In Which We End Up With a Tiny Person

So, this happened:

Our baby Paul is finally here! He actually ended up coming a few days early. He was due on the 22nd of May, and he arrived at 4:28 am on Tuesday, May 19. He came early because Nancy's doctor decided that she needed to be induced because of high blood pressure. She was afraid it was preeclampsia, but Nancy didn't have any of the other symptoms. Turned out what she actually had was what they call gestational hypertension. Either way, it meant that we got to see our baby boy three days sooner! Nancy's doctor's appointment was in the morning, and she was sent straight to the hospital from there. I was at work, proctoring a test, and when I got Nancy's text, I told one of my administrators, "So, there's a bit of a complication, here. My wife is on the way to the hospital to have our baby." My boss told me to go, though it turned out I could have stayed at school all day. I was glad I went anyway, because I didn't want Nancy to be alone in the hospital. We spent the entire day in the hospital watching HGTV and waiting for lab results to come back on Nancy's blood to know what they were going to do. Then they FINALLY got the ball rolling around 5:00 in the afternoon. To give you some perspective, we got to the hospital around 10:00 in the morning. Nancy responded well to the drugs (She loved her epidural. She had some contractions without it, and they were punctuated with phrases like, "Why would anyone ever do this?") and Paul arrived just a few hours later! Here are some pictures from right after he was born:

Mom and baby! Nancy says that she looks pretty good for just pushing out a baby. I'm inclined to agree.

Notice the fantasticness of my hair. Also notice the clothes I'm wearing. I came straight from school and thus I wore those clothes for three days straight.

Even right at the beginning he had his eyes open and was looking around!

That's his GPS tracker attached to his navel (so people can't steal him) and the thing on his chest is a temperature probe. They
were warming him up under a heat lamp.

Since Nancy had to be on Magnesium Sulfate during delivery and tested positive for group b strep, we had to stay in the hospital at least 48 hours after delivery.  Then after that was up, they decided they still wanted to monitor her blood pressure and put her on bp meds, so we were there even longer. On Wednesday night Nancy's mom came, so I went back to work on Thursday, thinking naively that they would be at home by the time I got off. It turns out that hospitals are super slow. I had plenty of time to leave school and go to the hospital and even hang around for a bit before we finally got to leave. Here's a picture of that:

Paul didn't love his carseat that first time. He's cool with it now.

So now we have our awesome baby at home! He's super cute and we love him a lot! It's true what they say about babies not sleeping much (at least not much at night) but every time he looks at you with those eyes in that face he just melts your heart! (and this is coming from me, remember). We're super glad we have him. Basically, I can't stop taking pictures of him. I'll bet most of my Facebook friends are already tired of seeing pictures of him. But, here are a few more pictures! (They're not in order.)

Chillin' with dad.

Swaddled up in his crib.

THAT FACE!

Ready to go on his first walk (he fell asleep)

Ready to go to bed!

So, there's the story of how we ended up with a new, tiny person living in our house. Updates will continue to flow in as we continue to do awesome things, now with a new baby to be awesome with us! This is Captain Danger out.

In Which I Visit Another Canyon

So our friend Matt was down from Utah this last weekend, and even though it was conference weekend, we decided we needed to show him a good time. Nancy had to stay home for this one, unfortunately, but those of us who did go had an excellent time! We went to a canyon that's been on my list ever since I heard of it, though before I moved to Phoenix I never thought I'd actually get to it. It's called the Jug of Salome Creek, and it was awesome. It's a flowing water canyon with a single rappel that can be jumped, though all of us chickened out when that time came. The rappel was pretty sweet, though. It was down through a chute and the water really pushed on you. There were also several waterslides and swims. Observe the pictures:

Looking down canyon from the head of the canyon.

Classic Matt

Water slide!

Sarah coming down the water slide

Me sitting in a waterfall. I ended up backing up the water and it was quite a bit of pressure,
but I made it through. I now I know that you shouldn't sit in waterfalls!

Cool leaning rock

I told Dustin to look awesome. He did this.

This canyon was crawling with huge spiders.

I thought this picture was cool, but then Sarah insisted that I let her take the next one.

The rappel. You can do the jump from the end of the safety line that you can see on the top right.

Pulling the rope

Then the rope got a little stuck and I yanked on it and it came loose and I fell in. You can see Dustin laughing at me.

The hypothetical jump can be done from the rock just above and to the left (in this picture)
of the waterfall. Like I said, we all wimped out. Oh well.

The last swim

Looking back at the mouth of the canyon.

Cactus flowers!

The view on the hike back to the car. The road you can see across the valley is a previous section of the trail.

So, that's the canyon! Matt had a good time and so did everyone else. It's definitely one I'd be willing to make my way back to, and if there's enough water, I'd probably even try the jump! At any rate, that's about all I've got for the moment. This is Captain Danger out.