Simply Stunning Stourhead Saturday

October 27, 2012

Simply Stunning Stourhead Saturday

Wow - what a glorious glorious glorious day today.

We had planned to go to Stourhead as the forecast was good and so we were up super early and waiting by the door of Starbucks for them to open.

Yes, it was only 1 degree, yes a hot drink would have been more sensible, but come on .... it's us!

We arrived at Stourhead at 9 am as they opened and we were so glad we went early as the light was just perfect. There were so many photographers there - the really serious sort with the amazing cameras and tripods. People who knew what they were doing unlike us who just went snap, snap snap.

But we were thrilled with our snap snap snap pictures.

and actually my favourites were with the i phone

The first half an hour was very painful as my Reynauds has been bad and I had a major freeze, but once that was over it was just cold, but fabulous.

We stopped in Hermit's Cottage for a hot chocolate - YUM.

Then this afternoon I did some scrapping for the UKS Cyber crop and even made two pages using today's photos.

How amazing was that. From camera to complete in just a few hours.

and here is the other on e- both were fab classes but I adapted them as they both used paint and I don't 'do' paint really

Today I am thankful for

a truly magical day
a half term stretching ahead of me
cyber crops

and finally my page a day calendar

MYSTERIOUS WAYS
Eli was early.

Several weeks before he was due, my wife, Shelly, was diagnosed with severe preeclampsia. Shelly was
admitted to the hospital and an emergency C-section was scheduled. Fortunately, our doctor had time to assemble an expert medical team, including a top neonatologist.

But the time came for the operation, and the team wasn’t there. We waited. And waited. I paced in my wife’s hospital room, watching her look sicker and sicker. Where are they?

Finally, the team arrived and whisked Shelly to the OR. My anxiety eased a bit when the doctor told me my son was responsive and his heart rate and breathing were normal. He would be transferred to the NICU in a hospital across the river in Illinois for observation, but the doctor was optimistic our boy would come home with us soon.

Waiting for the transport, I noticed another baby being put into the ambulance, and another worried father looking on. “How are things going?” I asked.

“Better now,” he said. “But we had a rough delivery.”

At the NICU, the other father and I sat in the waiting room. “I almost lost my wife and son,” he told me. “But the second things turned bad, a team of people came to take my wife to the OR. They even had a top-notch neonatologist there. It was a miracle.”

Suddenly I knew what had taken Eli’s team so long. I told the father and we hugged.

His wife went in that day with no complications, no health issues, no reason to have a high-risk pregnancy medical team standing by. But the epidural had gone horribly wrong. Her heart stopped. The baby’s heart stopped. A code blue was called, but there was no time to assemble an emergency team.

But a team was there already, just leaving the scrub room. Eli’s team. He came to us early. And now I understood why.