Ryan Hale My life and times, stories and happenings

Hannah’s Baptism

Hannah was baptized recently.  It was great to be able to be there to help baptize her.  Really proud to be a Dad in this moment!  Here is the video that our friend Dave Mershon took for us that afternoon:

Evan J. Hale

Evan came into the world at 1:58pm this afternoon.  We had quite a journey getting there though!

First of all, he wasn't really ever supposed to be here in the first place.  Ten years ago, we stood in front of a screen while our doctor completed a test to see if we could have more children.  After having tubal pregnancies both before and after Hannah, the doctor told us that it wouldn't be possible.  After adopting both Ellie and Julia, we found out that Evan was determined to defy the odds!

Last night, we came to the hospital to be induced.  We started at about 10pm having some initial preparation medications and then this morning they started the Oxytocin to begin the contractions.  A couple of hours later, they broke the water and then shortly after gave Gina the epidural.  After that, they started an exam, so I walked out to go talk to the grandparents who were down in the waiting room.  Suddenly, nurse Amy, who was doing the exam, appeared around the corner into the waiting room and started waving me back to the room.  On the way back to the room, she told me, "Gina is 7 cm and I just shook hands with the baby!"  I thought she meant that things were just moving quicker than expected, but she meant it pretty literally.  Turns out that he had pushed his hand and part of his arm out and as the nurse was doing the examination, he grabbed her finger!

The lead nurse tried to push the hand back in a little bit, but he wasn't having any of it.  He actually pushed it out even further, so they called Dr. Franco to come and check it out.  He decided that they needed to do a C-section right away, so they put the surgical stuff on us and out the door we went!  The C-section happened within the next twenty minutes and we were seeing Evan.  Awesome!

Here are a few pictures from our day today:

Skiing At Breckenridge

Gina already stole my thunder on this one but Hannah and I made a trip to Breckenridge a few days ago. She did great up on the slopes and really took off after only having done ski school previously. We did some greens and even some easy blues. We didn't finish too well as she fell and twisted her ankle on a fairly difficult hill for her, just as a big snow storm was coming in and it was getting dark. Ski patrol came and pulled her down the hill in a toboggan but she ended up just fine. Mostly tired, I think, although I probably picked a little high on the difficulty list for our last run. We got in about six hours of skiing and all-in-all, it was a great day!

Recent pictures

Here are some pictures from skiing, some Christmas events around home, the cruise, and Christmas in Florida.  Enjoy!

New babies and a little time to reflect

We've been down in Florida since last Wednesday on vacation.  We went first on a cruise down to Cozumel and then have been here in Venice since Monday.  With a few days away from work and all of the craziness of regular life, I've finally been able to start thinking a little more about all of the news that we've been getting over the last few weeks.

First, back when we were in Indiana over Thanksgiving, Gina was really starting to not feel well.  She was feeling pretty nauseous most of the time, a tough thing when you're trying to dive into the turkey.  She thought that it was just the flu coming on.  Well, we got back to Denver and I was beginning to feel the bug to go skiing.  So just before we were to go out to Breckenridge a few weeks ago, she comes in - all out of breath - and announces that she is pregnant.  Of course that made me sit straight up in bed...  "You're what?!?"

Pretty incredible given that for the last ten years, we have been under the belief that it wasn't possible for her to get pregnant any longer.  I was there when we had both tubal pregnancies, there when the doctors did the test telling us that we couldn't have any more children, there when we went through all of the crazy in vitro treatments, and there when it ultimately led to the adoption of Ellie in China.  It has been a terrible, and yet awesome, adventure that has brought us to today.  So when you have been through that series of events, it makes it difficult to even believe that it is possible to be pregnant yet again.  We definitely regard this child as a miracle and I think we've just been hanging on to see what God is going to do next!

Well, so we found out...  The day before we came down here, we got a call from our case worker for the adoption we have been working on and we have a little girl waiting on us in Awassa, Ethiopia.  We can't share her picture yet as that is a problem from a legal standpoint with Ethiopia, but those will come soon.  Her name will be Julia Joy Hale and she is five months old at this point.  Her paperwork says that she is in great health, and from the pictures that we've received so far, she is beautiful!

So two of them.  Huh...  I've spent quite a bit of time with Gina over the last year or two saying that we weren't going to have more than three.

Paige Clausen reminded us of a little prophetic word that she had for us a few years ago.  I have to admit that I was a little skeptical at the time, but she kept saying, "You know, I just see two babies."  Knowing that we couldn't have any more kids and that I had no intention of adopting more than one more, I just couldn't see how that was possible.  At this point, though, I'm sort of imagining God sitting there saying, "How about them apples?"

Don't get me wrong.  This is going to be good.  Just different than what I had imagined.  Of course, that has been the case since the beginning of this whole story.  Maybe one of these days I'll learn to sit back and enjoy the ride!

Busy times!

The last couple of weeks have been just a little busy here around our house.  That isn't altogether unusual, but these were just especially crazy times.  Between birthdays for both Hannah (9) and Ellie (4) within a week and a half, Halloween, emergency gall bladder surgery for Gina, a visit with Grandma and Grandpa...oh, and 18 inches of snow in the middle of all of that...well, that has had us running a little.  Here are some pictures from the last several days:

As far as Gina's surgery is concerned, this last Monday night and Tuesday, she was feeling really badly, and on Tuesday morning, we decided that we should go to the hospital to have her looked at.  Turns out that she was experiencing gall stones and needed to have both her gall bladder removed as well as a further procedure completed because there were still some residual gall stones.  The doctors took care of those and was able to come home in the early afternoon on Friday.  She's been moving a little slow but has been doing well.

We just see things a little differently

I've been doing just a little bit of work with AdoptBlogs over the last few weeks, trying to get the site working the way that I would hope.  The idea behind AdoptBlogs is to give adoptive families for the thousands of kids adopted in the U.S. every year a place to blog and tell their stories.  It has been a little slower getting started than I would like, but what I'm trying to do is offer some great features that you couldn't get elsewhere in addition to the obvious aspects of being able to blog within a community of people who share your life experiences as adoptive families.

So I've been adding a few features and was telling Gina about it:

Me:  Honey, you can put a YouTube video on your blog now.

Gina:  Yeah, I guess that's something that we probably should have had before now.  OK, so she's right about that...

Me:  I made it possible for you to connect to Google Analytics so you can see your statistics on your site.

Gina:  Yeah, that would help, I guess.  I thought this was pretty cool since you have to get outside stats counters on other sites, but at least it was a better response than the last one.

Me:  I also set it up so you can tie your own domain to your blog for free!

Gina:  Oh, well, I guess I thought you could already do that.  (Letdown... you pay a pretty fair penny for that with other blogs!)

Gina:  You know, I think all I really want is to just be able to list other people's posts on the sidebar on my blog.

Me:  Yeah, you've had that one since the beginning.  I showed her how to do that and now she's starting to do that on her blog (see the left side).

Being the gearhead in our family has taught me that we definitely see things differently.  The stuff that I think is pretty cool is old hat to her, and I'm assuming others.  I'll just have to keep working to see if I can impress her!

Changes since moving to Denver

I've definitely noticed some changes in our family since moving to Denver.  A couple of things have occurred to me just this weekend with little things that have happened.  For example:

1. We've tried to embrace the outdoors, active life.  One of the first things we did when we moved here was buy some mountain bikes and a bike rack to transport them.  There are trails everywhere, including right around our neighborhood, so we'll either go for a ride here or pack the bikes out to some open space or to the mountains when we've gone.  Ellie started with a trailer that I pull behind me, or now she even has her own larger bike.  She's still trying to get used to managing it, but she's already starting to take it on as she watches Hannah get out and go.  This weekend, even in the rain, I got out and took a ride down to Chatfield reservoir.  We've been doing quite a bit of that type of thing lately.
2. Going Green (or at least more-so...).  While not terribly PC, I have to admit, I'm being dragged along a little by this one.  Our recycling bin is one of those huge 90 gallon trash cans, while the cans where our regular trash goes are our little ones.  Yes, we fill up the big recycling bin each week, so I guess that's a good thing.
3. Eating more healthy.  I think this goes along with being more active, so you can have the energy to do it.  The thing that struck me this weekend is Gina's insistence - twice - that we have sushi.  We went out to a movie last night and her idea of going to have dinner afterward was to go to Costco and get some sushi to take home.  I agreed, although when we arrived, Costco was already closed, so we ended up at Applebee's instead since they have the Weight Watchers menu where you can get something more healthy for you.  Today, after coming home from church, she went to the grocery store and returned, not only with the groceries, but with a sushi lunch.  Hannah ended up with a quesadilla, but Ellie jumped right in with us, putting the "spicy" wasabi in her soy sauce in dipping in her fish.  She didn't even care about the rice near as much.  She just plucked the fish off of the rice and went to town!

The only thing I know to attribute this to is living in Denver itself because all of these influences are prevalent with the people around here.  I'm calling it "embracing the lifestyle" and it is different from how we lived previously, either in Indiana or St. Louis.  All good stuff!

Test post including video

Starting a new blog

I've been wanting to get back to doing some blogging recently.  At this point, I'm not certain how much I will be updating, which is a little frustrating, but I'm going to think that is OK for now.  My primary motivation for starting the blog was that we've started taking a Perspectives class in Colorado Springs each Sunday afternoon and I wanted to have a place to post online for the Lesson Reviews that are due each week.  Last Sunday was the first review that we finished, so I added that here as my first post yesterday.

That said, I'm interested in personally using the AdoptBlogs service a little more.  I've been working on building this up over the last several months but now want to become more of a user instead of just an administrator managing the blogging.  I was thinking that it might give me a different and better perspective.  Some software developers call it "eating your own dogfood".  It isn't exactly the same, but I think it is always good to have the user's perspective so you can improve on what you're doing.

So I'm back up and running.  I have several streams of thought that I've been saving up on over the last several weeks and months.  They'll probably come in bursts though.  My work, which we've moved to Denver for recently, has been overwhelming over the last few months as I've been working on starting something new here.  We've been getting up to speed on the Denver area as well.  I'll speak to that more in later posts too.  Lots to discuss.  More soon!