Cade Thomas Morris!


Born: Sunday August 21, 2011, 6 days early, at 4:32 a.m.
Weighed in at 8 pounds 11 ounces, measured 21 inches long--he's a big little guy!

Cade had pneumothorax when he was born. This is a small hole in the lung that lets air out of the lung into the chest cavity. He was having a hard time breathing right. He was taken to the NICU about 5 minutes after being born. The doctors thought that the pneumothorax would resolve itself so he was kept in a dark room and the nurses kept him calm. He was given an IV and a feeding tube so that he didn't have to be disturbed for the first 3 days. He also had an issue with his stomach and threw up food for a day or so.
I was able to spend a lot of time with him in the NICU and the nurses let me take care of him. Each day we could do more with him including nursing, feeding him bottles and just holding him. I went home from the hospital on Tuesday evening and Cade was able to come home on Friday. I used Tuesday through Thursday as my "practice mom" days. I asked the nurses lots of questions and they were really patient with me as I learned how to kind of take care of him. Then I went home at night and slept!
Cade LOVES his pacifier!

Cade and Dad in the NICU





















Now he has been home for 3 days and we are doing all right. Our two goals are to keep Cade alive and not go insane. So far we are passing! Each day he is doing better--taking longer naps and eating better. Really he is a little piggie and eats a ton! I'm still not too sure about this whole mom thing and I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing. I think it will take a little while, but I'll get there soon.
Here's my boys! I love how small and curled up Cade is in this picture. He ended up sleeping there for about an hour and a half.




















So how did it come about?
I started having contractions Saturday morning at 5 am. They got closer and closer and we decided to go to the hospital which is about 30 minutes away. As we drove,they slowed down. Instead of going to the hospital, we ended up at our stake center where Kirk played in a volleyball tournament and I watched. We went to Wendy's for lunch and then back to the stake center. The contractions were still coming the whole time and I didn't want to go all the way home. Finally about 1 p.m. we went to the hospital as they got stronger. I was only dialated to a 1.5 so they monitored me for a couple of hours and after no progress sent me home. Once we got home, Kirk was really tired and took a nap. The contractions got stronger and stonger and by 7 p.m. I couldn't walk through them and we headed back to the hospital. I was dialated to about a 3.5 and got the epidural right away. Then we waited. We brought the laptop and watched a movie and some baseball on tv. I ended up needing some petosin to keep things moving, but Cade came out at 4:32 a.m.--almost 24 hours of labor! Really though, it was only super painful for a few hours when I was at home up until I got the epidural.

The Memphis Redbirds: St. Louis Cardinal's little brothers. We went to this AAA baseball game on Monday night with Kirk's co-residents and spouses. It was fun and luckily, the weather was perfect!
Here we are just outside the gates (you can kind of tell how pregnant I am, but the black shirt hides it too)


Inside the stadium. The game was not crowded (as you can tell) I brought a pillow to use as a backrest and another blanket that I propped my feet up on the seat in front of me with. Not bad. I was actually quite comfortable the whole time.

Redbirds ended up winning 7-1 and we got to see a home run too! It was a fun night.

A couple of Saturday's ago, Kirk got the itch. The itch to go trout fishing. Unfortunately, there aren't any trout fishing rivers around here. But there is one 3 hours away in Arkansas. So we headed out there for the day. It was a pretty river and even though the day was hot, the river was cold and felt great. I don't really have the kind of energy fishing requires right now, so I brought my lawn chair and Tom Clancy book and hung out in the shade reading while Kirk waded up and down the river. I got up and waded a few times too when I got hot.
Here is the river and the shady bank where I spent the day.

We saw several turtles in the water and next to it.

Kirk's first fish! He ended up catching 13 (I think) This was one of the smaller ones too.

At the end of the day he caught one more thing: Gatorade. Someone had left this in the river to cool off and forgot to pick it up later. It was still sealed and brand new, so we wiped it off and enjoyed a cool drink.

We'll probably be heading back here again in a few months. It was a fun day. Lots of driving, but sitting in the car talking is better than sitting at home watching TV right?

As we were preparing to move here, several people told me that the south is a different place and to remember things that happen there. I am going to try to document funny things that happen here as our Memphis Moments.

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When Kirk works at the hospital, they provide a meal for him in the cafeteria. There is a sign there that says something like "We want to take care of our staff members so we deep fry our foods in the finest vegetable oil."
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We went to a drive-thru last week and got hamburgers. When we pulled up the lady inside asked if we wanted to try blah blah whatever. Kirk looked at me and I said to tell her no. Neither of us could understand what she said. Kirk replied "I don't know what you said but no." We continued to order and luckily ended up with the food we wanted even though we could only understand about a quarter of what this lady was saying.
In Los Angeles, you couldn't understand everyone either. The difference? There, they spoke other languages or had not been in the United States speaking english very long. Here, they just have crazy accents.
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Kirk was eating at the cafeteria another day and talking to the lady who serves the food.
Kirk: Does working here make you hungry all of the time?
Lady: No, actually I've lost 15 pounds since I started.
Kirk: Oh, congratulations.
Lady: No--I can't lose weight. I'm black and I gotta have booty!
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More to come, as they happen and as I remember them!

There was a HUGE moth outside our door yesterday. The wing span was probably 6 inches!

Kirk and I were able to go to the Pink Palace museum yesterday with another couple in the ward. Tuesday is free day there, so it was totally worth it. Kirk was supposed to be at school, but they forgot to put him on the schedule and so he didn't have any patients and came home early. I was excited because that meant he got to go with us. The Pink Palace is a museum with a bunch of stuffed animals and exhibits about Memphis life. Kirk really liked the one with an old dentist chair and dental instruments and kept telling me which ones he still uses. I liked seeing the old clothing styles and home set-ups. It was fun, but probably not somewhere I would go back to.