glaimee

A new Saul is scheduled to join us April 1st - no joke. For this baby, we decided to be surprised at the birth rather than find out if the baby is a boy or girl during the ultrasound. Here are a few shots from the ultrasound showing that the baby does look like a baby, has feet, and rubs its eyes with its hands.

This post became so long that I decided it need to have a picture to make it more interesting. Unfortunately, I didn't have a camera on my trip so I decided to go with this picture from a good 10-13 years ago that has nothing to do with this post other than it is a picture of me and a plane. I never even got into the plane above. I could further explain the picture, but if you thought about it for a few seconds you'd realize that you don't really care - you're just reading this to find out about the medical emergency. On with the story...

On one of my recent trips to Philadelphia (Yes, I've been there multiple times over the past 3 weeks), my flight had to make an emergency landing in Pittsburgh, PA. You might notice that those cities are in the same state, so you know that the emergency couldn't wait.

I managed to get stuck near the back of the plane with very little room once the person in front of me reclined their chair, but managed to squeeze my laptop onto my lap to watch a movie on it. There was an in flight movie, but I had already seen it on another flight and there is only so much Ice Age a guy can take. The one nice thing about my seat was being next to the window. I love the window seats. Putting things away and getting up to allow someone else to get out to uses the restroom is slightly annoying to me. Once I'm in my seat, I'm there for the entire flight 98.5% of the time on flights 7 hours or less.

Frantically running down the isle came a flight attendant. He was nearly yelling, so I would have heard him asking, "Is anyone a doctor?!" even if I hadn't noticed the blur of his blue uniform streak past my row. A hand shot up, earphones came off, and a man in [I'd guess] his 50s or 60s sitting a few rows behind me stood and walked with the flight attendant as the situation was explained to him at an auction style pace. All this immediately got everyone's attention and, like gophers peaking from their holes, we looked around to figure out the reason for this inquiry.

It wasn't hard to find the focal point of the unfolding drama. Hearing the explanation as the flight attendant explained it to the doctor as they passed my row did help me know what to look for, but I couldn't have missed the big wad of napkins being held to the forehead of a man about five rows up on the right side of the plane (I was on the left). The man's head was tilted backward and a flight attendant, who had been serving drinks from a cart, was tending to the man with the a fore mentioned napkins.

Apparently, a "jerk", as I later heard him referred to by multiple people, wouldn't wait for the service cart to get out of the way and decided to reach around it and open an overhead bin to get something out. Unfortunately for the victim, a laptop of unknown ownership (I don't know who's it was anyway) was poorly stowed and toppled out. An edge of the laptop collided with the victim's forehead causing an injury which released the red bodily fluid commonly known as blood in the English language.

The doctor attended to the victim for a while, then returned to his seat after instructing the victim and the flight crew that the victim should not go to sleep the remainder of the flight and should seek further medical attention after landing.

At this point you are probably trying to anticipate what caused the emergency medical landing. You may be thinking, "Perhaps the man fell asleep and couldn't be aroused" or "Maybe he had a seizure" or "Maybe the man assaulted the 'jerk' in retaliation." You'd be completely wrong. The medical emergency that caused the landing had nothing to do with a laptop paying an uninvited visit to someone's forehead.

About thirty minutes later the same blue streak went by, retrieved the doctor, and led him to another passenger in distress. This time a man was sweating and feeling faint. I never got more detail than that about what the problem was, so I can only tell you what I saw and heard - a medical kit, a request for clean cloth and alcohol, an IV was setup, a woman walking back to the bathroom with blood on her hands (probably related to the IV).

Over the intercom, the pilot told us that we'd be landing in Pittsburgh due to a medical emergency and the plane immediately began descending. It was the quickest decent and landing I've ever seen. Even taxiing to the gate was fast. Emergency crews were ready to go when we got there, boarding the plane as soon as we stopped. Four men, two from the fire crew and two from the ambulance, assisted in carrying off the faint passenger. I didn't notice the earlier victim being removed from the plane, so I think he stuck it out until the flight made it to Philadelphia. After refueling in Pittsburgh, we were off again.

When we originally took off the pilot told us that he expected us to land early, but after the emergency landing we ended up coming in a bit late. It wasn't too bad though - I had a very interesting flight and still made it to my final destination, eh.

A few months earlier I had another interesting flight on which a man was warned by a flight attendant that he was very, very close to being arrested, but that is whole different story and not quite as interesting.

You may have noticed that we haven't posted to our blog in a long time. No, we didn't forget what century we're living in, where the paper goes in our typewriter, or how to get to the "internets" on our computer. The truth is - we've been holding out. Yep, we've had a ton of posts drafted and never published. Well, the floodgates have opened and we just posted 14 of our drafts, so you'll want to go all the way back to March of this year.

We still have recent stuff that we ought to post about and we hope to get to those soon, but at least you now have something to wet your appetite.

We had a great time camping with friends at Mt. Madonna and had a beautiful camping spot. It was a short trip and both fun and exhausting at the same time. The Hales came up Friday night for dinner, dessert, and songs and skits around the campfire. The Sandersons and Ahlgrens camped over night with us. Everyone pitched in for different meals and snacks.

We had a good time cooking our hot dogs over the fire and cleaning them off when they go too close.




Smores always hits the spot (and then stick all over it). The dutch oven cobbler and ice cream were terrific, but we didn't get any pictures - we were too busy eating it.

Glen taught the older kids a submarine skit that his family

It was an interesting night due to the babies - the screaming seemed to rotate between our three tents throughout the night. It sprinkled on us in the middle of the night, but we think everyone managed to stay dry.

Since we survived the night, we celebrated by having breakfast. For the first time since we got it over a year ago, we broke out the camp stove to help make breakfast. Heating water on it for oat meal and hot chocolate was as complicated as it got this trip. We'll look forward to burning pancakes on another trip.

I took Gage on the Aaronic Priesthood Commemoration (Father and Sons) camping trip. I hardly consider it camping since we actually slept in the back of station wagon (Gage slept fine, and I took several naps in a row). I only managed a few pictures and didn't take any of myself.

Here is Gage next to our "tent" (a.k.a. the car). I was going to take a tent, but someone suggested the car and I thought, "Hmm. Maybe I'll give that a try so I don't have to figure out how to set up a tent with Gage." I think I'll set up a tent next time.


Folks brought their own dinners to eat or cook over the coals.




We had cobbler and ice cream for desert, cooked in dutch ovens.

We had a great time at Caleb's birthday party. There were yummy cupcakes and fun playgrounds.

I had a nice birthday including a surprise birthday cheesecake at Anne and Tom's and a short hike in a park below Mt. Madonna that we'd never been to before (It was rather steep for a stroller. The picture doesn't do it justice).

Aimee and Gage made another fun trip to Gilroy Gardens with Shelly and Boyd Wilcox and Amy and Shelby Kingsley.