The night she was born

If you follow my sister's blog, you've already heard this story from her, but I'd like to tell it here as well for my own sake about the night Ashley was born.

At the time, my older sister (whom I'll call Gabby), my younger brother (Hermano) and I were the only three kids living at home. My parents were going to a geyser class in Yellowstone National Park, and my sister's husband was going to a work conference in San Diego, so she agreed to come and stay with us. She was 35 weeks pregnant at the time but thought it would surely be just fine.

On the evening of July 18 we were attempting to contact our parents. This was in the time before cell phones (yes, I know I'm dating myself here), so we had to use the hotel switchboard in order to reach them. My mom had just called us 10 minutes before and then hung up so we could try reaching her through the motel system. It had just closed, since it was just after 10 p.m. My sister was scrubbing something up from the carpet (I can't remember now what it was) and went into the bathroom because she thought she'd had a little accident.

Nope. It turned out her water broke.

When my Mom called back about 10 minutes later, it was to much excitement and perhaps a little fear. Luckily, my grandparents live only four blocks away from my parents so they came to drive my sister to the hospital. In the meantime, we were calling her husband like crazy to try to reach him, again without the aid of a cell phone. He was just getting back into Evanston (where they were living at the time) that evening so we knew we had to catch him.

We finally got him a little after midnight, and he jumped right in the car and booked it down, shaving half an hour off the journey in the process. That meant he arrived in time for Ashley's birth just after 7 a.m.

In the meantime, my mother was panicking that she couldn't be around for the big event, so we decided to make some arrangements. Gabby's boyfriend, Albert, who is now her husband, drove the two of us to Rexburg where we met our parents. My mom went back with them while I went to Yellowstone with my dad so finish out the class. It was a cool experience, particularly the part where we got to go off trail and see features we'd never seen before and probably won't again, even if we had to walk five feet apart single file in order to reach some of them.

It immediately became apparent after Ashley's birth that something was wrong, when they couldn't put a tube down her throat. They life flighted her to Primary Children's Medical Center only hours after she was born and performed her first surgery (to attach her esophagus to her stomach) shortly thereafter. My mom went with my brother-in-law to Salt Lake to be at the hospital so my sister could recover a little bit. She still ended up in Salt Lake within a day.

There's much more to the story, which many of you have probably heard, but this will do for now. It's late, and I'm sure I've babbled on so hopefully this all makes sense. :)