Pressure Cooker

Finally came across a good movie.  It's a story about culinary arts students in inner city Philly and their inspirational teacher.  The reason our school systems stink is because there are no longer teachers like this.  It used to be these teachers were the majority and the sheepish ones were the minority.  Now if you're a good teacher you get a documentary made about you.  Granted the major reason it is this way is due to the threat of lawsuits at the smallest inspirational teaching cuff.  Anyway, a great movie to give you a small glimmer of hope that there are still teachers that are old school.  We had plenty of teachers like this... Mader, Robers, Gigstad... I'm thankful.

Turning Ron Dayne

Today I turned 33.  As far a milestone in age I definitely wouldn't call it that.  Aside from a couple gray hairs on the head and more joint pops 33 isn't all that much different from any of the previous 1o birthdays.  I'm not going be to going out and taking 33 shots tonight but the crew can still hang with the best of them.  I did take a 3.3 mile jog.  I guess this is the one major area of decline since my knees still get sore with extended pavement pounding.  I did it in 26:34 which is a 8:02 pace.  Not the greatest but I can at least do it without dying.  Overall, not bad here at 33. Most important, I got Della as my b-day present.  I couldn't be happier about that.  A healthy, happy girl and I hope she stays that way until she's 33 and beyond.

My Birth Story by Ryan

Oh lord oh lord oh lord oh lord oh lord oh lord oh lord oh lord oh lord oh lord oh lord oh lord oh lord oh lord oh lord oh lord oh lord oh lord oh lord!!!

My Birth Story

Since my recollection of one week ago today is much different than Mommy and Daddy's, I thought I'd let Mommy do a guest post. *** Here is the story of how Della Jolee Rau came into the world, from her mommy's eyes... Last Saturday night I went to bed around 11:30 and started getting really sharp pains in my very lower back. I'd been having a sore back while sleeping for the past couple weeks, so thought nothing of it, especially since it still went away when I got up, went to the bathroom, and went back to sleep. But I was up a lot more that night than usual, and the pains were worse than usual. I finally got up again at 5:30 Sunday morning and just stayed up because I was annoyed with waking all the time, and by then the pains had moved around to the front to be super low cramps. It almost felt like even my hip bones were sore they were that low. So I showered, threw in some laundry, and did a little cleaning, all the while thinking I could just take a nap and catch up on sleep once the cramps subsided. Good thing I shaved my legs in that shower too, ha! ;) The cramps got more intense, but stayed very randomly spaced, so the last thing I was thinking was labor pains - I just thought I was going to have diarrhea at some point that morning (sorry, gross I know). By about 8 I woke Ryan and just said I feel like crap with these cramps and didn't get any sleep last night, so I might have to call the doctor this morning to see what's going on. Of course right away he thinks baby is coming, but I was still not even considering that and just thought I was about to poop any second. I finally called the doctor at 9 (I had to get my chores done first!), and the on-call doctor called me back at 9:15; my regular doctor was on vacation last week and into this week, of course. So I explained to her what I'd been feeling, and how now I'd started having some bloody mucous. That had tipped me off that I *might* be having some labor signs with all this, but I was still totally thinking it's just cramps, nothing more. So she said if the contractions get stronger and are about 3-5 minutes apart for an hour to go ahead and go in to labor & delivery, or if I start having heavy bleeding to go in. As soon as she said "contractions" I thought wait a minute, I said I'm having cramps, not contractions! Anyway, I told Ryan what she said, he said, "I bet this is the start of it", and he went to shower up and continue to snooze on the couch while we waited. At 9:45 I was sitting on our futon, since it was the only…