March 19th 2008

The morning didn’t start off well for us in terms of going to another appointment. Carter needed to go to the bathroom but he was all stopped up and so “Tummy, Hurts!” was how he put it. His stomach ache set his mood and so it set the tone for what we were expecting at the Doctor’s office.

The plan was the same as the previous appointment, I would drive my car to work and Kristy would follow me and we’d drop my car off and go from work. The only problem was that my car battery was dead. So the plan was modified to go to the appointment and then go to get a new battery right after the appointment, then go home and install the new battery and then go to work. The dead car battery was just another small, unplanned inconvenience to add to the morning’s already rocky start.

We arrived at the Doctor’s office with no additional incidents and went straight in to see our favorite personality in the office, Collette. She checked Kristy in and reminder her to get her brown paper bag. Then she was talking to someone on the phone and said “You are now free to fly”. I didn’t get to listen to her always entertaining words after that because I was distracted by Carter.

Carter wanted to get in and out of the “Hooge (Huge) Chairs” and whenever he got up in the chairs facing the east windows he would point out the window and say “See the cars go Bye Bye? Hi Cars!”. Then he put his John Deere wheel loader in my pocket, his backhoe in his pocket and he kept playing with his Dig Dig (Excavator) on the chairs.

My mind was also preoccupied with thoughts about a sign I had read on the way into the building. The sign said that as of some date that I don’t recall, no smoking would be allowed on the campus to comply with a new Washington law that prohibited smoking on medical campuses.

Kristy noticed that Collette had a new iphone, which awe struck both of us. Then I heard her mumbling “I’ll have a fit” while looking at a small device in the palm of her hand with a frustrating glare. Then before we knew it a nurse was calling out Kristy’s name.

We went back and weighed in and then went to our room. Kristy had her blood pressure taken and Carter started chomping on “Fish Mama!” which is gold fish crackers for those of you who don’t have small children and aren’t familiar with this standard issue weapon in child soothing and containment. The goldfish cracker in all its various forms, baby goldfish, regular goldfish and colored goldfish, made by Pepperidge Farm is like the AK-47 assault rifle that every bad guy has in every action movie, it’s standard issue and you see these crackers in the seats of friends mini vans and left behind in shopping carts in every store. And I myself can eat a few hundred in one sitting if I’m not careful, so these little bite size crackers are powerful tools to parents with young children. Sorry for the digression but I felt it important for any potential future parents that might be reading this blog to commit this point to memory.

This was the first of our all booked out appointments and this time we were given the rest of our remaining pamphlets telling us all about our pregnancy. This was looking to be another quick in and out appointment. Kristy just needed to have her Cervix checked and we’d be done. A note for any ladies that are reading, when you have your Cervix checked, you should take your hands and put them on your low back, right near your butt and make them into fists, the same way you would if you were at the gym and going to do a leg lift. This gets you into better position for being checked and helps make it a less painful experience. Joy taught Kristy this trick and judging from the expressions on Kristy’s face and amount of discussion around how painful the checks were afterwards, I have to say this works. If you don’t believe me, just lean back and get checked and then try it the next time and then don’t try it the next time and eventually you’ll figure out if I’m crazy or if I’ve passed on valuable information to you.

Anyways, back to our appointment. So Kristy got checked and she was 3-4cm dilated, yes, 3-4cm! She was also about 50% effaced (thinned out for those of you that didn’t read my Carter blogs). Joy thinks our baby girl will be making her debut into the world sometime next week.

This means that I’ll be on “Yellow Alert”. According to Star Trek terminology a yellow alert is a Star Fleet vessel with a ship wide state of increased preparedness for possible crisis situations. Shields and deflectors are brought to full power but the weapon systems remain off until a “Red Alert” is issued. What can I say; one of my fondest memories of being a kid is discovering Star Trek re-runs when I was six and watching them on TV every night at 6:30pm.
We did get an Ultrasound on one of the small portable office units. We had never had one of these done before and the machine was really pretty cool. It was a small laptop looking device and it actually had decent resolution. We could see the fluid sacks and a full bladder and everything looked good. So, we were basically done with this appointment. I made a comment about how it would be cool to have one of those little laptop units and Kristy called me Tom Cruise which really hurt my feelings. Will the next blog be a hospital blog?