Holy crap we made a person

I would like to know in what world is it okay for a city to get 8 inches of snow and not plow the roads for 4 days. In this world we drive a teeny tiny Saturn and slide around foolishly in our neighborhood with a newborn. Fun. It snowed on Wednesday and the plow came by on Sunday. Apparently Anchorage only has 28 snow plows. What the crap? That is ridiculous! We were looking forward to a ton of snow in this new city, but now we are really dreading the possibility of a lot of snow. Even the main roads sucked for quite a few days. We went to the doctor and we were bumping and sliding around everywhere. I just can’t believe a city that gets as much snow as Anchorage has such poor snow removal management. This is what happens when there are no taxes. That’s right people. No taxes in Anchorage, but try to get to the grocery store, I dare you.

Dan and I had a baby. It’s very exciting. Oskar is a great little guy and is busy eating, sleeping, and pooping. The labor and delivery went pretty well. The hospital was pretty busy and there were 2 unplanned C-sections so it took them longer than they would like to get me back into the delivery room and get my epidural. They gave me a different pain killer until I got the epidural that worked really well. I got this pain killer twice because it doesn't last very long. Then they gave me a longer lasting pain killer that made me vomit pretty violently. I requested to not have that medicine again. They finally got me moved back to delivery and got me the epidural and I was able to sleep quite a bit through the night, having only to wake up to flip to my other side every hour. At 5 am my water still hadn’t broken and they said they would break it at 7 to get things moving along. It broke on its own at 6:50. I think around 10 or so they gave me Pitocin to speed up the contractions and dilation and that’s when things really started to suck again. More vomiting. They tried to adjust the epidural but my pain was beyond the help it could provide. Some may say that with the epidural it’s more pressure than pain. Lies. All lies. It is pressure in the same way that getting your tooth extracted without Novocain is pressure. Little guy also decided he was going to come out face up instead of with his face toward my spine. For some this can be excruciatingly painful in the lower back, but I didn’t really notice that. I pushed for maybe a half hour or so and Oskar arrived into the world with what looked like a donut on his head. Most kids arrive with a cone head. Not Oskar. In the words of the doctor, “Hm, I’ve never seen that before.” Yes, that is what you want to hear when delivering a child. Everything since then has gone well. He scared us a bit at the hospital with some amniotic fluid spit-up and nose drip, but luckily there was a nurse there at the time and she took him away and suctioned him out a bit and he came back all cute and happy.

I have thoroughly enjoyed laying on my stomach and back, and having bad posture. I have not done a thousand sit-ups yet. We’ll wait for a couple weeks to do that. Even though we need to get up every 3 hours to tend to Oskar, I feel like I have never slept better in my life. I know that is an exaggeration, but I was sleeping so poorly before he was born that part of me believes it. Most of all, pregnancy nose has exited as fast as it arrived and I love not smelling everything as well as a bloodhound can.

It is official. If you don’t like the pastoral staff at your church, hire Dan and they will leave. No, I am not saying anything bad about any of the Pastors Dan has worked with. Actually, I like them all a lot. That has nothing to do with the fact though that every church Dan has preached/worked at has lost its Pastor(s) while Dan was working there. This began with Julie and Bock. He was only assisting on some weekends, but I think it counts. It continued with Chuck and Anne at House of Prayer and now it has hit Scott at Gloria Dei. I understand that it is purely coincidental, and for each of these Pastors it was quite simply time to move on, but the pattern cannot be overlooked. Scott has officially accepted a call in Marshall, Minnesota and will be gone at the end of January, leaving Dan to deal, once again, with the whole call and interim process. At least he understands how it works, I suppose, and can help the congregation through it all. Everyone goes to Minnesota except us.

This may or may not affect our timeline up here in the last frontier. We’ve decided that we don’t mind if our year gets cut short. We just want to be sure to make it up to Denali before we go. The people in the congregation have been absolutely amazing. They are all so wonderful, kind and extremely generous. We are absolutely underwhelmed by anything involving the rest of the city. Drivers are horrendous, the snow removal is terrible, and I am still upset with the fact that it took a week to get our power back on after a windy day. There are more things that bother us, but we will try to focus on the fact that the community at Gloria Dei is great and just leave it at that. The scenery is great too, the mountains are absolutely beautiful. Too bad between the gloomtag weather and the dark days, we can’t see them 80% of the time.

Shaken, not stirred.

We had an earthquake! It was a 5.8 (I know I said 5.7 on Facebook, but they changed it), lasted about 30 seconds and the epicenter was about 25 miles away from us. Apparently it was a fairly large one for its location, which was along the coast. I kept thinking it was over but it felt like it grew after it paused every time.  Our landlady said it was the biggest one she had felt in many, many years and she was very sweet and came down to check on us afterward. Some reported that things on walls fell off, but we didn’t have anything happen. Our greeting cards didn’t even tip over. It felt really big though, especially to us. I was napping. It was a very violent alarm clock; somewhat reminiscent of when Dan used to jump on the bed to wake me up.

One of the things I wanted to experience while here was an earthquake. Well, it has been experienced, and I must report that neither Dan nor I were particularly fond of it and the more I think about it I dislike it more. There are few instances in my life where I have felt less in control of a situation. And then it just kept going. We prefer tornadoes. They most often some with a warning, you get an awesome green sky, you go hide in the basement if necessary and it passes, usually outside of a town. It’s true that my life has never been much affected by a tornado, but still- the tornado comes, chances are you can get out of the way. The earthquake was everywhere. There is no escape. Instinct says get outside where nothing can fall on you, but apparently that’s wrong. But we live in a basement where the house could fall on us, and I believe that is wrong. By the time one makes a decision, hopefully nothing has happened and you are in the bathroom with one shoe on because you couldn’t decide what to do (no this is not what happened, we were much less smart than this, we just stayed put). In summary: we’re good on earthquakes; they can stay bottled up until we leave. Thank you for the experience.

No baby yet, but my doctor said things are progressing nicely and did something on Monday to hopefully help him along. We’ll see. I’m pretty stubborn; baby might be too. The due date is technically Thursday and I’ll go in to get hooked up and checked on then if he isn’t coming and we’ll schedule an induction date for next week that hopefully we won’t have to use. My doctor doesn’t like to go past a week overdue because in her experience, the babies tend not to like the contractions very much. She didn’t seem concerned though and just wants a contingency plan in case he doesn’t want to arrive on his own. I’m sure it’s partially for my sake to, just so I can see an end to my misery. My Achilles tendonitis has returned and my knee is super sore due to the stretching out of ligaments and tendons and the extra billion pounds so walking hurts super bad, which is unfortunate because walking can help move labor along. I had forgotten how much these injuries hurt. They hurt real bad.

My child gets the hiccups at least once a day. His size makes everything shake. It was cool at first, but now I don’t care for it.

From here on out, blog posts might be somewhat sporadic for a while. I’m sure you all get this, but just an FYI that this won’t be high on my list of things to do.