Mandylio’s Valley Below

At the end of 2002 we went to the US again for Christmas vacation! It’s always fun to be there for Christmas! At least over there it used to be so that you had a 100% chance of a white Christmas! Not that I was looking for that, but Laura was used to that. I don’t really remember much about that vacation, only that we did a LOT of baby shopping there! Strollers over here in the Netherlands seemed so scandalously overpriced compared to US strollers. So we figured that we would just buy one there and ship it here. This would bite us in the asses later on, but we were totally ignorant of that. We bought a lot of bottles there, with pooh themes on them, not knowing anything about that stuff that they discovered now is in clear plastic and can be scraped off the inside of the bottle by a bottle brush .Celebrating the old year / new year is always fun in the US as well. When the clock strikes midnight, nothing changes… You don’t hear a single BANG outside! Sure in big cities like NY they have big fireworks, but your average US city doesn’t do anything like that! Besides it was very cold outside again, so who would want that? So we found the PERFECT deal on a Graco Winnie the Pooh stroller there at the local walmart, and we were going to get it! $120 for a stroller WITH the car seat for in the car as well. If that wasn’t an awesome deal, I wouldn’t know what was. So we had lots and lots of extra stuff to bring with us! We had to keep an eye on the weight restrictions and we had to weigh everything! We threw in some extra stuff with the stroller and just used the whole box as as suitcase , that fitted the weight restriction. I have no idea how we thought that this would all fit in the car here in the Netherlands, but fate helped us out a little bit there. The flight back must have been a problematic one, more like usual, and when we arrived in Brussels, we waited and waited, and I think none of our suitcases made it here, it probably didn’t make it in Chicago, and we got to go home without any luggage but the stuff we had as carry on. It makes things easier I guess, because a messenger delivers the suitcases for free at home, usually the day after! But there’s always a chance that customs wants to look at them, and add a free bill in it for all the stuff you are illegally importing in the country! I don’t know how that works though, I mean, I don’t live in Belgium, so why would they care? How would Dutch customs know about it if we landed in Brussels? Anyways, our stuff made it home at my parents the day after! The stroller looked amazing, and we were so glad to have something that no one else had over here! It didn’t look cheap or anything, it looked very special because we didn’t have any strollers like this over here! Later we discovered that you can buy strollers cheap, but that means the quality of the stroller is what you pay for, and I don’t think the stroller was used for more than a year! Americans lead an ultra pampered and sheltered live. They use cars to drive to and from the mall, and there’s never any obstacles like we have on the streets here, so our stroller clearly wasn’t made for riding on our streets, things broke off, it was bumpy as hell, in short, it was a bad judgement call. More about strollers later!

We had started to look for an apartment , because it was essential that we were going to have a place of our own soon, for every body’s sanity If Laura had a lot of baby clothes to get washed, it wouldn’t have worked if my mother was still so eh, uptight about doing the laundry. We quickly checked what kind of mortgage would be possible for me, and that wasn’t so bad, there were plenty of things to chose from! We specifically looked for an apartment, but looking back on that, we should have never chose that! We found one place online, and we made an appointment to go look at it. The price was like 90k, and we had an eerie feeling walking up the stairs there! It was 3rd floor, we had all these foreign names on the doors, that made us already feel like it was wrong to be considering that place. When the realtor opened the door, there was NOTHING inside. No carpet, nothing on the walls, the kitchen was completely removed. This was nothing for us. I told the realtor that I wasn’t even considering it if he knocked 10K of the price, and of course, he wasn’t considering that either, so that first encounter left us kind of wondering if we were ever going to get a good deal for the money that we were wanting to spend.. Then a little bit later we saw an add for the apartment we currently live in. Immediately we loved this place. It had a bath, which we valued a lot, and mostly , places in our price range just had a shower and nothing else. The downside was that it was 3 floors up as well, and of course, no elevator. We got a mortgage for it, didn’t really look any further because our minds were set on this apartment! One funny thing I remember was that on the day we went to sign the papers, we went to McD, and I had Mcnuggets for the first time in my life, and it gave me a very severe case of food poisoning. Really high fever, and I couldn’t keep anything inside. We signed the papers and we were ready to move in here! I already had a double bed, we both 3 identical cupboards, 2 for us, one for baby Sebastian. We also bought a nice cupboard to have Laura’s computer in! For the first part after Sebastian was born, she wanted it to be in his room. The thing was hell to put together, and I was sure that it didn’t have all the parts required, but after calling Ikea, we went through all the parts, and sure enough I had everything. I finally managed to assemble it. I had help with from my family with the moving, and a friend from work Dirk helped me move in. After seeing the apartment for the first time, we were kinda shocked at the state it was in. There was birdPOOP everywhere from the previous people and their birds, and they left big holes in the wall where they attached stuff to. The cabinets that we agreed with the previous inhabitants seamed in a VERY poor shape as well. They required some major work. I also had a big screen projection which was a LOT of fun to get up here LOL. It was not that it was too heavy or anything, but it was too big to handle. Dirk and I had no one else to help us, so we only slowly managed to get it up here. Dirk informed me right then that he wasn’t going to help me with it again if I moved anytime soon Last days of March in that year, we moved inhere. Very quickly the 3 flights of stairs became annoying to walk up and down all the time. I guess it kept us in shape, but for Laura it was becoming less and less fun, getting bigger with Sebastian all the time . It didn’t take us long to become annoyed at both the neighbors we had. Across the hall they always seemed to blast their music. It’s 6 years later, and I STILL don’t even know what they look like. I never see them! The neighbor next to us always played his XBOX games on a big speaker set, and it was always war next door. Shooting, explosions, or racing cars crashing. I am sure that added to irritation levels with Laura. Being pregnant, being sick a lot, walking up the stairs, it wasn’t easy, but at least we had our own place, and we could do whatever we want, whenever we wanted

School was becoming increasingly difficult, but Laura was lucky enough that she didn’t have to be there the whole school year! She got to get out of it a month earlier because she was pregnant. She had already passed that year, and wasn’t required to come back, so that worked! I am skipping a few months now to the end of the pregnancy! We had arranged that Laura’s mother was going to be here at that time, that helped! She could make all the comfort food for Laura and that surely strengthened here quite a bit. The due date came and went, and there was just no sign of Sebastian whatsoever. Laura’s mom was only going to be here for 3 weeks, and slowly there was a danger that Laura still didn’t have Sebastian and Laura’s mom had to go home already! One night she began leaking, and we went to the hospital, but they said it was nothing and we had to go home again!I wanted to film the delivery and checked the camera and the new tape that I had bought for it, and everything worked like a charm! Then it was time to be induced, because they don’t really allow you to go over more than 2 weeks. It’s not good for the mother or the baby! But when we were there, we had some OB tell us that we were wrong in the date of conception! That could not BE because we know exactly when Laura got pregnant and I am very confident that Sebastian has half of his gene pool from me, and not from someone in the US So we weren’t wrong. The guy did an ultra sound of Sebastian, measured some things and said that it was an average baby. We were put in a room, she got some hormone to be induced, and it was all going really slow. At least we got to hear the babies heartbeat for like half a day!Slowly we started to wonder about things, and they quickly made it known to us, that we had nothing to input in the delivery anymore. It was all the hospitals decisions, and the mom had nothing more to say about it anymore! Since the baby was going to be induced, all the mothers wishes flew out of the window! We had always objected to being cut, to have the vacuum used or to have the tangs used. But we would see them all hours later. Being induced was slow as Hell. It took hours and hours, and it didn’t really seem like there was any progress. We had one whole team that already went home because their day was over. Then we got a new crew, and we would see them go home as well! By now, she was dilating, and pain was more and more eminent. Laura always said that she didn’t want to use anything and have a natural birth, but everyone involved seem to want to force Laura into having the epidural. I have to admit that I helped, and so did Laura’s mother. It just seemed like the best thing to do at that time, even though Laura didn’t want to use any drugs. She had already had one drug in IV, and now some OB was going to give her the epidural, which Laura had agreed to take to make everyone shut up! Looking back she was glad that she got it, because I am sure that pain wise it was great! By then I filmed quite a few things already , but didn’t bother to check what I filmed , that should be a hint where I am going with this. Anyways, the final crew came in, and there was this young woman that had been on call all this time, and she finally decided that it was time to get the baby! Epidural was going to work off and that wouldn’t benefit anyone. All the events that happened after this , I shall never forget . Details maybe, but I saw far more than I ever desired to see . Laura was finally done and started pushing. They let her push for at least a whole 3 minutes when without any occasion, they got the vacuum, and the scissors because the baby needed to come out! Now, was there any medical reason for it? Was it obvious that the baby was in distress? I never heard anything about that but before I knew it, she was cut and the vacuum was used and the head was out. Of course, Sebastian, being difficult as he’s always been was positioned wrong and his nose was facing up. Of course that way, the shoulders are horizontal, and a woman is shaped more in a vertical way down there so that wouldn’t work. The DR that was doing the delivery grabbed his head and just turned it in like a 10th of a second, like you do if you would be BREAKING someones neck. This sounds like something from a horror movie, but I saw her do it! By then I was politely asked to stop filming, because they said that we didn’t want to ever see this at home. I can imagine!! It was blood and gore I tell you! Laura’s mom wasn’t even in the room anymore most of the time, she totally couldn’t cut it anymore and was more outside smoking than anything else. I couldn’t blame her, knowing what I all saw! So I just watched myself. She yanked Sebastian out, and a loud crack was noticed by us all. They were afraid that they dislocated her shoulder when she pulled him out! Sebastian was rushed in the other room where I snapped a few pics from him! He looked dead , almost purple, but he was OK… as OK as you can be after such a trauma! Shoulder possibly dislocated, 2 weeks overdue, WAY more heavy than anyone expected! He was like 4250 grams, and that’s a big baby! They told us that had they known how big he was, he should have been a c-section baby! But at least the recovery from it was a lot shorter now! Sebastian was brought upstairs to where the incubators with little babies were. His bloodsugar level was also not OK, so he was not allowed to leave the hospital anyways! I was quickly called downstairs again to be with Laura, because they couldn’t get the placenta out either. Right before they decided to surgically remove it, an OB managed to gently force it out of her body! Of course I was in heaven that everything was OK, and that I had a baby! Marleen was called in the middle of the night that everything was great, and she valued the phone call, even if it was very late for her Looking back on how that room looked when they were done with Laura , it was JUST a scene from a slasher horror movie! The delivering doctor was putting stitches in Laura’s downstairs, and I felt strange that she asked me to OK the results . I was like..whatever? As long as she doesn’t bleed anymore! They made an extra fold down there, so apparently putting stitches in someone was ALSO not this woman’s best quality.. I didn’t really think that she was fit to be a DR that delivers baby! She seemed like she was like 24 years old or something ,not older! Laura was OK however, and she was brought to a room! Laura’s mom and me went home for a little bit of sleep! Laura wasn’t going to sleep long, just an hour or 2 – 3 because they wake you up in the morning to have breakfast! I remember that on one of the more busy intersections in town, a Sheppard with ALL his sheep were crossing there, and I was like HUH? What now ? Sebastian was required to stay 48 hours. Laura wasn’t , but was allowed to stay there to be with the baby! My mom visited alone on Friday because dad was sick, and Marleen came on Saturday to visit the baby! On Sunday they finally got home and we had Sebastian all for ourselves! I filmed him when we got home with him, and we immediately looked back at it and it worked, but later when we wanted to watch the whole birth, everything was black, and the camera didn’t record anything, but that part when I tried it while still at home ! Strange huh? I was of course glad that we had Sebastian home now, but you know..babies aren’t really my thing, I love to cuddle with them, as plenty of pictures will show, but you don’t have much conversation with a baby, and not too much interaction either, so I always said that I would spend more time with Sebastian when he got older, which I do Laura’s mom had to fly back a day or two after, so we brought her to the airport, I am not sure which, but it was probably Brussels or Dusseldorf? I am sure that she will have thought back to the time in the hospital and I bet she wished that she came AFTER the baby was born. Having two c-sections, she never got to experience a birth.. If that is good or bad, I can’t really say? Fact is that when they put a zipper in your belly after they gently yank the baby out of it’s protective cover, you take a lot longer to heal, and often stay in the hospitals for several days up to week, so you don’t really get to enjoy much time with your baby then either! I remember that Laura didn’t really feel that she was a mother yet. She only enjoyed Sebastian on her chest for at least a full minute before they rushed him out, so that’s not the usual BONDING that you are required to do, but quickly she became a very protective mommy! Nobody touch my baby, go wash your hands, and don’t anyone dare smoking around my baby!

We had to go to Amsterdam to the American embassy to report Sebastian there. Rules were strict already about open eyes on the passport pictures, so that was hard to do, since Sebastian wasn’t very old? We got his passport ready though, and had a trip to the US planned already! Travelling with Sebastian means that we didn’t have to pay for a seat for him, so it was very affordable. But no seat also means that you can’t strap him in a car seat either! The parents have to hold the baby on their laps, and that is FAR from easy with a 3 month old. Sebastian was not difficult or anything, I think he was a little sick so he got some baby cough medicine and that made him sleepy most of the flight, but it still wasn’t easy to deal with ! I think UA or AA also had a basket thingy where you could put the baby in for sleeping, that worked, but we had to switch seats with some people for it! I don’t remember much about the US visit itself though I am sure we did some more baby shopping, and Laura’s family was smitten by our little friend (seriously, who wouldn’t be with such a charmer) . We went to Des Moines with Laura’s brother and his wife to go to adventure land and we got a call from Laura’s mom there (or we called her) and found out that Sebastian had a really high fever! After adventure land we hurried home but still visited a Babies are US there after we ate across the street. At Babies R us we bought some outfits I am sure this is blogged somewhere already, haha! After we got home we noticed that Sebastian had like a 41 degrees fever, so we called some ER’s over there to see if we could bring him there. Of course, since Sebastian is dutch, he falls under my insurance, and no one in the US knows how things work, so we ALL figured that I just needed to show my card and that would be it? But that wasn’t it we later found out. They did ALL sorts of useless tests on Sebastian and hours later they said they found nothing, he just had a respiratory virus, to give him some Tylenol and he would be OK. Well THANKS, you could have said that immediately! We had to SIT on Sebastian basically to keep him still so that they could draw blood from both his arms, and they even got pee from him by going up his you know what! What cruel people to do that when they knew that they weren’t going to find anything interesting? They said later that almost always, babies get a high fever because it’s their first time… They couldn’t just have told us that? What did think, that we were some Munchhausen by proxy parents that did something to their baby so that they could bring it to the ER? Anyways, at home later they told us that our medical insurance wouldn’t have okay-ed us to go to the hospital and they weren’t going to pay the bill. Well, OK….you don’t pay, but we don’t pay either. So the quite expensive bill never got paid.. Poor Sebastian huh? He quickly was OK though. Laura called her cousin that Sebastian was sick, and since his baby was going to be there, she didn’t want him to catch whatever Sebastian had. Laura’s cousin said it was OK to come! When we came there, we heard loud coughing and apparently HIS baby was sick too, had the CROUP, which you can easily spread to other babies, so why didn’t have the courtesy to not mention this to US shall always be a mystery to us! We flew back again to the Netherlands and continued our lives! I don’t think there’s anything that year worth mentioning, but I have been known to be wrong, so I might add something more later!

At the end of 2002 we went to the US again for Christmas vacation! It’s always fun to be there for Christmas! At least over there it used to be so that you had a 100% chance of a white Christmas! Not that I was looking for that, but Laura was used to that. I don’t really remember much about that vacation, only that we did a LOT of baby shopping there! Strollers over here in the Netherlands seemed so scandalously overpriced compared to US strollers. So we figured that we would just buy one there and ship it here. This would bite us in the asses later on, but we were totally ignorant of that. We bought a lot of bottles there, with pooh themes on them, not knowing anything about that stuff that they discovered now is in clear plastic and can be scraped off the inside of the bottle by a bottle brush .Celebrating the old year / new year is always fun in the US as well. When the clock strikes midnight, nothing changes… You don’t hear a single BANG outside! Sure in big cities like NY they have big fireworks, but your average US city doesn’t do anything like that! Besides it was very cold outside again, so who would want that? So we found the PERFECT deal on a Graco Winnie the Pooh stroller there at the local walmart, and we were going to get it! $120 for a stroller WITH the car seat for in the car as well. If that wasn’t an awesome deal, I wouldn’t know what was. So we had lots and lots of extra stuff to bring with us! We had to keep an eye on the weight restrictions and we had to weigh everything! We threw in some extra stuff with the stroller and just used the whole box as as suitcase , that fitted the weight restriction. I have no idea how we thought that this would all fit in the car here in the Netherlands, but fate helped us out a little bit there. The flight back must have been a problematic one, more like usual, and when we arrived in Brussels, we waited and waited, and I think none of our suitcases made it here, it probably didn’t make it in Chicago, and we got to go home without any luggage but the stuff we had as carry on. It makes things easier I guess, because a messenger delivers the suitcases for free at home, usually the day after! But there’s always a chance that customs wants to look at them, and add a free bill in it for all the stuff you are illegally importing in the country! I don’t know how that works though, I mean, I don’t live in Belgium, so why would they care? How would Dutch customs know about it if we landed in Brussels? Anyways, our stuff made it home at my parents the day after! The stroller looked amazing, and we were so glad to have something that no one else had over here! It didn’t look cheap or anything, it looked very special because we didn’t have any strollers like this over here! Later we discovered that you can buy strollers cheap, but that means the quality of the stroller is what you pay for, and I don’t think the stroller was used for more than a year! Americans lead an ultra pampered and sheltered live. They use cars to drive to and from the mall, and there’s never any obstacles like we have on the streets here, so our stroller clearly wasn’t made for riding on our streets, things broke off, it was bumpy as hell, in short, it was a bad judgement call. More about strollers later!

We had started to look for an apartment , because it was essential that we were going to have a place of our own soon, for every body’s sanity If Laura had a lot of baby clothes to get washed, it wouldn’t have worked if my mother was still so eh, uptight about doing the laundry. We quickly checked what kind of mortgage would be possible for me, and that wasn’t so bad, there were plenty of things to chose from! We specifically looked for an apartment, but looking back on that, we should have never chose that! We found one place online, and we made an appointment to go look at it. The price was like 90k, and we had an eerie feeling walking up the stairs there! It was 3rd floor, we had all these foreign names on the doors, that made us already feel like it was wrong to be considering that place. When the realtor opened the door, there was NOTHING inside. No carpet, nothing on the walls, the kitchen was completely removed. This was nothing for us. I told the realtor that I wasn’t even considering it if he knocked 10K of the price, and of course, he wasn’t considering that either, so that first encounter left us kind of wondering if we were ever going to get a good deal for the money that we were wanting to spend.. Then a little bit later we saw an add for the apartment we currently live in. Immediately we loved this place. It had a bath, which we valued a lot, and mostly , places in our price range just had a shower and nothing else. The downside was that it was 3 floors up as well, and of course, no elevator. We got a mortgage for it, didn’t really look any further because our minds were set on this apartment! One funny thing I remember was that on the day we went to sign the papers, we went to McD, and I had Mcnuggets for the first time in my life, and it gave me a very severe case of food poisoning. Really high fever, and I couldn’t keep anything inside. We signed the papers and we were ready to move in here! I already had a double bed, we both 3 identical cupboards, 2 for us, one for baby Sebastian. We also bought a nice cupboard to have Laura’s computer in! For the first part after Sebastian was born, she wanted it to be in his room. The thing was hell to put together, and I was sure that it didn’t have all the parts required, but after calling Ikea, we went through all the parts, and sure enough I had everything. I finally managed to assemble it. I had help with from my family with the moving, and a friend from work Dirk helped me move in. After seeing the apartment for the first time, we were kinda shocked at the state it was in. There was birdPOOP everywhere from the previous people and their birds, and they left big holes in the wall where they attached stuff to. The cabinets that we agreed with the previous inhabitants seamed in a VERY poor shape as well. They required some major work. I also had a big screen projection which was a LOT of fun to get up here LOL. It was not that it was too heavy or anything, but it was too big to handle. Dirk and I had no one else to help us, so we only slowly managed to get it up here. Dirk informed me right then that he wasn’t going to help me with it again if I moved anytime soon Last days of March in that year, we moved inhere. Very quickly the 3 flights of stairs became annoying to walk up and down all the time. I guess it kept us in shape, but for Laura it was becoming less and less fun, getting bigger with Sebastian all the time . It didn’t take us long to become annoyed at both the neighbors we had. Across the hall they always seemed to blast their music. It’s 6 years later, and I STILL don’t even know what they look like. I never see them! The neighbor next to us always played his XBOX games on a big speaker set, and it was always war next door. Shooting, explosions, or racing cars crashing. I am sure that added to irritation levels with Laura. Being pregnant, being sick a lot, walking up the stairs, it wasn’t easy, but at least we had our own place, and we could do whatever we want, whenever we wanted

School was becoming increasingly difficult, but Laura was lucky enough that she didn’t have to be there the whole school year! She got to get out of it a month earlier because she was pregnant. She had already passed that year, and wasn’t required to come back, so that worked! I am skipping a few months now to the end of the pregnancy! We had arranged that Laura’s mother was going to be here at that time, that helped! She could make all the comfort food for Laura and that surely strengthened here quite a bit. The due date came and went, and there was just no sign of Sebastian whatsoever. Laura’s mom was only going to be here for 3 weeks, and slowly there was a danger that Laura still didn’t have Sebastian and Laura’s mom had to go home already! One night she began leaking, and we went to the hospital, but they said it was nothing and we had to go home again!I wanted to film the delivery and checked the camera and the new tape that I had bought for it, and everything worked like a charm! Then it was time to be induced, because they don’t really allow you to go over more than 2 weeks. It’s not good for the mother or the baby! But when we were there, we had some OB tell us that we were wrong in the date of conception! That could not BE because we know exactly when Laura got pregnant and I am very confident that Sebastian has half of his gene pool from me, and not from someone in the US So we weren’t wrong. The guy did an ultra sound of Sebastian, measured some things and said that it was an average baby. We were put in a room, she got some hormone to be induced, and it was all going really slow. At least we got to hear the babies heartbeat for like half a day!Slowly we started to wonder about things, and they quickly made it known to us, that we had nothing to input in the delivery anymore. It was all the hospitals decisions, and the mom had nothing more to say about it anymore! Since the baby was going to be induced, all the mothers wishes flew out of the window! We had always objected to being cut, to have the vacuum used or to have the tangs used. But we would see them all hours later. Being induced was slow as Hell. It took hours and hours, and it didn’t really seem like there was any progress. We had one whole team that already went home because their day was over. Then we got a new crew, and we would see them go home as well! By now, she was dilating, and pain was more and more eminent. Laura always said that she didn’t want to use anything and have a natural birth, but everyone involved seem to want to force Laura into having the epidural. I have to admit that I helped, and so did Laura’s mother. It just seemed like the best thing to do at that time, even though Laura didn’t want to use any drugs. She had already had one drug in IV, and now some OB was going to give her the epidural, which Laura had agreed to take to make everyone shut up! Looking back she was glad that she got it, because I am sure that pain wise it was great! By then I filmed quite a few things already , but didn’t bother to check what I filmed , that should be a hint where I am going with this. Anyways, the final crew came in, and there was this young woman that had been on call all this time, and she finally decided that it was time to get the baby! Epidural was going to work off and that wouldn’t benefit anyone. All the events that happened after this , I shall never forget . Details maybe, but I saw far more than I ever desired to see . Laura was finally done and started pushing. They let her push for at least a whole 3 minutes when without any occasion, they got the vacuum, and the scissors because the baby needed to come out! Now, was there any medical reason for it? Was it obvious that the baby was in distress? I never heard anything about that but before I knew it, she was cut and the vacuum was used and the head was out. Of course, Sebastian, being difficult as he’s always been was positioned wrong and his nose was facing up. Of course that way, the shoulders are horizontal, and a woman is shaped more in a vertical way down there so that wouldn’t work. The DR that was doing the delivery grabbed his head and just turned it in like a 10th of a second, like you do if you would be BREAKING someones neck. This sounds like something from a horror movie, but I saw her do it! By then I was politely asked to stop filming, because they said that we didn’t want to ever see this at home. I can imagine!! It was blood and gore I tell you! Laura’s mom wasn’t even in the room anymore most of the time, she totally couldn’t cut it anymore and was more outside smoking than anything else. I couldn’t blame her, knowing what I all saw! So I just watched myself. She yanked Sebastian out, and a loud crack was noticed by us all. They were afraid that they dislocated her shoulder when she pulled him out! Sebastian was rushed in the other room where I snapped a few pics from him! He looked dead , almost purple, but he was OK… as OK as you can be after such a trauma! Shoulder possibly dislocated, 2 weeks overdue, WAY more heavy than anyone expected! He was like 4250 grams, and that’s a big baby! They told us that had they known how big he was, he should have been a c-section baby! But at least the recovery from it was a lot shorter now! Sebastian was brought upstairs to where the incubators with little babies were. His bloodsugar level was also not OK, so he was not allowed to leave the hospital anyways! I was quickly called downstairs again to be with Laura, because they couldn’t get the placenta out either. Right before they decided to surgically remove it, an OB managed to gently force it out of her body! Of course I was in heaven that everything was OK, and that I had a baby! Marleen was called in the middle of the night that everything was great, and she valued the phone call, even if it was very late for her Looking back on how that room looked when they were done with Laura , it was JUST a scene from a slasher horror movie! The delivering doctor was putting stitches in Laura’s downstairs, and I felt strange that she asked me to OK the results . I was like..whatever? As long as she doesn’t bleed anymore! They made an extra fold down there, so apparently putting stitches in someone was ALSO not this woman’s best quality.. I didn’t really think that she was fit to be a DR that delivers baby! She seemed like she was like 24 years old or something ,not older! Laura was OK however, and she was brought to a room! Laura’s mom and me went home for a little bit of sleep! Laura wasn’t going to sleep long, just an hour or 2 – 3 because they wake you up in the morning to have breakfast! I remember that on one of the more busy intersections in town, a Sheppard with ALL his sheep were crossing there, and I was like HUH? What now ? Sebastian was required to stay 48 hours. Laura wasn’t , but was allowed to stay there to be with the baby! My mom visited alone on Friday because dad was sick, and Marleen came on Saturday to visit the baby! On Sunday they finally got home and we had Sebastian all for ourselves! I filmed him when we got home with him, and we immediately looked back at it and it worked, but later when we wanted to watch the whole birth, everything was black, and the camera didn’t record anything, but that part when I tried it while still at home ! Strange huh? I was of course glad that we had Sebastian home now, but you know..babies aren’t really my thing, I love to cuddle with them, as plenty of pictures will show, but you don’t have much conversation with a baby, and not too much interaction either, so I always said that I would spend more time with Sebastian when he got older, which I do Laura’s mom had to fly back a day or two after, so we brought her to the airport, I am not sure which, but it was probably Brussels or Dusseldorf? I am sure that she will have thought back to the time in the hospital and I bet she wished that she came AFTER the baby was born. Having two c-sections, she never got to experience a birth.. If that is good or bad, I can’t really say? Fact is that when they put a zipper in your belly after they gently yank the baby out of it’s protective cover, you take a lot longer to heal, and often stay in the hospitals for several days up to week, so you don’t really get to enjoy much time with your baby then either! I remember that Laura didn’t really feel that she was a mother yet. She only enjoyed Sebastian on her chest for at least a full minute before they rushed him out, so that’s not the usual BONDING that you are required to do, but quickly she became a very protective mommy! Nobody touch my baby, go wash your hands, and don’t anyone dare smoking around my baby!

We had to go to Amsterdam to the American embassy to report Sebastian there. Rules were strict already about open eyes on the passport pictures, so that was hard to do, since Sebastian wasn’t very old? We got his passport ready though, and had a trip to the US planned already! Travelling with Sebastian means that we didn’t have to pay for a seat for him, so it was very affordable. But no seat also means that you can’t strap him in a car seat either! The parents have to hold the baby on their laps, and that is FAR from easy with a 3 month old. Sebastian was not difficult or anything, I think he was a little sick so he got some baby cough medicine and that made him sleepy most of the flight, but it still wasn’t easy to deal with ! I think UA or AA also had a basket thingy where you could put the baby in for sleeping, that worked, but we had to switch seats with some people for it! I don’t remember much about the US visit itself though I am sure we did some more baby shopping, and Laura’s family was smitten by our little friend (seriously, who wouldn’t be with such a charmer) . We went to Des Moines with Laura’s brother and his wife to go to adventure land and we got a call from Laura’s mom there (or we called her) and found out that Sebastian had a really high fever! After adventure land we hurried home but still visited a Babies are US there after we ate across the street. At Babies R us we bought some outfits I am sure this is blogged somewhere already, haha! After we got home we noticed that Sebastian had like a 41 degrees fever, so we called some ER’s over there to see if we could bring him there. Of course, since Sebastian is dutch, he falls under my insurance, and no one in the US knows how things work, so we ALL figured that I just needed to show my card and that would be it? But that wasn’t it we later found out. They did ALL sorts of useless tests on Sebastian and hours later they said they found nothing, he just had a respiratory virus, to give him some Tylenol and he would be OK. Well THANKS, you could have said that immediately! We had to SIT on Sebastian basically to keep him still so that they could draw blood from both his arms, and they even got pee from him by going up his you know what! What cruel people to do that when they knew that they weren’t going to find anything interesting? They said later that almost always, babies get a high fever because it’s their first time… They couldn’t just have told us that? What did think, that we were some Munchhausen by proxy parents that did something to their baby so that they could bring it to the ER? Anyways, at home later they told us that our medical insurance wouldn’t have okay-ed us to go to the hospital and they weren’t going to pay the bill. Well, OK….you don’t pay, but we don’t pay either. So the quite expensive bill never got paid.. Poor Sebastian huh? He quickly was OK though. Laura called her cousin that Sebastian was sick, and since his baby was going to be there, she didn’t want him to catch whatever Sebastian had. Laura’s cousin said it was OK to come! When we came there, we heard loud coughing and apparently HIS baby was sick too, had the CROUP, which you can easily spread to other babies, so why didn’t have the courtesy to not mention this to US shall always be a mystery to us! We flew back again to the Netherlands and continued our lives! I don’t think there’s anything that year worth mentioning, but I have been known to be wrong, so I might add something more later!