Lindy 1 Month Old!

I know everyone probably says this, but I can't believe my baby is already 1 month old!

Lindy has been really fun to have in our home. She eats and sleeps most of the time, and sometimes cries a little in between, but on the whole she's a perfect baby. Brett and I are having a lot of fun just watching her little face while she sleeps - she seems to have a lot of food-related dreams. We sure enjoy having such a sweet little gal.

I suppose I should have blogged earlier, but there really isn't a whole lot to say, so I'll add a bunch of pictures instead (I tried to put them in chronological order so you can see how she's changed already).



This isn't a particularly exciting video, but she's awake, sculpting the air with her hands (which she does constantly if she's not swaddled), and sneezing (anybody who's anybody loves baby sneezes, right?).

Wake Up, Little Lindy... Wake Up!!!

This is mostly for my PUs in Hawaii so they can see the kid in action!

Who let that stork in here?!?

Who knew this could actually happen ... on April 7th, we left the window open on a nice spring day, and a stork flew in and dropped off a lil' kid for us.  Magically, the tumor in Katie's abdomen was immediately resolved!  Magically-er, both of us are getting less sleep these days!

We call the bundle "Lindy Paige Groneman."  Lindy is the nickname of Katie's Aunt. Katie has been doing great since the stork's delivery and her tumor extraction/disappearance.  She's only been on Ibuprofen.  She hasn't even needed the Percocoet, even in the hospital.

If the stork had given me an ugly kid, I would have loved her all the same, but Lindy is ridiculously cute, and makes us laugh a lot with the faces she pulls.

WHO DISTURBS MY SLUMBER??

She's actually better than I had imagined with sleeping.  Sometimes (certainly not always) she'll sleep for 4 hours at a time if we don't wake her up, but then we usually wake her up at that point to eat.

Her bilirubin levels are high, so we started with the bilibed yesterday.  Levels are down today because of that, but we're going to do another day of bili-lights.  I guess I'm just glad that we have the ability to monitor her bilirubin levels to make sure she's okay.

She's cute.  She's fun.  We're both very glad she's here and doing okay.  I'm glad Katie is doing great too.

For the record, here's the series of events at the hospital:

Apr. 6th:

0800:  We get the call to go to AF hospital for the induction.
1000:  Start Cytotec
1600:  Start Pitocin (which was tapered up to the maximum "normal" dose for quite a while without much progress, and went a little beyond "normal" with the OB's approval.)

Apr. 7th:

0120:  Artificial Rupture of Membranes [which was particularly effective to get labor really going]
0430:  Epidural
0940:  Surprisingly suddenly dilated to a "9 1/2" and "pushing" commences.
1023:  Stork flew in and dropped off a kid, and Katie's tumor was resolved!
1032:  Lindy to Nursery because she wasn't 100% on APGAR scores, not a particularly strong cry and a little floppy.
1100:  After nurses and a respiratory therapist listened to her and assessed her, they called the pediatrician and recommended that he order an IV bolus to expand intra-vascular volume.  He did.  60 mL.  IV started, bolus given.
1110:  I clean her off while they're working on their stuff.
1330 (ish): Katie down to Mom/Baby and meets up with Lindy again.

Apr. 9th:

1000 (ish):  Discharge from hospital to go home.

     

Induction to commence in T- some hours

They haven't given us a specific time yet, but we'll be induced tomorrow. They apparently have to wait through the night to see how many admits they have and if they'll have any staffing issues. So... we'll get a call early tomorrow morning and then head in ASAP if all goes well. I'm barely dilated, so getting my body ready for induction will be a long process in and of itself, before they even start the pitocin. Likely baby Groneman won't actually be born until April 7th... but here's to hoping for a quick and speedy labor (...right...). Details (and cute pics) are soon to come.

Bed-Rest = Baby Quilt

I've been put on bed-rest for pre-eclampsia (although we're thinking it was connected to a cold, which is resolving, so maybe my pre-eclampsia is resolving as well). Anywho.... since I've been hanging out at home all week, I figured I might as well put in several hours on the baby quilt that I'm making for our upcoming arrival. Click here for the tutorial I used (I stole the color combo as well).

The camera can't handle all the colors, so these pictures don't look quite right, but it's close. I'll take a picture of it outside when it's completely finished - maybe then the colors will be right. Mom Boren is going to help me quilt it when she gets home - which is coming up in 3 months to the day - yay!!!

Fabric used

Front

Back

You spoke, we listened!

Yesterday while taking my car in to get fixed, I overheard 2 employees (right there in the front room with me, and knew I was there) talking to each other about another car:

Employee 1: So we need to give this guy a discount or something so he feels like he's getting a good deal and will come back.
Employee 2: So what do you want to do?
Employee 1: How much do we normally charge for this?
Employee 2: About $360. So how low do you want to go then?
Employee 1: I don't know.  We can't do much lower.  Lets just raise the price in the computer to $400 and give him 10% off to make it $360 so he feels like he's getting a deal.
Employee 2: You can do that?
Employee 1: Yeah, it's easy, here I'll show you...

I'm not surprised at all that this happened.  I actually don't really care either.  That's business.  That's exactly what "sales" are.  It's called the anchoring effect. I was just surprised that they just talked about it right there with me listening to every word.

To their credit, we're actually repeat customers to this place now because there's another guy there who seems very trustworthy, who's worked on our car both times.  And in contrast to the story I just told you, he actually told me there would be no charge for what he did yesterday, when I was fully expecting to pay him something.

Teaching kids these days... bah...

It's been an incredibly long week. Student led conferences (glorified parent/teacher conferences) are finally over. I wrote a pretty lengthy journal entry on some of my feelings about parenting and education, but I thought I'd try to summarize what I've been thinking about here.

1. Teachers are human - we do not have an extrasensory ability to know when or why a student is not doing well. We are not computers that can track 200+ kids grades at any moment.
2. Most teachers have several students that are doing worse than yours - try to remember that when you're freaking out about your student having a C.
3. Talk to the teacher before the crisis happens - knowing what you expect can help teachers know how to best help your child. It's also good to talk to the teacher first instead of going straight to the principal for some petty problem - I'm an adult... I can fix things without needing to be told by my boss.
4. It's harder to succeed in public schools than some alternatives for a variety of reasons. We have limited funds, huge class sizes (about 1:32 in my case), and large enrollments (~1500 kids at my school). 
5. Teachers' biggest problem is finding time - it's impossible for me to get everything graded, future lessons planned, presentations made, worksheets and tests written, and notes prepared all within a 45 min. preparation time (it takes me 5 of those minutes just to take a breath and go to the restroom). I spend hours after school trying to get the necessities done. I wish I had time to check everyone's grade and make a plan for helping individual students - but I don't. I pick the ones that are hurting the most and that's the best I can do.
6. If it comes between believing your 14 year-old and 10 adult educators... please believe the educators - are you really going to believe that every teacher in the school has it out for your kid instead of thinking, maybe my child has (or is) a problem?
7. It seems like students these days are academically irresponsible. A surprising number of them won't do homework and don't study - they'll happily admit it, and then wonder why they're failing. I have had several students ask me why their grade is low and when I say it's because of homework and tests they look shocked.
8. While I think they're academically lazy, it's not because they aren't busily doing something. A lot of them are so overloaded with "EXTRA-curricular" activities that they "don't have time" to study - and if they really are doing karate, lacrosse, music lessons, church, and a part-time job, then I don't blame them. Are parents not stressing that school should be their focus?
9. Teenagers cannot be expected to be adults - they need supervision and external motivation sometimes.  
10. Just to make it a nice round number.

Most of this rant stems from a discussion I had with a parent yesterday about her son who I only have in my TA (homeroom) class. In TA they read and I check their grades once a week (I don't necessarily have them for science class). This parent had some major issues with why I didn't do anything about her son who had transient Ds and an F earlier this quarter, but who now has 4 As and 3 Cs. I explained that our policy is only to refer those students with 2 or more Fs to discuss on Friday's. Unfortunately, we usually have a full schedule of these multi-failing kids, and don't have time to discuss the others that are close, but not quite. She felt like the "system" had failed her son, and that his teachers were not paying close enough attention to him - so she's going to pull him out to do online school. She did not seem to grasp that the reason why grades are not updated at optimal speed is because we each have about 200 kids, and if we do something every day (which I certainly try to do), then that means grading 1000 worksheets a week... um not going to happen. She also did not grasp that while it's not great that her kid has Cs, my first concern is for the 2 kids that I have in my TA class that are failing all 7 classes. When I say this, she replies, "Well that tells me something about this school then, doesn't it..." Huh? Two freshmen in high school choosing to fail all of their classes is the school's fault? BARGGGGGG!!!!

I could go on, and probably offend some more people, but I'll stop there. I know I'm no expert... I don't have kids (well... not quite). But I've interacted with over 400 kids at school (and I'm only in my 2nd year), and have seen a lot of patterns. The main thing I've learned is...

I'm staying HOME while my kids are in school (if at all possible) - I'm pretty sure that would solve 95% of the problems I see in students these days.