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.