Thursday, February 1, 2007

Introduction

Hi. I'm Julie. I've been married to Rob for 9 years, and have a (nearly) 4yo daughter named Nicole and a newborn son (11 weeks today) named Jacob. My life is typically fairly boring and not nearly blog worthy, if I do say so myself. But the last few months have been packed with enough drama that I figured I might actually start to have some stories that someone else may actually be interested in.

So here's the background material. It all starts the first week in November. I'm starting my 9th month of pregnancy. It's a normal Thursday night. My husband always picked up Nicole from day care (I did drop-off), so I wasn't in a massive hurry to get home. I wish I had been that night. I came home and walked into the kitchen. The first thing I saw was Nicole perched up on a stool at the kitchen island, staring down at something. When I came in further, I saw that she was staring at her father, lying unconscious on the floor, seemingly bleeding from his head. His eyes were open, but he wasn't even close to lucid. And there was Nicole, just staring. She's 3 (but turns 4 at the end of this month), and could easily have decided to leave the house and look for help. But thank goodness she stayed put. I called 911, and they had almost arrived by the time I got off the phone. Rob started coming to a little bit while they were there, but was still clearly confused. His speech was slurred, and he wasn't entirely sure where he was. They took him to the hospital, since we all suspected that he fell somehow and possibly had a head injury.

All tests came back fine, and after they got him all cleaned up, I took him home. My neighbors all came over when they saw the ambulance, and all asked if they could help. One of them has a son Nicole's age, and she took Nicole to her house so I didn't have to take her with me to the hospital. I called my mother (who's about 45 minutes away), and asked her to pick up Nicole at the neighbor's house and take her home and put her to bed. Rob and I got home around 1am. I e-mailed work and told them I'd be late the next day. This was partly because of the exhausting evening, and partly because I had to take Rob in to school the next day. Yeah - he's going to grad school. He works full-time, but attends these marathon classes every other Friday and Saturday. And this weekend was a class weekend. The doctors recommended he not drive for two days, because he still may have had a concussion. Class didn't start on Fridays until 1:00, so I went into work after I dropped him off. By the way, he attends classes at the same university where I work, so at least it wasn't out of the way.

Fortunately, my mother-in-law had already made arrangements weeks before to pick Nicole up from day care that Friday and have her spend the night at her house. So I was able to stick around and bring Rob home from school and take him back the next morning without having to worry about Nicole. We had plans with Rob's mom and my parents to go out to dinner Saturday night. So we all met up for dinner, and afterwards, returned to our place where we discussed plans for a "meet the baby" party that my mother-in-law decided to do. I'd had two showers when I was expecting Nicole, and while we knew we were having a boy this time, we weren't even hurting for clothing, since I'd done some shopping already. So even though her original thought was to have another shower, we talked her out of it but agreed to a post-baby holiday party instead. So, it seemed that "the fall" incident was behind us (a mystery as to what exactly happened, since Rob didn't even know), and we could just resume our present course of dealing with the anxiety of the upcoming expansion of our family.

My plans for the next installment - Jake's surprise birth.

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