Word got out that I was slacking a bit in the baby photo department, although in my defense I blame daily trips to the hospital and painting and shopping sprees for the majority!
But nonetheless, after posting these all up to the walled garden that is Facebook for friends and family to Like to their hearts’ content, I also spent another hour uploading them over to Flickr as well, which you can now view right here and now via the handy, little slideshow you see below… 🙂
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I wanted to share this one not for the crazy, bizarro story line that most of these dream posts have, but instead just because I thought it was interesting to see so many appearances that were correct “in face only,” but so completely missed the mark as far as timelines and personalities are concerned… 😕
I had written two applications for work. One had been handed off to another guy, while the second I still maintained myself. I had just recently discovered a small problem with both – one, the guy had linked to one of my personal websites on the site’s Links page, which I had to politely ask him to remove as being non-professional, and the other had something worse that apparently I had to sneak into somewhere to resolve without anybody knowing.
It was kind of like a classroom setting, and the lady in charge who I was trying to evade looked a lot like one of the teachers from my elementary school. She eventually walked in on me in the middle of what I was doing because I had gotten sidetracked, but she didn’t really care and didn’t have the slightest idea what I was doing anyways…
Then … it was Christmastime!
We were celebrating Christmas at my parents’ house, who were still together.
My Dad was particularly proud of this gigantic turkey sandwich that I found in the fridge. Like seriously, the slices of bread were the size of sheet cakes, and it had been cut into halves at that, so when my Mom pulled out a mere sample to show me, the half of the sandwich filled her arms completely.
I was with Sara, though it was hard to tell for how long because we weren’t quite as comfortable together. She was apparently still living with her parents, as was I, because at one point we flashed over to her place and it was a large, basement bedroom much like mine, with shag carpeting and a couch. She also had a fridge, which strangely enough matched the carpeting because it had shag attached to the front, and I was a little bit jealous of that.
Back at my parents’ house, it was time to open presents. I had gotten Sara this collection of old Disney movies (on VHS) that had like 8 different movies in one giant pack … though it was the size of a fold-out DVD case and not huge like the VHS tapes would actually require in real life. Her and my Mom were going through them as she pointed out which ones she didn’t already have, which good on me was most of them.
For my Mom, I had gotten her a CD of Disney songs, to which she asked where all of the other ones were because the disc was numbered 107 or something and she only had the first couple of discs in her collection.
Among other gifts, Sara got me this homemade candy log thing thing that was covered in frosting and filled with peanut butter cream. It was awesome.
Our relationship must’ve been going fairly well because among her gifts was a small box that I knew contained her engagement ring, though she always seemed to open a different gift so we never really addressed that part. I was very nervous and got up about four times to go into the other room while I waited, and I seemed to have a piece of paper in my pocket with a speech or something written on it, but I wasn’t sure if I had the guts to say it or not.
Cleo was there, although she was much smaller, along with two other dogs that were possibly Lori’s dogs? The owner of all three was unclear because I discovered them by noticing a leash stuck in the front door, and opening it I found one of my cousins sitting against the front step playing with one of the dogs.
At one point, Lori and James also came over for Christmas hand in hand. Madelyn was already at the house with my Mom, though it also wasn’t clear who her owner was because they just walked by her when they came in.
Eventually I found us walking downtown around a little park that was bustling with people, and it was very green and sunny out despite it being Christmas day. My Mom had all sorts of people who she wanted to introduce me to, and at one point she was talking with my uncles about some classic car that was supposed to be mine, though I’d never actually driven it yet.
The open space kind of looked like a cemetery, but not really.
I finally woke up as it became clear that the engagement ring plot point wasn’t going to take place, for reasons unknown, though the girlfriend and I hadn’t had a falling out or anything … it just never got addressed.
That was a weird Christmas.
This afternoon we spent roughly 4 hours at our local Babies ‘R Us.
This afternoon we saved $1,080.89 completing out our baby registry, so all in all I think it was a worthwhile use of our time!!! 
The staff at our local store was awesome in spending as much time as it took with us to finish everything that we wanted to do, and by the end of it all we had applied an average of 40% in various discounts across the multiple orders it took to get there!
(a few items were either out of stock or online only, so in addition to checking us out, they helped us to place those online orders as well to make sure that the same discounts carried over across the whole lot)
Packed Sara’s car from front to back, with thankfully the largest items either getting delivered straight to the house (with free shipping!) or shipped to the store where I can go pick them up when the car’s not quite as thoroughly packed. As you can see above, we had a whopping two shopping carts overflowing by the time we were done this afternoon!
But I think we should be just about done with the shopping for now – got the crib and dresser coming, rocking chair is on its way as another gift, playpen, car seat, diaper dumpster thingy, a really cool play pad where he lays on his back on the back of a whale – so much stuff, and right now it’s all piled in the middle of our family room until I finish painting the nursery and we can start putting it all away.
I was also pretty pleased that I was able to slip in a couple of new Lego sets for me, too, because hey – that baby’s not the only kid around here who loves toys around here! 😉
Anywho, once again – MAJOR major kudos to Cindy and Jasmine at Babies ‘R Us for taking the time to help make our baby shopping spree extravaganza so spectacularly successful. We were told when we first setup our registry last fall that it was possible to stack coupons in order to maximize our discounts to pick up whatever was leftover after the shower, but I never would’ve expected this…
Babies ‘R Us Baby Registry Completion Coupon – 10%
Toys ‘R Us Friends & Family Discount Mailer – 20% (just started today)
Toys ‘R Us Credit Card Application Reward – 15% (day of application only)
Grand Total – 45% off!!!And scanning back through the veritable book of receipts that we have shows that there were even a few items that were discounted another 25-35% before our other discounts were considered, so wow!!!
One note I will offer for anyone who finds this post and does their best to beat our discount (post a comment if you do!), the percentages aren’t taken off the total altogether, but are applied to each item, in order, so instead of this:
$10 Random Baby Thing
45% off item = $10 – $4.50 = $5.50
$5.50 Sale Price
You actually end up with this:
$10 Random Baby Thing
20% off item = $10 – $2 = $8
15% off item = $8 – $1.20 = $6.80
10% off item = $6.80 – $0.68 = $6.12
$6.12 Sale Price
Now I certainly wasn’t going to quibble over the math when you considered that we still pretty much made out like bandits, especially considering that they had a special sale on breastfeeding stuff for buy 1, get 1 50% off that was a nice little chunk of change by itself for this new, apparently Medela-branded family … but it’s just something to keep in mind when you’re doing your numbers because it probably ended up being an extra hundred bucks in the grand scheme of things when the purchase price of everything was close to $3,000 for us.
Plus we’ve even got another $200 coming back to us in rebates for 10% of the total items bought against our registry by everyone, not just us … so needless to say, Babies ‘R Us has probably earned our business for a while even if it sometimes is a little more expensive than Walmart or Target. Not today, though – that’s for sure!
What do you know – I grew up, and it seems that I still get to be a Toys ‘R Us kid after all! Not too shabby… 😉
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(via IGN)
The list is finally out – so how did my predictions do???
7 out of 16 for pass #1, and pretty much just Itchy and Scratchy from #2. And it doesn’t really surprise me that they ended up including the full family as the first five minifigs, either. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to lead the series with a $200 set – as much as I want it myself, I haven’t exactly dropped the change on it yet, either, but every time that I look at the minifigs included with that set, all I can do is shake my head at their stoned eyes.
At least it looks like they got it right for the CMF series, though. Now it’s just a matter of when these will actually start appearing in stores … because not for nothing, but I’ve had some terrible luck lately with my own local Walmart and Target stores keeping them on the shelves, and when they do have them, they’ve clearly been picked over something fierce on account of all the duplicates that I’ve been experiencing as of late.
Not that having duplicates of The Simpsons would be the worst thing in the world, mind you, but still, money doesn’t grow on trees and I don’t exactly have a trillion dollar bill handy to drop in order to complete a full set! 😉
It’s kind of funny – this whole time I’ve been saying that when we finally got through it all, I was going to sit down and properly write about everything that we’ve been through regarding infertility and going through IVF, and yet sometimes when you’ve been down a road for so long, you look back and can’t even tell where it really started anymore…
Like, literally, I can’t remember when Sara and I even started trying to have a baby at this point! 😕
But it’s definitely been more than just a couple of years … possibly dating back to when Sara graduated from nursing school … in 2009, maybe??? I don’t know – it’s been a long time and I don’t necessarily feel the need to go into all of the nitty-gritty anymore. Suffice to say, she had some issues and then upon further digging, I had some issues to be addressed, too, and over the past years that eventually led us to a local fertility clinic who helped us with some other procedures that ultimately led up to us doing IVF.
…which is why technically our son was first conceived in a test tube a year ago February, but ended up spending six months on ice before he was thawed and put back in with crossed fingers last August…
Anyways, it was a really hard time for us, and I had planned on writing up this big, old blog post about things that could’ve gone much different than they actually did, and the support that we were sometimes lacking, and just the emotional toll that it’s been on the two of us all of these years in general, and then I stumbled across this TED talk by Ash Beckham about ranking our hard against other people’s hard, and I kind of used her video as a stepping stone to get a lot of things that had been bothering me off my chest last fall in that earlier post.
So instead of re-opening those wounds when in these happy times I’m honestly just trying to forget about them, here are a few final thoughts on going through infertility from a number of perspectives that might be worth considering if you’re going through them yourself, or thinking about it, or you know somebody else who is…
If you’re getting ready to start IVF or are thinking about it:
If you know somebody else who’s considering or going through IVF:
I don’t think anybody ever really expects to deal with infertility when they’re finally ready to have kids … it was a big enough decision for me just to get to that point, so to start trying and then find that it wasn’t working was just unfathomable. It was tough at first when all signs and fingers pointed to problems on my wife’s side, and it was both relieving and even more aggravating when some of my own issues surfaced to help equalize the blame, too. Like I said, it’s weird to even look back at all of the time that’s passed now because it just seems like a blur … and I don’t just say that because I’m already sleep deprived running around for this kid now that he’s out!
And of course, there are other options besides IVF if you want to have children but can’t. My sister is a proud proponent of adoption because she’s an adopted kid and I suppose ultimately that turned out ok 😉 , but at this point in our lives Sara still wanted to be able to experience childbirth if at all possible so that’s why we went the route that we did. I think whatever you choose is going to be very taxing and very expensive and you need to be in it for the long haul … you have to really want it. Which most prospective mothers I’m sure have no problem committing to, but both people have to want it … not necessarily equally all of the time … but it will wear on you and when you hit a wall like our fourth try didn’t work or we need to save for two years before we can try again, you’re going to need that willpower to help pick you up off the ground so that you can move on…
I mean, even now I still worry a little in the back of my head – when are we going to get to bring Christopher home and what are we going to hear that might be bad from the next status update???
I’d like to think that the hard part is over, and there’s a part of me that keeps saying the hard part is just beginning. That seems pessimistic even for me, so maybe instead we just say that one of the hard parts is over, and I’m sure there will be more hard parts to come because life is like that most of the time.
Still, it’s pretty amazing that science was able to take two messed up adults and somehow still manage to breed a baby out of us, and that’s pretty cool.
IVF was a huge challenge for us, and for those just starting, there is hope on the other side, even if it’s not necessarily the path that you had planned. Worst case scenario, you can always just steal a baby.
No – don’t do that!
Remember that sense of humor that I was talking about?! Sometimes you think about stealing babies … that’s how tough infertility can be! But then sometimes everything ends up working out, and you don’t have to steal a baby … even though it definitely would’ve been cheaper than going the IVF route. But everything’s like that, really – everything is more expensive when you do it legally.
Now that’s the sleep deprivation talking…
Keep your head up, try not to go bankrupt or insane, and with any luck hopefully one day you can be sleep deprived and delirious, too. 😉
Wait – what happened just this last week again?! 😯
So … the last mention of babydom on this blog was approximately Saturday when Sara had her baby shower, and prior to that I wrote about the multiple trips to the hospital that we endured last week.
Well, a lot has changed since then!
Mind you, my head is still whipping around at a mile a minute, but as I have a few minutes this morning before diving into painting the nursery that I’ve put off long enough, I wanted to take just a moment in time to formally document the absolute craziness that got us from then to now! I’m sure I’m going to miss a few details here and there because I don’t have my resident nurse handy to correct every last detail, but something tells me this probably won’t be the last blog post I write about the whole experience, anyways… 😉
Oh Crap! … Monday Night Around 1:15am (technically Tuesday – 3/25)
I was just getting ready to call it quits with whatever I was writing at the time when Sara came in after presumably sleeping for a few hours and asked the question that would change my sleepy-time hours completely – “Do you think this smells like pee???”
Spoiler – it didn’t, and so after leaving a message for the doctor and scrambling to re-pack the overnight bag that we’d already packed twice the week before, we were en route to someplace that I could probably drive to in my sleep at this point! She was already starting to have contractions in the car – real contractions, not those bogus Toni Braxton ones, and by the time we made it to the hospital she was feeling them pretty good.
Mine, on the other hand, were mostly painless.
Lingering … 2:00am – 4:00am
This time was mostly spent in shock and concern and confusion as we waited for the nurses to do their thing and figure out where we actually were at that point in time. Eventually they confirmed that one way or another, she definitely was delivering the baby that day because her water had broken – a concern because she was only 34 weeks, 2 days – but at that time it was the kind of worry that remained unsaid, though everyone was probably thinking the same thing.
Through this all, Sara’s pain was slowly getting worse, which sucked because there wasn’t much I could do to help and I had left the tennis balls I had bought specifically to give her back rubs, just like the childbirth class said! back home on the counter. So basically Cleo got three free tennis balls out of the deal and I got a sore hand trying to rub my wife’s back harder than the mighty Thor! 🙄
Nap Time? … 4:00am – ???
I tried to take one, but it didn’t really work because:
So I “slept” just long enough to get a crick in my neck, then woke up and tried to console the wife as much as I could … at least until the magical epidural finally came along and promptly whisked all of her pain right out the door!
Seriously, that thing was like night and day for her, and aside from when she was pushing, I hardly heard another peep out of her until after she delivered. I thoroughly recommend epidurals for anyone, anywhere … in fact, if it didn’t involve shoving a needle into one’s spine, I’d probably be wearing one right now…
TIME TO HAVE THE BABY!!! … 11:15am
Holy shit, you guys – I'm about to become a Daddy!
— Scott Sevener (@ssevener) March 25, 2014
Literally when I went to sleep again after she got her magical happy-time juice, she was 0 cm dilated and I was thinking that it was going to be a while.
The next thing I knew, I heard someone say, “Hey, you might want to wake up – she’s going to have the baby pretty soon…” and if there’s anything that will whip a guy out of bed like it’s on fire, that would be it!
After taking a few minutes to comb my hair and splash water on my face and stare in awe into the mirror with the expression that led to that tweet above, I came out of the bathroom and watched as they slowly started to wheel stuff into the room that’s commonly associated with the delivering of babies, and more and more people started to gather … seriously, there were so many nurses in that room by the time we were ready to go … it was actually kind of comforting, considering all that was about to go down.
If anything, there certainly won’t be any argument when the bills come for all of this that we got our money’s worth as far as nurses and doctors are concerned!
As you might imagine, at this point times are a bit fuzzy because in the next 55 minutes, my son was born. 😯 The whole thing was pretty crazy/insane/wild/whatever adjective you want to use to describe it! Pictures were taken by my fascinated, also nurse sister-in-law, although I can’t really share any of them because they’re mostly pictures of my wife’s bloody vagina and you don’t need to see that…
In hindsight, I’m honestly just pretty proud of myself for not fainting through the whole thing – I guess despite how graphic the whole thing was, that new Daddy haze made it ok … which is funny because in looking back over those same photos later, well, let’s just say that my stomach is back to normal and they’re not exactly my favorite to look at anymore! 😛
But the baby came out – surprisingly effortlessly … granted, Sara might disagree, but we really weren’t at it that long. I held one leg and her primary nurse held the other while several other random people in the room told her to push. When I first saw just the top of his head, I really wasn’t sure what I was looking at with his hair and all, and my usual consult was a little busy for me to be asking her questions!
Then some more baby started to emerge, and suddenly before I realized what was happening, he was out and slimy and kind of pale, and they held him while I poorly cut the cord (seriously, it took me two tries because I was afraid of cutting the doctor and ended up cutting the cord only halfway through!), and then they cleaned him off a little and wrapped him up, and then this happened…
Up to the NICU … 12:10pm
Unfortunately baby didn’t get to stay in the room long because they wanted to get him up to the NICU and on some oxygen, so in a haze I left Sara behind with her bevvy of medical personnel and walked with Christopher and his own team over to his temporary home where I was introduced to more doctors and more nurses who at that moment in time I had nothing but admiration for as they got my new baby boy hooked up to all of the terrible and terribly important tubes and monitors that are required of a baby who decides to bounce into the world six weeks early.
I’m not gonna lie – that part was really hard, but it didn’t even have to be said that it was for the best…
By the time he was situated and I was ready to temporarily say goodbye, Sara was just about ready to move into her regular room, so I went and helped with that, then together we returned to the NICU and spent some more time before I headed out to get supplies so that I could actually spend the night that evening. After taking some time alone to process the fact that I’d just become a father while also giving our poor pooch Cleo a quick stroll around the block, I was back in time to read our little boy his very first bedtime story (The Pokey Little Puppy), then we quickly took care of the birth announcement and posting a few more pictures of our own before finally collapsing victoriously after collectively bringing a new human being into this world! 😉
So where are we now…
That was three days ago and today Sara got discharged to come home. Baby Christopher, on the other hand, is another story because at this point he’s still got a ways to go on his oxygen as his little lungs work to finish developing. We’re trying to just take it a day at a time because we’re still at that point where a time frame isn’t even something that his doctors are ready to spell out just yet. Again, he was born six weeks early and that’s traditionally not ideal, so right now we just need to give him a chance to grow and get stronger while the doctors and nurses do their thing.
For what it’s worth, pretty much everyone at the hospital from the maternity nurses through everyone watching over him in the NICU have been OUTSTANDING, so at least that makes it a little easier to sleep at night when I have to go back home and leave him at the hospital. I doubt it’ll be as easy for Sara, but we’ll get through it one way or another… 😉
Christopher Elliott Sevener
Born on Tuesday, March 25th, 2014 at 12:02pm
7 lbs 0 oz – 20 inches long
Baby is spending some time in the NICU to strengthen his lungs.
Mom is recovering well, and like Dad, is very, very anxious to bring our little boy home!
Thanks to everyone for all of your kind words and support throughout the day.
And a very special congratulations to our friends Tim and Amy, who welcomed their new daughter Ivy into the world exactly 5 hours prior to our new son!!!
Will definitely write more about this wild ride maybe tomorrow, but for now … sleep! 🙂
I guess it says something about my personality when the intent of this customizable shirt is actually this…
“If you’re a SCOTT, then this is for you! Let people know that whatever the problem that arises, there is no need to stress, you can handle it.”
And yet my first reaction is a little more something like this…
“What the hell?! Don’t I already do enough around here – how about Keep Calm and Leave Scott Alone and Handle It Yourself!!!”
I suppose mine might be a little long for a shirt. Maybe they can make it a two-sided or something.
So with all of the pregnancy craziness goings on, we haven’t really been over to Disney … since before Christmas, in fact … which is a long time for our family in general, but even more so as of late when you consider that I recently started writing for the Touring Plans blog.
…and by writing, I mean that I’ve written a whopping one article for them so far and that was more than a month ago… 😕
Fortunately for me, they’d definitely like me to write more, however with considerations taken first for bed rest in general and then especially this last week after having visited the hospital on multiple occasions without notice, it wouldn’t really make me a very responsible husband/future-father if I was two hours away at a theme park when the wife suddenly found that she needed to go back … but thankfully an opportunity surfaced yesterday with all of Sara’s family in town for her baby shower which unexpectedly gave me a chance to dart over to Orlando for the afternoon to snap some pictures for the next handful of articles that have been tumbling around my head that I otherwise haven’t been able to move forward with sans photos.
I ended up spending about six hours running around between Downtown Disney and Epcot, and even though it was a little weird doing so without the wife, admittedly it was a lot more running than stopping to enjoy things, so chances are she probably had a better time eating cake with her feet up and getting showered with gifts, anyways! 😉
Anywho, here’s a sample of some of my favorites – keep your eyes peeled over here for more in the near future…
It started off like any other dream – me and a friend unknowingly found ourselves on a water slide in Northern Michigan. It was a really strange “slide” where at first we were looking down at this undulating shape that splashed swimmers around, and then before we knew what was happening, somehow the wave splashed up at us and we were suddenly riding the wave like everyone else in their bathing suits…
…except that we weren’t in our bathing suits, and I remember being more than a little concerned about my phone getting wet…
Once we finally made it down to dry land, surprisingly dry ourselves considering that in theory we’d just been on a water slide of sorts, we had to go back to a nearby restaurant because I’d realized that I’d left a Kindle or something behind. There were four of us total, and when we went inside and got told to take a seat at a booth after retrieving my lost device, that’s when we got the feeling that something was wrong.
The dream itself never really spelled out what exactly was wrong, but after waiting a long time for our drinks in this eerily quiet restaurant and feeling a bit held captive, we finally decided that we had to go…
But apparently not before raiding our captor’s bitchin’ NES collection!
Again, not really sure how we were being held captive or who was even holding us captive, but in this big race to escape, I remember passing by an NES hooked up to a small TV with a sizable box full of games … and so in feeling due reparations for said alleged hostage taking, I took their games in return. Because you know, when fleeing for your life, the first thing that comes to mind is always, “I wonder if they have any games that I don’t have.”
Promptly upon seizing said box, however, that’s when the pursuit truly began, and with my view then changing to that of the classic Super Mario Bros side-scroller, complete with SMB3 Bowser chasing us across the landscape, that’s also when we officially decided that it was time to go!
No word on whether we escaped, or what apocalyptic thing had happened, or even if there were any sweet titles in our find, but there was definitely plenty of fire breathed in our direction from the big man … so maybe they were actually his games that we were effectively stealing???
King Koopa never can catch a break, I tell yeah…