T minus 1 week

Whatever that means, I'm assuming the T is for time as in the final time or deadline minus the balance remaining, I don't know it justs sounds cool. Beth's final OB viist was Wednesday, everything is still looking good. The morning of the 30th she will be induced at Lucille Packard Childrens Hospital. No c-section! Because her pregnancy is going well and Gabriel is doing great in utero she can deliver v-naturally. This is awesome since that was a major cause of anxiety to Beth (part of it might have originated with her friends stating " They pull your parts out and set them on the table beside you"). So Gabriel will be delivered and then taken to neo-natology where they will start a few IV's, one of whihc will be in his belly button utilizing the existing umbilical venous and arterial pathways. He will be living in the NICU and receiving a constant drip of med.s which will help keep the ductis arteriosis open (artery operating in utero but closing shortly after delivery) this will allow him to exchange oxygen which is a good thing for us mammalian types. The surgery will occur somewhere in the first week or so depending on Gabriel and the condition of the other babies in the hospital. The strategy is to allow him to live and strengthen a bit after delivery, overcoming the trauma of being born. Once he has adapted to our environment he will go in for open heart surgery but could be bumped by a higher priority patient, he is not the top priority! That is good! We'll take any little thing we can grasp. The days have been dragging as we wait to meet Gabriel. We've been filling our days pretty well. Monday we hiked up to "the dish" about a 3 1/2 mile hike with some decent elevation gain. Beth did great and told me not to post a photo of her so instead I posted a photo of Isabella, Powell and Gabriel (not my fault Beth got in Gabriel's way, maybe a little bit of my fault).

A bright spot of this entire ordeal is getting to meet my cousin Amaya. She works at Stanford as the athletic dept. coordinator and has been a wonderful connection to family. Tuesday she watched the kids and allowed Beth and I a night out at a nice little Italian restaurant where i tried their variation on steak tartare with thin sliced kobe beef, capers and pickled onions... lovely. The kids and I have also been swimming a bit in the outdoor pool, granted we're the only ones but it still beats Idaho weather. Powell mentioned the other day that we "were not just on bacation we are also on a rescue mission for Gabriel." Since then we've been able to deal with other little thrills of a transient life, onebeing the kif\ds discovering a neat little pill under the chair cushion. The wonderous powers of the internet determined it was phenazopyridine hydrochloride 95mg, used to treat interstitial cystitis. Fortunatley the kids simply brought it to my attention knowing this was not a good thing.

Unfortunatley we didn't have the same luck when Powell, bored and in the bathroom started playing with a disposable razor. He walked out with the end of his finger bleeding and told Beth "It did nothing when I went down but when I moved it sideways it cut me." I thought I might have been stopping the bleeding and transporting Beth simultaneously (another reason she's not a fireman, the blood thing and they fart too much).