Gems from James

Lucky you on a Monday!  I've got several gems polished up just for you!

While reflecting wistfully on his wife's always inconsistent disposition since Gracie's arrival on the scene:
"You were such a happy pregnant girl."

While shopping online:
"Look at this hat!  I don't know how much it will cost by the time I pay the shipping fee, but it doesn't matter because it's the hat I've always wanted!"

Declining my pro-offered scarf while holding our naked baby at the outdoor farmers' market on a fall day mid-diaper blowout change:
"She's going to have to learn to deal with the cold sometime."

Said the stranger passing by:
"She's shivering!"

Mentally preparing herself for the cold.

The Griswolds are preparing for another vacation - I'm sure there will be some tasty morsels for you when we return!
Shelby

Goal Oriented

We've been very busy this past week round these parts.  Busy-ness which has included, but was not limited to Gracie's four month shots, swim class, moms' group, lunch with nana, coffee with friends, and my triumphant return to (substitute) teaching.  All of this activity has meant the nap schedule has gone.  Off.  The. Rails.  And I knew I would have to pay the piper eventually. And pay I have.  So, at four thirty this notmorning notnight, I vowed that we would not be messing with the tattered remains of the nap schedule for at least two days.  Our public will just have to wait to see us for awhile.  Which will of course help build our mystique.  I know Suri would approve.
So, knowing I would be under house arrest for the next couple of days, I began setting my goals for the day.  Did I mention it was four thirty?  That may explain why my goals are somewhat mismatched.  But whatever - the important thing is that I have goals, right?
Here they are, in no particular order: Have a nap, bake this chocolate zucchini cake, work up a sweat to my new Jillian Michaels DVD.  Guess which one is yet to be accomplished?  But it's only four thirty in the pm.  Coincidence?  I think not.

It's busy-ness like this that will get you into trouble . . . 

Parenting Fail

It's been quiet* Chez Quinlan, save for the sounds of teeny, tiny sneezes and equally teeny, tiny coughs.  But we've survived it.  That's right, we've survived our first cold.  And we did surprisingly well.  Gracie still managed to get some sleep, which is amazing, because when her mother has a cold, she needs no less than three pillows propping up her stuffy head, two NyQuil, a big ol' cup of Neo Citron, and half a tub of Vicks in order to slumber while sick.  Gracie?  She had none of these luxuries, although I set the box of NyQuil on her dresser to see if it would have a placebo effect.

Aww, baby's first cold!  Another milestone to add to the baby book!

Having escaped the first cold with very little to complain about, Gracie so kindly decided I needed more fodder for my blog and obliged yesterday by napping for no more than 15 minutes at a time.  Until her late afternoon feeding that is, when she decided to conk out in my arms for a solid two hours, knowing I wouldn't have the guts to put her down.  Thank goodness I have many, many episodes of Ellen on the PVR.
Fearing a similar scenario today (which CANNOT happen because today is new moms' group day - the one day I get to see other people, and I NEED Gracie to be semi-pleasant while we discuss Victoria Beckham's new collection) I laid Gracie down for her morning nap and was rewarded with a chorus of screams.  And grunts. Gracie never screams when I lay her down, so I figured the suspiciously clean diapers of the past day and a half had something to do with the screams and the grunts, and swooped in with the Ovol. Having calmed her enough to coax some of the elixir down her gullet, I approached her with the eye dropper, and dropped some Ovol in her eye.  Oh, that's not what an eye dropper is meant for?  Whoops, silly me!  Don't worry.  Gracie reinforced that lesson with piercing screams the likes of which I look forward to hearing again next week when I take her for her immunizations.  After exhausting herself with all of that screaming however, she's been sawing logs for a solid hour and a half so far.  New moms' here we come!
Shelby
*That's a total lie.  It has not been quiet.  Gracie has found her volume button, and her cute coos and babbling sounds have turned into shrieks.  Not unhappy shrieks, just shrieks-for-the-sake-of-shrieking shrieks.  Is this just a phase?!

More Surprises

No one ever told me she'd laugh like this.  That dripping sound you hear?  It's my heart melting.  That and the leaky kitchen sink neither Jimmy nor I have the brain/will power to repair.  Is it ridiculous to call a plumber about a leaky sink?  I feel like they'll laugh at us for being too incompetent to repair it ourselves, then charge us a trillion dollars while they laugh some more.  I think I'll just stick another cereal bowl under the drippity-drip and go eat up my daughter instead.
Shelby

GMQ Makes her Debut: Part 3

If you missed part 1 or 2 (not that you ever would) you can look them up here and here.

The last bump pic.

So, we were waiting at the desk - the empty desk, apparently the only desk in the whole wide world that has staff capable of admitting a labouring woman, even one who is lowing like a cow and terrifying every patient everywhere.  Jimmy was in disbelief and didn't know quite what to do.  I was just glad that I was no longer in a car and could resume my counter leaning and hip swaying routine.  I'm not sure how long we waited, but finally two ladies entered through a door behind the desk wearing their cots and carrying their lunch bags, clearly just arriving for their shift.
"Oh my, have you been waiting long?" They ask.  "Where is Maria?  She is supposed to be on shift now!  No one was here to help you.  Oh my!" They went on and on, until another contraction came and my grunting and groaning prodded them into a very medium paced course of action.
And then the porter, the poor porter arrived.  The man who had to convince me to sit in that wheelchair.  Who came up with this policy?  Don't all the books say a labouring woman should walk and move to bring the baby down?  I tried to explain to him that after this was all over I was pretty sure I'd never sit down again, what with all the busyness of being a parent and the life sentence by hemrhoid I feared was about to be mine.  I told him I was just preparing myself for a life on two feet and would be happy to walk myself to labour and delivery, but he was having none of it.  Sensing I had found a man who wanted to do things by the book, I tried to negotiate.  I said I would get in the chair only if he promised we could pause so that I could stand up if I needed to.  He didn't seem to understand that the world would stop turning if I couldn't stand and sway my hips and he started blathering on about how it would be best to get me upstairs as quickly as possible where there were people who would help me.  Wrong tactic buddy, no one could help me now, no one and nothing but the graceful, hip swaying dance of the tropics.  Clearly he wasn't about to be swayed by a (normally) petite blond, so that's when I went gangsta on him, and he smiled and continued to insist I get in the chair, which I did, like any gangsta would.
Once we arrived in the delivery room, my new obsession began.  Gone was my fixation on hip swaying and here to stay was my fixation on poop.  You're probably thinking I was worried about poop appearing on the delivery table, as so many are, but you would be wrong.  The pressure had become so intense that I felt sure if I could just poop, all my woes would be righted, and we could get on with having this baby.  But no, said the nurse, I can't let you poop, it's not time to push.  She did tell me that I was at 6 cm, and that when it was time to push, the poop would come on it's own, which gave me little comfort, but I was about to find out that "comfort" isn't a word my nurse was familiar with.
To distract me, my doula suggested a nice warm shower, so Jimmy got changed into his swim stuff and we prepared to enter the warm water.  I got in, and tried to do the lean and hip sway, hitting my head on the many safety bars attached to the walls and promptly got right back out.  Jimmy complained about the fact that he had gotten changed for this two second dip, and I felt really, really, bad about inconveniencing him.  Or not.
So, leaving the pint sized shower stall behind, I made my way to the bed where we found we were making good progress.  Nine and a half centimeters!  I nearly leapt with joy at the thought that the poop baby would arrive soon!
I continued to gently murmur through each contraction, keeping my voice at an always pleasant volume.  After a contraction passed, I would exclaim that it wasn't that I was in pain, there was just so much pressure, and when would I be allowed to poop?!  Nurse Comfort, sensing she would have to do something to motivate me to continue, checked things out and confirmed it was time to push.  Halleluah!  So with the next contraction, I pushed.  Nurse Comfort stood at the foot of the bed, arms crossed and eyes narrowed.  And she stayed there until the next contraction when I pushed again.  I looked at her, expecting some kind of encouragement or update on the arrival of the poop, and she offered up a real pearl.
"Shelby, I'm going to need a little more oomph," said she.
Even Jimmy, the man who will, by the end of this tale utter words no man should utter in a delivery room knew that was not the most encouraging or instructive thing to say.
Thanks goodness for my doula, because had I only my nurse's directions to guide me, I would still be in that delivery room waiting for my baby to learn how to crawl so she could enter the world under her own power.  As it was, I ended up pushing for about an hour and a half, and I was exhausted. We all thought this would be a fairly small baby, maybe six or seven pounds.  I don't know why we thought this, based on all the DQ Blizzards I ate throughout my pregnancy, but we did.  So while my mom was holding my hand, giving words of encouragement, her thoughts were not so encouraging.  She told me afterwards she was thinking we were in big trouble if I couldn't push this little six pound baby out!
But we slowly made progress, and soon my entourage was exclaiming things like, "I can see the head!" and "Look at that unibrow!" which motivated me enormously.

And all of a sudden, she was there on my chest.  I remember being so surprised when I heard she was a girl.  She looked so big to me!  She proved our hunches wrong again, weighing in at a healthy eight pounds two ounces.  There were many tears and exclamations when she arrived.  And I thought the hardest work was over.  But no, there was a small issue with the placenta.  After waiting about 45 minutes for it to deliver to no avail, my doctor gave me some laughing gas so that she could call in a large man wearing soccer cleats to jump up and down on my abdomen to "help things along".  So, placenta delivered, there was just one small item left to take care of involving a surgical sewing kit.  
I have never had stitches ever in my life.  I hate needles and am afraid of every and any surgical procedure.  So, still high on laughing gas, I began loudly voicing my fears to the room.  Jimmy, proud new father, comfortably seated in the rocker with his daughter offered some words of encouragement.

"Remember the time I had to get ten stitches in my lip? I did just fine, and you will too."
Ahem.
My doctor (bless her heart) threw him a death glare and said in the iciest tone she could muster, "This is just a slightly more delicate area."
Silence.
And I survived her handiwork.  

We settled in to get to know our new daughter, Jimmy and I and my burst blood vessels.  Jimmy had a couple of hours to spend with us before he got back on the road to Calgary to win his playoff game, even scoring a goal in the process.  It was fun to watch online in the hospital, and Gracie got several mentions during the broadcast.  Jimmy made it back to the hospital by about two am to spend the rest of the night with us.  I was very lucky to have my family stay with me during the day, and my sister through most of the night so that I wasn't on my own.

Ready to go home.

So Gracie has known how to keep us on our toes from the beginning, but her timing was perfect! Her dad was there to meet her and still got to his game on time.  And it makes for a pretty good story ;)

Shelby