20+3

Twenty-three was another good/bad year (again, isn't every year a good/bad year?).

We went to an Orem Owlz game for my 23rd birthday.

The good: Rex.

The bad: Rex.

As mentioned, just before my 23rd birthday we found out I was expecting.  And we kept it a secret.  It was fun having a little secret between just the two of us.  Because I was still teaching, I had the summer off so I rode my bike to the library and checked out every book on pregnancy available.

We entered the BYU Pinewood Derby again for the "My Major on Wheels." We didn't win anything on account that the car was too heavy to compete (we'd covered it in clay)

And that's when I went crazy.   By which I mean, I formed very strong opinions on the way pregnancy and birth should play out to which I still hold strongly today.  These strongly held beliefs in the divine nature of a woman's body and its ability to create and birth a baby without medical intervention plays a significant role in the "bad" of this year.

Greg also bought a scooter that summer, which was pretty amazing.  It had all the ease of use of a bike, in that we could squeeze between traffic and park up close, but without the effort--meaning we could go further.

And then school started.  And it was about 50% better than the previous year.  I spent several months at the end of my first year teaching making a color coordinated, detailed calendar of when I would teach each standard and the projects/book reports/ field trips, etc. for my second year and gave it to the principal to get him off my back.  It worked.  Kind of.  He still didn't let us watch The Crucible even though we studied both the Salem Witch Trials and the McCarthy trials in history.  He said it was because he didn't like the way the girls acted and how they made him feel.  Um, duh?  They were evil, mean little girls who got a lot of people killed.  I digress.

I really liked my students that year, and even got invited to a wedding this year (yes, it's been that long that they are getting married and having babies now).  I had a better grasp of the curriculum.   It was better.

And a football game sometime in the fall--on the scooter.  Parking is so much better on a scooter.

Weekdays continued as they had the previous year: work, dinner, running, study--only this year we studied in the Talmage Building because Greg had added a computer science minor and wanted to be closer to the TA's.

We went on our 2nd annual fall break temple excursion to Logan.

We were Doug Funny and Patty Mayonessa for Halloween

Weekends were not the same.  Once we announced the pregnancy in September, we realized that we lived in a fairly small one-bedroom, which barely fit our queen bed.  While I was busy thinking of ways to squeeze a baby into our current abode, Greg decided we should buy a house.  Which made sense.  It was 2008, the market was down, we both had good jobs and a decent savings account.  So we spent weekends looking for houses with an apartment to rent to cover part of the mortgage.  And we found the perfect house around the corner from our apartment.  We wouldn't even have to change wards (although the house and apartment are now in different wards.  Utah).

We put an offer in on the house, hosted Thanksgiving at our tiny apartment and packed before Christmas.

I was pretty proud of how the tables turned out.

Thank you Smith's.  You will always be the best grocery store,

Then we went to Myrtle Beach for Christmas, which was terrible.  Well, the going, not the beach.  Greg found tickets for $200 cheaper leaving from Las Vegas, so we drove to Las Vegas with his sister and her husband.  Six-foot-two-inch Greg, and 6-month pregnant Heather got stuck in the back seat of a Toyota Corolla with two suitcases for six hours.  Then Greg bought my plane ticket under "Heather Robins" instead of "Heather Baker," so getting into the airport was fun.  Then our flight was delayed by 6 hours.  Then coming home from the beach, we got over $600 worth of electronics stolen out of our checked luggage.  We later got reimbursed, but I also only check dirty underwear these days.

Who doesn't love matching Christmas jammies?

A few days after we got home, we moved into our new house.  We painted a few rooms, redid a floor, bought some new couches and enjoyed the luxury of 2800 square feet.

Our first house, how cute.

Sometime in January or February, I wore heels to church and slipped on the ice walking in.  Greg freaked out.  I thought nothing of it.  Until we got home from church and noticed that my skirt and underwear were wet.  My water broke!  We called the doctor and went to the hospital.  We were admitted and tested and waited.   As it turns out, when you fall on frozen water, you get water on your.  But then the nurse noticed how small I was for how far along I was.

And so began the bad.

Through a series of tests, Baby Baker was diagnosed with Inter-Uterine Growth restriction.  Basically, the placenta wasn't working the way it should, so they said, which clashed with my strongly held beliefs that pregnancy is not a medical condition.  And thus began weekly, and then bi-weekly ultra sounds and non-stress tests.  And up climbed the hospital bill.  At 37 weeks, the perinatologist, said that the baby still wasn't growing as fast as he should be and that it was time for him to be delivered.  I, however, was the school Mock Trial coach that year and had a competition that week, so could not have a baby.  We pushed it off a week.  We went in on Wednesday night to be induced, Rex was born Friday night, and rushed directly to the NICU.  Now six years, and two babies later, I know that he didn't have IUGR.  What we should have done is push the due date back a a week like we did with Alice and Henry and then expect a late baby.  Hindsight is 20/20.

I spent many a-afternoon sitting like this.

Those months were rough.  I've never been a real lover of doctors and then to not trust them but have them tell me that my baby will die if I don't do what they say and being pregnant and hormonal anyway.  And then when Rex was in the NICU I felt like such a failure.  I couldn't even take care of my own child.  My milk came in pretty late and the nurses harassed me constantly about it.  Then when it finally did come in, I couldn't get Rex to nurse properly.  I felt like the doctors were testing me to see if I could be a good mother and that I just had to prove to them that I could.  I did everything I could.  I challenged the doctors and their weighing methods.  I started going to the hospital every six hours all through the night.  At one point, I was so tired I nearly threw up.   Luckily, my mom was in town to talk a bit of sense into me.

 Through all this, Greg had to deal with me and my hot mess while also having a baby in the NICU.  One day, when I went to the hospital to feed Rex, I found Greg there, just holding Rex.  He was supposed to be at work, but had decided that maybe Rex just needed to be held.  It was like a humility slap in the face; I had been so worried about me that I almost forgot that Rex was a little human.  Seeing Greg, just sitting there, holding our tiny baby, is still really tender to me.

Seriously, look how pathetic he is.  I honeslty think he would have been born April 8th at 7 pounds 14 ozs and about 20 inches if the doctors had let my body do it's thing.

I mean really, how sweet is this?

After 13 days, Rex finally came home, oxygen tank and all and that's when the real party started.  Not really.  Rex was a bad baby.  He didn't sleep through the night until he was almost 10 months old.  For the first few months, he ate for 45 minutes every 2 hours, which gave me 15 to 20 minutes at a time not attached to a baby.  I didn't realize it then, but looking back now, I had a pretty bad case of the baby blues for about a year.  I hated leaving the house for fear Rex would start screaming.  But I also felt trapped in the house.  Again, Greg pulled it through on that one and tried his mightiest to keep me sane, while working full time and going to school.

Finally home, the day before his due date.

Blessin day--outfit made by Grandma Pattie

I remember one night we were going to go out to dinner. I had just finished feeding Rex and we were getting in the car, when he started crying.  I gave up and decided not to go.  Greg got a bottle and said we should go anyway, so despite my fear of a screaming child in a restaurant, we drove down to Flying J (yes, it's a truck stop) and ate at the diner there.  And we didn't die.  I don't even think that Rex cried all that much.

Just before or just after, I can't remember, my 24th birthday, my cousin stayed with me for a week between semesters at BYU-I.  I wanted to badly to not bore him to tears and to take him out to do stuff, but I just couldn't get out of the house with Rex.  My aunt also came to visit one day.  She wanted to know when she could come over.  I said we weren't ready before 11, which she questioned--what was I doing until 11?  When she did come over, she commented on all the dirty diapers hanging around my living room.  I was a mess.  On the bright side, I read a lot of books that year.

And so ended my 23rd year--I had a baby and a house but I was a wreck.  Too bad I didn't know what a wreck I was so I just continued in my hot mess ways until Rex started on solid foods.

And then 24, it was pretty good.  24 is, after all, the best age.