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WOW I haven’t blogged here in a while… but it’s time to get back to it. So much has happened, and it would be impossible to list it all, but here’s the long and short of it.
November 2003 – I moved to Ann Arbor with Craig because I got a new job. We lived in a crappy apartment in Ypsilanti, and we were making almost no money at the time – my job started out at a really low salary, and Craig had to transfer to a lower-ranking job at Enterprise here. I was out of medical insurance, and it just so happened that at that exact time, a mishap occurred and we found out we were pregnant with our first child. What timing! We were scared out of our minds, but excited at the same time – we had been married for four years, and were very sure that our love for each other and our unborn child would get us through whatever was to come. As cheesy as that sounds, it’s proven true so far!
April 2004 – I started swelling up like a water balloon! I was going to the nurse midwives at the University of Michigan, and they were sure that the swelling was not abnormal, and I had no medical need for any intervention… basically I just had to deal with it and try not to exacerbate it as much as possible. The only problem was… my job required that I sit at a computer for 8 hours a day, and our office wasn’t air conditioned! My coworkers weren’t helpful at all, probably because I have an attitude and was acting like I was fine, but I ended up using an old box (we had plenty lying around at the office) to rest my legs on during the day, which I liked to believe actually helped me, and when I got home from work Craig would rub my legs to relieve the pain of swelling so much. My legs would actually seep from all of the water they were retaining! It was great. Pregnancy from hell, but all along I was assured that my son was fine and I’d get through it… and I did it with as much grace as I could muster.
September 2, 2004 – Connor was born! A beautiful 7lb 1oz baby boy that looked exactly like me as an infant, he delighted everyone that met him. I delivered him naturally (with Pitocin, unfortunately, but he was 3 weeks late!), but I didn’t have any pain medication and I was in labor for 13 hours. I’d totally do it that way again – it was such an amazing experience and I don’t ever want to forget a minute of it. PAIN isn’t always bad, let me tell you. I felt so proud of myself when it was over!
September, 2005 – Craig started nursing school in the Second Career Nursing program at the University of Michigan. It was a really hard 12 months – Craig had to take a job at Blockbuster for us to be able to pay the bills, but he was doing something he loved and that made all the difference. Our bathrooms were constantly overflowing with nursing textbooks (Craig’s in the bathroom a lot – longer story that I’m willing to type), and Connor started going to daycare because of the time commitment that Craig’s school required. Connor had 6 ear infections in that first year, and that sucked a TON! Again, we got through it.
August, 2006 – Craig graduated from nursing school, got his first nursing job at the Surgical Intensive Care Unit at the University of Michigan Hospital, and we bought our first house! We looked for months for the perfect place, and were disappointed time and again with the funds we had available versus the kind of house we wanted. Times are hard in Michigan though, and as sad as it is to say it, we benefited from someone else’s troubles – we found a house that had been foreclosed in 2005 but had only been lived in for 2 months after it was build – so it was pretty much brand new. It’s great! In our last apartment, we had four UofM football players living upstairs, whom I fondly called “Turds” and hated with a passion, and apparently Connor latched on to that name as well… still to this day he asks me to reassure him that no “Turds” will be waking him up in the middle of the night with their loud music, stomping, and general disrespect for anyone around them. Those guys sucked. But we’re away from them now, and there’s a community pool located in the lot next to ours (a nice one, too!), plus we have the community playground basically in our backyard… It’s paradise for Connor, and we’re liking it so far too. So that’s it! I’m sure I missed some stuff. More to come… hopefully with less than four years in between!
