My child laughs in his sleep!

Never when he is awake, just when he is asleep. He gets these great, low laughs and that grin I love where his tongue sticks out a little. I'm sure awake laughs are coming, since smiles started in his sleep, too.

First Christmas

This is Jeff and my seventh married Christmas, but it is our first Christmas as a trio. Jude's first Christmas. At nine days short of three months, he of course, has no idea what is going on, but it was fun anyway. This morning "he" opened gifts from mommy & daddy, Aunt Ann & Uncle Joe, Great-grandma & Great-grandpa, and Grandma Linda. Respectively he received his first piggy bank (so he will understand the importance of saving earl, a sock monkey & the bouncy seat from mommy & daddy, a great blanket and a TON of clothes from Aunt Ann & Uncle Joe, a great running suit from Great-grandma & Great-grandpa, and a super cool wooden monkey toy from Africa from Grandma Linda.

Here's the photos documenting the morning:

These guys got it right

As I read this passage from Luke 2 today, it struck me that these were the first evangelists! When they realized the good news that Jesus' birth was, they couldn't contain themselves. Imagine what a risk they were taking in first century Asia to be making such lofty claims!

" 15When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about."

16So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. 17When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, 18and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. 19But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. 20The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told."

Do we share that Good News with as much enthusiasm and conviction as the shepherds?

Salvation will always be the best gift that Jeff and I have received, but here's the next best:

In case you are wondering what his shirt says:















And here's what a 15 pound 11 week old looks like:

The Effectiveness of Prayer

God is so good! I know that He is good all the time, but I just feel it so acutely right now. Here is a video I got of Jude this afternoon. I could tell all day that people were praying for him. We didn't even have a single fussy moment today after four days of all out bawling at feeding times! We had a very sweet day together, which amazes me more because daddy was on duty today, so we were going it alone and I was preparing for a long day. Oh me of little faith:-( Of course, if I really had little faith that he would be better, I wouldn't have asked people to pray, I suppose! Or maybe faith follows the action?

Please Pray for Jude

Please pray for Jude. He has spent the most part of the last 4 afternoons screaming and screaming because at feeding times because his GER medication takes a couple of weeks to reach full effectiveness. Anyone who has met my little boy knows that this is just not his personality. He never cries unless he's hungry.

He seems to do better in the early morning, late evening, and over night feedings. But during the late morning/afternoon/early evening sometimes even being presented with the breast makes him cry. Not just cry; wail.

We see the doctor again on Tuesday. Hopefully his ear infection is gone so we only have to push one medication on him. Unfortunately, it's the one that tastes awful. I plan to ask the doctor about some things that other mothers with GER babies have suggested (I'm a member of a GER online community: momswearingpuke.com) like giving an ounce of Maalox before he nurses. There has to be something I can do to make him more comfortable. I've been giving him Tylenol a few times a day, but even that doesn't seem to help.

Thanks.

Baptism

Jude was baptized yesterday. True to Highland's form, it was not without event. First, I was nursing when Travis called us up because he always does them at the end of the sermon and I expected the sermon to be longer. Then, Travis realized he brought the adult baptism questions, so he had to run downstairs to get the parent questions. Here he is explaining that to us.















Whew! Got the questions! Hooray for the Book of Church Order!












Then, the water poured into Jude's eye. Here's the instant right before that happened. It took everything in me not to jump in and brush it off, but all Jude said was, "Eeh, eeh," and continued looking around the room.















Ready for his close up!


















Family photos:
























And, here is Jenn's little girl. We've already prearranged the marriage. Expect a wedding invitation in a couple of decades:-)











And I just loved this photo.

First Parade

Jude went to his first parade this evening - LaFayette's Christmas parade. It's nothing much. Basically every baseball team, church, or civic group in town riding trailers pulled by pick up trucks. Jeff said it was pretty "red." But we had fun. Actually, there were a couple of nicely decorated "floats" (using that term loosely. We even had a tractor-trailer from the ol' Walmart in the parade. It had Christmas lights on it.
Jude slept through the whole thing, even when the firetrucks came by running sirens and blowing their horns! Slept through the LHS marching band and ROTC. Slept through the hot rods driving by revving their engines. The minute we walked into Subway to get dinner, he woke up. Guess it was too quiet!
It was 29 degrees, so here is what he wore:




























He was the warmest one of us all to say the least!

Also, I finally got some photos of him smiling (sort of):















































Shortly after these were taken, Jeff took this photo:














Guess he had a big day!

Round Two

It appears that Jude has another ear infection (or the same one). But this time we have a reason for why he may be getting them. It turns out that he has GERD. My poor baby has acid reflux! No wonder he's been having such a difficult time nursing these days. Though you wouldn't guess it because he's up to 13lbs, 8ozs. But we think that's a little down because Jeff weighed him at over 14lbs a few days ago and he's not nursed right since the day before Thanksgiving.

So, it's round two of antibiotics and starting on an H2 blocker for the reflux. Hopefully it works. I'd like for him to start getting consistent sleep at night (because I know I want some!) and the reflux keeps him from doing so.

Do you realize that my son has gained seven pounds in less than two months?

A Song for Jude

Couldn't resist:


On the other hand, this girl has more talent in her little toe at 8 years old that I have had in my whole 29 3/4 years! But yo uhave to click on the link to go to youtube to view it because the embedding was disabled for her stuff. I guess a safety precaution since she is only 8.

In his likeness

Who is this?



















Well, if you guessed Jeff, you are right. However, had this photo not been so weathered, I would have thought it was Jude. Here is a photo of Jude around four weeks, which is how old Jeff is in the above photo. I wish we had a closer shot of his face, but this is the best we have.

We got the answer we wanted!

Everything checked out fine at the cardiologist yesterday. Thank you to everyone who prayed with us that it would be the innocent heart murmur instead of the congenital defect one. The doctor said the 8 of 10 babies have this particular murmur at some point in their childhood and only 1 in 10 get the other kind.

Everyone at the children's hospital was impressed with his size:-) He weighed in at 12 lbs, 11 ozs. That means that he gained 2 lbs and an ounce in 10 days! What can I say? The boy loves milk! He even let me sleep for a couple of four hour stretches twice this week. The other day, it seemed like he was up every hour and a half (yuck), but hopefully, that is past us now.

I bit the bullet and bought some brand new cloth diapers this week. I got the BumGenius kind that are really expensive (still cheaper than disposable in the long run). Well, lets just say that I know why they cost so much now. When I changed him, after being in the thing for four hours, the part that touches his skin didn't feel wet at all, but when I pulled the inner liner out, it was soaked! Amazing.

So, now I am trying to sell off the other brands that I bought (except the newborn sized ones) so that I can buy a complete set of the BumGenius. I think I'm in love!

Tracking Objects

Well, the developmental guidelines said he'd begin tracking objects with his eyes sometime around week 6 or 7. He was following this mobile with his eyes for a couple of minutes, but when I started filming, he shifted his gaze to the dog (off camera).


I liked this picture because it shows how polite Jude is. Most of the time when he nurses, he folds his hands like this. Look at those little chubby fingers!!!

Feeling Better

We bought another humidifier for the living room. As long as we have been married, we've always run one in the bedroom in the winter. However, Jude was still having trouble with his breathing. So last night, we had the bright idea to run both humidifiers in in the room at bed time. I joked with Jeff that I hoped it didn't rain in our room since one is a cool mist and one is a warm mist:-) He didn't have one problem breathing last night. His little nasal passages look the best that they have in weeks - no longer swelling! Though, the victory was lost by the fact that he woke every two hours instead of every three last night. Can we say six week growth spurt! At least I know it will be short lived.

Another positive is today is the last day for the antibiotics! I can't wait. They have really messed with his little digestive tract. I didn't think that baby poop could get any more liquid, but it sure can.

Also, I think that we got our first social smiles out of Jude yesterday. You should have seen him flirt with the ladies at the hospital when we were getting his x-rays. He had everyone eating out of his hand:-) Can't wait to catch one of those smiles on camera!

































**Edit, added at noon: Eeek! I just looked at the weather channel and it is going to be 18 degrees tomorrow night. Is this November or January?!

10 pounds 10 ounces

What a change in our "little" man! From dropping a whole pound in four days at the beginning to gaining 2 pounds and 10 ounces in three weeks! Jude weighed in at 10 lbs, 10 ozs today (and 22 in) meaning that he's really gotten the hang of this breast feeding thing:-)

The sad news is that we were only at the doctor because we suspected him to be sick. Turns out that it is normal for newborns to get congested at night, especially in winter, but that congestion caused him an ear infection:-( But a bottle of amoxicillian and we're on the mend (hopefully).

She's here!

Jude's future wife was born this morning:-) Welcome Eliana Grace Fagan!

Ta Da!!!

Look what I can do!



And here are a couple of photos of bath time. Not the first bath time (the third) but the first time we remembered that we needed to take pictures!

Big Ol' Milk Belly!

Yes, this is the same little boy who two weeks ago would barely nurse and was down to 6lbs, 15ozs. Now weighing in over 8lbs, I noticed he's got a little gut hanging over his diaper these days:-)



















I, of course put the diaper cover on crooked. I can't seem to get them on as straight as Jeff can.

This short video has no real significance to the post, and Jude is not doing anything really exciting. I just thought that you might want to see him in "action."



We have our cardiologist appointment on November 25th. I'm sure if it seemed like a really big problem, they would have got him in sooner, but keep praying anyway.

The Jude Pose

If you are at our house at any given time, you will most likely see the same pose from our little Jude:










































Not that I am complaining, or anything. I mean, who doesn't love a baby that sleeps. It just makes it really hard to get nourishment into him. In his first four days he dropped a whole pound to 6lbs 16ozs. He's getting better about nursing now - he sort of resembles waking up to eat now. As of our doctor's appointment yesterday, he was up to 8 pounds!

Here is a rare awake picture. Those are our favorite cowboy jammies. They were about the only thing that fit him until this week as he was too small for newborn clothes and too long for premie clothes. He grew out of these jammies this week.















We do have an area where your prayers are coveted. The pediatrician heard a heart murmur yesterday. He explained the two types of heart murmurs. One of them 90+% of the time, the child outgrows by adulthood. The other type is the result of a shunt to bypass the lungs from the heart in utero that should have disappeared by now. If it is that type, we will be looking at medical treatment. We have an appointment with a neurologist at the children's hospital in the next couple of weeks. Pray for the self correcting one, please.

Intorducing Samuel Judah Roerdink

Jude decided that he did not want to wait until Election Day to make his grand entrance into this world. However, as it turns out, he is not 5 weeks early, but only two. The midwife that came to supervise could tell this by looking at the lines on his feet. The big one would have been much shorter, apparently, if he was five weeks early. So, here's the birth story:

Thursday early in the morning, I began to pass clots again. The first one was large and them several smaller ones throughout the day. I figured that since my midwife said it was just my cervix getting ready, it was no big deal. Around 3:00 am on Friday morning, I felt a pop in my pelvis. It felt like when your elbow pops. I thought, "man! That was a big kick!" but I knew that his feet were all jammed up in my diaphragm, but at three in the morning, who's thinking clearly?

Then the contractions started. Thinking it was just braxton hicks, I got up to sleep in the living room so I wouldn't wake Jeff. At 4:00, when they hadn't gone away I decided to take a bath, which woke Jeff up anyway. All the bath did was irritate me because the water didn't reach my belly unless I laid on my side. So, I got out and that's when things really started cooking.

Jeff began to time the contractions and around 5:00 am they were two minutes apart and a minute long. So, we called our midwife (hi Debi!), who it turns out, was on her first vacation in four years. At that point, I was really glad that I finally met her apprentice, Michelle, on Monday!

Michelle got lost (don't you love Mapquest) and by the time she got here, at 7:00ish, those contractions were right on top of each other. Every move I made would bring on another one (the pelvic exam was super fun, let me tell ya).

Jeff also called our dear friend Angel, who has done work as a doula, because we didn't have the towels, pads, newborn diapers, food, basically about half of the stuff we needed! And I thank the Lord that Angel stayed the whole time. She did dishs, let me pull on her hands, held a foot while I pushed, got us lunch, made us dinner, you name it! She certainly lived up to her name that (and many other) days.

It was probably around 8:00 when I felt like I had to push, but Michelle said I wasn't quite there. But by 8:30 I was definitely there and by 9:46 Jude made his entrance, with one arm up along side his head. Jeff said he came flying into the world like Superman.

We had Michelle's first birth without her supervising midwife. Another midwife drove up from Dallas, GA to supervise, but by the time she got here, our little man had already arrived. I was also Michelle's first stitches (my first stitches, too) thanks to that hand by his head.

So, our birth pool arrived today:-) Oh, well. I do not think I would have been able to get up off of the bed to get it because everything went so fast and the contractions were so intense. I have very little to complain about and not too many first time moms get to say that their labor from start to finish was around six hours.

So, he's here, weighing in at 7 lbs, 15 ozs and measuring 20.5 inches, a head full of dark hair and a score of 10 on both parts of the APGAR.

Praise God that His plans are better than ours. can you imagine how big he would have been if he WAS born on Nov. 4th? Now I can cancel my absentee ballot. I guess my son is in favor of his mom doing her civic duties:-)

Another One Bites the Dust

In one of my previous posts, I discussed all the factories that have been laying off or shutting down in this area. I sure hope that it encourages my former students and future students to pursue post-secondary training of some type (college, tech training, etc.). A lot of people around here used to just depend on going to work at the factory after they finished high school (or before), like their daddies did. Then there was this today in the Messenger. Mowhawk is one of the biggest factories here. I know that the Ft. Oglethorpe plant is smaller than the Dalton one, so thankfully Dalton is not shutting down, but it's still quite a blow to our work force. Unemployment in Walker County has risen by over 300% in the past couple of years - the highest hike in all of our surrounding counties.

I am really glad that Jeff works in an industry that can not be shut down (although one Atlanta county did close three fire stations last year, and then got in to really HOT water with Homeland Security for accepting a grant from them. Turns out, they used the grant money to build the fire stations. Not a good idea to shut them down with in a few years after taking gov't. money. And I am glad that when I was teaching, it was in a position that couldn't be eliminated.

I think things are going to get a lot worse here before they get better.

Great News!

We just found out that the midwife is charging us $700 less than we originally thought. Really good news in light of the fact that we now need a new (to us) car.

I told someone the other day how much we had to pay for the home birth (when I still thought it was going to be $2600) and she told me that was how much her birth had cost even with insurance. Made me feel not so irritated that the insurance won't cover it. I'm feeling even better now that it's less that $2000!

God's Protecting Hand

I've said this before on the blog: every morning that Jeff leaves for Gwinnett, I pray for God to protect him on the way and on shift. He's shown me once that He hears this prayer and He showed me again this morning.

Someone hit the Saturn from behind, rendering it completely inoperable (I'm talking both airbags, no more back seat inoperable) and then left the accident scene. The car was thrown from one side of the interstate to the other, but Jeff was completely unharmed.

Then as God would have it, a DeKalb County firefighter was driving by. He stopped and helped Jeff get all the stuff out of the car when another DeKalb firefighter came along and got the bumper and Jeff's gear bag out of the middle of the interstate. One of the firefighters took him on to work and the police said the figured they got the guy who hit Jeff a couple of miles up the road (possible a drunk driving thing).

So, if anyone knows where I can trade in a nice pickup truck for a couple of cheap cars:-) let me know. I figure it won't be too easy for fit two parents and a car seat into the Ranger.

Dramatic!

Well, we had a bit of a scare on Tuesday night and thought the little man might arrive six weeks early. But God is good and answered our prayers that he stay put a little longer.

The scenario goes: A lot of bleeding and me pretending to be calm so Jeff doesn't get freaked out, and Jeff pretending to be calm so that I don't get freaked out. In the end, it turned out that I was passing a (rather large) blood clot that had formed because my cervix has become active. It's common, apparently.

So yea! Nothing wrong, but WOAH! Things are moving along in there. Kind of puts the time line on perspective now that I am dilating.

40(ish) days to go!

It's huge

And I keep asking myself, "can it get any bigger?" How in the WORLD can there still be two more months?

More Donkeys

This photo was in the BBC this morning. Isn't it one of the funniest things you've ever seen?












Speaking of donkeys, often we drive by a field in LaFayette that has several and I usually comment about the little burritos (the Spanish for little donkey). But the other day I was trying to tell Jeff something about the donkeys and for the life of me I could not remember the English word for donkey! So I just spit out the word burrito really quick and he thought I was talking about the food. Kind of like the time I told him to look at that doughnut in the road and he was looking for a small pastry.

On to serious news, I actually slept for four hours straight last night, TWICE, with out having to get up for a potty break. It was amazing!

And we went to a Braves game last night, but the Marlins beat them (sad, since the Marlins are also a crummy team). The game was over in less than two hours. But, we got the tickets free when we bought our new toilets (ironic, huh? Free tickets for buying toilets and the team is basically in the toilet this yea) at Home Depot. Well, really the tickets were for spending $100 or more at the store, not because the items we bought were toilets.

So, besides my new (first!) stretch marks:-( There's nothing else new here. Don't know what made me thing I might dodge the bullet on that one.

Cactus

I got this cactus as a door prize at a faculty meeting a couple of years ago. It had fake flowers glued to it (way to go Wal-Mart!). I knocked it over and the fake flowers exploded so we pulled them off.

When we moved in to this house at the end of May, we repotted the cactus and since then it has grown pretty big. We were going to repot it again this week when we noticed these little nodes on the top. This morning, this is what I went out to:

Put your eyes on Jesus

I went to college with Jessica and had the privilege of working with her for a short time in the kitchen at Covenant. She went to be with Jesus on the 10th of July, but made a video for family and friends earlier in the year. This video is the best example I have ever seen of what it means to get your eyes of yourself and put them on Jesus. What a difference it makes in a person's life and spirit when they do that. Jessica's life was a great blessing to many people. Please click here to view her story.

First Baby Gift

Here's the outfit from Aunt Heather. Guess she knew we liked dogs:-)

This will definitely be our birthday outfit!

Another reason I chose home birth

I've heard stories like this before, and I already decided in high school that when I had kids, I would use a midwife (several of my allied health teachers spoke of the difference during class time. I LOVED those discussions.). I've even heard an MD that I attended college with (when he was undergrad of course) talk about how OBs, like all Drs. are trained to react as if everything during birth is an emergency.

Here's the story I read today that affirms my choice:

excerpt from Susan McCutcheon-Rosegg's book Natural Childbirth the Bradley Way

"In many ways her [the midwife's] experience with normal birth is superior to most physicians'. For example, she recently attended a couple from one of our birthing classes at home. Their baby was born with the cord looped three times around its neck - unusual, but not out of the range of normal. The midwife calmly slipped the loops one at a time over the baby's head in a matter os seconds and the body was born with the next contraction. She had listened to the fetal heart tones frequently and knew the baby was in no danger. Later, at the hospital birth of one of our couples, the baby's head emerged with the cord looped once around the neck - something quite common. The baby was having no problems, but the physician attending was shouting at the mother (whose control was perfect) not to push. The doctor then pulled out a bit of the loop, clamped it, and cut the cord before the body was born. That meant the baby had to breathe immediately since the lifeline supplying it with oxygen had been severed. Fortunately, it did. Neither baby had any problems at birth, but the hospital baby had been put to greater risk."

A funny thing

O.k. It's not like "HA HA HA! THAT IS SO FUNNY!" but just sort of interesting to me.


One of the baby tickers says I've 114 days to go (the one with the baby floating around) and the other says 113 (the one with the frog on the lily pad). I set both up with the same data.

In addition, the ultra sound tech said they calculated my due date as October 21. My calculations and the ticker company's calculations both say November 4th/5th. I am positive that we are right because this was meticulously planned, and I had been charting since December to make sure little one came along at the right time (after Jeff's fire fighter 2 raise).

Not that I would be sad if this thing comes a few weeks ahead of schedule. I hate the cold, so I would have to buy a bunch of warm clothes for the end of October/ early November, but then that is the only time they'd get used. As it is right now, I've only bought a few things and my two friends have lent me the rest of what I have been wearing.

One more funny thing:

We went to the Blueberry Farm with the Aaron and Sarah and their two little boys on Tuesday. The picking were decent. Not spectacular, but fair. We were able to at least each get a gallon of berries.

Well, I heard Sarah tell her oldest (he's 3) to turn his hat around so he wouldn't get sun burned on his face, but every time I saw him, the hat was backwards. I was relating this to Jeff, and he told me that Jeremiah (the little boy) told him he had to wear the hat backwards so that we could see him:-) I'm guessing he couldn't see us well enough with the hat on. Or maybe he couldn't see the berries? Not that that mattered. The kid ate more berried than he put in the bucket. I bet potty training was fun that night!

NEA top 100 books

It seems to encourage reading, NEA has put out a list of the top 100 books. They predict that the average American has read only 6 of them. I counted that I have read 24, but three of the "books" they listed were whole series (Harry Potter - 7 books, Narnia - 7 books, Lord of the Rings - 3 books) so really I read 38 of them.

Here's the list. How do you compare to the average American. (I highlighted the ones I read.)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - (own but haven't read yet)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - (own but haven't read yet)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - (own but haven't read yet)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - (own but haven't read yet)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - (own but haven't read yet)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - (own but haven't read yet)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

It's a. . .

Well, you'll have to guess.

Here's a photo from the ultrasound (we had to take our own pictures because they're not allowed to give them out at a diagnostic place, which is where we had to go since we're doing home birth).

Imagine the little critter is standing on its knees with its butt facing you. The indicator is going to be pretty near the very center of the screen. (Oh, and Jeff accidentally took it as video, but it's easier to tell if you just leave it still. Push the play button at the bottom, but pause it pretty quick.)


And here's the kid looking at you. See its head over toward the right? One of the eyes is visible toward the top (that would be the right eye), and nose, mouth and an arm right there under the chin. Peek-a-boo.














So, any guesses?

Walker Co. and industry

Wow, in the six years that I have worked for Walker County Schools, we have really seen industry here take a hit. I do not understand how our schools continue to grow like they are with all these large companies closing down.

When I first started teaching, the Sweetheart factory (that makes plastic drink cup lids) closed its doors. Just before that the K-mart closed. They both sit vacant today.

Then somewhere along the line the synthetics factory closed, the bus factory (Bluebird), carpet factory (Shaw), and appliance factory (Roper) all downsized their staffs.

A couple of months ago we lost a plant that made carpet padding (or maybe they recycled old carpet padding?) to a massive fire.

This morning's paper said that the Dow latex plant will be closing at the end of August.

I don't know what the statistics are for the rest of Walker County, but here in LaFayette, the average household income is $23,000. I can not begin to comprehend what is going on with the families that rely on these types of jobs because even with me quitting my job to SAHM, our household income surpasses that by more than ten thousand. But my heart aches for these families. Jeff and I were talking about where they could possibly go to find jobs now. The only options now (besides moving) seem to be driving to either Chattanooga, Rome, or Dalton, and with gas nearing or passing $4 around here, I don't even know if that is a good option.

A Day at the Doctor

So, what do you and your doctor do at the end of your doctor's visits?

I had to go see a general practitioner today because TN state law allows midwives to attend homes births as long as they report to an overseeing doctor. Like my midwife, this doctor has her office at her home. We sat around talking and whatever while I was filling out the paperwork, then she did the poking and prodding that would indicate I was having a physical.

To wrap up the visit she prayed with us and then told me that she always likes to give her patients a book and that I could pick which ever one I wanted off the shelf (I got one about end times called, "Left Behind or Sincerely Taken").

Then as we were getting ready to go she asked us if we'd like to go get some vegetables from the garden. I wasn't sure if I'd herd her correctly, but she was like: "Let me go get a bag for you." Here's what we made out with, and it would have been a lot more if I hadn't reminded her that it was just the two of us.















I can not remember for the life of me what she said this squash is called (so if you know, feel free to fill me in. I figure that I can figure out something to do with it.














These little guys that look like tomatoes are actually plums.














I wish that there were doctors like Dr. Pat in LaFayette (although it almost seems worth the hour and a half drive to switch her to my GP).