The Only Constant Is Change

So, a few months ago, my niece Evy learned to sing the "Baby Mine" song from Dumbo & my sister Jen recorded her singing it & sent it to the fam. I thought it was the cutest thing ever! So when I heard an instrumental guitar version of the song on my Pandora account, I of course had to like it!

In the wee hours of the morning of Sunday, March 31, 2013, I was just settling down to sleep after a 12 hour ambulance shift knowing that I'd have to wake up in another 7 hours to begin my next one. At 12:39 AM, I was awakened by Sherawn yelling, "John! John! Wake up! I've either just totally peed myself or my water just broke!" Continuous flowing of amniotic fluid confirmed that, yep, this momma was ready to blow! So we grabbed Sherawn's hospital bag (which she had packed & re-packed everyday for the past 3 weeks & had been consistently bugging me to add my own things to on an at least daily basis!), put some water & food down for our doggies, then jumped in our truck to head into the hospital! (BTW, it took me all of five minutes to grab my clothes & bathroom gear but hey, who's counting?)

We arrived at Banner Desert Hospital (the same hospital where I was born 28 & 1/2 years earlier!) at 01:00 AM. We checked into OB triage where the nurses confirmed that she had indeed broken her water & recorded the first mild contractions. We were then moved to our labor & delivery room in the adjacent department. Our first nurse in L&D was Kathy, a very sweet lady who helped to get us situated in our room & helped Sherawn through her progressively more intense contractions.

Then, at about 04:00 or 04:30, Sherawn was able to get her epidural. It was so crazy seeing her in that much pain & knowing I was virtually helpless to intercede with anything beyond helpful words, ice-chips, & a very worried hand to hold. The epidural worked like a dream! It's not like the movies where Sherawn looked like some drugged out Heroin user getting her fix in. She just slowly stopped feeling the pain from the contractions but was otherwise totally with it.

Although her contractions were strong & steady, she was not dilating beyond a 4 even with a Pitocin drip through her IV line. So, at around 06:15 we just settled down & I caught a quick nap (which right now I know is actually the most sleep I've had in about 48 hours!) I woke back up at about 08:45 & got to meet our new nurse, Angelina, who would remain with us throughout the rest of the delivery process. Angelina was our super hero! She was the best birthing coach we could have ever hoped for! She reassured us & gave us the confidence we needed every step of the way! She is a shining example of the most impressive patient care I have ever seen from a health professional since we moved back to Mesa! When she had come on shift just after 06:00, she had suggested that Sherawn use the peanut ball (a large peanut-shaped pink inflatable medicine ball that goes between your legs to help the Cervix to dilate).When we next checked, Sherawn was dilated all the way from a solid 4 to a full 10 centimeters! That was at about 09:00 & that's when things really started to happen. Angelina got everything prepped the rest of the way & Sherawn was instructed to start pushing.

Now, I have always been extremely impressed with my wife & especially with the fact that God would bless me with such a strong, beautiful, & precious partner. But I have never been more impressed with any one single person in my entire life than I am with my Princess after this experience. She was pushed to her max over & over again working to push this little guy into this world. I have NEVER seen somebody hit such a huge physical & mental wall so many times & then power through to the other side only to be faced with an even more daunting/exhausting wall on the other side. This girl never gave up though. She is my Iron Lady! My Rock! She would NOT give up! She pushed that little guy actively for over 2 & a half hours! 2 & a half hours of painfully draining physical determination! & every time, no matter how much she just wanted it to be over with, she kept right on pushing & giving it everything she had to give! I'll say it again, I have never been more proud of someone in my entire life! She deserves a medal!

But, as impressive as Sherawn's physical, emotional, & mental endurance was, there was nothing quite so impressive to behold as what that strength actually produced. Abel Alan DeWitt came sliding into this world at 12:02 PM on Sunday the 31st of March, 2013 weighing 7 lbs. 4 oz. & 20 inches long! The kid looked like he had just come from a Coneheads convention or an extra from the set of Indiana Jones & the Crystal Skull(Seriously, at least 4 inches of his height were due to his head alone)! But besides his bizarrely shaped noggin, he came out with a full ten fingers & ten toes & breathing a whole lot better than his daddy did when he was born! I was so scared when he came out that he wouldn't breathe but he just pinked right up & was good to go!

It seems like there only exist a few moments in this life where we are blessed with the clarity to recognize when our lives are never ever going to be the same.

That song, "Baby Mine" that I had liked on Pandora all those months ago; I thought I felt touched by that song when I heard Evy singing it, then again hearing it acoustically, & now, with my one day old son sleeping next to me in my beautiful wife's arms, I am struck yet again that this is my life & how it will never be the same. I don't know what tomorrow holds for our little family but I know that today, as I listen to that song playing again through my laptop, I am so full of love & thankfulness to my Father in Heaven for the entrusting of this beautiful angel to our care & that I couldn't be happier.

Nature Sunday

When I was growing up, occasionally life would get all together too frustrating & my parents would decide that we, as a family, all needed to spend some time just getting away from our normal day-to-day routine & would pile all five of us kids in our old Suburban for what my mom called a "Nature Sunday!"

We'd just get in the car & go. Most often, our goal was to find something beautiful & natural but sometimes we'd just end up driving around the city & listening to my parents tell us stories of the Valley as they remembered it growing up. We'd sing church songs or Styx, Eagles, Boston, even Bread but our favorite to sing would be Disney songs. We didn't even need the music to sing almost any tune from any Disney animated feature you could come up with. It didn't matter where we ended up or what we talked or sang about doing it, those memories of doing that together are some of my most precious.

So Sherawn & I have carried this tradition on into our little family as well! Today was another Nature Sunday where we piled into our truck with Patsi & Caleb (our two dogs) & hit the road. We couldn't go too far because Caleb has a nasty history of being violently car-sick, so we went to the local park where we had a fun walk & where the dogs considerably expanded their territory by marking every tree, bush, & trashcan they could lift their legs at.

It was Caleb's birthday yesterday & we didn't get to celebrate all that much since I've been really busy with my new job & Sherawn's been working on her two online classes she had to take in order to walk at her graduation from NPC because the stupid college didn't accept all of her credits that she earned from MCC this previous semester (jerks...). So we had a pirate-themed birthday party for him! He had a blast! We made peanut butter cracker sandwiches & ran around through the park together. He is 4 years old (or 28 in dog-years, same age as his daddy!).

The dogs are so tuckered out now from their day at the park that they look like dead doggies! Here's a couple of pics of Caleb from our day today!

I'm really excited for kids of our own to enjoy this awesome family tradition of breaking the norm & getting outside to enjoy the world around us together!

Humility

Well, whatever I keep saying about updating this thing more often is a load of bull!

So, updates!

Sherawn is currently 35 weeks as of TODAY! Hurray! Baby Boy DeWitt is almost here! & I'm pretty sure that Sherawn is counting down the seconds right now! She's had a pretty easy pregnancy so far (according to her! I wouldn't presume to speak for her or any woman on what is easy or hard in a pregnancy, not so long as I don't want to find myself sleeping on the couch or worse!) She didn't have any morning sickness or weird cravings (beyond the occasional late-night run to In-&-Out Burger!) But lately, she's been having a lot of back & pelvis pain & she keeps feeling contractions that she denies are contractions which really upsets her doctors, nurses, & husband & which she doesn't feel are serious enough to keep track of until her husband gets grumpy enough with her to make her lay down & drink some water! (Sorry for the prego hubby shpeal...)

So, after I quit Community Bridges, I was out of work for several weeks finishing up the semester & attempting to get another EMT job. It's been brutal & NOTHING was coming from any of my HUNDREDS of applications that both Sherawn & I were working on both day & night, so I finally started asking/looking for any old work I could find. That's when Brandon Staples (one of my best friends of all time) threw me a bone. His little brother Zack got a hold of me & was able to get me an interview with the company he does IT work for, a marketing company called Tier 3. It was a great company to work for. Neat people, somewhat energetic atmosphere, a good marketing approach, there was only one problem; I was lying through my teeth to every single person I spoke with over the phone! It was not such a big deal when it was a grumpy jerk calling in to claim our too-good-to-be-true prize, I could care less if the schmuck was chatting up got wrangled into a high-pressure sales-pitch for a vacation club he couldn't afford. What tore at my soul were the genuinely sweet people who called-into me. The sweet old widowed grandma on a fixed income who would tell me for fifteen heart-wrenching minutes about how she was going to use her free airplane tickets (which she almost certainly never received) to visit her two grandkids whom she hadn't been able to visit in years... or the engaged couple expecting to be able to use them on a honeymoon.... So I wasn't too upset when they pulled me into their offices to tell me that my numbers sucked & that I should start looking for work elsewhere!

God works in mysterious ways for sure! I didn't waste any time feeling sorry for myself. I went straight to work interviewing anywhere that would give me a shot including Home Depot & Walmart. I think that's what Heavenly Father was waiting to see because no sooner had I left my epic failure of a telemarketing job & begun applying to places I swore I would NEVER work while I had any shred of self-respect did I get not just one but TWO interviews with both PMT Ambulance & Southwest Ambulance which I'd been dying for since before we even moved back to the Valley! I also was rehired for another wild fire season with Wilderness Medics & Paramedics Unlimited but I also got hired by a special events medical staffing company called Amphibious Medics! All within a week of leaving Tier 3!

I turns out both PMT & Southwest gave me employment offers! I felt a rush of humility & gratitude to my Heavenly Father for such gracious blessings! I ended up going with PMT even though they start their EMT's at a lower pay rate ($9.60/hr instead of about $11.00/hr at Southwest), with PMT I'll have a much better chance of still being able to deploy for wild fires & since they are a smaller company, I'll be able to advance much more quickly than with Southwest.

I'm already so grateful Heavenly Father guided me to PMT! Everyone of the employees I have met & worked with so far have been amazing! Truly great people to work with & I am extremely excited to begin working my regular shifts!

I am so thankful for all of the great blessings Heavenly Father is allowing me to receive right now & I pray that I can remember to stay humble & thankful for everything he is doing for our family!

So This Is The New Year

        I have come to the realization that I am not a good blogger. On the other hand, this blog has become just about par for the course for me when compared to how frequently I've written in my previous journals.

        Well, 2012 has been a very intense year for us! I started the year with a broken foot which led to a totally new career path from the firefighting that I had been doing over the previous two years. 

        We also started out the year with mounting frustrations at our efforts to have a baby only to be blown away by the news that we are going to be having our very own little boy!

        Sherawn finished her last semester of classes for her Associates Degree & I finished my first semester of pre-med courses! (Only like 20 more to go!)

        We moved into the Komenda's house where a ridiculous number of our family members have already lived! 

        I quit my EMT job working for Community Bridges. They are a good company with good intentions but were unable to work with my school schedule & I knew that school had to remain my priority.

        I'm currently taking the semester off. It was touch & go there for a while with me not working & doing school full-time. I put in over 150 individual applications trying to find work but to no avail. Sherawn & I are so grateful to our families for all of the support they have lent us during this time. We also grew a lot closer to our ward during this time & have gained a new appreciation for the Church & what it means to truly need help from others. 

Out with the Old! In with the New!

It's so funny... When I started to write in this blog again, I thought I would treat it like my own personal journal & write in it almost everyday. Ya well, that hasn't exactly worked out for me... Sorry... On the other hand, it's not that big a deal since I'm pretty sure my wife is the only one who reads these blog posts.  :-)

Tonight, Sherawn & I watched her favorite movie, "Marley & Me". She loves it but it makes her cry her eyes out every time! I like watching it because it makes me feel like because I have my own blog (a totally unheard of/unfrequented blog but a blog nonetheless!) that I am almost like a columnist, too! Wishful thinking? I know, but it's still fun.

So update on us & our medical school aspirations:

We are now moved down to Mesa, AZ again. We moved into a small (400 sq. ft.) one bedroom apartment/guest house at my brother-in-law's parents' home. It's small (crazy small!) but the price is right for two very poor college kids & our two puppies, so we can't really complain too much.  ;-)

Sherawn was able to get her old job at PetSmart back (with a $0.31 raise! Woo-hoo!) & I was hired at the first EMT job I applied at! It's a great non-profit organization that's been operating in Arizona now for 30 years! They are a behavioral health company that specializes in addiction recovery & community outreach programs to educate youth. We've been really blessed to have these opportunities come our way. We both feel even more strongly now that this is where we are supposed to be.

We both pray that Heavenly Father continues to answer our prayers & grant us our righteous desires. I hope that I can have patience with the people who come into my life with this new employment & express the compassion that I know our Savior feels for everyone who feels lost & is seeking help in this life.

On a funnier note, Caleb (our little Welsh Corgi/Jack Russell mix) & Patsi (our little Chihuahua/Dachshund mix) both got into trouble with our new landlords! Sherawn is always on my tail (pun intended!) about putting the doggies on their leashes but I am always going to bat for them, telling her what good obedient dogs they are & how she needs to trust them more (right!). Well, as you can probably guess, the morning in question, I let them out front to go relieve themselves & guess who decides to come out of their house with about a half a dozen kids & grandkids? You guessed it! Our landlords! Now, our doggies are really great with kids but they also totally stop listening to their daddy when they see a ton of people who they've never met before. So naturally, they take off all over the place, peeing on the brick mailbox & pooing in the neighbor's lawn! What little stinkers! Ugh!!! 

Well, regardless, we're happy to be here & excited for the neat adventures to come! Thanks for reading!

It's been a rough... year.

Life is so weird. There's no greater feeling than having your prayers answered. Knowing that Heavenly Father hears you & knows what you are going through is an amazing thing. But as I look back at the big & important answers I have received in my life, I see a pattern emerge. With every prompting, there is an inevitable in-between period that always KILLS me! I know where I am supposed to be going & have a fairly decent idea of what I am going to do once I get there but that indefinite time between having made the decision & actually getting to follow through with it is like torture to me.

My mission was probably the first time I really experienced this. I knew I was supposed to go, felt it was where I should be, sent in my papers, & even received my mission call but still had to wait several months before I was able to go & serve.

When I knew I was supposed to marry Sherawn it was better however "engaged but not yet married" (as any young Mormon kid will surely tell you!) is about as hard as it gets!

When I knew I was supposed to move up here to the White Mountains to do Fire & EMS, I was really excited & couldn't wait to leave my hated job doing pest control for an evil soul-sucking company. Everyday seemed like agony!

Then, this last answer that I should pursue medical school has been such an amazing feeling. But now, I am again consumed with frustration at having to wait to begin another new chapter in our family's life! When I broke my foot a few months ago, it was, in many ways, a great blessing in disguise as it allowed me to reconsider my future in firefighting. I recognized that, as much as I loved firefighting, as much as I knew I was prompted to come here to Snowflake, I also felt like Heavenly Father was providing me with a unique new perspective. He was helping me to realize that He had other plans for our family. So, again, I searched out my feelings & prayed. The answer came like a flood of understanding & I know that we are supposed to be going back to school right now.

But this is where my current frustrations come in. While that broken foot allowed me to get this monumental answer to a question I didn't even know I had, it also put me out of work for nearly two months. Since we had been living little better than paycheck to paycheck, we got seriously behind on our bills & whatever savings we had were quickly depleted. Our landlords had been really great, allowing us to pay when we could but it was quickly apparent that there would be no way for us to recoup our lost income much less be able to pay our outstanding bills. It was time to eat some humble pie & we moved back in with my parents.

My poor parents. They've been so great helping us out. Helping me to find work & even allowing me to work around the house & yard to earn money when work outside the house has been scarce. Yet, it has still been a huge struggle to stay ahead of (even with) what we owe. But each day we work at it & I have the hope of deploying on several wild fires this summer as an EMT on the fire line. But no husband feels like much of a bread-winner when he begins to receive calls from creditors 3-4 times a day.

I just have to stay positive I suppose & remember that if Heavenly Father is aware enough of me to guide me this far, He is not going to abandon us now. So here's hopin'. ;)

Another Week Done & Gone!

So it's Sunday night & I am pretty beat! Another good shift on the Ambulance Friday for Taylor Fire & EMS. Then, covered for a few of the guys at Show Low Fire so they could come here to Snowflake & participate in the local community college's talent show. SLFD has a Pipe & Drum Corps (a bagpipe band) that is fantastic to hear.

What stinks is Sherawn was singing at the show as well & I had to miss it. I heard she did really well though & I am very proud of her & all the hard work that she has done this year with the three different choirs that she's been singing with this semester! Everyday I try to take some time just to think of how lucky I am to have her in my life! She may not seem like it because she presents herself so well but she has had to overcome so many different trials in her life. I am amazed by her strength & her constant support of me as I drag her around the world following after all of my crazy dreams! There is a song that makes me so happy every time I hear it & it seems to sum up how I feel about her so well. It's called "The Girl" By City & Colour.

When I first decided that I wanted to pursue firefighting, Sherawn was initially very resistant to the idea. Her own home had burned down the summer between her junior & senior year of high school. The idea of me dying in a fire scared her to death. But we both prayed & fasted about what we should do because I had felt this to be the right decision for our family. We went to the temple & she told me she still had her worries but that she couldn't deny the feeling of peace that she had after she had prayed & she has been so supportive ever since then.

A few months ago, I broke my foot on a family vacation & it really scared us both. What would happen if I had an even more serious injury? As it was, I was out of work for nearly two months. It gave us time to stop & think about our options again. We both felt very impressed to reconsider trying to get into medical school. I know that I was impressed to get into Fire & EMS & that it was the experiences that I have had with the different departments & people that I work with that have pushed me & helped me to realize my potential. I would never have felt capable of handling the school & workloads that pre-med & medical school bring with them had it not been for these experiences.

How grateful I am to our family who have all been so supportive of all our crazy dreams! But most of all, I am

grateful to my girl. She is my strength when I feel unable to continue, my inspiration to excel, & she is where my empathy for others stems from. She follows me wherever I

go & asks for so little in return. Everything I now am & hope to become, I can confidently credit to her loving influence & support. I love you Princess

!