Healthvues

We’re thinking that the birthmother could go at any minute, so we’re reluctant to venture far. But it was such a nice day (sunny and 60s) that he had to take the “scenic” route, rolling through the Ozark National Forest and expansive pasturelands. We saw a real American Bald Eagle in the wild today - pretty impressive! Never saw one outside of a zoo. (See how exciting the simplest things can be after 13 days of staring at each other?) Spoke with the birthmother again today - she was very chipper and looked forward to giving birth at any minute. Tonight, we had dinner (at “the club”) with our lawyer and her husband, a real cowboy! One the cool things about this whole experience is meeting people with such different backgrounds from ours - it’s really refreshing to talk with someone who has a totally different perspective on the world. Gary is one of those people. He manages ranches and is probably exactly like you’d imagine - very down to earth, easy going and can sum up the world in a sentence. Fascinating, great stories! Among other things, we learned that you should not attempt to break a mare in heat as she’s standing next to a eager stallion. Sounds like great advise - we’ll file that one away! And don’t leave your truck running where your dog, who you’ve previously ticked off, can get in it and try to run you over. Well, that was a no brainer… We all had big steaks, as the birthmother told us her grandmother told her that eating steaks induces labor. (Well, I certainly felt like giving birth after eating that thing!) Potential disaster: It was karaoke night at the club. It was refreshing to find that Dena and Gary had only slightly less inclination to join in than us - we scrammed.

The steaks didn’t work - the birthmother didn’t pop. The biggest news of the day: Andy narrowly escapes being listed in the police blotter for stealing newspapers off of downtown business’ doorsteps. The fact that it our lawyer’s doorstep, and he fessed up only after the newspaper received an irate phone call from said lawyer, didn’t help his case. He’s now under house arrest, but actually… it feels no different than any other day.

We’re both now fighting wicked colds, something we must’ve caught at the club. The weather has turned extremely miserable - very wet and very cold. Our hosts, Mike and Gloria, are in Tulsa for the week. Mike has to have surgery for a blocked artery and is expected to be OK. But it’s still stressful for everyone. This is sure shaping up to be one heck of a week…

We’ve mentioned before the superb quality of the local TV spots. We’re not exaggerating when we say they’re often more entertaining than the daytime programming. For those of you familiar with “Raising Arizona,” we have found the actual furniture store owners upon which that movie must have been based. A husband and wife team, whose primary marketing talent seems to be based on parking themselves in the deal of the day and, using visualization/projection techniques, get the viewer to imagine themselves in said furniture (never mind that the viewer cannot actually SEE said furniture, because, well, let’s just say our proprietors have hit the Chik-Fil-A once too often…). And our favorite (the one whose leather sofas were “worn by cows to work only last week”) has a new spot wherein he pushes his face up to the camera and scolds us to get our fat butts off the Lazy-Boy and come down and see him, “Bub.” This is the same guy who tells us to come down right away to take advantage of his deals because he “fell off [his] medication.” A cross between Crazy Eddy and Uncle Fester. This is all not a slam on these spots - we love these things. When we’re feeling down from our colds, the wait, the being away from home - 30 seconds of this kind of therapy is like a shot of adrenaline to keep us going until the next commercial break!

Maybe it’s something with Wednesdays. Our colds are the worst, the weather is a cold, driving rain and our sense of adventure is completely gone - at least for now. Absolutely nothing of note happens during the day. We speak with the birthmother, and she’s probably more surprised than anyone that she hasn’t popped yet. As much as we want to move forward with this, she wants to get on with her life too. Her next appointment is Friday and she said she may even talk about trying to induce. That’s fine with us, but we also know that for everyday the baby stays in, it’s another day it’s getting healthy and strong. And we don’t even want to get into the status of the men’s basketball program of the University of Maryland - other than the ugly slide from pre-season Final Four expectations to middle-conference mediocrity. I mean, they lost to FLORIDA STATE at HOME for crying out loud!!!

We can differentiate the local TV news anchors by name. We’re developing accents. We don’t need the road map anymore. We know the TV channel line up by heart. The Walmart Greeter says “Hey Spike!” every time we go there. We washed the rental car. Our biggest thrill today was going through our mail from home and paying bills.

Boredom and waiting. Of course, we know that once we get “the call,” the pendulum swings the other way and the birds will sing again. The amazing thing to us is that these 18 days have really flown by - it’s hard to imagine we’ve been here almost 3 weeks already. Of course, we’ll be here for another 2 weeks once the baby is born, but that will be an entirely different story. We’re also reminded of all that can still go wrong and that nothing is a done deal until the 11th day (or close to it). There is a finite amount of time we’ll spend here - it’s just hard not knowing what that time will be yet. Like anyone, when you’re sick, discouraged and thrown out of your comfort zone, all you want to do is go home. We also miss our dog, Jersey, incredibly - we wish we could’ve brought her with us as she would be a huge comfort. But she’s apparently doing very well at Camp Smokey/Nancy. This will all be worth it. We’ve said it many times though - things could be a lot less comfortable - we could be spending this time in a Holiday Inn rather than the home-away-from-home we’ve found here.

There are many things we’ve witnessed on this adoption journey we never thought existed. This one definitely goes down as “you don’t see that everyday.” While parked at a gas station for a quick pit stop, we noticed how lifelike the rendering of a beautiful catfish was on the Coke machine standing outside the convenience store. Then, we begin to wonder how Coca-Cola would come to the image of a catfish to be the perfect representation of the “pause that refreshes.” Then we see the “live bait” graphic. This is no ordinary soda machine, but an honest-to-goodness live bait vending machine! Not a rinky dink, handmade contraption - but a high end, electronic wonder of crawly delights! If that weren’t enough - you had SIX different types of bait to choose from! Hate to be around that thing when the power goes out…

Enough of this cold/flu already. After a rather scary downturn in Andy’s condition, we finally go to the doctors to get this flushed out. Sure enough, a severe sinus/ear infection has been running amok. Nothing much else happens today other than hunkering down on the sofa between work and sleeping it off. Finally, the birthmother calls at 6:30 pm and announces that she has officially begun labor. This is it - or so we think. We’ve been packed and ready to go for 20 days! We hardly get any sleep as we run around repacking and unpacking and repacking. Oh happy day! Even Maryland spanks Wake! “Terpin’Tine” as ESPN put it! Expecting the phone to ring at any minute…it doesn’t.

No phone calls by 7am. It’s a bright, sunny morning and the antibiotics are already taking effect! What a day for a birthin’! Finally, we hear from the birthmother. Her labor is progressing, but not as quickly as she had thought. We speak with her several times throughout the day - getting updates. She still cannot believe that she has not popped yet. She, and we, were convinced that Alex would have been born last night or early this morning. Oh well, nothing to do but wait and get a lot of work done before we take off at any moment. After the most dazzling sunset we’ve witnessed in a long time (a sign, perhaps?), we finally go to bed after talking with the birthmother again - but there is little slumber to be had.

A bright pink sky greets us in the morning. The birthmother calls again at about 8:30 am and tells us she’s going to the hospital in about 2 hours. Her contractions are about 90 minutes apart now and she wants this over with NOW! This is it - we’re off. It will take us about 2 hours to get to Harrison, AR where the hospital is located. It’ll only take the birthmother about 30 minutes to get there. It’s an absolutely glorious day - not a cloud in the sky and about 60 degrees. We hardly say anything on the ride up - not really knowing what to expect. We didn’t know for sure if the hospital staff would be receptive to an adoptive couple (we’ve been told that not many hospitals are adoption-friendly). We didn’t know how the birthparents would be about all this - after all, this is crunch time. Now, not only are we kicked out of our comfort zone of home, but also our new-found comfort zone of Siloam Springs. We get to the hospital before the birthparents and decide to go check in to a hotel for the duration (some hospitals will let the adoptive couple stay in the hospital just like a birthmother, but we could not here). When we came back, we met the birthparents in the parking lot. After some nervousness, things start falling into place. The birthmother seems to be getting more comfortable as each thing falls into place - where we’re staying; that we’ll be allowed to care for the baby; that the legalities are in place; etc. Every nurse who comes in contact with us knows all about us and could not be any warmer and friendlier. They say that they do not get many adoptive situations, so we’re kind of an interesting adventure for them! This is a fairly small hospital serving a largely rural area and this doesn’t come up everyday. We meet the birthmother’s doctor and she is wonderful. She tells us she has been looking forward to meeting us. And she’s also fascinated by our choice to preserve Alex’s cord blood - they’ve never done that before either! (BTW, we talked about this with the birthmother months ago and she agreed it was a great idea. We contacted a cord blood bank in Boston and have the kit already with us - it’s incredibly easy to do.) She goes over Alex’s stats and tells us everything is looking great. All the nurses know about us and are so welcoming and include us in everything. They make sure they know how to get a hold of us when the magic moment arrives. The birthmother’s contractions are about 20 minutes apart, but she could still have a long way to go, so her doctor begins to induce. We’re told that we might as well go back to the hotel and wait for their phone call. We leave with an incredulous feeling - we’ve heard so many horror stories about rural hospitals and unfriendly nurses and policies towards adoption - but we have not experienced any of that. And the coolest thing about this so far? We hear Alex’s heartbeat for the first time!!! But for now, we head back to the hotel after saying a short “see ya in a few hours, hopefully!” to the birthmother. We go back to the hotel room and call over to the hospital every few hours to see what’s happening - progressing, but not very quickly.