you can take a breath but don't wait too long

I would like to just provide a disclaimer that I mostly blog for myself. Not as an excuse, but as an explanation. I like the exercise in writing for the idea of an audience (when I write in my journal, the images of my future descendants doesn't work. They're going to hate me, and what is usually chicken scratch and disjointed ideas and large gaps in between entries is going to make them crazy. I'm a little sorry, but also I'm over it. #sorrynotsorry kids.). So putting info up on a blog is a much better mental exercise for me. Even if no one were ever to read it, I'm still usually pleased with myself when I'm finished and have managed to remember so much because I've taken the time to pull out ALL of the memories and put them together in a logical, sensible, follow-able manner.  

Now, when you live thousands of miles from family and friends that want to know what's going on in your life, and there actually is an audience, there's not any more pressure on quality of writing, just on quantity of details. The longer I wait to write a long story, the more details I have perhaps forgotten, but also the more details accrue in the passing of time. So I've been in a catch-22 of writing about Oxford, Oslo, and now Berlin, and everything in between because there's so much that has happened since I last wrote that it's overwhelming, but as I wait longer there's ever more to cover... Yes, my self-induced stress is making my life rough. Don't mock. 

So in attempt to get caught up, there are going to be some readers' digested versions that are then readers-digested again before they end up here. I'm a little sorry about that, not to any readers, but for myself, because so far this organized chaos is way better than the chaos in my journal. 

First, Oslo. I started writing about Oslo getting here well before he was even here. And almost a year later, I'm trying to finish it up. It was the crazy start to a lot of adventures. So I might as well start there. Maybe, someday, when the details don't matter or aren't interesting anymore, other stories will follow. Don't hold your breath.

His birth actually started in June of last year, when my water broke sometime toward the end of 20 weeks. I wasn't aware that was what had happened til 22 weeks (because I didn't realize anything was wrong in the meantime). Jeremy was still at school in England, finishing up his term, while Berlin and I were in Texas for Jace's homecoming (read: family reunion), and the Friday that everybody in my extended family arrived was the same day I snuck out of the pool party with Rick to go to the emergency room when I saw blood. I was hospitalized that night, we learned my water had broken sometime the week before, my amniotic fluid level was about 3cm (of the normal 15-20), and even though I hadn't gone into labor the first week, there was still a pretty good chance I would go into labor any day within the next week. Jeremy flew out the next day, and we met with neonatologists to learn what to expect when the baby came, whenever that would be, while I was pumped full of antibiotics and listened to the baby's heartbeat every few hours. On Monday I was discharged because, even if I went into labor, there wasn't anything they'd be able to do for our then 22-week baby.

It was absolutely terrifying. The first doctor who suggested the broken amniotic sac looked at an ultrasound, pointed to the lack of fluid, and said, "I hope that I'm wrong. This ultrasound image isn't very detailed, and I really hope that it's the lack of detail that I'm seeing. But I'm afraid you'd better prepare yourself for the worst." While I waited through the more detailed ultrasound, I was waiting for the doctor to say, "Oh, everything is fine, you just need some antibiotics. No worries!" To this doctor's credit, he was just as kind as he said exactly the opposite. Every doctor had to give me the very difficult truth of what would happen if I went into labor anytime in the next three weeks, and at the same time, tell me there was nothing to do but wait and see what happened.

Being without Jeremy for the first 36 hours was also a lot harder than I thought it would be. I certainly had visitors (I had 40-something members of my extended family in town, so... duh.), and of course my attitude is always, "I've got this, no big deal," but this was different. The night before Jeremy landed, another doctor came in to talk to me to tell me that even though the situation wasn't promising, there was always hope, and he'd seen a lot of miracles. As soon as he left I started bawling. Miracles or no, I was scared, and I didn't want to do it by myself.

When Jeremy did arrive, I found myself finally embracing the good signs, of which there were quite a few. The fact that I'd made it a week without really noticing anything was wrong was great because it meant there weren't any signs of labor. Then I made it through the weekend at the hospital sans contractions. The baby still appeared to be growing normally, and was actually measuring (weight-wise) a week or two ahead of schedule. This was all promising because, really, there's nothing anyone can do about it but wait. There's no surgery that can be performed or medication that can cause it to heal. Basically, I just needed to wait for signs of infection or labor, and hope for the best.

Jeremy and I debated for the next few days whether we were going to stay in Texas or fly back to Oxford, and with a million different factors weighing in, finally decided to fly back to the UK. One doctor suggested that if we were going to do it, making the pond jump before we hit our unborn's brink of viability was really the only time. We went to the doctor when we got back to Oxford. She told us what to watch for and when to come back to the hospital, and I was admitted at the end of the week for blood loss. I stayed for a few days until I was stable again, went home, and was back a week later. After a few days of still not being stable, my doctor said, "I think you're here for the long haul," which was really, really hard to hear. It had only been the start of my second full week living in the hospital and I was going a little crazy. Every time I had a major gush of blood they brought me across the hall from the delivery rooms for monitoring. I'd spend a day or so there and then be brought back to the maternity ward. A few times a day I waddled down to the monitoring room to listen for contractions and monitor the baby's heartbeat. I was hot, I was exhausted, and the normal discomfort of pregnancy was amplified because I'd lost my cushion around the baby. I really would've just slept through my time at the hospital except that a nurse or midwife came in every few hours to check my vitals, give me antibiotics, or just make sure I wasn't losing blood.

I did have a number of visitors (despite the somewhat insane restrictions on visiting hours - 3-4PM and 6-8PM. The only exception to that rule was Jeremy, not Berlin). While I was in the hospital Jeremy's sisters came to visit the UK, so when I had energy I would go to the park across the street from the hospital and sit and chat with them. And outside of my desire for contact with the outside world, it was pretty life-saving that they came because Jeremy was trying to finish his MBA program and run around after Berlin in addition to making sure I was feeling loved every day. So as crazy as everything was, it went as smoothly as we could've ever hoped for.

But one of his sisters came and went while I was still in the hospital. I couldn't believe I'd been in the hospital so long. On the day I reached 29 weeks, August 4th (the DAY my sister-in-law left, of all days),  my doctor came into my room and said, "We're going to send you home today!" They decided I was stable enough to be away from the hospital (since we lived only a couple of miles from the hospital) and they were aware that I was probably going crazy. I was so excited. So excited that I slept for the first 12 hours I could in my own bed. The next day I slept again, had a few hours of being awake and coherent, but was ready to go to bed with everybody else because I was, once again, exhausted.

Don't worry, I was only home for 36 hours.

I woke up at 4AM, and I was so exhaustedly out of it that it took me several minutes to be conscious enough to realize I was having crazy contractions. (I had had zero up to this point. Zero. Not even Braxton Hicks contractions.) We called an ambulance, an experience which turned out to be thoroughly foreign and confusing. The operator asked Jeremy if she could talk to me, and then she ran me through 20-questions before the paramedics arrived (including "Is the baby crowning? No? Are you sure? Can you have your husband check?"), and then once the ambulance arrived, three paramedics were sitting in our living room asking me further questions for what felt like forever while I was sure I was going to deliver the baby on the couch. Then their supervisor showed up, only stayed for a few minutes before deciding everything was some sort of satisfactory, and then several more minutes after that we eventually went downstairs and got in the ambulance, a ride which was about the most uncomfortable I'd ever taken in my life (not even including the contractions part). Next time we have a baby and don't own a car, we're calling a taxi.

Everything after that went pretty quickly. I was all for an epidural the second I got there, but since I was only at a 3 it seemed we had plenty of time to wait for the anesthesiologist, who had been notified I was ready for her but she was working with other patients, so I was somewhere at the bottom of the list. But there wasn't really time to wait for the anesthesiologist anyway. Oslo made his appearance less than an hour and half later at 8:25AM, weighing a whopping 3 lbs 9 oz.

The first week was probably the craziest. They were the most concerned about his lungs (my water broke right in the middle of the most important weeks for lung development), and he had a torn alveolar sac that meant that air was leaking into his chest cavity and making his blood pressure go crazy. But with the help of a chest drain and faith and blessings, it healed. He had taken his own first gasping breaths and x-rays showed that his lungs seemed fine, just little and needing more time to grow. He was on oxygen and air pressure to keep his lungs open for almost two months, had a jaundice lamp to help his bilirubin levels, but almost everything else appeared to be normal for his age. Before he could come home from the NICU he had to reach a few benchmarks, like being able to breathe on his own, and he had to prove he would consistently gain weight eating out of a bottle instead of a tube (his cleft lip and palate meant that he couldn't nurse, and the doctors wanted to make sure it wouldn't make the fact that he was born so little any harder). He came home in October, a week before his due date, and he was already 8.5 pounds.

Oslo Larry Lindström, 10 weeks old, the day before his due date.

Since then, we've mostly just been watching him grow. He's doing well. He's weighing in a normal range for his age group, and he's enormous for his corrected age group. The regular follow-up doctors appointments finished in December. He's developing normally. He did have his first cleft surgery, and everything went really well (minus him pulling out some stitches in the recovery room, but. What can you do). He's a little champ. Sometimes it's a little crazy that we've had him here so long, and other times it's fun that in some ways we got this baby phased slowed down by a few months. I've been shortening this story to, "he was just really excited to be here!" Most days, that still seems true. Occasionally, though, he reminds us that he is, in fact, tolerating us.

[title from little bit better by sherwood]

hey mama, don't want no drama

Finally moved out of our Provo home, we began the "nomad phase" of the summer. We had no idea that it would last as long as it did, but at its start, we didn't care. We were just so happy to be done moving out of our apartment. We increasingly realized we still had way too much junk, and still quite a bit of everything else to square away, but... one step at a time.

The initiation into this phase was a little bit glorious, to be honest. It was vacation in some of the truest forms. We had no schedule requirements, and deadlines seemed pretty distant because they were dependent on things we couldn't control. (We really should have applied for visas in July, but the university had to send us some info. Which they hadn't. And we were halfway through August. Super frustrating, but there was really nothing we could do about it). So it was a waiting game, but spent with siblings and grandparents and friends just hanging out, and all without any real pressures? Yes, please.

This picture is SO posed. We just wanted a cute picture of Berlin on the lion. 

He just wanted to play in the lion water fountain a few feet away.

We went to watch a baseball game. Berlin went for long car ramps.

Our boating trip, pre-rock injury.

The first week we spent in Rexburg with Jeremy's family. We missed the psuedo-family reunion earlier in the summer (right before Dallin and Jessica moved to North Carolina), so we had our own mini-psuedo-family reunion. We went to the zoo, we saw the Minion movie, we boated down the river with their ward, and we slept in, because Elaine was so happy to play with Berlin when he got up hours earlier than we wanted to be awake. The only sad part of that week was Berlin splitting his head open on a rock and needing a doctor visit. And the ensuing socks taped to his hands to keep him from pulling off his bandaids, which he hated, and we hated. His forehead is now acting like it might be permanently scarred, but his dad has a matching one from about the same time in his younger years. So it works.

He didn't love being pinned down while they cleaned his head, 

but he was still an amazing sport about the whole thing. Almost zero tears.

During our stay in Rexburg, we finally got our visa info, and we started the application process. This brought more stress than it did relief.
1) We learned that for our applications we had to visit a US Citizenship and Immigration Services office (USCIS, should you ever need to know) to have our fingerprints and pictures taken and sent to the consulate where we were sending our visa applications. The closest two options we have for those offices (who have open appointments before 2020) are Boise, Idaho (a 4-hour drive from Rexburg) or Denver (a 9 1/2-hour drive from Rexburg).
2) Visas can take up to 6 weeks to process.
3) Jeremy committed to teach at a jump rope workshop in Canada, for which he would need his passport. He made this commitment months before, when he thought he would have his visa before we left Provo, and then he planned to just hop on a plane as soon as he got back from Canada to fly to England. So it's now three days before he is supposed to leave for Canada, and we've just finally received everything we need to apply for visas. And he can't actually send in his application because he needs to take his passport with him for the week that he's in Canada. So besides calling the coach and cancelling three days before her workshop (not an option), the only other option we have is to delay his visa application, and as a result, pay an extra few hundred dollars to expedite it a week later so he can make it to school on time.

The "glorious" part of our nomad phase came to an abrupt halt.

We were planning to spend a long weekend in Boise to visit friends that weekend anyway, before we knew about needing to go to the office of immigration, so we were incredibly grateful that particular office had appointments available on Monday, just a few days later. But we didn't really know what that meant for our plan when Jeremy got back from Canada, so it was really difficult to say goodbye to Jeremy's family. We thought it was likely that we would be seeing them again the next week -as soon as Jeremy got back from Canada, we would head back to Rexburg from the airport- but we weren't really sure. Jeremy needed to leave as soon as he got his visa. And we had no idea when that was going to be.

Apparently governments require pictures without band aids. Which is too bad.

In case you're reading this to try and get yourself prepared to move overseas- The USCIS in any state, like any government office, is either super busy (think DMV) or super slow, so you should probably plan for the worst. There are a lot of warnings on your appointment confirmation about being late and missing your appointment and needing to reschedule (and not being able to make new appointments for weeks and weeks), so make sure you leave plenty early, even if you think you know where you're going (because who's really familiar with the location of their local immigration office?). We had to schedule a three-hour block for Jeremy, Berlin, and me to all have our fingerprints and pictures taken, but the whole process, for all 3 of us, took maybe 20 minutes. It's another hassle that seems like a giant ordeal beforehand, but then you get in there and it's nothing. Or at least it was for us, so hopefully it is for any of you going through it too.

So we spent the rest of the afternoon getting Jeremy and Berlin updated visa pictures, and then we played with the friends we came to visit. The next day Jeremy got on his plane to Canada, and Berlin and I drove from Boise to Spanish Fork to spend week 2 of nomad phase with my grandparents. We shipped off our two visa applications that we weren't expediting (and had passports for) as soon as we settled in. We spent our time in Utah mostly in Provo, waiting for Jeremy to get back and for our visas to arrive (we timed it poorly with my grandparents- it was the week of my grandma's birthday, and they'd had plans to be out of town since before we knew Jeremy was going to Oxford). When Jeremy was flying back from Canada, Jeremy's buddy offered him a job for a few days. This was an incredibly-timed opportunity, since both of us were unemployed heading into approximately one zillion dollars of student loans, so we didn't head straight back to Rexburg like we'd planned (and a foreboding feeling that we might not see them again hit me really hard. I was so happy I was very wrong). We instead stayed with my grandparents for week 3 of nomad phase (which I'm now going to refer to as oNP) while Jeremy worked, and at the end of the week, with no visa in sight, we drove back to Rexburg.

The situation in our car this time was almost exactly as uncomfortable as the time a couple of weeks before. We drove to Rexburg with Kiersten (so 4 of us in a 5-passenger vehicle) with stuff that we'd left at Kiersten's house all over our laps and necks and any place there was the tiniest bit of space (at which point I had to wonder what on earth we got rid of at the yard sales. Why the crap did we still have so much crap?)

At this point in the nomad phase, it was Labor Day weekend, and we actually did get a small break from worrying about moving over the ocean. Our visa applications were in, and again, there was nothing we could do but wait. We went and played with Jeremy's family, enjoyed huge meals, I ran my first 10K, and we went on a couple of great hikes. Somewhere over the course of the past month, I'd been hired as a remote personal assistant to the CEO of a test-prep company in Florida, and the company flew me in for a few days to get some on the ground training. At the beginning of week 4 oNP, I drove back to Salt Lake with Kiersten and flew to Ft. Lauderdale, where I spent the next few days working and seeing old friends when I had any spare time. On Friday afternoon as I was driving back to the airport, Jeremy called me to tell me that all of our visas had come in the mail. You know, the one we paid our next child to expedite and the other two that we only sent in a few days before the expedited one...

Whatever. It's over, I can't even be mad about it now.

I tried to snapchat Dallin and Jessica when I was in their state. Then my phone died.

The sign asks "Who is John Galt?"!

Love this woman. I accidentally showed up in Florida just in time for her son's wedding. 

Man, I'm so lucky sometimes.

I got to the airport and my dad and I booked Jeremy's flight to England for the next morning. Elaine and Brita were driving to Salt Lake for a Sister Fest that Elaine's sisters had organized, so Jeremy packed his suitcases and came down with them, and I did get to see him for a minute before he flew overseas. Berlin and I enjoyed being Sister Fest participants, and we drove home to spend week 5 and 6 oNP with them. We worked, played, went homecoming-dress shopping and to jump rope shows, all while virtually apartment shopping with Jeremy. The Bishop of the ward in Oxford was kind enough to let Jeremy stay with him and his wife while Jeremy was apartment-hunting, and I think they understood that so much distance with no end in sight was hard on us. In the middle of week 7 oNP, my mom bought a ticket and Berlin and I flew to Texas to stay for an undetermined amount of time- Jeremy had finally found us an apartment, but we didn't have any idea when we could move in because the landlord was not trying to help us. At all. He didn't believe that we had money to pay for the apartment (despite bank statements and employment verification letters and loan statements that proved otherwise) and eventually asked if we could pay the year's amount of rent before we moved in, just so he could be sure. We finally dropped that one and Jeremy went through with a contract for another apartment, but they were really unclear about our move-in date. Once in Texas, I bought a ticket to fly out on Tuesday, October 6th, because that was the soonest date the real estate agency could guarantee.

This spinning ride with these gals is one of the funn(i)est things I've done in a long time.

But on Tuesday, September 29th (the week before), beginning of week 8 of nomad phase (no abbreviation for emphasis) I broke down. I was video-chatting with Jeremy and I just started bawling. It had been almost a solid month since Jeremy had left, and more than a month since we had a place to call home, and in the meantime, Berlin and I had been just floating between the homes of people who love us but had lives they needed to live. As much as I love our hosts and love being around them, it was frustrating for me to feel like I wasn't able to progress. I wasn't doing much of anything. I was working here and there, and when family was at home we loved doing whatever with them, but aside from that? We were just existing. Even if we found fun things to do, it was just kind of a distraction from the fact that I missed Jeremy and I really wanted to be settling into the new adventure together. He started school before we even dropped the first apartment, so every day just felt like we were missing more and more.

While I was sobbing to Jeremy, he told me that even if we couldn't stay with Bishop, there were other people in our ward who were willing to let us stay with them while we finalized all the details of this other apartment. During this conversation, my mom texted me, "I'm pretty sure your ticket is transferable."

So when Jeremy went to bed, I changed the ticket, spent the next day scrambling to get everything finally ready to hop over the pond, and, four weeks behind Jeremy, Berlin and I finally left for England.

And we were all pretty happy about that. 

[title from hey mama by mat kearney]

how to travel overseas with an infant (part ii)

In the three weeks between submitting a passport application and waiting for it to arrive, we had an airplane test-run with Berlin and we flew to Lubbock to stay with my siblings for a week.

Test-run is the wrong word. If it went poorly, we were still going to Germany, so... preview. We had an airplane preview with Berlin. 

Overall, it went pretty well. Jeremy gave Berlin a grade on each flight, based on a scale of 0-100 and assigning the appropriate letter, and Berlin got As on both flights on the way down to Texas. Granted, they were short, but we were still grateful that they were smooth. That was certainly promising.

 

We used the advice we'd been given to feed him during takeoff and landing (the sucking and swallowing helps with babies' ears and the pressure changes), and he didn't ever cry about his ears, so it's something we'll continue. I guess we couldn't really say if it helped or not, but I'm not really willing to have him scream because I skipped that step. We fed him when he got the least bit fussy (because thus far in his life, the only reason he ever cries is because he's hungry), took turns taking him to the bathroom to change his diaper, and held him carefully for the 20 minutes he fell asleep. He was a pretty happy camper. 

Until we got to my mom's. And it was bedtime.

There's no way to know for sure if it's related, but Berlin was really constipated that first night. He's never had this happen before, and we've been on several flights since this one and it's never happened again, but he had a really rough night because we had no idea what was going on. After about an hour of just screaming, he finally fell asleep. He woke up in the middle of the night screaming, ate and fell back asleep, and then in the morning he woke up and was just unhappy. My mom remembered, randomly, that some of her kids had that problem after flying, and so she and my step-dad grabbed some generic suppositories from Walgreens. 10 minutes later he had a gross diaper and the tears were over for good. Like I said, Berlin's never had this problem before flying, and even flying several times after the problem has never repeated itself, but I always travel with suppositories now. Just in case.

We had a fun week, and at the end of it, we flew home. The flights home were mostly uneventful, though I think Jeremy did give Berlin an 85 on the very last leg. Probably because he cried once or twice because he was exhausted but tries to keep himself awake always. He's so afraid of missing something.

 Oh. Looking at the pictures and realizing there's an outfit change, I remembered. We did have one event. Why would you need to change an outfit for a kid who doesn't vomit or spit up? Considering the first flight, was a good sign because, hey, he's not constipated!

But Jeremy was the one who took him to the bathroom. That's why he got an 85. 

Still not too bad. And even though he was smiling and good-natured for the drive from the airport, the poor kid was so worn out, he fell asleep almost as soon as we got home. Even before we got home. We stopped by my cousins' house to see my aunt, and he fell asleep during the introductions.

So after a mostly uneventful trip, we felt like we had some really good experience. We can handle flying to Germany, right?

...right?