Ann vs. Jason

By: Ann

I just wanted to give everyone an update on the stuff that’s been going on here. Last night we had a little scare. I’m currently home now, newly discharged from the hospital. But Jason, the baby, and I are all okay.

Around 3:30pm or so I had this feeling of nausea and clamminess at work, but I thought it was just my sugar getting low. I alleviated this feeling by having my “just-in-case” supply of scrumptious corn pops cereal that I had on hand. I immediately felt better eating that. However, 2 hours later, I started having that same feeling, only this time I felt really out of it. It wasn’t like I had a particularly busy day at work. In fact, my day at work was a little on the slow side.

We were planning on going to our last childbirth class last night, so I thought that maybe it was just me dreading the thought of going back outside for another long night of class. Jason proceeded to start to eat dinner, and all I could do was just stare at my food. The very idea of putting anything in my mouth seemed to make my nausea a little worse. The clamminess and nausea then became worse. Then I blacked out. According to Jason, I still had my eyes open, but I just stared into blank space. I was unresponsive to Jason for a few seconds. When I finally came to, I was very confused and wondering why Jason was yelling my name insistently. He asked me if I was okay. I just said that I felt really hot, sweaty, and nauseous. Then I blacked out again. Jason called my name several times and then I finally came to again, very confused. It was then, with some other alarming symptoms, that my husband decided it was time that we should go to the hospital…or at least call my doctor/OB.

The OB on call called us back and got my information. She didn’t seem too concerned at first and just told me to take a 30 minute walk and hydrate myself. Which we did. On our walk, we also were trolling for any drug store that sold litmus paper in order to see if my water had broken or not. Funny thing is, many pharmacists (hopefully I was talking to techs and not the actual pharmacist) did not know what litmus paper was. So, for future reference, if you’re ever in the need of litmus paper, it needs to be ordered from the pharmacy first, and you need to spell it and define it several times for people to know what you’re talking about. It’s not something that they have on hand, as I was told by my doula. Also, during the walk I started to have some tightening in my abdomen that I was just attributing to braxton hicks every 20-40 minutes.

After the walk, the OB on-call called back because she thought about my situation even more and was starting to get a little concerned. We decided that it would be a good idea to check in at the hospital. Jason made fun of me because while he was frantically running around the house trying to pack the “birthing bag”, I was frantically trying to find a number of someone I could reach at work to let them know I wasn’t going to be in to work today.

So, when we got to the hospital, they did the usual poking and prodding and gathered from the fetal monitor that I was having contractions every 2-3 minutes pretty regularly. I wasn’t feeling most of them, just the really big ones every 5-10 minutes or so. These didn’t hurt at all, just lots of pressure. They settled us into our hospital room for the night, pumped me up with lots of IV fluids, and gave me a shot of terbutaline to simmer my uterus down. The terbutaline did help for the rest of the night, but upon being discharged, the monitor was showing that I was having the contractions again. It wasn’t doing anything to progress labor, so they sent me home, along with a neurology consultation appointment that I have tomorrow for the blacking out. I also have a follow-up appointment with my OB on Friday to give me the good bill of health to return back to work. So…no work for Ann for the rest of the week.

Jason was so great throughout it all. He’s the best. I felt so sorry for him because he had to sleep in a chair for most of the night (no sleeper chairs, just a regular chair). I made him finally hop in bed with me to have him at least get some kind of sleep during the night. I maybe got 2 hours of sleep. There was a channel called the “newborn channel’ that was really addicting. All the stuff that I don’t have in my pregnancy books was on here about being a new parent.

This all came about so quick. I felt absolutely fine over the weekend. I did have a busier than normal weekend, but I handled it fine. Looking back, however, I did have the biggest braxton hicks contraction ever that lasted about 10-15 seconds long on Sunday right before seeing the redwood trees at Henry Cowell State Park. The walk that we took wasn’t a long hike. I don’t do hikes any more with my buddha belly and all.

Okay. Here are some pictures of the pregnancy progression. I haven’t been as good about it as I wanted to be. Maybe next pregnancy I’ll be better.

13 weeks

16 weeks

24 weeks

30 weeks

33 weeks...the day before the hospital stay

Jason told me to make a sick face

I really was okay

By Jason

One of the strangest things about coming to work for Google has been the fact that I can’t really tell people what I do at work.  That includes friends and family.  The work my team does is visible, in a way, to thousands of people every day but if we’re doing a good job they don’t even know it.

So when friends and family (i.e. you all reading this here blog) ask me about my job I end up saying a lot of vague, general stuff.  I feel bad, like I’m being evasive.  The best description I could come up with for Grandma was that I was the “Janitor of the Internet.”

So today, I’m happy to say I can actually share something with you all:  I wrote a post on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.  There you can read about the sorts of things that I think about all day.

A few other quick updates:

• Ann and I had our third anniversary on Wednesday.  We walked over to the Garden Fresh Vegetarian Restaurant for dinner.  Our trip to Monterey and Carmel counts as our big anniversary celebration.

• We currently have 560 votes in our baby name poll.  Some of the more interesting write-ins include Zora, Neeti, Ea, and Saskia for girls and Pelayo, Kaden, Nintendo, and Agitation for boys.

• I changed the way comments are set up so it’s easier for you to comment on the blog.  Just type away. If you read our updates via email just click on the headline at the top to go to the site and comment.  We have to approve everything before it will appear, and I have some automatic anti-spam stuff in place too (see my Google blog post).

By Jason

First off, thanks for all the baby name votes – follow this link to my blog to see some of the results.  Second, a disclaimer – this is yet another photo-heavy travelog post from Jason.  I know that it seems like all Ann and I do is take trips, but the fact is we only write about the interesting stuff.  It’s hard to create awhole post about running errands and catching up on laundry.

We had some folks in town from the Dublin office and they wanted to see Yosemite, so we took a quick trip last weekend to do some hiking and camping.  Ann promised not to have the baby that weekend and told me to go, she’s basically the best wife ever.

Because of bad Bay Area traffic we didn’t get out to the park until after dark.  We stayed the first night at Housekeeping Camp, which is somewhere between tent camping and staying in cabins.  We ended up stuffing eight people into one “cabin” (really three concrete walls and a tent roof) that should really only fit five.  But we did take a quick night hike down to a footbridge over the Merced River, where I was able to play with my new camera’s long exposures:

The first stop was Vernal Falls.  In the spring this waterfall overflows and causes mist to drift down the valley, but in the late summer it’s a lot more reserved.  You can see a bit of the rainbow at the bottom in the picture below.

Here we are at the top of Vernal Falls.  Since we got a bit of a later start, this was a good point to stop for lunch.  We introduced Alvar, Iban and Juliane to two great American traditional foods: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and beef jerky.

Right above the falls is a broad area where the water flows over the bare granite, creating a natural waterslide.  In the spring it’s pretty dangerous but the river was so dry that it was only an inch or so deep.

Here is the view of Nevada Falls on the way up the trail.  This was a pretty nice hike, I would recommend it to anyone is decent shape (except Ann, at least not for a month or so yet).  There’s a lot of uphill hiking and switchbacks, but it’s not so relentless as the hike up to Yosemite Falls.

Here’s the view from the top of Nevada Falls – it’s really spectacular, definitely worth the walk.  This is about the halfway point for the trail to climb Half Dome.  I think next year we’ll get some people together and do the whole thing.

Here’s Mark, the new guy at work, taking a look down to the valley floor.

We decided to take the John Muir trail back, along the other side of the valley.  You can just barely see Nevada Falls on the right.

Here’s a view of Liberty Cap and Mt. Broderick with Nevada Falls at the bottom right.

We stayed the second night at Curry Village, which I would recommend to just about anyone.  It’s not as posh as the yurts we stayed in on my first trip, but the tent-cabins are really nice and the bathrooms are clean with private shower stalls.  The only drawback is that you can’t have a campfire – the cabins are way too close together.

The next day we took a drive up to Glacier Point, which provides a panoramic view of the Yosemite Valley and mountains.  Here I am with Half Dome in the background.  I made sure to arrange the camera angle to make myself look like some kind of crazy daredevil, but it’s nowhere near as dangerous as it looks.

Here’s a more straightforward pose at the top of Glacier point:

That’s it for now.  I have a truly ridiculous number of photos in Flickr, with lots of landscapes and nature shots if you’re into that sort of thing.  I’ve also made some large-scale panoramic photos that I’ll put up soon too.

Edit:  Reid brought along his GPS so he could generate a trip report.  Here’s a graph of our hike, you can see the full data at Motionbased.

By Jason

Many of you have asked about possible baby names.  We’ve got some ideas but we’re still fairly undecided.

Since I work for Google it only seems natural to let everyone vote on baby names over the web.  So fill out the form below and hit submit to let us know what you think we should name little Morrison child number 1.*

If you can’t see the form, follow this link to fill it out.

*We do, of course, reserve the right to completely ignore the results and name the baby whatever we feel like on a whim at the last minute. Still, isn’t this fun?

By Jason

Since last weekend was a long weekend we decided to take a trip down the coast to see Monterey and Carmel.  The hotels were pretty booked up (and expensive) so we stayed in nearby Salinas.  Salinas is famous for…  well, not much, except maybe John Steinbeck.  Also, according to Wikipedia Craig Kilborn worked there as a sportscaster before he hosted The Daily Show.

One fun fact not listed in Wikipedia is that there are two Best Western Hotels on the same street, separated by one other hotel.  We almost went into the wrong one before we realized the address wasn’t quite right.

Overall I think we would give Salinas a thumbs-up – it was pretty close to everything we wanted to go see, and we had some really good Mexican at El Zacatecano.  At the end of our trip we also found out that there’s a free shuttle between Salinas and Monterey so we could have even taken advantage of that.

A quick warning:  this will be a pretty photo-heavy post, since I got a new camera, a Nikon D60.  I’ve been thinking about getting a new camera for a while now but I really wanted to get a DSLR before the baby came – that way I can better handle low light and motion.

Our first stop was Monterey, where we visited Old Fisherman’s Wharf.  There was a nice little Greek Festival going on but unfortunately we had already eaten.  The view from the wharf is nice:

We kept passing places that had caramel corn, salt-water taffy, cotton candy, and other sugary goodness.  Ann captured me trying to get the last sugar fibers off the cotton candy stick.

The wharf was worth a stop, probably a bit more touristy than we would have liked but a good place to pick up whale watching tours and such.

On the drive back I couldn’t resist playing with my new camera.  It gives me a lot more options, for example 4-second long exposures at night:

Ann was pretty worn out:

The next day we drove down to Carmel-on-the-Sea with then intention of taking some pseudo-artistic pregnancy photos on the beach.

I like the way this one turned out, specifically the low angle and the way the breeze has Ann’s skirt moving in to the middle of the frame:

We were hoping to pick up a long flowing wrap or a sari to make better use of the ocean breeze but the stores were selling nothing but jackets and hoodies.  I understand that they stock things seasonally, but I can’t imagine we’re the only people on the planet who once in a while want to buy a summer item in summer or a winter item in winter.

The waves were fun to watch but it was in the 60s and the water was pretty cold anyway, so we didn’t do any swimming.

Carmel is a nice little town, it started as an artist community and still has that feel, though the houses are all ridiculously expensive and the shops sell $400 purses and whatnot.

We followed the coast a bit further down to the Carmel River State Beach and took more pictures.  This is the estuary where the river meets the pacific.  The water from the river is clear and and very warm and calm compared to the ocean just a few feet away, so it looked like a great place for little kids to play.

A fun picture of Ann’s shadow:

Our next stop was the top of Jacks Peak, the highest point on the Monterey Peninsula.  You’re able to drive pretty close to the top, but Ann made it up the rest of the trail, so we’re going to say she officially climbed a mountain while pregnant.

Ann gives me a classic skeptical look:

A view of Monterey from the peak.  I made a very large vertical panorama of the view looking towards Carmel, too.

Here’s Ann smiling.  The park was nice, though full of poison oak.  There were a couple places that were supposedly filled with fossils but I didn’t see any, which was disappointing.  Ann thought maybe they were there, but I just didn’t notice them.  I assured her that I know what a fossil looks like.

The next stop on our trip was Cannery Row in Monterey.  There they have not one, but two Thomas Kinkade stores, which meant that I had to throw up twice.  Other than that it was nice, touristy like the wharf but a little bit upscale (meaning more expensive).  We didn’t go to the aquarium, so we’ll have to head back some time to check it out.

It was getting late so we decided to head to the beach for the sunset.  Monterey faces north so we had to go up the coast a bit.  There are miles and miles of beaches but not as many access points as you would think.  We ended up in Sand City, on a big dune overlooking a beautiful beach.

Here’s the sunset.  Because of the often cloudless sky and general haze off the ocean, I’d have to say we have better sunsets in Cleveland, but I’m not complaining.

On Monday we drive back up the coast toward home.  Here’s Ann at the Moss Landing beach.  It was too chilly do take any artsy photos here.

These tiny birds are sanderlings.  They’re pretty entertaining to watch, because when the water retreats they all rush down the beach the look for food, but when a wave comes in they all run back up.

Here’s a photo of the Elkhorn Slough wetlands near Moss landing, this is supposed to be a great place for birdwatching.

We went home and had a little cookout with hotdogs and a greek salad.  We’re probably going to go ahead and count this trip as an early anniversary, too.

I’ve got more photos at Flickr.  You can also see the photos from our trip mapped out by following this link.

Next up, an update on baby names and some democracy, so stay tuned!

By Jason

Before I write about our trip last weekend to Carmel and Monterey I wanted to write a little about the baby shower from a guy’s point of view.  While the various shower activities were taking place, my dad, my brother, Ann’s brother, Ryan G., and I were in attendance, but segregated into our own man room in the back.

Traditionally baby showers are ladies-only but since we came in from out of town it made sense for me to stick around and visit with friends and family.  To be honest it wasn’t that strange – my mom organized it and she knows that Ann isn’t into the whole super girly glitter and unicorns thing, so it was just a big party visiting with a lot of people.

Another nice thing about the trip was seeing by brother, who surprised us by flying in from Boston. He seems pretty excited about the baby too. Probably because he will teach it how to be mischievous.