Bonus Post: Pittsburgh Pictures

Pictures from the June 2017 trip to Pittsburgh.  The cousin lineups are already outdated due to babies.

Walter and Kaitlyn eat breakfast:

...Joined by Edward:

How the girls spent one morning:

How the boys spent the same morning:

Games in the attic:

Cousin line-ups:

Bonus Post: Introducing Matthias

Matthias Edward Barhorst

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

4:20 pm

9 pounds, 4.7 ounces

21 inches long

This story could have been much more exciting if it started Monday night.  We had tornado warnings, with sightings just northwest of us, around 10:00.  As Bryan, Jillian, and I sat in the girls' bathroom draped with sleeping children, I commented that given the timing we were lucky we weren't having a baby in the basement as a tornado raged above us.  As it was, the tornado passed us by and the night continued uneventfully.  As we headed off to bed, Jillian did forbid me from going into labor during the torrential downpour that followed our vigil.

Tuesday morning began routinely enough.  Bryan got up for work, I decided to rest in bed until Kaitlyn's demands required my presence.  She came bouncing in, already dressed in Gretchen's clothes, around 7:45.  No demands were made, though, and after a good morning kiss she happily went off to play.  At 8:00, I felt what I am calling my first contraction.  I'd been having fairly strong Braxton Hicks contractions for days, and the line between strong practice contractions and weak real contractions was pretty blurry.  By 8:30 I'd had three more weak contractions and figured I better start my day.

Thus passed the rest of the morning.  The contractions got mildly stronger, but not really uncomfortable.  Sometimes they were as close as 6 minutes apart, but more often they were closer to 10.  The girls and I said prayers and got breakfast.  Well, they ate breakfast.  I had three shredded mini wheats while I was pouring cereal and decided I wasn't hungry.  When they went to play, I wandered around the house doing small chores and halfheartedly timing contractions.  My tracking of contractions is abysmal at best, even when I'm not doing other things.  

Bryan came upstairs to get breakfast and I mentioned that I'd been having irregular contractions.  He thought about panicking, but I must have appeared unfazed because after asking if he should call his mom he calmly said to just come get him when it was time to go.  I went back to chores.  During this time, the dishwasher was loaded, the remaining dishes were done, the clothes were folded, and the floor was swept.  Later, as we were getting ready to head to the hospital, I joked to Bryan that his mom might not recognize our house since it was so uncharacteristically clean.  Bryan came up for lunch just before noon, and I told him that contractions were now consistently 3-4 minutes apart and I was going to call his mom as soon as I finished the dishes.  He went back downstairs to take the afternoon off work.

Murry answered her phone with "Is it time?!" and I told her to start heading our direction, but to take her time.  That seems a necessary precaution ever since she made the hour drive to our house in 35 minutes when Gretchen was being born.  I went to check the mail and stopped on the way back to pull some weeds in the garden.  Bryan, worried about my nonchalance, called Elesha and Sarah to put them on notice as back up babysitters in case we had to leave earlier.  We did not have to leave earlier, though, and Murry arrived just after 1.  We put our stuff in her jeep (leaving her the van and carseats), told the girls goodbye, and left.  Olivia was very excited about the coming baby, Gretchen was excited about Olivia's excitement (although I think the baby part was explained better after we left), and Kaitlyn was excited to see Grandma.  :)

The drive to the hospital was pleasant.  Contractions slowed down to about 6 minutes apart, causing me to question our decision to leave.  We called the hospital to let them know we were on our way and to find out which entrance to use since it was daytime.  Bryan talked about how nice it was to be making the drive in the daylight after a full night's sleep.  He claimed that this was the ideal way to have babies.  I argued that I much preferred waking up nearly in transition and having a baby within three hours as opposed to having contractions for half a day while simultaneously dealing with the needs of three other children.  I also pointed out that, as the one having the baby, my perception of ideal counted for much more than his.

We discussed which of our five boy names we would use on the off chance that we had a boy.  I was thinking Matthias, but we agreed that we'd favored Samuel more consistently during the pregnancy.  We decided that Samuel would probably be the name, and then decided that it didn't matter because we only have girls.

We arrived at the hospital around 1:45, entered through the outpatient doors, and waited through a rather lengthy check-in.  I guess when you go through the emergency room they tend to shorten the process a bit.  A short walk later, we were settling into a hospital room on the labor and delivery floor.  An IV was placed in case of emergency, more questions were asked, and the midwife ascertained that I was 7 cm.  One nurse asked my plan for pain, to which I responded, "Um, ignore it?"  After all of that, I was allowed to get up and wander around the room.  All that was left was to wait for a baby.

Around 3:15, Bryan told me he thought we'd have a baby by 4.  Sure enough, at 3:55 I had him go fetch the midwife.  Little did we know that it would still be 25 minutes before the baby made an appearance.  In an odd twist, contractions slowed down as we got closer to the actual birth.  I'd have a contraction and then wait about four minutes for the next one to come.  The midwife broke my water, but even that didn't speed things up.  Bryan and I chatted with the nurses about all sorts of things (like whether we thought this would be a boy given the difference in labor, and the purpose of the approximately 12 pairs of scissors on the table that they wheel in).  Everyone had plenty of time to get in position and get things set up.  Finally the time came to push.  The first thing the midwife did after the baby was born was ask Bryan the gender.  After he said it was a boy, her next comment was on the size.  Apparently this was a large baby.

The boy was passed up to me, and Bryan leaned over and asked, "Can we name him Matthias?"  Apparently he looked like a Matthias, even though Bryan never thought he'd be the kind of person who decided a baby's name based on his first look at said baby.  And so Matthias he is.  :)  When the nurses finally got around to weighing him an hour or so later, Matthias did indeed turn out to be a large baby, weighing in at 9 pounds, 4.7 ounces.  Our initial thought was that he looks like Kaitlyn, but as I look back on pictures of the other girls, I'm not so sure.  He probably just looks like a baby.

Murry had wanted to stop by with the girls to visit on her way back to Sidney, but the timing didn't work out well and they were excited to get to Grandma's house.  They decided to visit the next evening instead.  Dinner arrived just as everything was cleaned up (one perk to having a daytime birth was that meals were available when I was hungry) and Fr Mark and Presbytera arrived after dinner to visit and say prayers.

We spent that night and all of the next day in the hospital resting and snuggling Matthias.  Steve and Murry brought the girls to visit after dinner that day, arriving just after Jillian.  Matthias slept through getting passed around, much to Olivia's dismay.  All the girls were very happy to see and hold the baby.  They were initially disappointed to not have another sister, but upon meeting Matthias they all decided that a brother was good, too.

Bryan took the girls home that night so that Murry could head to Cleveland in case Keshia had her baby (she ended up having her son the next night).  Bryan spent the night at home and dropped the girls off with the Hodges the next morning before coming to fetch Matthias and me.  We were all checked out and ready to go before lunchtime.  Bryan, Matthias, and I spent a few hours alone at home -- enough time to watch Iron Man, because Bryan wanted the first movie Matthias slept through to be a superhero movie -- before he headed out to pick up the girls.

By dinnertime on the 13th we were all home, ready to begin being a family of 6.  :)

Pictures:

Bonus Post: Cleveland Pictures

Pictures of Rudy's birthday party.

The drive-in movie:

Dancing in hula skirts:

Painting pictures:

 

Rudy and Kaitlyn with Bernie:

Bryan:

Olivia and Grandma:

Chalk:

June 11-July 2

It's tough being the littlest one.  The big girls had VBS a few weeks ago, and Kaitlyn never ever got to stay.  Since the Wey boys were also attending, Elesha and I traded off giving rides.  Kaitlyn also never got to stay with Mrs. Wey.  And then, to make a sad situation even sadder, Aunt Jillian had work most days, and Kaitlyn didn't get to do that, either.  She spent her mornings with me, telling me how it was Kaitlyn's turn to go to school and Mrs. Wey's and work.

A Gretchen mispronunciation: accilently.

A Kaitlyn mispronunciation: ehferma (elephant)

An Olivia update: She started both long vowels and subtraction last week.

We recently went to the zoo with the Weys and toured Africa.  It was a hot day, but that made the African animals more cooperative and active than usual, which was a pleasant surprise.  The lion even jumped right up to the window, startling all the kids standing there, before flopping down in front of it for admiration.  The giraffes were (as always) a big hit.  They're so big and really have nowhere to hide in their enclosure.  Also there's a viewing deck where you can pay to feed them lettuce, so they tend to be pretty close.

Last weekend we went to Cleveland to visit Keshia, Tyler, and Rudy.  It lined up with Rudy's birthday, so Keshia threw a luau themed party and decorated box cars for the girls to all watch Moana in their own personal drive-in.  They all had fun playing and painting and dancing in their grass skirts.  I will probably have a pictures only post soon once I get a chance to go through all the pictures that Keshia sent me.  I told Murry about how I did so many prostrations right before Kaitlyn was born, and she told Keshia and me that we better get working on our Easter crunches so that both our babies would come while she was there to watch all the other kids.  We declined.  :/

After Cleveland, the girls and I headed to Pittsburgh to see the Bossards.  Their new house is only two hours from the Palsgroves, so the drive was relatively painless.  The girls were three across in the back-seat-moved-to-the-middle and we Bryan and Jillian packed the back of the van full of Bossard belongings from the basement.  The kitchen table didn't actually fit in the van, so Bryan took that and the rest of the basement Bossard belongings to Pittsburgh in his truck on Saturday before meeting the rest of us in Cleveland.  This means that the Bossards are out of my basement!  Anyway, we spent Sunday night and all of Monday just visiting and hanging out.  The cousins played together and Justine and I unpacked a few things that I'd brought and decided where furniture was going to go.  We took the kids up to the empty attic and ran them through an exciting series of games and races, managing to get several good cousin pictures in the meantime.  Again, those will go up when I get a chance.

On Tuesday the movers came to drop off boxes.  I spent the morning keeping children in the playroom while Justine and Joseph directed traffic.  After lunch we put on a movie and I began the task of unpacking (mostly dumping boxes of toys into the playroom) while Justine double checked everything with the movers.  Then the real work began.  Over the rest of Tuesday and the beginning of Wednesday, we managed to unpack the kitchen, dining room, playroom, the boys' bedroom, the bathroom, and part of the living room.  Not everything was put away in a permanent home, but it was all out of boxes.  We were impressed by the packing skills of the kitchen guy especially.  We were unimpressed by all of the labeling skills -- sharp knives were found split between a box labeled plasticware and another labeled canned goods.  On Wednesday afternoon I needed to leave, so I stole some cardboard from Justine, rigged a shelf for the portable DVD player, and loaded the girls into the car.  The movie was supposed to be saved for a little later in the trip, but Kaitlyn took an early nap on the couch and was awake enough that we started the movie as soon as we hit I-76.  The last two hours of our trip were cranky, at least until all three girls fell asleep within half an hour of home.

Things we learned:
-When you get Justine's early rising boys together with my comparatively late to bed girls, everyone goes to sleep late and gets up early.  However, if Kaitlyn and Walter are sequestered away from the rest of them (and each other), everyone tends to get a bit more sleep.
-A pile of grass clippings and a ride-on bulldozer will keep all six children happy for about an hour.
-If you don't care about organization, having each child fill one of those fabric cubes to the top with toys will get the playroom relatively clean in a short amount of time.
-It takes seven cups of oatmeal each morning to feed everyone breakfast.

We spent Wednesday evening at home and then went down to Sidney on Thursday afternoon so that Bryan and I could squeeze in our La Comedia date before Bean is born.  We were originally scheduled to see this show on July 9, but I called and got our date switched to opening night in hopes that we would make it.  :)  The show (Beauty and the Beast, which, incidentally, is the first thing that Bryan and I ever saw at La Comedia nine years ago) was good, but the trip was made more memorable by the drive home.  We were with the Weys in their van and every warning light on the dashboard came on, one after another.  Then all the dials dropped to zero even though we were still traveling along at about 65 miles per hour.  Jon lost the ability to accelerate and moved over to the shoulder in anticipation of having to stop.  The headlights dimmed so much as to be useless, so he turned them off and was rewarded with a renewed ability to accelerate.  We probably would have made it to that next exit, except that another car had broken down on the shoulder and we couldn't pass them safely.  Half a mile from the exit, we gave up and stopped to call a tow truck.  The tow truck driver suspected a bad alternator.  Bryan's dad came to pick us up, the Weys took our van home, and we stayed in Sidney until their van was done in the shop the next day.  While we were driving we were joking about how after the show would be the perfect time for me to go into labor because Murry already had the kids.  As the van slowly lost power, we thought maybe I'd go into labor five minutes after we stalled on the side of the road.  However, we ended up right next to a hospital, so clearly that was too convenient and no baby came.  The night was pleasant, though, so the timing for a breakdown wasn't too bad, all things considered.

Yesterday (assuming nothing happens after I schedule this post) Bryan and I went to a wedding in Toledo.  The girls stayed with friends and then Jillian picked them up for dinner and bedtime.  Related note, Jillian got her license while I was in Pittsburgh.  She took the whole driver's test in Bryan's giant truck.

Today we're back in Sidney for a pool party, and then I think we're planning on being mostly home until Bean arrives.  Maybe I'll work on my Easter crunches this week.  :)

Pictures, all out of order: