HOMOwners at Home

     Its been over a week since the last blog, sorry about that. We've been busy.  Beastie came on Friday, November 24th at 7:48pm ET (6:48 CT). First order of business, Beastie will henceforth be known as John.  John Robert Tidwell-Davidson      John Robert Tidwell-Davidson.  Sorry, son.  We know its a long last name.  John came, not without drama. (I hope he's not setting us up for the future.)      As we found out at our 39 week appointment at the OB, he had flipped himself upside-down...from where he should be, (which is up side down) -eh his head was in her ribs and his butt was in our surrogates pelvis. Also known as breech.  This is almost the worst case scenario.  The OB said he wanted to schedule a version procedure for Friday morning. This is when we were also supposed to induce. This is when they inject a muscle relaxant (that only affects the uterus) into the surrogate.  After waiting 10 minutes for the uterus to relax the OB came in. SHE WAS A RIOT.  I

Happy Thanksgiving! I write this installment while watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Its been a week filled with Thanks. Thankful for friends, new and old, family and family to come. To get you up to speed, we are now up in Wisconsin on baby watch.  We left Saturday morning at 5am. My parents arrived at our home in Georgia, Friday night, to watch the pups while we're gone. My mom was wondering why I was putting RainX on my windows before we left...I knew we'd encounter rain on the way. What I wasn't certain of was what we'd be driving through... I happened to be taking my break, cause (surprise!) I didn't sleep Friday night. I wake up to this whistling, howling noise coming from the car...and Dustin says, "Ryan? Is that rotation?" **Meteorologist Activated** Cloud lowering, serious wind, check radar. We were in what looked like a Quasi-Linear Convective System (QLCS) a line of thunderstorms that has kinks in it. The kinks

Here I am. Sitting at work, with the usual Friday events and leading up to thanksgiving we're talking all about Thanksgiving travel.  Turned out to be a much more interesting day (and week) then I thought. I was called in to work WUTV on Thursday, haven't worked this show since we transferred Beastie to our Surrogate! My goal was to go get my tires re-balanced at Costco this morning before work. They told me to show up when the doors opened so I could be in and out since there were no appointments available. "About an hour," they said. 3 hours later, I got to work... They didn't pull my car into a bay UNTIL I asked to see the manager...some customer service...RAGE! Back to baby life. This week, for our OB appointment on Wednesday, we had made a little progress.  Now measuring in at 2+cm and something more than 50% effaced.  We had a little guessing game. Guess who was right?  Obviously the one with the most baby experience. Either way, we all were

On Snapchat Friday night last week...       We had a bit of a scare.  Our surrogate sent us a text, "I need to talk to you two on the phone. Nothing serious, don't freak out. Who's phone is best to call?"      So of course, we start FREAKING out.      We got on the phone with her and she begins explaining to us that she's been having contractions for several hours. They started at 8 minutes apart and are down to 6 minutes apart.  She wouldn't normally be concerned, but since we have to travel to get there in time, she wanted to make sure it wasn't the precursor to labor and was heading to the on-call nurse and OB to make sure.      We were fine with that and the, 'ok this could be go-time,' started.  I got out the spreadsheet to figure out what flights were going to be available when and if we needed to go. Dustin got his go-bag out of his car to get ready to go to the airport if he needed it.      I put the car seat in my car and st

     A lot changed in the last week. You know, like the month. That hit us pretty hard.     -eh...saying hit us hard sounds negative, it was more like sobering, like, "OH...this is the month our baby is supposed to be born in..." [insert "The Scream" emoji here.] Dustin organizes the Tidwell-Davidson Grocery      We finally finished up the pantry this past week...at least to the degree that we could put the food in there finally and get it out of the dining room.  As I was building it and putting everything in there both of us started freaking out... Are we going to actually have enough room??      The answer turned out to be yes. Thankfully, MORE than enough room. That was a big sigh of relief. Getting all our food and kitchen electrics organized into a singular space has been clutch. Now, our limited counter space is open for everything and our pantry is almost stocked and we can SEE everything that we have.      Dustin wanted a counter in there, as w

Being homosexual comes inherently with challenges.  Being a homosexual, married couple adds a few more hurdles to that pile. Being a homosexual, married couple, expecting a baby?  Things start to get weird. Actually, in the current sociopolitical climate, there have been many issues brought to light in dealing with equality and fairness; Women, people of color, homosexuals...all fighting some battle just to be treated with equal rights and protections under the law and from the rest of humanity.   One group, which rightfully, isn't really included in the fight for equal protections or treatment (because they've been given the priority for basically most of history) are men.  Stay with me.... When you think of instincts when dealing with a child, what is that called?  -Maternal instinct Who is said to have the closest relationship with the child? -the mother The vast majority of baby books are written for? -Moms (and when they're not they're mostly geared to D

      Here I am sitting on the first day of week 34 and I, not being pregnant myself, am so anxious. I can't imagine how all my recent pregnant friends have felt wanting to be done with pregnancy and get this party going!       The last time I posted, we had just finished the nursery.  After several weeks of hurricanes, power outages and lost weekends from working...now, its decorated and filled with goodies from our Baby Shower. I got the ROYGBIV balloons for the front yard to mark the party place. It looks like the 'UP' house!      We got handed a load of life in those few weeks.  A few days before the first guests arrived at the house...a few things went wrong. For starters, our 11 year old Labrador Retriever/mutt came down with a mysterious illness that enlarged her liver and made her basically immobile. She was barely eating and drinking, wouldn't move (I had to carry her inside and outside the house and up the stairs for bed). she was just in so much pai

     With an abundance of devastating and catastrophic weather events over the last few week its been a long three weeks at work. Though I can't even imagine what the last three weeks has felt like for the people of Texas and Florida. I am just thankful that we only lost power.      Its been over a month since my last post. A lot of things have happened! We renovated and renovated and renovated and we still are. We also have gotten baby stuff going full speed.  We took a baby class this month and learned some pretty interesting things from some veteran dads (that's at the end of this post). The entire kitchen was hermetically sealed. We joked that it was like we were in a scene from Dexter...      For starters we finished the nursery, the upstairs hallway ceiling, and the kitchen ceiling!  Safe to say we will NEVER. EVER do more than one room of spackling at a time.  We both thought, to minimize the dusty mess drywall sanding is, that doing them all at the same time would