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I’m officially a Grandma!

Miss Raydin Leann Holbrooks was born Monday, 10/20/2008, at 12:40pm. She’s 7lbs. 7oz. and 20 & 1/4 inches long. Mom and baby are doing well. Everyone’s happy and healthy. They got to come home yesterday afternoon.

Of course, I’m a little partial…but I swear she’s the cutest thing on two legs.

Paul (Amanda’s boyfriend) and I were in the delivery room with Amanda. Raydin’s Daddy, Bryon, got there just a minute or so after she was born. Amanda and Bryon decided to go with Raydin, rather than Miranda, for her first name. So, she’s Raydin (pronounced Ray-din, just like it’s spelled) Leann (Lee Ann) Holbrooks.

I’ll be posting videos shortly of Miss Raydin. We have footage of her very first minutes of life, the first time Daddy got to hold her, the first time Mommy got to hold her, and bringing her home yesterday. (Grandma got to be the very first one to hold her, but no one was manning the camera at the time…I had to give her to Daddy so I could go get the camera. lol.)

It’s been an eventful couple of days, to be sure. The other day (Tuesday) wound up being a little more eventful than I’d prefer, but we’re still breathing - which beats the alternative.

We started out the day on a bad footing and it didn’t get much better from there. Amanda and I got ready to leave for her appointment with Dr. Gresham, only to find the Jeep had a flat tire. (Nothing like starting the day out with changing a flat tire at 8:30 in the morning!) We called & let the doc know we’d be a few minutes late. Got the tire changed and headed out on our way. Half way to Waynesboro, we get a call that the doc had been called out for surgery & we had to reschedule for later that afternoon.

No biggie. We worked on the house until a couple of hours before her new appointment time. To kill some more time, we stopped by Burke County Medical Center to take a tour of the Labor and Delivery area. Amanda got to see where she’ll be delivering and meet some of the staff. They were wonderfully warm and friendly. I think she’s happy with the choices we’ve made so far.

So, off to her appointment we go. Everything’s fine in terms of Mom & baby. Dr. Gresham scored a few more brownie points when he didn’t even charge us for that day’s visit. (All they did was routine weight check, listen to the baby’s heartbeat, etc.) I thought that was wonderful, since Amanda’s a private pay patient (not covered by insurance.) Her next appointment is in 2 weeks - they have to check her blood sugar and do another sonogram.

We leave Dr. Gresham’s, only to get 5 or 6 miles outside of Waynesboro and wind up with my spare tire going flat. GREAT! I thought maybe we picked up another nail or something from the house in Waynesboro. Long story short - no. It wasn’t a nail. When Wal-Mart mounted my new spare tire last year, they broke the valve stem sensor thingy & air was leaking from the side of the valve stem. Luckily, we managed to make it to C & S Tires on Highway 25 (a few miles outside of Augusta) before the tire went completely flat.

Unfortunately, just as I got out of the Jeep to show the mechanic which tire it was, I got stung by a wasp. Apparently, someone dropped off a used AC unit for the owner to install in the shop & it was full of wasps. The guys thought they had killed them all off, but obviously there was at least one survivor & he wasn’t happy. He stung me on my ankle before I even knew there were wasps around! And of course, I didn’t have my Epipen handy. (I took it out of my purse like an idiot because it was getting mangled after almost a year - plus it was out of date.)

The guys at C & S were wonderful. They replaced my broken valve stem and got us back on the road in record time. To top it off, they didn’t even charge me for it, in light of my run-in with the wasps. Good thing too (in terms of the speed they used to get us mobile again) because I barely made it to the Lowe’s in South Augusta before I had to pull off. Amanda had to call for someone to take me to the ER as well as someone to get her, Paul, and my Jeep home. Luckily, Micki was free to leave the shop and run me to MCG.

They shot me up full of “icky-be-gone” stuff, as well as a dose of Prednisone. Of course, because nothing in my life should ever go as expected, I had some adverse side effects to the Prednisone. Muscle cramps, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, headache, you name it - if it’s on the list of “rare” or “possibly severe” side effects for Prednisone? I probably had it. It made for a rough night. (Nothing like being awakened from a drug-induced, Benedryl super-dose sleep by extreme nausea and the loss of what little lunch I ate.) Needless to say, I won’t be continuing with the 4 day course of Prednisone I’m supposed to be on. I almost think the allergic reaction would have been more comfortable than the side effects from the Prednisone. Talk about feeling like I had been repeatedly run over by a Mac truck. Yuck! But it seems to have passed for the most part. (Thank Heavens!) At least the muscle cramps and weakness have subsided enough that I can pick up and hold my coffee cup without dumping it. (Can you imagine how retarded I looked AND felt, having to have my 13 year old fix my coffee, bring it to my nightstand, and then drink it from a straw because I didn’t have the strength/dexterity in my hands to pick the cup up and hold it?)

So, I spent most of yesterday feeling like death warmed over. However, we still had to go back out to Waynesboro for my business with the Tax Commissioner. (Good thing I have power steering, since most of the muslce issues I was having were in my arms/hands.) And I had promised Amanda and Josh that we’d do a little exploring in downtown Waynesboro. (They have some cute little shops and cafes on the main drag going through downtown.) I figured at least going to run errands would be better than just sitting at home in bed, feeling crappy. At least I’d have something to do to keep my mind off of feeling like dog poo.

Now keep in mind, “downtown” Waynesboro is all of about 2 blocks long. Just one little strip on either side of Liberty Street with a typical small southern town courthouse, some Mom & Pop boutiques, a few cafes, and Five & Dime-type stores. These are the kind of shops where the owner is most often the only employee, and there’s no way you can just “run in” and grab something without having a pleasant 10-30 minute conversation about the weather, the neighbors, the grandkids, or what-have-you. It’s a slower pace out in the country, that’s for sure. There’s even an old-fashioned barber shop, complete with the little red, white, and blue barber pole and white-haired little old men in white smocks, ready and willing to provide a shave and a hair cut, as well as the scoop on all the best local goings-on.

We wrapped up things at the Commissioner’s office, had lunch at a little Mexican restaurant downtown, and browsed a few of the shops. We found some cute things for the nursery at the Emporium (a little “this and that” kind of shop,) and a few outfits for the baby at one of the boutiques. It didn’t take long though before my stamina was zapped and I felt even more like dog poo, so we headed home. It was a pleasant afternoon, even if I did feel crappy.

After the last couple of days? I think I deserve a bum day today. So, my plan for the day is NOTHING. Some reading, some movies, maybe a little bit of light-weight work (so long as it doesn’t cause brain cramps) and most of all? Relaxing. Just relaxing and enjoying not feeling like crap.

Wow! Today and tomorrow are going to be busy days, to be sure. Amanda has a doc appointment with the OB today, then it’s off to work on the house in Waynesboro. Tomorrow we have to turn in the Uhaul, work on the house in Waynesboro, pay bills, go to the Tax Commissioner’s office, go to City Hall here in Grovetown, blah, blah, blah. How did everything seem to pile up in the course of two days? Yikes!

The house in Waynesboro is coming along. I started putting up the OSB on the new garage wall yesterday. In the mean time, Amanda and Paul have started gutting the master bedroom/nursery to get those ready to re-wire. I was right in my guess that the nursery (the room with the dark paneling that we thought in the beginning might have been some sort of game room) was an add-on to the house. We pulled out some panelling to find solid brick behind it. No biggie - WireMold here we come. (I’ve had to install WireMold to run wiring in places where there are no wall cavities to work with.)

I still don’t know if we’ll make our Sept 1 target date, but we’re working hard at it. Charlie (my next door neighbor) is coming Saturday to help get started on the kitchen. I’ll have to take the sheetrock down on the wall where the new panel box is, so that we can get to the base of the panel box to tie in new wiring. We also have to install the dishwasher, the new sink, cut a larger opening for the new stove, lay new flooring, etc. I’m hopeful that between this weekend and next, we can get the kitchen done as well as installing the new hot water heater. On the weekdays in between, the kids and I can work on the bedrooms. The hardest part will be the demolition/clean up. After that, it’s just a matter of running the wiring, putting in insulation (most of the house is completely uninsulated) and hanging new sheetrock.

Charlie’s going to help with the sheetrock too, when we’re ready for that. (We plan on using 4×12 boards wherever possible to minimize the number of seams and the amount of mudwork that has to be done. Those boards are huge & alot heavier than standard 4×8’s - I’m going to need someone who knows what they’re doing with those monsters.) With all the work I have to get done on the house, Charlie jokes that he’s going to quit his crappy day job and come work for me full time until we’re done. THAT scares me, as I know I don’t have enough work (or the budget) for full time help. But hopefully he’s not even quasi-serious about quitting. That would put such a stress on me to keep him working. Shudder!

In any regards, work continues. The kids are having way too much fun demolishing the old to get ready for the new. That’s okay though, because demolition has never really been my favorite. Sure, I enjoy taking a 6lb sledge to walls and what-not, but the clean up gets me every time. I swear it takes 3 times as long to clean up the demolition debris as it does to actually demolish it. And there is so much debris that I’m going to have to arrange a rollback. (Those huge construction dumpsters that look almost as big as a train car.) In fact, I’m having to arrange a 4 ton rollback (the biggest I could find) to make sure we have enough space for all the garbage around the house, as well as the construction debris.

I have to admit, this whole project does scare the beejeebers out of me from time to time. What if we run into something I can’t do? What if I run into a major issue or defect that zaps my entire budget? What if we don’t get done in time? What if I under estimated the costs? What if we don’t pass inspection? What if someone gets hurt while working out there? Arrrgh! The what-ifs give me knots in my stomach! So, I try not think about them much. They could easily drive a person quite mad, indeed. But they surface every once in awhile. All the same, we’re still just trying to take it one day, one project at a time and see where we go from there.

Better get my rear in gear…have to leave in 30 minutes for Amanda’s appointment. It takes a good 45 minutes in morning traffic to get to Waynesboro (where her new doctor is) so we have to leave by 8:30 to have her there by 9:15 - her appointment time. I’m glad she likes the new doc. She really likes his nurse practioner & thought the girl was just “so cool.” I have to admit, I liked them both too. So…off we go!