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Saturday, 30 July 2011

  • Twenty-nine years ago today...

    A college friend of mine reminded me this afternoon that on this date twenty-nine years ago (which was a Friday), she was at her wedding rehearsal dinner and preparing for her wedding the next afternoon.  And my plan was to drive from Markle to meet another college friend in Kokomo to attend that wedding.  After all, I was three weeks from my August due date and the last ultrasound showed a September due date.  So, no worries! A trip to Kokomo was in my future. Or not......

    I have to back my story up a week in order for you to appreciate it fully.  We'd been married 13 months and our very first huge fight had been about Mike not going to the doctor when he was really sick.  In my home, you went to the doctor when you were sick.  In his home, with a single mom caring for 3 boys; you were a bit more choosy about when you went to the doctor.  And once he got on his own, Mike never went to the doctor or dentist unless he was almost dead.  So with this in mind, I had to drag him to the doctor on Monday because he was having trouble breathing.  Diagnosed with asthmatic bronchitis, he was handed a script for an antibiotic and sent home with orders to come back in on Friday.  If he wasn't better by Friday, Dr. Cripe was going to admit him to the hospital. I had just quit my job at Target in Ft. Wayne to prepare for the baby's arrival so we just kind of hung out at home and spent most of the day in the bedroom.  Me doing needlepoint or reading or watching tv and Mike trying to squeeze air into his lungs.  We had two cats and a dachshund, Nutmeg, and we all spent the week together in that tiny little bedroom.  The only things Mike got out of bed for was eating, bathroom needs and changing the channel on the tv (no remotes in 1982!)  Friday afternoon, I loaded my some better husband into the car and drove the 13 miles to the brand new medical satellite clinic in Ossian. He struggled into the building and I sat him down in the waiting room while I went to the ladies room. Because everyone knows that all pregnant women who are somewhere in the 9th month of their pregnancy have to go to the bathroom immediately upon arriving at their destination; no matter how short or long the journey.

    This is the last picture of me taken before we headed off to Mike's doctor appt. 7/82

    While in the restroom, strange things were going on with me. I emptied my suffering bladder and then stood up to finish. Hmmm, I was still going. I sat down, nothing. Nada, not a drip. Stood up, and I'm going again. So I sat down and started thinking about my birthing class where they talked about losing your cervical "plug".  I could hear Jeanne Ploetz in my head.  "It could be a trickle, or it could be a gush."  About then, I was beginning to have a light bulb moment. I cleaned up and walked out of the restroom to the counter, told them that I think my water broke: did they have any maxi pads? Someone gave me three hospital-sized pads and I went back to the bathroom.  But, it was pretty much too little, too late by this time.  I totally threw one away, used the other two and went out to find my husband; who had been escorted back to the exam room by then. They let me use the phone to call my doctor and then offered me a chair to sit down.  I looked down at the beautiful new carpet, new plush chairs and went to stand over on the mat by the door and asked for something plastic to sit on.  I stepped out of my beautiful new wooden Dr. Scholls sandals (which were the Crocs of the day) and stood there until they found a ratty old plastic chair. The woman behind the counter said more than once, "We've never had this happen here before!!" I was right there with her. I was absolutely mortified.  That new office couldn't have been a month old at that point.  I was 3 weeks from my first due date and 6 weeks from the second one and I had plans to go to a wedding the next day.  It was NOT the day to have a baby. Dr. Cripe gave Mike a shot of epinephrine and sent us home, since apparently we were about to become parents. No time for a hospitalization for Mike that day! When I'd called Dr. Shaw from the Ossian office, he told me that if I hadn't started labor by 8AM on Saturday morning to come in and he'd induce me (it was about 2:45 on Friday afternoon when I called him.) So, that is what I decided was going to happen.  I drove my shaking husband to my mom's house in Bluffton and my sister drove me to Markle to pick up the dog, cats and clothes for Mike and I.  I was fretting about all the things that I had left to do before the baby came, I remember lamenting the fact that my kitchen floor needed mopped.  I could not let that go. We didn't have our suitcase packed and we hadn't practiced our Lamaze breathing (BECAUSE, I HAD THREE WEEKS LEFT UNTIL MY DUE DATE PEOPLE!!)

    This was our "family" before the human baby arrived. None of them took to the new litter-mate well.  :)

    Dori and I got what we needed (or thought we needed, haha!) and went back to my mom's.  Daddy had left just that morning for the annual canoe trip to Canada with the Explorer scouts.  On Thursday before he left, I remember him admonishing me not to have that baby while he was gone and I'd laughed because it was so far to my due date. Oh boy, was he going to get a surprise when he got home! I had so much to do once we got to mom's.  I had to make sure that my husband stayed down on the couch, I had to call Deb and let her know that I wasn't going to be able to meet her in Kokomo to attend Ruth's wedding and I had to call Ruth and let her know that I wouldn't be there and why. (She told me then that I'd so far given her the best excuse of anyone for not coming to the wedding!) We had Pizza King pizza for supper (cause no one told me not to eat) and watched crazy tv for the rest of the evening with mom and the varmints. We went to bed; played cards and watched (and I am NOT lying!) The Howling on mom's old B&W tv while waiting for my labor to start or Mike's medicine effects to wear off, which ever came first.

    And that's what happened twenty-nine years ago today.  :D

     

Monday, 11 July 2011

Saturday, 18 June 2011

  • Testing, Please Scan and Leave Feedback!

    I honestly am not trying to sell you anything, just trying to find out if this works. I created a QR code for my business, so take out your fancy cell phones, scan it and see where it takes you?  But if you happen to see something you like, I won't stop you from buying anything.  blush

    You should see my smiling face up in the upper right hand corner of the website.  laughing

     

    qrcode

     

    Reply and let me know what you ended up. Then you can leave, don't look, don't shop and definitely don't find anything that you want to own since it is BUY TWO GET ONE FREE.       Oh yeah...I forgot.  I'm not selling anything. winky

     

    Have a great weekend!!!

Thursday, 02 June 2011

  • Young and Stupid Revisited

    Many years ago, when I was young and stupid, I made a terribly foolish mistake that as an adult makes me look back and marvel at the goodness of God and his mercies.  The Blizzard of '78 was in January of my senior year and our little city got a ton of snow.  We were buried in for days before the trucks came and plowed out the streets so we could all go to the grocery store.  I was even excited about finally getting back to school; I can't even remember how much school we missed.  I do know that we went to school less days that school year than any other graduating class.  They didn't even try to make up snow days.

    Several weeks after the blizzard, maybe even a couple of months, everything started to melt. And flood. And melt. And flood some more.  We had marching band practice at the high school one Saturday morning and afterwards I headed home in my 1976 Ford Pinto (yes, one of the ones that would explode upon impact.) We lived several miles from the high school downtown and the quickest route home was to drive down River Road which was right beside the mighty Wabash River.  Which, normally isn't very mighty...you can run a canoe down it as long as you haven't had a good dry spell.  I wish I had the story-telling skills of Old Hat; if I did, you'd be rivited in your seats instead of wishing I'd get to the point of my story...Hey Hat?  Could you re-tell my story after you read it?  laughing  So, I'm heading home when I notice that the river is kind of high, heading for the grass partition between the bank of the river and River Road.  As I tootle a little farther along, (cause that's what one did in a Pinto...tootle) I'm noticing that the water is inching itself across the road.  I can still see the lines in the center of the road so I just keep driving. Then I looked out my window and noticed that the water was half-way up my doors and I started to get nervous.  The road was gone and I was in the water.  I can now hear and see the water seeping into my car and I'm inching forward, hoping to find some other cars, but of course there were none.  No one else seemed to think it was a good thing to drive into the mis-placed Wabash River.  I thought, 'If I can just get up to that driveway, I can get home via a different route."  But then, disaster struck.  Barry Manilow quit singing and the car just sputtered and died.

    I am just 18 years old and I was sitting there thinking that driver's ed didn't prepare me for this, what now?  I have to get out of this water and darn quickly!  The car wouldn't start so I had to do something.  I had enough sense not to get out of the car; probably couldn't have gotten the door open anyway.  It was still sitting still, hadn't started floating yet but I knew that my time was limited and I had to get off that road.  I have no rememberence of praying, I surely should have been, but I can't recall.  I did know that to get out of the water I was in, I needed to go backwards.  So, I put it in reverse (it was a 4 speed on the floor) and started popping the clutch.  It hopped backwards a bit and I repeated my action of popping the clutch.  Again and again, back I went; a few feet at a time.  For endless minutes.  I can't tell you how long it took, but I know that it felt like forever.  I'm distance challenged so I can't even tell you how far I had gone from the place where the water didn't cover the road to where I was when the car stalled.  For you Bluffton readers, the water crept over the road just past Wayne St. and I got stuck just shy of the picnic area.  Not a far distance, but it felt like I had gone miles by the time I got the Pinto on dry ground.  By this time, there were some kind passers-by waiting for me (and I'm sure they were enjoying the show) and once I got out of the car, they took me to my boyfriend's house.  Once there, he and his dad got a big chain for the truck and went to get my car.  It probably took 5 minutes to get to his house, and another 10 to get back, but the river was rising so fast that by the time we got back to the car, it was no longer sitting on dry ground.  And boy-howdy, that water was cold!  My memory gets a little fuzzy at this point as to what happened next, but I do know that it took FOREVER for the inside of that car to dry.  The carpet froze solid because we had some more cold, cold weather; then we had to thaw it out and dry it out.  Daddy had to put the Pinto in the garage and put heat lamps and heaters in the car for days.  Oh, did it stink....a moldy, mildewy smell that never quite went away.

    What triggered this memory?  The semi-annual Meridian Street Flooding.  The street out in front of our house and for an entire block to the south of us floods when we get a hard, fast rain.  In 1998 they had some very serious flooding and at that time, they "repaired" the drainage system and that took care of the problem (not!)  We've got several sets of pictures of our kids and neigbors playing in the various floods of the past 12 years.  We once got a call from the neighbor across the street at 1AM advising us to move our car since the water was getting so high. We had so much rain on Saturday, it came down in sheets and it had been raining for days.  The street started getting some water backed up and then just closed over the road and started rising.  A young girl decided that she'd be able to drive through that water, she must have been thinking, 'how deep can it be? I only have to go one block!' whatevah  Two houses south of us, her car stopped.  And there she sat while the water just kept rising.  Quite the event in Greentown.  All the neighbors who were home were out with thieir kids and their cameras: it was like a block party!  Henry Edwards made the comment that he was "sure glad that they fixed this problem!" which of course made us laugh...Our young visitor to the neighborhood wasn't in any danger of floating off or being swept away by the water and eventually she got out of her car and made her way to the porch of the neighbors' house where most of the spectators were congregating.  The Greentown police finally barricaded the road (too little, too late), the city guy came with a shovel to clean out the drains in the road, we all finished chatting and reminising about the other floods (remember the year of the apples?) and returned to our homes.  At some point, a big red truck backed up to the girl's car and pulled it out of the road. 

      

    Of course, in 1978 there had been no tsunami in Japan and we didn't have 24 hour news coverage of the devastation and distruction that the water can cause.  We hadn't seen any news coverage of water rescues where they have to pluck stranded motorists off the roofs of their submerged cars by helicoptor while the raging water raced by.  Who know how deadly a flooded street could be?  I sure didn't.  Ever since that episode, I have a healthy fear and respect for water on the road.  For a very long time after that, I would shake if I even had to drive through a fairly deep mud puddle.  Kids, don't try this on your own.  Don't try to drive through high water.  How stupid was I??  VERY!!  How LUCKY was I?? VERY VERY!!!  God had mercy on an ignorant kid that day.  As He has many times since (but He hasn't ever found me driving in high water again.)

    Blessings,

    Wendy

Friday, 25 March 2011

  • 4 out of 5 ain't bad...

    I got bit by a dog this winter.  I can't say I've ever been bit by a dog before except when Katie or Rascal and I were playing and one of them got a bit rough.  So, that really doesn't count as a "dog bite" wouldn't you agree?  I have a friend who was bitten by a dog as a toddler and had to have plastic surgery several times; even as a young adult.  All I could think about (besides how much it HURT!!!!!!!) was Kathy and her eye and what was I going to find in my hand when I pulled it away from my face?? 

    He was a big dog, about 85 pounds, but he wasn't aggressive (or so I thought.) He'd been trying to get my attention all evening and his owner kept shooing him back to his blankie and chew toys. When we were sitting at the dining room table working on the computer, he would nudge me try to get me to pet him and his head was level with my armpit (so you can see how big he was.)  If we got up and went into another room, he went with us.  We were drinking coffee and eating cookies and unlike Katie and Rascal, if we wanted to go into a different room; we had to take our cookies with us because he could just help himself to anything on the table. 

    He finally got tired of following us around and jumped up on the bed in the master bedroom.  We'd gone in to try to decide which size of Uppercase Living expression to order and where exactly to put it and he watched us as we came into the room to measure and visualize.  We did not surprise him as he was following our movements with his head so at that point, I decided that I was ready to pay attention to him because we were pretty much done with our business. I walked up to the bed and started talking baby-talk to him and lightning fast, he bit me in the face.  His snout and front teeth between the canines must have hit my cheek square-on because it honestly felt like someone hit my face with a bat.  I remember saying, "Oh, oh, oh! He bit me! He bit me!"  I pulled my hand away and my eye wasn't in it so I just went back to trying not to throw up because it hurt so much and act like I wasn't in too much pain because I didn't want to upset my friend.  She was mortified and kept saying, "He's never done anything like that before..." and then took me back to the bathroom to put a cold cloth on my face.  By the time we got there, I was bleeding in two places: right under my eye and right above my lip. (Canine teeth, would be my guess.)  Oh, did it hurt.  It hurt for days.  I finished my business, got in my freezing cold car and wailed all the way home in the privacy of my car.  It hurt when I went to bed, it hurt when I ate.  You know how it feels when you go to the dentist with a big cavity in one of your top teeth and the dentist gives you a really strong dose of Novocaine?  How funny it feels while the numbness is wearing off?  And if you smile, it aches because the shot was so deep?  That's how my face felt for two weeks.  Hurt like the dickens.  Or is it all-git-out?

    I had a black eye for a couple of weeks and I have a scar on my face right above my lip that is still a little bit tender at times, but I'm no worse for the wear.  And it gave me something to blog about!  I am so thankful that the dog wasn't any bigger, or any smaller.  I think if he'd been bigger; I'd have lost my eye.  If he was smaller, his teeth would have been sharper and I might have had puncture wounds instead of just scratches.  God was merciful to me.

    My new co-workers didn't know what to think of my black eye.  It was only my second week in my new job so no one really knew me and one day I didn't have a black eye and the next day I did.  (And it got worse after this picture.)  I had to explain that I got bit by a dog and tell my doggie story several times as the different people would come and go.  They all wondered about my eye but no one wanted to ask me how I got it!  silly

ziggswife

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