25 Weeks

Well here is a shot I took this afternoon with our Skype Cam. As you can clearly see, Plus One is growing and so is my belly.

Robbie and I are still in the process of determining who or how we will have Plus delivered now that we are settled in John Day. While living in Juneau, we were attending the Juneau Family Birth Center and were seen by three wonderful Midwives. I've had it in my mind during the pregnancy to birth outside the hospital setting, if at all possible and we remain a low risk pregnancy.

John Day does have a hospital and one Midwife who performs Home Births. It was time for a check-up so we met with the Midwife, Sherry, last week before heading out to Sandpoint, ID for holiday. She is very knowledgeable and has already confirmed that I/we would be comfortable with her delivering Plus One. Now we just need to do all the responsible stuff, like find out if our insurance will cover the cost of home birth and Sherry's services. The hospital here as one can imagine is pretty tiny and does have Labor and Delivery services available. It is amazing in this town how many people ask where we are going to deliver and as soon as we mention Sherry, they tell us how she birthed their children, or that she birthed them. Can you tell I'm already biased, and practically have my mind set.

Anyways, our last check-up went great, and the baby should be about 1&1/2 pounds now. We heard the heartbeat again, and we were able to hear the swooshing of the blood going in and out of the heart valves. It is amazing to know that all that is going on inside my body. The baby has been much more active the last few days too. I think he/she must be doing somersaults or something and causing quite a bit of commotion.

As we approach the third trimester, I will try to be better about keeping you updated. I'll add pictures, but suspect they will be hard to distinguish my belly size until right before I explode. What you will be able to see grow and stretch is probably my tattoo. Robbie and I wished we had measured it early on in the pregnancy to see how big it will actually get. Any wagers?

I know, we are slacking off!

Just want to let you know we have not forgotten about you or the blog. Hopefully this evening or tomorrow we can give you an update on our move, our new home, and the baby. Please be patient, as we just got our belongings yesterday, and the computer hooked up with internet last night. Look forward to telling you more later.

Plus One

Turn up your volume!

Eastern Oregon

Last week Robbie and I made our way down to John Day, Oregon. This town is our soon to be home. We took a few photos, and I know that some of you are anxious to see what the area looks like.


Many of the fields we drove past had groups of mule deer grazing, as seen here. I have never seen so many deer in one area. They not only frequent the fields, but they also frequent town and spend their days lazily laying in people's yards.


One late afternoon we drove up to a small lake located in the National Forest. Three gentlemen were fishing, and it didn't look like they were doing too bad. This lake has a trail around it, and could easily be done in an hour or so.
This shot is a little washed out, but gives a better idea of the valley in which we will be living and the forest that surrounds it above.Here is a photo of a pheasant that Robbie spotted on the side of the road one afternoon. He had a lady friend with him, but she wasn't as pretty and was much more camouflaged in the background.



Oh yes, the shoe tree. No highway is complete with out one. Need I say more?

Hoonah

This last weekend Robbie, Chad, Scott (Chad’s Bro), Marc (Chad’s Bud), and myself all took the ferry over to Hoonah, Alaska. Hoonah is a small fishing town of about 800 residents, located on Chichagof Island. We all had the intention of catching Coho (silver) salmon. Chad, Scott and Marc also brought their shotguns for some duck hunting. According to Chad, the fishing wasn’t off the hook, but we were all able to bring in enough fish to send everyone home happy.

We were pretty fortunate the weather held out all day Friday and through most of Saturday. However by Saturday evening the sky broke free into a Southeast Alaska down torrent. Luckily we had a “Tarpologist” with us, as Marc referred to Robbie. Actually, all the men worked really well together and donated great ideas so that we could still enjoy the outdoors, and cook without getting soaked from the rain. Can anyone guess where I was during all of this? Yep, you got it, in the truck, nice and dry. I figured it best to stay out of the way of all that testosterone. Plus, like a moron, I forgot an extra pair of waterproof boots, and didn’t want to take the chance of getting my feet soaked. That could have been a downer for everyone. Needless to say that evening most of us went to bed early, and listened to the rain hitting the cabs and canopy roofs of the trucks.

On Sunday, we awoke to the rain, but not as hard as the night before. Robbie and I didn’t go fishing with the others. We drove some of the forest service roads, looked for critters, and explored the town and its infamous brown bear hang out, the city dump. I’ve heard plenty of stories from Robbie and our friend Keith about the Hoonah dump and how huge the brown bears are that frequent it. According to Robbie the dump is different now, they have a gate around the freshly dumped off trash, and had it on fire, actually more like a smolder. Robbie didn’t expect with the change that we would see any bears, but low and behold one came out of the wood work, and another was down by the big pile of somewhat already burned trash. I thought the bears were plenty big, but Robbie assures me that the bears of the past got so big on human waste, that their belly’s dragged on the ground.


More pictures are down below in the albums, if you care to take a look.