Courtney

That next year, we had a couple more pretty significant connections with our friends, Eric and Marie Hughes. One year to the day after Alexis was born, they also had a baby girl. Then they also rented a townhome in our neighborhood. 

After a few years, our landlords wanted to sell the townhome and they offered it to us. Laura didn’t want to buy because, from what we had heard at the time, townhomes didn’t resell very well. I wasn’t concerned about that. I just wanted the stability of having something that we could call our own, somewhere we could raise a family and be established.

I was excited about the opportunity. Once again, I wasn’t grasping for middle-class status but it felt like an arrival of sorts, a bit of permanence. In one sense, some uncertainty in this life is good to help recognize our dependence on God but it can also be unsettling and I was grateful for the provision. I also saw it as a nice-sized, manageable home. I didn’t want to get something too big, with all the extra costs and time associated with that. I thought of this as our final stop. While neither Laura’s nor my expectations would turn out to be correct, we signed the seemingly endless papers and the townhome was ours - or at least our bank's.

By this time, we also had a second child on the way. I wanted another girl. This time our doctor did do an ultrasound because Laura had had a miscarriage in between and he wanted to make sure everything was okay. All was okay, especially for me because, once again, we found out we were having a girl. 

Her name was to be Courtney and she was also going to be another good-sized baby. As the due date got closer, there was a potential issue. Courtney was breech, which means her head was facing up and she needed to turn around for the birth. But as she was so big, it was questionable whether she would. There was also a danger that if she did turn, the umbilical cord would wrap around her neck. We decided to go ahead with a cesarean section.

I was in the operating room for the surgery. They gave Laura an epidural so she was awake but they had a sheet up at about her chest so she couldn’t see what was happening. I was sitting on a chair by Laura’s top half. I am pretty squeamish when it comes to surgeries and blood and stuff so I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see what was going on down below either. I took a peek or two until the doctor told me to either stay on one side of the sheet or the other for non-contamination. I just stayed up top and held Laura’s hand.

Courtney was 10 pounds, three ounces and kind of bloated. She had a lot of fluid in her lungs so she had to be patted for a while to bring it up. I always say she was so big because she didn’t get the fluid squeezed out of her as she came out. I had liked those front-lawn stork baby announcements ever since I first saw them so I had one of those waiting for Laura when we got home.

Stork Announcement


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