A grumpy birth: Oliver's Birth Story

In which I have a very, very, very bad attitude.

Based on my previous three births, there were a few things I knew about how this birth was going to go.  I knew this baby was going to be born several days past his due date.  I was betting on between 6 to 8 days late.  I knew it was going to be a long-ish labor, more than 10 hours, probably around 12, with a long early labor stage that would give me time to pack my bag, make cookies for the nurses/midwife, shower, etc.  I knew that I would labor at home as long as I could before heading to the hospital.  I knew my water wasn’t going to break on its own until well into labor.  I knew I would throw up at some point, at least once.  I knew when it came time to push that I would be able to get the baby out easily in just a few pushes.  (Asher took only one contraction and two pushes!)  I knew the baby would be somewhere in the 8lb range.  I was also pretty sure that I wouldn’t go into labor until the evening.

There were also a number of things I hoped for from this labor (apart from the obvious healthy mom and healthy baby).   We had invited my mom to attend this birth, and I really wanted it to be a good experience for her.   While she has always been supportive of me doing natural childbirth, I also know that she thinks I’m crazy for wanting to do it, and so I really hoped that she would get to see how peaceful, powerful, and spiritual natural childbirth can be.  To that end, I hoped for a more peaceful and calm birth like Caleb’s, rather than a more difficult and intense labor like Asher’s.  I also hoped there wouldn’t be a need for the midwife to break my water, as there was when I had Asher, because it made labor a whole lot harder, as in please-kill-me-now, harder.

So…this baby was due somewhere between May 7^th and May 9^th, depending on who was doing the calculation.  My midwives had the date as the 9^th.  Of course May 7^th, 8^th, and 9^th came and went with no baby, just as I had expected they would.  If anything, I was almost in denial that I was about to have a baby.  I knew we had passed his due date, but I just did not think he was coming any time soon. By May 10^th, between 1 and 3 days after my due date, I still had not packed a bag for the hospital. The crib wasn’t set up and the baby’s room wasn’t ready. I hadn’t bought the new car seat I had recently determined that we needed.  I hadn’t cleaned my room, made cookie dough, or done most of the dozens of things I wanted to do before the baby was born.  I was determined that we would have a very productive day on Friday the 11^th, so that we’d actually be more ready for the baby to come.

On Friday morning Scott and I were lying in bed, about to get up for the day.  At 7:15am I started to feel a mild contraction but thought nothing of it because I had been having them for weeks.  But then at the end of the contraction, I felt this little pop, followed by a gush of fluid.  I was completely stunned.  Truly shocked, I turned to Scott and told him that I thought my water had just broken.  I got up and went to the bathroom, where additional gushes of fluid confirmed that yes, my water had broken. 

Unlike a normal pregnant woman who is past her due date, I was NOT happy about this.  In fact, I was downright grumpy about it.  I was not ready for the baby to come that day. I wanted a few more days. I did NOT want labor to start with my water breaking.  I knew it was going to make labor harder.  Plus, I was Group-B Strep positive for the first time ever, the standard protocol for which involves IV antibiotics during labor.  I had requested that they re-test me, however, and was seriously considering declining the antibiotics.  But having your water broken for very long is one of the risk factors for  GBS transmission to the baby, so when my labor started with my water breaking, I no longer felt comfortable declining the antibiotics.  I knew it also meant that the midwives would want me to come to the hospital right away to make sure I got the antibiotics, rather than my being able to labor at home like I wanted. Thus, I was very grumpy.

I called my sister, who lives 2 hours away and had agreed to come take care of our other kids when I went to the hospital, and told her to come on over.  I also called the midwives office to let them know what was going on and was promised a call back from the on-call midwife within 20 minutes.  If I didn’t hear back by then, I was instructed to call them again.

In the meantime, I spent about 15 minutes wandering around the house in a daze, telling anyone who would listen that I couldn’t believe my water had just broken, as if that was an unusual way for labor to begin.  Finally I started getting my hospital bag ready.  Scott, being Scott, asked if I would mind if he went into work for an important morning meeting he had scheduled.  He assured me that I could call him if I needed him to come home before the meeting was over and that he would only be 15 minutes away.  Contractions hadn’t quite started at this point, so I agreed.

Despite not yet having contractions, while I puttered around, eating breakfast and getting everything ready to go I was still feeling rather uncomfortable.  This is way TMI, but my intestines were, shall we say, quite active and that was a contributing factor in the discomfort I was feeling.  The same thing happened when I was in early labor with Caleb, and I hated it and had hoped not to experience it again.  Contractions at the same time as intestinal, ahem, activity is just not fun. Having to use the bathroom repeatedly while having contractions is also no fun.

The kids were all up by this point and excited to hear that their baby brother would be coming that day.  Though my mom kept them from bothering me, I found that their being awake and in the house was something that really distracted (not in a good way) and bothered me.  (One of the reasons I have never particularly wanted a home birth.)  I was, once again, NOT happy with how things in this labor were going and spent much of my time getting ready to go to the hospital reflecting (grumpily) on whether I really wanted to have a natural birth again.  The sad thing is that I truly was not excited about it or looking forward to it at all.  I was, instead, just very frustrated that none of it was happening how or when I expected and hoped it would.  I don’t think I can overstate how very, very grumpy I was about the whole thing.

Around 8am contractions started.  Still very manageable, but also stronger than what I am used to having labor start with.  I timed them some but they were pretty irregular in their pattern.  By 8:30, an hour after I had called them, the on-call midwife still had not called me back, so I called them again.  This time I got a call back within just a few minutes and was, as I expected, asked to come to the hospital right away so that I could get the antibiotics. So I called Scott, who had to leave his meeting early, and continued packing, though I was in no hurry.  Scott came home, loaded the car, and we were off.  I could tell that we were going in earlier in labor than usual because I was able to ride the whole way to the hospital sitting down instead of kneeling backwards on the seat, as I did on the way to the hospital while in labor with the other boys.

We arrived at the hospital around 11:15am and, after I made my very slow way in, were taken to the waterbirth room.  They placed the IV for the antibiotics, briefly monitored the baby (who was doing beautifully), and, since I was getting antibiotics anyway, I consented to a cervical check.  I was actually rather curious to know where I was at, since usually I am still laboring at home during this stage of labor.  I was 4cm.  It was good to know that progress was being made. I was still feeling pretty unenthusiastic about the whole thing, though.

About 45-minutes or so later my mom arrived. (Scott and I had been taking bets about how long she would take to get to the hospital. It was actually less time than we expected.)  Also around the same time, the nurse asked if I wanted her to fill up the tub. I said yes. In the meantime, I was dealing with contractions by leaning over, moaning, and swaying. I also had to keep going to the bathroom due to the aforementioned intestinal hyperactivity. (As in, I kept having to go poop out these small nuggets, which always brought on an extra long contraction.)

The tub took longer to fill up than I would have liked, and it was the built-in kind with a door that opens and closes, so they filled it up part-way, I got in, and then they filled it up some more. That was all well and good, except that I needed to get out several times to use the bathroom, which meant the nurse kept having to drain the tub some and then refill it some more. The upshot of this was that by the time Oliver was born, the tub was not as full as it would normally be, a fact which would turn out to be somewhat important.

I labored in the tub for maybe an hour or an hour-and-a-half. The water was not nearly as soothing as it had been during Asher’s birth, but it was still better than nothing.  Unfortunately, I never felt like I was dealing with the contractions terribly well. I just kept thinking about how much I didn’t want to be doing any of this right then. I even toyed with the idea of an epidural more than I ever did in my other natural births because I just did not feel like being in labor. (In other words, I was still really grumpy about the whole thing.)

As things progressed, I started to vocalize more and more during the contractions. I was good about keeping those vocalizations low and helpful at the beginning, but as things got further along they got louder and higher in pitch. I wouldn’t say I was screaming, exactly, but I was definitely moving more in that direction than I liked. I remember, during one contraction, the midwife vocalizing with me in a much lower register to remind me to do a low moan rather than a high-pitched scream. It was actually a fairly effective tactic, and way less annoying than if she had just kept telling me to lower the pitch.  As I got further into transition, however, I just started ignoring her. (Have I mentioned that I was grumpy about how things were going?) I also started to get really, really hot.  The nurse made some old compresses to put on my neck and my mom helped hold them there, which was really, really nice.

At some point, I told the midwife that I felt like I might need to use the bathroom again, but I wasn’t entirely sure. I thought it also could just be the baby moving down, and she was pretty sure that’s what it was. Also around that time I started saying things like, “I don’t want to do this anymore!” Somewhere in all of that, and I cannot for the life of me remember exactly when, the midwife offered to do another cervical check, hoping to encourage me, I think. I agreed.

“How does 8cm sound?!” she asked me enthusiastically, obviously expecting excitement from me.   “It doesn’t sound like 10,” is what I thought (but didn’t say).  I was unimpressed but continued to labor on. Not too long after that, I could tell Oliver had descended more and I started to feel a little pushy. I have always had very short, very effective pushing stages, so I was relieved to get to that point. I started to feel the so-called ring of fire, and so I began pushing, expecting to have the head out in just a push or two, which is all it has ever taken before. Instead it took me a couple of contractions to get his head out. (Making me, once again, very grumpy that nothing was going how it was supposed to.) I was on my knees in the tub at this point and was working to push his shoulders and body out, something that has always been the easy part of pushing for me. But try as I might, I could not get his shoulders out.

After I tried for a contraction or two, the midwife said in a very serious and commanding tone, “Stand up. Stand up!” I stood up. Oliver’s head was out but his shoulders were a bit stuck. The midwife tugged on him this way and that, trying to get his shoulders free. It took less than a minute, and finally I was able to push the shoulders out. (My mom said it was crazy to watch all the pushing and pulling she was doing.) The rest of his body followed and I reached down to pull him up, but the midwife had to tell me to wait a minute while she untangled Oliver from his cord, which was wrapped several times around his torso. Finally she handed him to me, and I sat back down in the tub.

Oliver, though, was blue and floppy, with no muscle tone and little movement. It was a little scary. No one took him away from me, though, so I knew we weren’t having an emergency yet. I stroked his face and kept telling him, “Breathe, baby.” The nurses and midwife rubbed him some and gave him some oxygen (all while leaving him in my arms) and finally (seemed like it took a few minutes) he started moving, pinked up, and began to cry. And he did not stop crying for at least a half-an-hour. Nothing I tried soothed him, not jiggling, rocking, sushing, breastfeeding, nothing. Apparently he was pretty grumpy about the whole birth experience, too. He also took a really long time to open his eyes. This was in marked contrast to all my other babies, who cried only for a few seconds and then looked around curiously. (The blue floppy baby experience was very similar to the one you can see on the Inga’s birth part 2 video here: http://rixarixa.blogspot.com/2011/03/ingas-birth-story-part-1.html  It’s about 2/3 of the way down the page. The part I’m talking about is from 7:48 minutes until 10:11 minutes, or so. It’s a little disturbing to watch. Mom knew neonatal resuscitation techniques, though – it was a homebirth that was an unplanned unassisted birth -- and baby was ok. The funny thing is I had just seen this video a few days before Oliver was born, so I guess I was prepared for it in a way.)

I delivered the placenta and then moved to the bed. Scott cut the cord after it stopped pulsating. No one took Oliver from me.  He stayed skin-to-skin with me for at least a couple of hours. They asked which procedures I wanted and which I didn’t. They asked me if I wanted to keep my placenta. (I declined, but I appreciated that they asked. We were really, really impressed with how mother-baby friendly the hospital was.) Finally, when we were ready and at least a couple of hours after he was born, the nurse weighed and measured Oliver. Since everyone had remarked on how big he was, she asked us to guess his weight. I didn’t think he looked particularly big, so I guessed somewhere in the upper ranges of 8lbs. My mom guessed a little higher than that, and then I think Scott guessed 9lbs 2oz. The nurse was surprised at our guesses and said, “Really? I’d have guessed at least 10lbs.” Then she put him on the scale and, sure enough, he was 10lbs even. I was shocked. That’s a full pound-and-a-half bigger than my other babies. He was also 22 inches long.

After the weighing and measuring we moved to another room, as someone else needed the tub. Scott and I settled in and talked names. I had been hoping to name the baby Micah, but Scott had long been partial to the name Oliver. When it came down to it, I looked at the baby and just felt that he was Oliver, so that’s what we went with. Before we left the hospital, I was able to ask the midwife who delivered Oliver why she had me stand up as I was pushing. She said partly she needed more room to work since the shoulders were stuck, and partly she was concerned that because of the lower water level in the tub and the way I was pushing (on my knees) that the baby’s head might end up going in and out of the water as I was pushing the body out, which could ultimately result in him inhaling some water. Having me stand up just seemed like the safest thing to do under the circumstances. So now I tell people that Oliver was both a water birth and not a water birth.

So in the end, very little about the labor went the way I expected it to. The day it happened, the time, the way it started, how not calm and peaceful it was, what pushing was like, how big the baby was, how long the labor was (6 ½ hours from when my water broke and 5 ½ from when contraction started), even whether or not I would throw up – none of these things went the way I expected them to. Which just goes to show that the more you think you know, the less you actually know. But at least after I held my baby in my arms, I got over being grumpy about the whole thing.

Asher's Birth Story -- 2 1/2 Years Late

Getting ready for another baby to be born gave me enough motivation to finally write Asher's birth story, which I promised to post here more than 2 years ago.  Warning: I'm pretty blunt. So if you don't like birth or medical stuff or may never be able to view me the same way after having me use the word cervix, I'd suggest you skip it.  Plus it's dang long.  :) 

According to the midwive’s magic wheel, Asher was “due” on August 31, 2009. I was pretty positive I had ovulated a little late, though, and thought his due date was more like September 1^st or 2^nd. Both Evan and Caleb having been born 5 and 4 days, respectively, past their due dates, I did not expect Asher to make his grand entrance before September 5^th or 6^th, though I thought there was some possibility he might come a bit sooner than that, as he was my third and Caleb (#2) had come a day earlier than Evan (#1) had.  In fact, after Asher’s due date had come and gone, I remember having dinner at the home of some good friends, whose oldest son had been born on September 9^th.  He expressed the thought that maybe Asher would be born on his birthday.  I didn’t say so, but I didn’t think there was any way my 3^rd child would be born a full 10 days late, even though a birthdate of 9/9/9 would be pretty cool.

The due date(s) came and went.  Days went by with no signs of this baby being born.  I finally started to get impatient.  There was even one day when I was nearish 41 weeks that I had Scott come home from work/school early because I was pretty sure I was in labor.  It fizzled into nothing.   Never happened to me before.  I felt like a first-time mom who couldn’t tell the difference between real and false/prodromal labor.  I went in for my 41-week appointment and asked the midwife to strip my membranes.  If I recall correctly, that was my first cervical check and I was hoping that maybe the prodromal labor was at least doing something.  Nope.  I was only dilated to a 1-2, just like I always am before I hit active labor.  (Maybe one of the reasons I have long labors?)  The membrane stripping was uncomfortable and also ineffective.

Because I was more than a week past my due date, we scheduled a non-stress test after for a few days later (after the 3-day weekend).  I did not believe I would make it to that appointment.  But I did.  Fortunately, Asher looked fine on the monitor and there was no need to induce.  I asked the midwife to strip my membranes again and authorized her to be as aggressive as she reasonably could be.  It did NOT feel good (I believe she said she was able to stretch me to 5cm, though of course I didn’t stay there), but I started having more serious contractions on our way home.  We stopped at Olive Garden to pick up dinner for ourselves, my mom, and Evan and Caleb.  I recall having to stop a couple of times on the way into and out of the restaurant to deal with contractions.  I did not want anything to eat, but I was pretty darn sure I was finally in active labor.

We went home after that, and this is when things get pretty hazy for me, especially since it all happened 2 ½ years ago.  I think I just kept dealing with contractions while my mom and Scott took care of the boys.  I remember kneeling backward on the couch a lot, and I’m sure I must have gotten in the shower at one point, but I really don’t remember much of any of that.  I do know that after a few hours I began feeling very frustrated because I did not feel like I was dealing with the contractions as well as I had when I was in labor with Caleb.  Somewhere around midnight (I think), I started to make comments about going to the hospital soon.  Scott appropriately ignored my requests for a while.  It wasn’t until I threw up once that he decided we should head in.  I know by this point I was vocalizing during the contractions.  I continued to feel like I wasn’t handling them well.  I was much more aware of the time in between contractions and was not able to zone out as well as I had been able to with Caleb.

We got to the hospital around 1am or 2am.  Don’t remember much about that.  I do know that we had called ahead and told them we wanted the tub set up.  I was happy to see that the midwife on call, Leila, was one I had met recently and really liked.  (I switched hospitals and midwife practices only several weeks prior, so I had not met all the midwives.)  It was a slow night and Leila ended up being in the room with us for almost the entire night.  Talk about awesome labor support.

Here again the details are hazy. I don’t remember how long it was before I could get in the tub or what I did in the meantime.  I *think* they monitored the baby for some period of time first, and I know that I was 6cm upon arrival.  I also know that I loved being in the tub.  It was big and deep and constantly warm (it had a heating mechanism to keep the water at the appropriate temperature).  So I sat and labored in the tub for quite some time.  Contractions kept coming but didn’t seem to get any worse.  Scott and Leila chatted away, with me participating a fair portion of the time.  It was all comparatively pleasant.  A little too pleasant.  After a few hours of that and seeing that the contractions didn’t seem to be getting any more intense or frequent, Leila expressed some concern that perhaps the tub was a little too effective for me, that it was relaxing me too much and stalling labor.

This was particularly concerning because I was getting really tired. Also really hungry, which was a new experience for me in labor. Usually I don’t want to eat anything.  So Leila offered a cervical check (sure enough I was STILL at a depressing 6cm) and suggested I try laboring out of the tub for an hour to see if that moved things along. She also suggested I consider having her break my water, as that might speed things up.  I was reluctant to allow any sort of intervention, though, and so declined at that point.  The nurse also brought me some peanut butter toast, which I was not really able to eat, despite feeling hungry.

Unfortunately, the only thing getting out of the tub helped with was making the contractions hurt more.  I definitely felt them more strongly and was having more difficulty coping with them, but an hour later I had still made no progress. Leila again brought up the possibility of breaking my water. She told me that it was entirely up to me, but that she was worried, based on what she was seeing, about my having enough energy to keep things going for several hours more.  She mentioned that if she broke my water we might be able to have the baby here in as soon as an hour.  I really was feeling remarkably exhausted at that point, in a way I had not with the longer labors of both Evan and Caleb, and so agreed to the AROM.

Literally within seconds of having my water broken, I had the most horrendous contraction and began throwing up.  I didn’t see it, of course, but Scott told me that Leila and the nurse smiled and nodded in satisfaction when that began to happen.  Someone (I can’t remember if it was the nurse or Leila) suggested I try sitting on a birth ball in the shower to try to encourage the baby to move down and get into a more favorable position.  I HATE sitting on the birth ball when I’m in labor because it makes everything hurt so much more (probably because it opens the pelvis up and makes the contractions more effective), but I was desperate to be done, so into the shower and onto the birth ball I went.

Unfortunately, all of this happened right at the beginning of shift change for the midwives.  So after having spent nearly the entire night in the room with us providing fabulous labor support, Leila had to leave to get ready to hand things over to the next midwife coming on duty.  The nurse was in and out of the room at this point, while I sat on the birth ball and Scott sprayed hot water on my back.  And. I. Wanted. To. Die.  The contractions were so awful, I wasn’t sure how much longer I was going to be able to handle them, but I was also pretty sure I was too far along for an epidural.  I even remember thinking that I might be willing to take a c-section at that point, if someone were to offer me one, just to make it all stop.  And the biggest problem was that I was thinking I still had a good 45 minutes to an hour left before Asher would be ready to be born.  (It had only been 10, maybe 15 minutes since I’d had my water broken.)

A couple more contractions and I just couldn’t take being on the birth ball anymore and fell to my knees.  At this point I began to feel this odd stinging sensation and wondered (quite stupidly, in hindsight), what on earth it was.  It took another contraction for me to realize that, duh, that feeling was the baby crowning.  I just so had it in my head that I had an hour to wait that it simply did not occur to me, until I had an intense urge to push, that maybe everything was so intense because it was moving along a lot faster.  For a minute I thought Scott would be delivering Asher by himself on the bathroom floor.  I somehow managed to communicate to Scott that the baby was ready to come and he needed to get the midwife.  He yelled for the nurse who ran to get Leila, and I was able to make it through the contraction without pushing.

Leila and the nurse came back in and asked whether I wanted to deliver in the tub, bed, or elsewhere.   To be honest, at that point I didn’t much care, but I chose the tub.  They helped me get back into it, and I got on my knees and leaned my arms against the side of the tub, facing outwards.  At this point, Scott tells me, there were at least two midwives in the room, Leila and the midwife who was coming on duty, as well as the nurse.  But they were all kind of scrambling because they could not find the special gown and gloves they were supposed to use for a waterbirth. 

I, however, was completely unaware of this as another contraction hit and I again felt that intense need to push.  What I could not figure out, though, was why no one was helping me or saying anything to me.  In fact, I think I even said, “Help me” a couple of times.  Everything was happening very quickly, though, and no one responded to my request because they were frantically trying to find the stupid gloves and gown.

Well, I thought for a minute about waiting until someone told me whether it was ok to push or not, but then I decided I was already in water, no one needed to catch the baby, and I was going to push anyway.  Probably not actually a smart thing to do, but what woman in labor is rational?  So I pushed once and the head came out, and I pushed a second time and the whole body came shooting out.  Like a torpedo, Scott said.  In fact, he’s the one who would know because he was the only one to actually see Asher be born.  After Asher was out I remember saying, “Where is he? Where is he?” and someone said, “He’s right behind you.”  So I turned around and scooped him up.  I was the first person to touch him or hold him, which to me is still one of the most amazing things about his birth.

 

(Holding Asher minutes after he was born.)

The cord was around his neck, but they untangled him pretty quickly and he had good Apgar scores, though I don’t actually remember what they were.  I got out of the tub to deliver the placenta, had so little bleeding that the midwives actually remarked on it, and had only minimal tearing that required no stitches, despite Asher’s extremely rapid entrance into the world.  All told, I went from 6cm to Asher being born in about 15 minutes, maybe 20.  Leila said that we could just have stayed home since we didn’t end up needing her to do anything.  We were also told by another midwife who was coming into the room as Asher was being born and *kind of* saw him being born, that it looked like he might have come out turned a little funny, which would explain why I got stuck at 6cm for so dang long. Who knows, though.  Altogether, it was quite the experience, one I’m pretty sure was shared around the midwives office because the receptionist seemed to know about it when I called to schedule my post-partum visit a week later.

(With Leila, my awesome midwife).

Air Travel with Kids Is Fun

Our big summer trip to California began at 3:30am EST, when we woke the kids up and buckled them in the car. Forty-five minutes later we were at the airport and being informed by Southwest that to have Asher fly as a lap child, we needed to have his birth certificate or immunization record to prove his birth date. We had neither. I used to fly with the boys' birth certificates, but then no one ever asked me for them so I stopped bothering. Not to worry, the airline informed us. We could simply purchase Asher a seat right then, and they'd even give us the infant rate. And we would "probably" be reimbursed by the airline later if we sent them the receipt and proof of Asher's birth date.

It was 4am. Our suitcases were packed, our car was in the long-term lot, our boys were full of anticipation, we had a rental car scheduled for pick-up in Sacramento at noon. We bought the seat.

This is Asher.

This is Asher's new backpack.

This is Asher pulling his backpack.



Apparently, this is some kind of magical cuteness formula, because never in my 5 1/2 years of being a mother has any of my children garnered the kind of attention Asher and that backpack did. People of all ages, genders, races, and nationalities stopped to stare and giggle as he pulled it down the terminal or ran with it down the moving walkway. Even groups of tattooed twenty-something young men commented. It was like traveling with a B-list celebrity, without any autographing. Scott has decided that if I'm going to die, I should do it soon so that he can use Asher and his backpack to find a new wife.

So we're at the airport in Chicago. The airport in Chicago has lots of moving walkways. The boys LOVE moving walkways. We went up and down the moving walkways while we were waiting for our connection until I found myself chasing Caleb, who was running gleefully away from me in the wrong direction on the moving walkway, while what felt like the entire terminal stopped to watch and everyone on the walkway jumped out of the way to let him go by rather than, I don't know, stopping him for me. That was the end of playing on the moving walkway.

I've already blocked out the details of the actual flights except for a general recollection that Asher reinforced my belief that kids from 18months to 2 1/2 years or so are the worst to travel with.

Once we finally arrived at the airport in Sacramento Scott had to go get the rental car while I waited in the terminal with all the kids and bags. Caleb continued to enjoy running away from me, so he got to spend some time sitting in his car seat on the curb while a very nice airport police officer on a Segway tried to distract him. The getting of the rental car took longer than expected (doesn't it always?), so I let Asher out of the stroller to run around (with his backpack, of course). While I was chasing after him and talking to Scott on the phone about when he was going to be there, Evan, who was sitting in one of the car seats on the curb, pulled one of the plastic car seat bags the airline had give us over himself. A couple of women walking by stopped him and then proceeded to give me the longest, dirtiest looks I have ever received in my 5 1/2 years as a parent. Apparently they were unimpressed with my parenting and supervision skills.

Eventually Scott arrived with the car, we discovered the only way we and all of the luggage could fit was with half of our stuff sitting on our laps, and then we were off. Caleb fell asleep in about 30 seconds and Evan spent the next 2 hours asking us 162 times if we were almost there. Finally, a good 16 hours after we left our house in Massachusetts, we arrived at Grandma and Grandpa's house in Redding.

Hiking to a waterfall on a very uncharacteristically cold day.

Scott explaining rock formation, erosion, or some such thing to the boys.

Throwing sticks in the waterfall.

Asher trying to fling himself in the river.