Life is never dull around here with all these cats. I'm laughing so hard, I can barely breath. We had some flies in the house we couldn't get rid of, so we hung some of those sticky fly strips to catch them. One was hanging on the edge of a shelf over the computer. Well, Honey jumped up there and got the fly strip stuck to his fur. He jumped down, trying to get it off, and pulled the whole thing down off the shelf. He ran in the kitchen, and the fly strip stuck to a plastic Gladware container I had set on the floor for the cats to eat something out of. He was running circles around through the kitchen and living room, hissing at the items that were giving him trouble. I was trying to catch him, but he was moving too fast. Steve and I were laughing so hard, I had tears rolling down my face. Maybe those of you with cats can picture it.

  This is Honey.

I thought I would give an update on Heather. She is in the hospital and it looks like she is going to be having a baby, probably in the morning. She is 30 weeks and 1 day along.

When I picked her up this morning, she said her lower back was killing her. I didn't tell her then that it sounded like she was having contractions. We were at the doctor's office until noon, and the doctor had to go deliver a baby. So we went and had lunch. She finally saw the doctor around 1:15. Her blood pressure has been running in the area of 170/113. Her platelets are dropping and she has proteinuria (Google it if you don't understand). She has toxemia and gestational diabetes. She had gained 9 lbs in just one week. You know what a surgical glove looks like inflated? That's what her feet look like.

The doctor sent her straight to the hospital. Heather had expected that would happen, but she cried. She has been in the hospital 4 times now with this pregnancy. The nurse hooked her up to the fetal monitor. Heather kept saying, "I'm having this pain real low."   She doesn't know what contractions feel like because her son was born by emergency C-section at 25 weeks (she had Toxemia with him, too). She never went into labor. I watched the monitor and finally told her she was having more than just Braxton-Hicks contractions. Her husband, Justin, was out of town, so she called him and told him to come home. I waited till about 6:00 p.m., till her parents got there. I didn't want to leave her alone because she was scared. The doctor came in and told her she had really expected to deliver this baby tonight, but she was going to do more lab work at 9:00 and see how it looked. Then she would decide in the morning if she would go ahead and do the C-section. They want to hold off as long as possible.

But she won't go that long. She was having harder, more regular contractions when I left. When we first got there, the nurse wasn't sure she was having real contractions. By the time I left, she had come back in and asked if Heather was needing any pain medication for the contractions. So they were starting to believe they were real. They gave her a steroid shot (and will give another 12 hours later) to mature the baby's lungs.

The neonatologist (the premie doctor) came in and talked with her to let her know what to expect. For some of you ladies who might be interested, I believe the neonatologist was Filipino. I liked her very much - she spent a long time talking and making sure Heather knew what they would be doing to the baby. I also really liked her ob/gyn. She sat in there a long time talking with us about favorite tv shows  The nurses were all so caring. I really felt like she was being well taken care of. I didn't meet anybody that seemed to be having a bad day. Everyone was really nice.

So that's the latest news. She kept apologizing for me having to stay up there with her. I told her I love this kind of thing. I would deliver that baby myself if I could. It's fascinating to me. I was there when two of my nephews were born (Justin and Michael).

We had pizza for supper, because I knew everybody would be hungry before I got home and started cooking. So I ordered Dominos    

We are expecting to break a record low temperature tonight. They are predicting 36 degrees. This late in March, in Houston, Texas, that's rare.