Parker Edward

Hello All! Parker Edward was born at 11:07 PM on May 15th. He weighed 8 pounds 8 ounces and is 21 inches long. Kristin and Parker had about a 27.5 hour delivery. They did very good! Parker is in the NICU to make sure he is breathing well and doesn't get an infection from any of the pregnancy complications. Our family is doing very good! Hi from all of us.

Love,
The Schwickeraths

Induction is planned!

Met with the doctor today, with the elevated blood pressure and now elevated liver enzymes, she thinks it best that we have an induction. So we'll be checking into the hospital no later than Tuesday of next week. Of course there's still a possibility that we'll go into labor before then.

I'm happy that we're finally going to meet our little one, but I sort of thought they might induce sooner than Tuesday, especially because the elevated liver enzymes can be an indicator of the HELLP syndrome (a life-threatening variant of pre-eclampsia). She made it sound like Tuesday was the earliest they could schedule the induction.

I'm having alot of contractions, just not regular or very intense yet- so who knows what will happen.

A few updates on our plants

The new Rose of Sharon







Below are some highlights of our shade garden.



























The diathus are starting to bloom (in red and pink)















Our lonely dwarf lilac,
the other didn't survive


Coral bells













Ajuga in the shade garden (purple)





The seed geraniums are starting to blossom.











Our pulmonarium is so happy











The two new autumn blaze maple trees

Our garden just alittle later!!!

Now our garden is actually showing off some of its beauty. The tulips are blooming, the pulmonaria is thriving, and our primrose are goregous. Patrick is so proud. The hosta are slow coming up but just wait, they'll soon be up and happy.

Our garden

For those of you who don't know Patrick, he loves plants! And we have done lots of landscaping and gardening since we bought our house. We got several (dozen) hosta from my mom, and we bought a few others. We also have primroses, dianthus, columbine (which my mother started from seed), we also have 2 bleeding hearts (one red and one white), and then we have a bunch of bushes and trees. We also put in about 2 dozen tulips and a bunch of daylillies, the later of which have yet to bloom- and we can't wait. This year Patrick put in 2 autumn blaze maples, a rose of sharon, and about a dozen potato plants. Unfortunately, just the other day the potatos were damaged by some late frost- so we're still sad about that.
Great trick we have learned is to use compost in our plant beds- the Iowa City dump and the Cedar Rapids dump have great compost (often free) which we fill our beds with every year. As the compost continues to decompose, we add new compost and the plants just love it. Oh and very important- all those walls you see- Patrick made! I thought he was insane because he insisted on leveling every single block- but who can argue with the results! They look wonderful and the plants love them.

Nursery is all set, any day now.

The nursery is pretty much ready for our little one. We have a very nice changing area, a rocker for feeding, crib and bassinet and of course a carseat, stroller (not shown), pack-n- play (not shown), high chair (not shown, and actually on recall :-( ). Plus while on bedrest I made 2 covers for the changing table pad, and a cover for the pack-n-play. Plus I knitted a bunch of items, maybe I will post pictures of those later.

Pregnancy Progression