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Hey all. Time for a family update. And yes, even though I have done nothing halloween related past week, it is still on topic! Just read and shiver....

The last few days have been hectic since, well..... Layna Jacelynne Bandell decided it was time for her to be born at 3:43 PM PST on 6/12. Weighing in at only 2058 grams (4lbs, 8oz) but a decent 47 centimeters (18.5 inches). She was only 34 weeks and 5 days old, so after the hastly scheduled C-section brought her into this world, she went into the NICU (Neonatal Intensive care Unit). We have pretty much been spending our days in the hospital since that tuesday...

Good news is that she is relatively doing fine. No major defects right now, besides her lungs that are still under developed and need extra care. I truely believe that she will make it through this rough start. If only we could hold her right now, bonding would be so much easier.....

Anyways, just probably ask why the weird title of this blog? Well,  see, at times you have Deja-Vu's etc, and last night a lot of things, unrelated to Layna, happened at the Labor and Delivery floor of this hospital.

A woman was brought in by ambulance who later had her baby pass away in the same NICU Layna is in. During the unfolding of this family's drama, I subconciously noticed a dark/reddish glowing hooded figure in the dead end side of the hallway. He was right next to the side entrance of the NICU. I noticed this figure while I was turning away into another hallway heading towards the elevators.

I didn't actually stop and look again, it just registered but did not 'click'. It is one of those things that you only see out of the corner of your eyes or the section you are not truely focussing on. Lateron you go: 'Hey, I did see that!'.

Well, this morning my wife told me that she was now sharing her room with the woman who had lost the baby. And that this made her really uncomfortable (especially since Layna's condition had worsened a bit). That was the moment where it finally clicked inside of me that I had seen the Reaper! When I had seen him, in the hallway, next to the NICU, he must have been waiting or searching for the baby to arrive in the NICU to take away this young life from this world.

Even though an experience of seeing things can be 'kewl', this time it wasn't so kewl. I mean, I simply don't want to be there in the hospital, and see him againhovering around the NICU and then have it later turn out that he was waiting for my little girl. I would immidiately grab a big knife, stab and finally burn my reaper costume which I have made for last years Halloween to start my mourning process.

Now how freaky and on topic was this?!?! What do you think?

-Yaron.

After many hospital visits the last few weeks, and Stacey not allowed to drive, we now have heard that our second little hauntster will arrive no later than week 36 or 37. The baby would be too small after that, so the risk of letting her bake in the relative darkness of the womb could be rather deadly after that...

We don't have to do any twice a week 'no stress' tests anymore: they kept coming back with the baby possibly pinching her own umbillical cord, dropping her heartbeat to about 80bpm for several minutes.

Now we have to do a once a week contraction stress test to see how the baby handles actual labour type stress. If not good, it will be a planned C-section delivery.

Stacey and I are still worried however about Stacey losing about 7 pounds over the last week. We just hope the baby is not falling behind more than the perinatologist expects her to fall behind: at 28 weeks, baby was at 27 percentile, at 34 weeks, last thursday, she was at 20 percentile and weighed just over 4 pounds. At 36 weeks he thinks she might be at the 15 percentile mark. She should definately not drop below the 10 percentile mark....

So now we are in for a premie baby: the planned going home outfit (and Sterlings matching outfit) shot to hell. I was looking forward to seeing them in them matching dresses.

Needlessly to say: nothing major Halloween going on yet here at 'Sungonneth Cemetery'. I have not even had time to order Propmaster's DVD set which features a slideshow of my 2007 Haunted Yard Display. I am having the urge to do something with paper mache, just cause the California sun is baking, which means drying times will be much better than the average 2-3 weeks it would take, back in Holland for doing monster mud like paper mache-ing.

Anyways, time to try and relax a bit by watching a movie in bed with Stacey, and hoping for lots of little critter activity inside Stacey until critter delivery time is here.

 -Yaron.

PS: We have not yet settled on an official name yet  for the baby girl...

Time to blog a bit about what has been happening the last few weeks.

 

Stacey is still very much pregnant and has had some black outs. Needlesly to say she is not allowed to drive right now. It also means I'll be trying to work from home as much as possible: I don't want her to 'wake up' again laying on the couch, not knowing how long ago Sterling cuddled  with her.

The May NorCal CalhauntS gathering was a blast. Seeing the Skulltronix skull in action was super. Too bad it is kinda out of my price range. But boy, that thing is kewl! Check those guys out at www.Skulltronix.com
.

 

Myself I am still trying to figure out what I want to add to my display without spending any deal of money. I know I still need to finish my gate and columns. But other than that I don't know. Perhaps some more wicked difficult tombstones. Some paper marche props asdn that will be it I thing for this year.

We'll see how the little one will eat in our free time :)

 

-Yaron. 

The Horror! The Horror! Two weeks and still sniffles and snorting and eyes tearing because of allergies...

I never had allergies until I moved here to California. There are so many pollen around here that you can wash your car and half an hour later a nice layer of yellowish, greenish dust is all over it again. No wonder my airways are protesting.

Anyways, besides allergies, I have been extremely busy with work. Way too busy, but then again, work is also sorta a hobby of mine. Outside of work, Sterling turned 3 years old this last week. Holy cow! How fast time goes by! At her 3 year well baby/well child appointment she weighed in at 36lbs and 40.5 inches. She is still at or just above the 96th percentile of height. Our little amazon, she is!

Time has been going by fast for the 'baking' process of our second little girl as well: Stacey is already 25 week along and still not really showing. With Sterling she was showing at least somewhat by now. I am still hoping to see her turkey timer pop! Last time it didn't.

When it comes to halloween, I've been waiting for some better weather out here so I can do some simple stuff outdoors. The columns still need to be finished and I'd like to make some skulls and corpses using paper mache. Perhaps next week I might get to some of this.

For now: time to take a shower and relax a bit and.... take a benedryl to control the allergies a bit.

-Yaron.

Yes, we had the ultrasound done on Wednesday and it is going to be a baby girl! Our second girl! Woot!

Too bad it is not a baby boy, but we would have said the same thing if it would have been: too bad it's not a baby girl. Basically, we couldn't care less what it was going to be, as long as we knew what it was before it popped out :)

Now here comes the hard part: finding a frigg'n name for this new girl. The name 'Sterling' of our first baby is going to be rather hard to top....

Anyone a suggestion? Let me know!

-Yaron.

Woohoo! The last few days have been dry and warmer again. It is almost springtime!

I can feel the urge building up to go into the garage and do some fanatasitc prop building work.

Right now I am just spending time with the family and enjoying it inmensely.

Other than that nothing much to report besides spending two weeks at the office chasing and fixing broken systems etc, not able to do the things I should be doing. Oh well... Problems were solved this last thursday (finally).

-Yaron.

Nothing halloween like going on for the past few weeks.... Last week we finally got around getting rid of the x-mess tree. In fact, I think it was January 31st.

The last two days were fun days and somewhat halloween related: took a comp day off from work and we went to see the Winchester Mystery house. Nice place, not nearly as freaky as I thought it would be. Stacey's ears and nose clogged up as soon as we arrived and unclogged as soon as we left. When we drove by a second time (don't ask) it happened again to her. Kewl!

From the Winchester Mystery House, we went to Morgan Hill to spend the night in the Holiday Inn Express. Boy did we get greeted there: a mushroom factory stunk up the place at night. I can only imagine that to be the exact smell of a bunch of rotting corpses. Stacey dry heaved a bit and I summoned her to go inside before she would truely barf.

The next day, stench was gone and we drove to Monterey to go see the aquarium once more. However, the little decided to be sick with the sniffles but not wanting to show us she was. She failed, we noticed! We only spent about an hour at the aquarium and then started our uneventfull drive home. The litle one was in bed by 7pm and Stacey and I were in bed by 8:45pm... God I am getting old ;)

The garage is still clean and the x-mass stuff need to go into the spot most of the halloween props stash is taking up. Hopefully somewhere in the next few weeks I'll be able to take the time to do that.

When all that is done, I think can concentrate on finishing my cemetery columns a bit. It should be a bit warmer outdoors as well, so working in the non heated garage will be a bit easier. I want to start some other, cheap, props to fill in the cemetery. Even though I would like some moving things, I think my best bet right now would be attempting making the yard more creepy by static stuff like Pumkin Rot's. I think 'paper mache' to be the best bet: it will allow the little kid to help out and get messy :)

Oh yeah, last years slideshow video was submitted to the 'usual' outlets. Kudo's go to PropMaster for announcing the delivery date!

Man, I hate it that my baby girl has been stalling to go into bed for a few days now. Tonight it took 2 hours to get her to go to bed and as of writing, she still doesn't want to go to bed.

Oh well, I'll hope for the best that it will pass over.... Last nights 'I dont want to go to bed' episode ended in my wife's knee coming out of the joint and back in after The baby flung herself over and hit the lower half of my wife's leg with full weight. Needlessly to say it was not fun having to deal with two crying persons in the same room. And I mean that in the loving way of dealing with. Not the bad way. I love them both very very much. But seeing one in tears because not wanting to sleep and the other in tears because of the excessive amount of pain just makes me sad.

The knee is doing better, but is still sore according to my wife. I hope it will be less painfull tomorrow.

Anyways. I am beat. I wanted to code on a website project tonight but did not get to it. All I managed was to just upload one picture to my gallery here showing off the finished product of my Celtic Cross and reading up on some comments.

Thanks you all for your wonderfull comments in the last few days. it's good to know that people do read my ramblings and watch my gallery and like the pictures there.

Darkness has fallen, time to sleep!

-Yaron.

It has been a while since I last blogged. A lot of things happened, a lot of time was spent at my daytime job. So it is time for an update don't you think?

At my daytime job there has been a lot of stuff going on that has kept my mind busy and not thinking about Halloween too much.

Beginning of December, we took a one week break and visited a very good friend of Stacey. We surprised the friend for her birthday by flying all the way to the east coast. Sterling had a blast flying on all the airplanes, seeing and playing with snow for the first time in her life.

During this time we also learned that we are expecting a second child. It was the unplanned product of a halloween party *yay halloween party!* but all three of us are very excited and are currently wondering if it is going to be a little sister or little brother for Sterling. The due date is set on July 19th (ofcourse of 2007). Stacey is already not feeling well: lots of morning sickness and hence trouble keeping food down at times. She feels tired all the time. I can only start to imagine how much of a life altering experience this must be for a female.

Yesterday Stacey called me at work stating that the apartment complex owners gave their 24 hour notice for measuring the inside of our duplex "for creating blue prints". I don't know what to think of this, but it sucked coz the housee was a mess not to mention the garage: all my halloween stuff was stashed there in a hurry nearing midnight of halloween to be able to go to bed quickly. I never had the time to clean this up properly. So I left work a bit early and first helped clean the house. After Sterling went to bed, Stacey and I watched a conjoined twin documentary followed at 10pm by me heading into the garage and cleaning...

I cleaned out several boxes and two full bags of sawdust and styrofoam dust. I managed to find a good spot for the (still unfinished) columns. All other stuff was stacked in a corner in boxes. The garage looked pretty clean and organized at 12:30am when I decided it was enough and time to head to bed.

Oh yeah, almost forgot: santa gave me 4 gallons worth of fog juice and two ghost/haunted places of california books. I was so happy with that! I love Santa!

Time to celebrate the last few days of this year and roll into the new year: a new year a new halloween. Sterling is already psyched: not one day goes by or she talks about wanting to see "Dadies Ghosts" (either on the computerr or in the garage) :) Yep. My mission has started off good, she is a little haunter in training.

Happy New Year!

-Yaron.

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