Picnic in the park

We had yet another fun weekend with extended family on Sunday. This week, we celebrated an adult cousin's birthday by heading out for a picnic after church. Though originally scheduled as a NJ picnic, we took about two hours to prep and folks weren't up for another one hour drive before we opened our no longer steamy vats of fried chicken, biscuits and other goodies. So we took the opportunity to visit one of our local natural playgrounds, Wolfe's Pond city park. The threat of storms any minute kept the table competition minimal and we thoroughly enjoyed quite the banquet.

After our meal, the boys (including our guest of honor) enjoyed passing around a football, kickball and a couple of frisbees. It was kind of fum keeping so many projectiles in the air simultaneously. Aim was such that everyone got a solid running workout from the afternoon. Even my mother-in-law got in on the frisbee action at some point.

Penny was beside herself to see a real frisbee in action. Previously, she had only seen the on the Wii Sports Resort game as a little disk you throw to a puppy to catch. Whenever she managed to snag the frisbee, she would toss it to me, tell me to pick it up in my mouth and return it to her. Sometimes I'd be the retriever, other times I tossed it to her and she returned it to me via her mouth. The evil and infectious laughter was too cute. At one point, Daddy threw it to her from across the field. It was an excellent shot from a fair distance and I keep wondering whether she planned to try catching it in her mouth like the puppies on the game do. Regardless of her plan, the frisbee made its way inexorably toward her head until it came to a jolting halt on the bridge of her nose. Thankfully we were outside, otherwise the collective gasp of shock would have sucked all the air out of the room. And she needed all the air she could get for that first ear-shattering wail. She pinned her hands to her nose so tight I couldn't properly assess the damage. Dr. Dad crossed the field in a heartbeat, but was no more successful than I, so I set him to work on a teeny little ice pack back at the cooler. The novelty of the ice pack was almost as effective as the numbness it was intended to induce, because Penny stopped crying as soon as it touched her nose. She looks a little stunned in this picture, but I think that's more lack of nap than injury related because it was taken an hour or more after the incident.


Penny did recover completely. It was actually somewhat fortuitous because previously she had been so excited to play that she skipped eating. Her recovery period was spent catching up on lunch/dinner. Later, she rejoined the frisbee game, though everyone threw well away from her or tried to convince her to go to the playground. So there is no permanent frisbee-phobia affiliated with the event. Dan, I think, continues to feel pretty bad as there's a respectable visual reminder and it causes flashbacks to a certain previous frisbee victim. I tried to joke with him that he was just helping her have my nose (somewhat off-center due to a sporting accident of my own in my youth).

In other news, our 17 week checkup went lovely. A certain little someone enjoys squiggling away from the doppler, so it took a while to get a heart rate reading. She's doing well so far, though. I think Dan officially agreed that he didn't want to find out in advance, which is a nice relief because I wasn't sure logistically how I could maintain ignorance if he knew. It just seemed like it would have slipped out at some point. It's hard to verbalize why I don't want to know, but based on Dan's description of his reasoning, we're pretty much on the same page.

I was a little weepy at the appointment because it was the first time I've talked with the doctor about the delivery room. Even when I was pregnant with Augustine, the thought of delivering the standard US way was very stressful for me. I just hate the idea of being confined to a bed for hours on end when I could be doing useful things to help the process along and make it easier on myself and the baby. I don't understand why I have to go to a crunchy granola place to get what I want instead of a hospital, where they are better equipped to handle complications. Dan was reading one hospital's description of their midwife services aloud and just interrupted himself with a "...let's see if they can mention "low risk pregnancies one more time." I don't relish diving into the search for the right delivery location/care provider all over again. Plus, my current doctor was awesome about listening to me and recognizing what I was actually asking for. He didn't call me a nut (like my previous nyc midwife did), tell me it was absolutely inadvisable, just that hospital restrictions would make it tough for me to find. He recommended some good places to start the search. I like him a lot, so it seems a shame to ditch him. I really want someone whom I know at my delivery, though, and as THE guy who handles high risk deliveries, there's just no way to guarantee that. We'll see how the search goes and he will stick with me until we find what makes the most sense.

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