abc family

Home!

We're home! It was a lovely relaxing week and I am unabashed about the fact that I didn't write a word the whole time.

I do plan to get back to the birth story tomorrow, but in the meantime I've got something else to keep you busy: my sister has started a blog! As she has now graduated from college, she's got time to write and she is a bee-yoo-tiful writer. She has committed to fifteen minutes a day, and wait until you see what this girl can do with fifteen minutes! You're missing out if you're not reading Miriel

(Oh, and the photo is a bonus. You can thank Blaise's godmother for that.)

Blaise's Birth: PAUSE

I know you all are going to want to kill me, but I'm having to take a break from Blaise's birth story.  We're going on vacation for a week and I won't have Internet access where we're going to be.  (In the middle of nowhere, yes.)

I am going to try to keep writing the story each day, and if I come across a wireless network in our travels, I'll be sure to post an installment or two.  But if I don't get a chance, I'll catch you on the flipside of what I hope is going to be the best week we've had this year!

Blaise's Birth: Part 5

It doesn't occur to me to be concerned about the missing paperwork; when I went into labor with Camilla I showed up at a hospital that hadn't heard of me or my doctor and still got admitted with no problem, so I know I'll be fine here.  It is more funny than anything else, because while they don't have paperwork from my midwives for my current pregnancy, they do still have the paperwork from when I pre-registered for Camilla's birth.  I didn't deliver at this hospital, so it's still lurking in files.

The woman staffing the counter walks out with the sheets in her hand and a bemused expression on her face.  "It says here that you're due in... October? Of 2006?"  Her eyes travel to my belly and then back to the paper.  "That can't be right."

We laugh about it, and I assure them that I know enough details to fill them in and get us started, so we move back to triage.  I have to inform them that I'm GBS positive, since my chart from 2006 says I'm negative (which I was with that pregnancy).

They have me go through the normal rigamarole: leave urine sample, undress from the waist down, put on gown, get hooked up to monitors.  I get to do my [not] favorite part, where I explain about my white-coat hypertension.  They leave us in the triage room to wait for a resident to come and check my progress.

Even though I feel certain my labor is progressing, somewhere in here I start second-guessing myself.  What if I'm still in very early labor?  I don't want to be stuck here, so I ask and am assured that if I'm only 2 or 3 centimeters, they won't admit me and I can go home.

A medical student comes in to ask a bunch of random questions, the only one I will remember later is that he asked if I have any STDs.  (No.)  He writes my answers on a small yellow Post-It, which seems odd.  I wonder idly whether my answers will go on my chart at all; maybe they just send the medical students around to keep them busy and make the patients feel like our time in triage is not going to waste!

My contraction pattern is holding steady; every four to five minutes I'm reaching for Bryan's hand so I can hold it tightly and stay calm, breathing slowly and evenly through the pain. 

The pain has increased since the early part of my labor, but it is still quite manageable.  I know that later it will creep up and encompass all of me, and I will have no choice but to release my mind and sink into the pain to make it through.  It's not there now; mentally I can still relegate it to my uterus where it belongs.  Good.

I feel I am holding it together well, an impression that is confirmed by the reactions of the staffers who see me.  None of them seems concerned, for instance, about my having time to get in a full four hours of antibiotics before I give birth.  I am concerned about that - it's the only reason I'm here this early in my labor.  (It will turn out later that my concern is justified.)  But as they interact with me, each one of them seems to think I still have quite a while to go.  That's why I think I must be doing well at staying calm.

In fact, Bryan will later tell me that when he went out to grab a cup of coffee after Blaise was born, the woman staffing the front desk told him that she was shocked I'd already given birth.  She had been sure, from my demeanor, that I wasn't even in labor, and would be sent home immediately.

I thought my closed eyes, sighing, and deep breathing had to have been more obvious than that.  But what do I know?

The resident who eventually comes in to check me seems surprised when she gives the verdict: fully effaced, zero station, 4-4.5cm.  The bag is still intact but bulging; she predicts it will break any minute.

After the resident leaves I have Bryan snap this picture.  It will be the last one we take before our son is born.

Part 6 is here.

Blaise's Birth: Part 4

Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.

When we leave my sister's house at midnight, we're planning to go home.  It's about a twelve minute drive, and the hospital is on the route home, halfway between her house and ours.

And in the six minutes it takes us to get to the corner where the hospital is, I have three contractions.

They're at least a minute long, and strong enough that I can't talk at all during them - I'm holding the handle of the car door and breathing with deep focus while they last.  The three I have in the car are three minutes apart.

Bryan looks at me as he pulls up to the stoplight where we would turn left to go home.  Turning right will take us into the hospital parking lot.  "I really think we should go to the hospital, honey, don't you?"  He's leaving it up to me, but I can tell he's nervous about being home alone with me at midnight, with my labor this far along.

We've got another factor too - because I'm GBS positive, they've told me that I'll need four hours of antibiotics by IV before the baby is born to avoid having to do cultures with his blood.  I really want to stay home for as long as possible... but I remember that during my labor with Camilla I progressed from 4.5cm to giving birth in three hours.  I feel like I could possibly be close to 4cm now, and I want to have time to get all four hours of antibiotics done.  So I tell Bryan to turn right.

The duffel bag, fully packed, is in the back of the car, and Bryan helps me out and then grabs it.  We've got a hundred feet to walk through the icy parking lot, and I have to stop him halfway there so I can hold onto his arm and breathe through a contraction.

The woman who is manning the security station inside the door asks me if I need a wheelchair.  I feel silly - I'm not an invalid, after all - but as another contraction hits I nod.  A wheelchair would be good.

We ride up the elevator and she leaves me and Bryan in the empty waiting room of the L&D area.  The lady staffing the desk asks for my name, and I dig out the registration paperwork I filled out months before.  She goes back to find my file.

It seems to be taking a long time.  While she's looking, I have to ask Bryan to come hold my hand at least twice so I can breathe through contractions.

I'm in a fair amount of pain, but staying calm.  This is so different from my labor with Camilla: I know what's coming, and I know for sure that I have the ability to get through it. 

It's not so much that I feel like I'm in control; I learned last time that the process of giving birth is impossible to control.  It's more that I feel that I now know how to cooperate with the process.  My body showed me at Camilla's birth that it is capable of so much more than I ever imagined it was.  This time around, I trust it, and I'm calm in that knowledge.

Hospitals, though, I still don't trust.  As I should not, because despite the fact that I preregistered, this one does not have my file.

Part 5 is here.

120 Days

I'm taking a break from the birth story, even though I'm having tons of fun writing it, because today Blaise is four months old!  I think making it through an entire third of a year calls for some pictures.

Here he is at nine days old.  I think this memory will always make me a little sad because he was sick here and we didn't know it yet.  But still, so sweet and tiny.

A month old.  Still so little, but healthy again!  This is during the period where he was growing five pounds in five weeks.  Basically, he just ate all the time.

A month and a half, my little cutie pie.  If I pulled that sleeper (newborn size) out now, I would laugh at its ridiculous tininess.

Two-and-a-half months, since I don't have any exactly-two-month pictures.  He was starting to get chunky here!  He weighed about fifteen pounds at the time.

Score!  We made it to three months!

(We mostly have colored cloth diapers, but for some reason we always seem to take pictures when they're wearing the white ones.)

Four months, and a toddler foot as a bonus.  Bryan took this picture this past weekend.

And today we took Blaise to the doctor.

He weighs 18lbs, 12oz, and is 27 inches long. 

I am kind of freaked out about this.  How did my four-month-old baby get to be just four ounces away from weighing NINETEEN pounds? 

Camilla was a more average-sized baby.  Biggish for a girl, but she weighed more than a pound less at six months old than Blaise weighs now.  I don't understand how, drinking the same milk she drank, Blaise is growing so much faster.  It must be genetics, is all I can think.

(I know I've told you before how I was a huge baby, right?  Weighing 21 pounds at four months and 27 pounds at a year?)

But the weight is not the real news.  The real news is the way that Blaise decided to celebrate reaching the four-month milestone.

This is how it went last night:
Blaise nursed at 9:15.
I offered to nurse him again around 11:00 before I went to bed, but he wasn't interested.
Bryan put Blaise in his crib sometime after midnight.
At 3:30 (!!!!!) I woke up because I was a little uncomfortable, as you would be too if your nurse-every-two-hours baby suddenly decided to go more than six hours without eating.  Blaise was stirring, so I fed him.
He (and I) then slept until 7:30.

And then I kissed his smiling, chubby little face all over, because I'd just gotten the best night of sleep I've had since January.

Tonight will, of course, be horrible.  And we're going through a nap regression like you wouldn't believe.  But still, four months!  Hooray.

Blaise's Birth: Part 3

Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.

I've grabbed the kitchen timer on my way out the door from our house, and in the car on the way to my sister's I start timing the length of my contractions as well as the frequency.  I've got a pretty good pattern going now: they're around 45 seconds long, six to seven minutes apart.

By the time we arrive at Branwen's it's 9:15pm, and I sit down on the couch with my iPod to order Lilypadz on Amazon, something I've had on my to-do list that is more urgent now that the baby's arrival is imminent. 

It's beyond Billa's bedtime, so Bryan segues right into that with her.  He gets her into her pajamas, feeds her a snack, and takes her upstairs to get her to sleep.  She'll be in her sleeping bag on the floor in Daniel's room.  It will be only the second night she's ever spent away from us, but I know she'll be fine with my sister and her family, who are her favorite people.  Plus, at the rate of ten contractions an hour I'm distracted, too busy to worry much about my already-born child.

[Camilla ended up being perfectly fine.]

Because of it being a strange place for her to go to sleep, it takes Bryan more than an hour to get Camilla down.  He comes downstairs and we discuss what to do - whether to stay at my sister's house or go home for a while.  I've still got a solid pattern of contractions, but they're not quite a minute long, just over five minutes apart, so it's not time to go to the hospital yet. 

My sister and her husband are obviously tired; I'm craving my own home; we decide that we'll go there.  But then Camilla wakes up again.

It's now around 11:00pm.  Bryan is upstairs singing to our daughter and everyone else is in bed.  I'm sitting on my sister's couch with my timer and a book, trying to keep my mind on reading so I don't focus too much on the pain. 

I remember from my labor with Camilla that later on in the process, I'll need all my reserves in order to get through the long, painful contractions.  At this stage, it's better for me to keep my mind outside them, trying to let them go unnoticed so that I save up my ability to dive into them until I need it.

Until now I really have been able to read through the contractions.  They're like strong but manageable menstrual cramps.  But during this hour between 11:00 and midnight - because it takes Bryan another hour to get Camilla back to sleep - they begin to strengthen.  I take deep breaths to deal with them, and it takes me four or five inhales and long, slow exhales to finish each one.

By the time Bryan comes downstairs, I am past the point where I feel I can do this on my own.  I need my labor support, and I lean on him as we head out the door, letting a few tears out because I am tired and so grateful that he is here with me.

When we're in the car, we watch the numbers on the clock turn 12:00.  It's a new day, January 19th.  This, I tell Bryan, will be the day our baby is born.

Part 4 is here.

Blaise's Birth: Part 2

(This is series where I write the story of Blaise's birth, fifteen minutes of writing at a time.)
Part 1 is here.

So, at 7:00pm I have a contraction and decide to start keeping track of them.  I'm not timing the length, just remembering to look at the clock each time I have one.

7:20.  7:35.  7:43.  7:56.

And I'm lying on my left side the whole time, doing nothing to stimulate labor at all.  I know that many women have had experiences where they've had a pattern of contractions that later disappeared - it happened to my own sister last July - and so I'm aware that five contractions in an hour does not necessarily mean that I'm in labor.

But my instincts are telling me that for my body, this is it.  I trust those instincts; they were spot-on during my labor with Camilla and I'm not about to ignore them this time.  I decide it wouldn't be a bad idea to start packing from the handy lists I made earlier in the day.  I also figure that if I get up and start moving around, things will either speed up or they won't, and then I'll have an answer about whether this is the real thing.

I also call my sister to let her know that we might be bringing Camilla over tonight, depending on what happens.

Then I go to the bathroom, and see blood. 

When my water broke with Camilla I saw [what seemed to me like] a LOT of blood, which later turned out to be probably caused by a partial placental abruption.  This time it is much, much less blood, but even the tiniest bit is enough to freak me out.  I grab the piece of paper with the on-call number for my midwives, and the midwife who answers my page calms me down by reminding me of what I knew anyway: it's almost certainly bloody show, call us if you have more bleeding, don't come in unless your water breaks or you're having a one-minute contraction every five minutes.

(Off-topic a little: one of the things that I like about these midwives is that, unlike the doctor I had last time, they don't necessarily make you come in if your water breaks before you're in active labor.  The only reason I would have had to was because I was GBS-positive.)

But after I have the bloody show I KNOW it means real labor for me.  I'm trying to be cautious - I'm sure there are plenty of women who've had the signs I was having and proceeded not to give birth for quite a while - but somehow I'm sure that I'm giving birth tonight. 

I call my sister again to let her know we'll definitely be bringing Camilla over there, and then I start packing.  We're in no hurry; I figure we have hours until we have to be at the hospital (which is three minutes from our house, six minutes from my sister's) but there is still a "this is a big deal" urgency about the whole thing, and we're in the car within forty-five minutes.

To my sister's house we go.

Part 3 is here.

Blaise's Birth: Part 1

(This is the beginning of a who-knows-how-long series where I write the story of Blaise's birth, fifteen minutes at a time.  I really want to record the birth and the only way to make myself do it was, well, to MAKE myself do it.  Hopefully it's going to make sense.)

Camilla's birth was decent, but Blaise's birth was wonderful.

When he was in the hospital from ten days old to three weeks old - the hardest ten nights of my life as a mother so far - I often thought about his birth to calm and console myself.  That was how good it was.  It was an experience that soothed my soul.  It was almost exactly what I've always wanted a birth to be.

If people ask about it, I tell them the only things I would change were the things that were completely out of my control.  First, I was group B strep positive, so I had to be on IV antibiotics during the labor.  I really dislike being on an IV during labor.

And the second thing, of course, was the time.

When I woke up on the morning of Sunday, January 18th, I came out and told Bryan that I had good news and bad news.  The good news was that I'd gotten a great night's sleep.

(How fondly I remember that night!  I haven't had a good night's sleep since.)

The bad news was that I'd started having real contractions, ones that hurt.  Just a few of them in the night, but they were definitely registering.

I'd been on Bryan-enforced reduced activity for weeks; my midwives' policy was that if I had four Braxton-Hicks contractions in an hour, I was supposed to go lie down, drink some water, and call them if the contractions kept up at that rate.  I'd have four B-H contractions if I did anything as strenuous as taking a shower, and if I did anything noticeably more active than that, the contractions would go up to six or eight an hour, and some of them would start hurting.  It had been like that since I was 31 or 32 weeks, and although they'd checked my cervix then to make sure it wasn't changing, they still said I should follow the policy of better-safe-than-sorry with the contractions, so I did.  I basically laid around on the couch for six weeks.

We thought maybe my taking it easy would help the baby stay in until his due date.  That was something we especially wanted at the time, since Camilla was in the middle of a respiratory illness (which turned out to be RSV... but you know that story).  We were not really ready for me to give birth yet.

But here I was, 37w6d, and the contractions were real, and hurting.  They were very, very sporadic, though.  I wasn't convinced they meant anything - my labor had been jump-started last time by my water breaking, but I knew that absent a clear catalyst like that, early labor could last for days.  On that Sunday morning I refused to gear myself up - we had no idea how long this stage would last, I argued to Bryan.  No point in assuming it meant anything until it was too obvious to avoid.

(By the way, isn't this the advice doctors and midwives always give their patients?  If you're wondering if you're in labor, then you're not.  Right?)

Bryan, however, was not to be convinced.  He prodded me into making a packing list, which I did because I'd been planning to do it anyway.  And every time I had a contraction that made me catch my breath, he'd make a comment like, "So, how many hours do you think it'll be until we meet our baby?  Twenty-four?"

I only had probably six contractions between 10:00am when I got up and 7:00pm.  It was hardly a labor pattern.  But Bryan was still sure.

I really need to learn that when my husband is sure about something, he is nearly always right.

At 7:00pm I had a contraction that caught my attention.  It was at least twice as strong as any of the others I'd had that day, so I decided to count how many I had in the next hour.  Just for fun.

Part 2 is here.

Arwen? Who?

OH MY GOSH, I think I've just set a new record for my blog neglect.  Four weeks, yikes! 

I have no problem at all isolating the reason that this blog is being ignored; in the four weeks it's gone bare over here I've written TWENTY posts for Faith & Family.  Which you are reading, right?  You should be reading, especially since we now have our own podcast where you can hear me babbling like the dork I am.

So I'm blogging more than ever in my life, yet my own blog sits abandoned.  Ironic, isn't it?

BUT.  I am planning big things for this place.  Including a long-overdue name change and a longer-overdue design change.  Look for it soon, hopefully!

(The URL will stay the same, since I am technologically-challenged and have no interest in messing with that stuff.)

In the meantime, I'm determining to start my 15-minutes-a-day writing plan again.  It is the ONLY way to force a frustrated perfectionist like me to get something on the page.  I've learned through successive Lents that I do actually have the willpower to keep with a discipline if I want to.  And writing makes me happy, and making myself write without constantly back-editing is very good for me, so I'm going to stick with it this time.

Tune in tomorrow for the first installment of "Blaise's Birth Story: 15 Minutes at a Time".

(Not fifteen minutes of the labor at a time!  That would be incredibly tedious!  Just fifteen minutes of writing at a time!)

Kisses to all you out there!