zoey was due on August 2nd. On Monday (July 27th), I was at 3 cm dialated and 80 % effaced, Friday I was at 4 cm and 90% effaced. I was very uncomfortable. Walking was hard! Friday night I started having contractions and they got as close as 4 minutes apart for an hour then just went away.

At my Dr. appointment on Monday I was 5 cm dialated and 90% effaced. Dr. Hardin decided that if Zoey didn’t come on her own then Wednesday morning we were going to induce. Everyone was convinced though that we wouldn’t make it until Wednesday. Zoey decided to prove us wrong

On Wednesday my brother came over to our house to watch Nathan and we checked into the hospital at 6:00am. I was still at 5 cm, very close to 6 the nurse said. We filled out all of the paper work and sat around in the hospital for about an hour. Then they came in with pitocin. My doctor told me that if I wanted an epidural I should get it then. Greg and I had been talking about it. I knew that the pitocin would make the contractions very hard so decided to go for it. I had already had my “natural/unmedicated” experience and decided to go for comfort this time. This was at 7:30am

My mom had brought us a book and the newspaper to read, but we ended up watching Talk shows. Boy, was it odd not feeling much below my waist. I knew when I was having contractions because of a slight pressure, but that was it. Ah was this the life. At about 8:30am I was already 7cm and they decided to break my water. At 9:15 my mom went to our house to check on Nathan, my sister and my brother. We wanted to make sure someone would fix breakfast for him… hehe.

At 10:20, I was 10cm and ready to go. I pushed 3 times and then we went into the delivery room. Once we got into the delivery room and everyone was ready, I pushed once and Greg said you could see all of her Black hair. Black! That was a surprise, Nathan had had just little tufts of light blonde hair. I pushed once more and at 10:47am, after only about 3 hours of labor, there was Zoey! I got to hold her immediatly while Greg cut her cord. He didn’t want to do that with Nathan. She was (still is) beautiful. Lots and lots of black hair all over her body and perfect little fingers and toes. Her head wasn’t even very cone shaped. Greg went and touched her and talked to her while she had her little bath. Then we were taken to our room where she met her big brother. Nathan loved her at first sight and wanted to give his baby kisses.

When we moved into this house we knew we would need to repaint a room or two. One of those was Zoey’s room. By itself it seemed like a really awful color of lime green. For Zoey’s birthday we decided to give her room a makeover. We bought things that would make the green seem brighter and more like a little girl room color.

Zoey and Nathan were at my dad’s house for the past week. This gave us time to redecorate the kitchen and Zoey’s room (for her birthday).

The kitchen was a dingy white and had a funky wallpaper on one wall that was starting to peel. We also needed to repair and paint the ceiling from the leaky roof that was replaced last month. We started by sanding down the walls to get the painful spikey texture smoothed out. After we washed the pounds of dust away, we patched all of the holes and primed the walls. The ceiling has a popcorn texture that had fallen off around the leaks. We thought it would be easier to patch than make a huge mess pulling down the rest of the ceiling. We bought an aerosol can that sprays the texture up to the ceiling. Greg taped of the area around the spot that needed patched and hung some papers from the ceiling around it to catch the spray. The directions say to shoot it from the inside of a box. We found out why when Greg started spraying the texture all over the kitchen. It was pretty comical and thankfully easy to clean up.

I decided that all of the walls would be painted a buttery yellow that matched both our table and cabinetry and wanted to have one wall that was different for accent. I picked out a tomato red that looked really good next to the yellow color. After 4 coats of primer and 4 more coats of red, the wall looked pretty good. The only problem was that when you looked at the whole kitchen it looked like someone had squirted mustard all over 3 walls and ketchup on the 4th.

All in all, not too shabby. The plan is, with Jennifer’s help, to paint a mural on the red wall. That should help tone it down some.