just for you sarah (and everyone else wondering how rachel's doing)after you made that comment sarah i realized that i haven't really taken any pictures of rachel since the first day of her life. i guess i'm ejoying seeing her all the time that i forget others don't see her as often as i do. sorry. i'll take more pics and post.
on a similar note, i promised to tell more of the 'hospital' story, so here goes:
as you may know deb's actual due date was oct. 23rd, but she was
DONE being pregnant a few weeks before then. so after talking to her doctor she actually set an 'inducement' date at the hospital for oct. 9th. but she called and cancelled it, so as to let the baby develop further.
at her weekly dr. appointment on the 18th she decided the baby had enough developing and asked the dr. what she could do to speed up the process. her dr. stripped her membranes and told her to go home and get childcare situated for the other sisters and head to the hospital by 6.30pm.
so deb comes home at about 3.15 and tells me that she's got the green light to go to the hospital. i ask her "how soon do you want to leave?" because i hadn't worked out yet for the day i wanted to go running. i asked if she could wait 45 minutes. she said yes, so i went running. after i got back we took the kids to my sister who was at the church getting ready for church that evening. then we loaded up the van and headed to sunnyside to have our baby.
after checking in around 6pm, the doctor came in and 'broke the water' around 6.30pm and we settled in for an evening of wheel of fortune and jeapordy. around 8.30 things were kinda still slow pokin but deb and i were getting hungry. deb asked me to go and sneak her back some clam chowder from skippers. i went out and got myself a
carne asada burrito and then made it just in time to skippers for the chowder.
i'm not quite sure what time they began deborah on petocin,
she says it was at about 11pm. but still things weren't picking up too quickly. deb went to sleep soon after being given the petocin, and i finally went to bed after "blogging" a bit around 1am.
at about 2am deb wakes me up because of the strength of her contractions. i briefly got up, i think i got her some more ice and water, and then i went back to sleep. (all within about 5 min. mind you.) at around 2.55am she wakes me up again. this time she's muttering something about wanting drugs. so i walk over to the nurses station telling them her requests and they come over soon.
they got deb into bed and checked her progress before they would give her any drugs and she was 6cm and about 90% effaced. deb thought that since she'd been at 3-4cm for such a long time that from 6 to 10 would still take quite some time. the nurses knew differently and had deb lay on her side and kept telling her to relax. (in actuallity they were stalling because the doctor was in the next room delivering another baby)
it was amazing to see the transformation once the doctor came in. the nurses went from "relax honey, just let the baby come down on it's own, you don't need to push"
to "ok, sweetie, go ahead and give it a good push. one or two good pushes and you'll have a baby! keep going, don't give up now"
so anyways, rachel joy was born at 3.16am. although at 3.16am we didn't know
who she was yet. we called our parents around 4am, after they had cleaned her up a bit, and she still didn't have a name! deb had left the final decision of the name up to me. and all the names we had tossed around until then just didn't seem right at the time. so i hopped on the internet and looked up "name of women in the bible". that led me to
this page where i started matching names to see what sounded good.
finally around 5am-ish i asked deb what she thought of "Rachel Joy Lara", she thought it was beautiful so we declared it to be. and if you'll
look back we proclaimed it to the world at 5.25am.
so that's the story of our rachel.
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if you noticed the link above, deb has made another entry into
her blog again --
post-pregnancy. i look forward to many more great posts in the future.
i did want to point out 2 more new blogs that have recently started. one if from our sr. pastor entilted "
time2team", very apropo if you know our pastor. he just started, and has admitted that after the first two initial posts he's not quite sure where to take it from there. but to be sure it will turn into a great blog on team leadership and 'other stuff'.
and finally,
jessikab has begun her blog. she's a very talented writer and will be documenting her life after high school with God in the driver's seat. may she '
live the beautiful life' that she writes about!
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2 more quick notes::
1) happy birthday to my sister!
and a congratulations are in order as she will be heading to portland to get her 'first mac' on saturday. believe me mag, your gonna love it! - and not just because i say so.
and 2) julia was fidgiting with our digital camera tonight and broke it. (YES!, in between the time i started this post - around 2.30pm - and her bed time - 8.30pm - she broke it.) actually it was simply making weird noises when the lens would open and shut, which is what happened the last time it broke. and i tried to 'set' it back in place and thus finished the "breaking" process.
i did manage to get the pictures off of it that deb had taken with the girls and their new sister (which i'll post soon) but after which i don't know how long it will be until we are able to get it fixed or get a new one. (the 1 year warranty expired like on oct. 25th?)
g'night all!
it looks like we're gonna be diving into homeschooling beginning next semester. so we're in the midst of wading through website after website, book after book, curriculum and workbooks. it's a bit daunting.
first off it was the first sunday for rachel joy. deb was/is still feeling exhausted and trying to adjust to all the changes in her body. so she stayed home. i usually do announcements on sunday mornings, so i came home (next door to the church) and grabbed rachel to hold her while i did announcements. everybody loved seeing her (even the ones who knew for certain that she'd be a boy).
i also got the privelage of baptizing 2 teenagers yesterday morning. one of them forgot to bring a towel so i let her use the one i brought and i just went home all soaking wet, in oct morning cold. (ok so not as cold as our MN friends, but cold nonetheless when you've just come out of a non-heated baptismal)
it was also my dad's birthday yesterday, so after church we went to his house for lunch. we spent a couple hours there and then came home to get ready for the evening service.
last night was a special youth service at reallife.CHURCH. we had our District Youth Director for the Northwest Ministry Network for the Assemblies of God (washington and northern idaho) as a guest speaker with us. we had Jeffery Portmann come speak last year and i've decided to make it a yearly event: DYD Day! i also hope to have him come back again sooner. some of our youth suggested during spring break or summer so that he could bring his whole family. (they didn't come this time because his boys have school the next day)
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today is my last day of 'paternity leave', deb has been noticably been "getting better". but she still needs to take it easy, so i'm glad i'm able to be available for her today.
i've got to get the kids ready for school so - later y'all.