And yet again!

Yep, can you believe it? ANOTHER post! Wow this is a record, you'd think I had nothing better to do all day than lie around and update the blog huh? ;)   Well, tomorrow it will be exactly 4 weeks since I've been doing just that. When I figured that out I thought, "Four weeks?? That's it? I swear it's been four months!" But no, just one month. The first week I was allowed to still teach preschool and do nothing else, but after that they said no to preschool too. So three weeks at home on the couch, one down in the hospital. Can I just say, being at home is SOOOOO much more enjoyable than being in the hospital! You actually have options at where you want to lay down: on your nice comfy bed, on your nice comfy couch, in your nice comfy bathtub, even your floor can seem nice and comfy for a little while! But now the only change of scenery I get is from pushing the arrow buttons on the side of my hospital bed to either be lying flat or just reclined. Yipee! Although the boys do love to come hop in and ask me to take them for a ride on it :)  Those cute little boys left yesterday to be entertained by grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends in Utah while Dad finishes up finals. Boy that was tough, I bawled the night before and almost backed out and convinced Jonathan to keep them here and just have them stay at friends' houses during the day while he studies, but really they were so excited to go and we haven't been able to go home at all to visit this semester so I knew it would be fun for them. The second they're homesick, though, they'll be right back down here! But I'm sure they'll have a ball, it's probably harder on Mama than it is on them, but if any of you see them acting a little crazy or emotional, just know that their life is a little mixed up right now and soon they'll be back home and calmed down. I don't know how long I'll be here, but Jonathan will be done with finals soon so he'll be able to take over and get them back into a little more normal routine. He took them to the library a few weeks ago and said he didn't know how moms do it (he left the movies to return in the car so he couldn't check out the ones he had gotten, had to come out and get the ones to return then go back in and check out the new ones, then forgot to unlock them and had to go back in again! Poor boy!) but he'll adjust. This will be a unique experience for him to do my job all day, but I've noticed that the more he's home taking care of the boys, the more patient he becomes. Sometimes I think he should really be the stay at home parent instead of me :)  Anyway, we had a wonderful Thanksgiving! My parents and siblings came down (minus David and Robin, but plus Ashlee's boyfriend David, so I guess that evens it out right?) Tuesday night and spent the week playing with the boys and coming to visit me every day. On Thanksgiving they brought over a plate of dinner and the pies and we shared them and played games in my luxurious suite. They left Saturday morning so they could stop on the way back and see my cute grandma who's in the hospital in Panguitch. Speaking of that, sometimes I feel like I'm an elderly person here. I normally don't like to take medicine and if I have a headache I'm much more likely to take a nap than a tylenol, but here I feel like a druggie. My mother-in-law even joked that she's going to have to give me some tough love to help with the withdrawals when I come out. I just got done with my 10am dosing and I got a whopping 6 pills! That's my biggest dose of the day because it includes 3 antibiotic pills, but basically I get 2 pills to stop contractions every 3 hours, two different types of anitbiotics that I get twice a day(in case there's an infection that's contributing to the labor), a prenatal vitamin, a hormone to relax my uterus, and colace twice a day since lying down all day doesn't help with digestion too much. The first couple of days they also gave me a sleeping pill at night since the blood pressure cuff monitored every half hour and my IV was super noisy, but I've graduated from those now so I can sleep much better(besides being woken up at 10,12,3,4,and 6 to take medicine during the night or have my temp and blood pressure checked). I guess this is good training for waking up with a baby right? The bad news is that when this medicine stops being effective enough on the contractions they're going to up my medicine to alternating between the two kinds every 2 hours. Whew. But at least I'm not getting poked anymore, the first day I had an IV, the horribly painful steroid shots, blood taken twice, and a terbutaline shot to stop contractions, so that day I just felt like a big pin cushion. Easton thought the IV was the most amazing thing in the world though and asked the nurse a thousand questions about it and what it was doing and why I had a straw in my arm. He was so disappointed when it was gone. I was also hooked up to the blood pressure, contraction, and baby's heart monitor for the first few days and I LOVED getting to hear his strong little heart beating all the time. Now they just do it for one hour twice a day, but I sure love that time! Keep keepin' on baby!
I think I should explain a little bit about why I'm here and why I'm taking all this medicine since I thought I understood but now I'm realizing I wasn't quite as clear as I thought. The "anti-contraction" medicine I'm taking is actually heart medication and asthma medicine, but they've found that it works to relax the uterus so they give it for that. The problem is there are some side effects, like I'm so shaky all day I can't even put makeup on and I have a hard time scooping up my food sometimes, so if I had thing to do that could be problematic, but since I'm just laying here it's worth it to keep him in. One of the medicines lowers my blood pressure so headaches and dizziness are common, although I haven't had too hard of a time, and the other one raises my pulse so that I get flushed and feel like my heart is racing, but I really only had those reactions the first couple of days I was on it and now I'm fine. Jonathan came in the first night after I started the pill form and got a shot of it and my pulse jumped up to 147 so the nurse told him he had to leave. Ah, true love :). It went down after a minute though so he got to stay. They're trying to relax my uterus enough to keep it from going into labor with these medicines though, because the last two options have much more side effects. The first is Indicine(sp?) which make the baby not pee as much, so they can only do that one for a couple of days, and the last resort is magnesium sulfate, which relaxes all your intestines so that you generally just feel sick and you can't eat anything while you're on it, and sometimes they can keep you on it for weeks if they need to, so all you get is an IV and I think liquids. Bah that doesn't sound fun at all, not that I'm loving the hospital food or anything, but I'd definitely like the option of eating. So we're hoping that I can avoid those for as long as possible, but I'll be honest, I keep having "episodes" of contractions that last up to a few hours and each day they get closer together. Friday I had a couple hours of every 9 minutes and then yesterday it was every 5 minutes, so I'm worried that they're going to increase the medicine soon. They said there's no way of completely stopping them, they're just putting off labor as long as possible, so once they get too close together and the medicines aren't helping they'll have to hit them with something new, but the fine line is to not up the dosage too early or my body will get used to it quicker, but not do it too late that I've gone too far and there's nothing they can do to stop it. Poor doctors, I am such a problem patient.
Well, if you couldn't tell by this post I am pretty bored these days and miss talking to people, although the nurses are super nice! And Jonathan has tried to be here as much as possible. He spent all day Friday and Saturday studying here and even slept over last night, so that's been nice to have company, but this week I'm sure he'll be busier than ever with finals. I'm pretty nosy too and I love to know all the details about what's going on with people, so I thought somebody else out there might want to know too, even though after reading this you may want to never hear the words "uterus" or "contractions" again. But could somebody help me out with my pictures? Every time I try to upload one it says "Sorry, your file is too big." How can it say that on every picture? I even tried to put one as the background and it wouldn't work. Any advice?? I promise we do actually do fun things that I take pictures of, I just am always to busy to blog and then when I finally get around to it something like this happens and I just give up, so if anyone knows what to do let me know!