Baby Cinco

 At 7:30am on Sunday morning September 12, 2021, Mary Margaret Knoll joined the family!  Less than 12 hours after the previous post, where I finally gave up feigned control and anxiety about when, when, when, Dylan and I called Fran back to New Orleans after having left that afternoon. Upon her arrival around 9pm, I shrugged and smiled, and she chuckled about its being Groundhog Day. Dylan and I got in the car with a Let's-Do-This attitude and headed to Ochsner, where my Dr. Baur was coincidentally on-call in Labor&Delivery. But I wasn't in labor. My contractions had plateaued at that same shortish, manageable, seldom level, but I was leaking amniotic fluid. When I texted Dr. Baur, she said definitely come in. I was pretty anxious about that for a minute, upset even, because of a strong desire to stay away from a pitocin induction (like had happened with Jack bc of the water breaking), but in we went. Thankfully I wasn't laboring hard because the hospital was full ! (A...

Well! It's been a bit of an anxiety-ridden week, though here we are on Saturday and everything's going just fine. No baby yet, though. We were ticking along in evacuation-mode nicely, and Dylan got word that our power had turned back on late, late Monday night, to which news I started having contractions. So then the what-ifs and what-do-we-dos started swirling. Tuesday morning, we decided that if things stay slow, we'd pack up to leave Wednesday morning. We gassed and stocked up at Costco, and I had regular, sparse, short contractions most of the day, but they picked up that evening. Our final decision was we'd go if I could sleep through the night and stay if things picked up. Wednesday rolled around, Dylan packed up every little thing while I did nothing, and I felt nothing ... until the car. The first 2-3 hours had 1-2 contractions each, and then the closer we got, the more relaxed I was by avoiding a "roadie baby" that they completed stopped. It was bitte...

First, a hurricane update. Many New Orleans residents still do not have power; most, in fact, but it is starting to trickle in. Those evacuated are still encouraged to stay away until power is restored. Further south and west, however, there's awful destruction (like in the Thibodaux where we grew up before moving to TX), and any sense or normalcy will take weeks+months.  Our family has not been hurting, praise God! Ginny & Ryan are being so gracious about having us here and letting us all invade their space. They're even both working from home, so they really have almost no respite from the busyness and noise of 4 kids, poor things. We have, however, certainly kept busy and tried to get the kids out of the house at least once everyday, keeping Covid in mind, too. (Gosh, evacuation, Covid, baby-waiting; so many things!) And post-naps are spent in their blow-up pool or watching TV or movies that they only get at family's <3. So, to our week! After that NASA adventure...