Birth Story Conclusion

When we last updated it was about 4:00 pm and S was dilated to a 7.  Her contractions were all over the place no matter how much Pitocin they gave her.  They came and checked around 5:30 and she was still at a 7.  More contractions, more Pitocin, checked again at 7:00, still at a 7.  At that point our doctor discussed doing the C section due to the lack of progress.  At this point, despite the epidural, S was exhausted, it had been over 24 hours at that point.  She had only slept maybe an hour that night and took an hour and a half nap and hadn’t eaten anything in ages, nor would they let her.  Our doctor explained that if we didn’t do the C section soon then she was afraid it would turn into an emergency C section.  S was done with labor, done with trying and was glad to see a light at the end of the tunnel.  We agreed to go forward with the C section.

Of course, I was somehow able to stay strong and sure in front of S, but in reality I was out of my mind with worry.  I went to the lobby and called S’s mom to let her know what was going on and then I called my mom and just broke down.  I was so scared that both of my babies wouldn’t make it through this.  Rationally I knew that they would be fine and no one was in distress, but in my heart, I was so afraid.  It makes me feel teary right now just thinking of those moments.  Luckily my mom knows me so well and calmed me down in a matter of minutes so I could go back to the room and be strong for S.

The C section itself was the most intense thing I’ve ever been a part of.  They had S pretty drugged up but she wouldn’t let them give her everything that they wanted to because she didn’t want to be dopey or too out of it to be aware.  So she did feel quite a bit of what they were doing.  I held her hand and tried to distract her.  I’ll leave the details of it to her to share (not sure if she will want to or not, but just in case).  The doctors had a CD playing and it was really cool because Jude was born during one of our favorite songs, Coldplay’s Viva La Vida.

Everything since then has been great.  I couldn’t love him more, and he is so strong and healthy.  We are actually about to go home, they are letting us check out early because both S and Jude are doing so great.  So we are packing up and this family is going home.

And of course, more baby photos!

Jude and his Uncle Brandon

Jude and Aunt Sandy

Jude and Uncle Duck

Jude and Aunt Lulu

Jude!

Love, Liz

Let's Go to the Mall!

Thank goodness I'm teaching a class this week at work.  I don't think I could spend this week just sitting around in my office, googling various ways to naturally induce labor.  That would be a long maddening week.  This week already feels like a long maddening week and I have plenty to do at work to keep me busy.  I'm grateful that our little Jude has made it past 39 weeks and I know that 50% of women go past their due date and it's not set in stone.  But at 5 days till our due date, I'm going a little crazy.  Today I've tried to make peace with the fact that Jude probably won't be here till sometime late next week.  That it's not a 5 day count down but more like a 10-14 day count down till he gets here.  It doesn't help that at work everyone keeps saying things like, "No baby yet?" and more annoyingly, "Tick tick tick!"  Yeah, no baby yet, obviously or I wouldn't be here talking to you jokers.  I know that all of this is SOOOOOO much harder on S.  The whole world it seems like is watching her for signs of labor and I can't help but do it too.  Everyday, "Any contractions?" and every time she makes a funny face or sucks in her breath a little bit too sharply, "Was that a contraction?" It's annoying and frustrating and I'm trying to stop.  This baby will come when he is good and ready to and not one minute before.

 In the class that I'm teaching this week there is a girl in here who has 2 kids, a 1 year old and a 3 year old.  She told me all about how with her last pregnancy her baby hadn't arrived by her due date and so she went to Walmart and walked around for an hour and bought some caster oil and then she went and walked around the mall for 2 hours and then she went home, drank a shot of the caster oil, ate dinner, and started having contractions a hour later and gave birth early the next morning.  Then, we read about one of our fellow baby bloggers, Breaking into Blossom, and how they started having contractions while walking at the mall.  So now S and I are determined to get ourselves to the mall this week!  I'm not sure yet if we are going to go do some mall walking today or tomorrow, but we are going to give it a shot.  I keep singing this song from one of our favorite shows, How I Met Your Mother.  

But I doubt the mall experiment will work.  S walks All.Day.Long. at work, goes up and down stairs and is as active as anyone 39 weeks pregnant could possibly be, so I don't think that a few laps around the mall will do much.  But at least it gives us something to do, something to focus on, so it's worth a shot.

Fingers crossed that this baby is born soon. 

-Liz

While My Wife Gently Sleeps

     Today is a bonus day.  S and I were up this morning, me getting ready for work and her up having some breakfast on her day off.  And she asked me, “can’t you call in sick?  Take the day off?”  And I looked at her and realized that yes, yes I could take the day off.  So I called into work “sick” (I really didn’t have much going on at work today anyway) and we have spent the day together.  We went back to bed for a while, went out to breakfast with a lovely friend, wandered around Central Market (which is a fun grocery store), went to the movies (we saw Hugo, it was magical), stopped and got ice cream, and now my sweet wife is taking a much needed nap.  I love golden days like this and seeing as how they are numbered at this point, I value them so much more.

     And while the days without baby are numbered, don’t worry dear public, they are not literally numbered.  I think with our last post a few of you worried that with our impatience we would do something drastic like induce S to get the little dude here early.  But I can promise you that we will not induce until 42 weeks.  It goes against everything we want for him and for S and a natural child birth, so don’t worry.  When we say we are going to do things to get him here I mean things like go on long walks, eat spicy food, drink apple juice, bounce on the exercise ball, that sort of stuff.  We arn’t going to do anything weird/dangerous either, no caster oil or other drugs/herbs to speed things along.  So if Jude gets here any time soon I promise you that it not because we forced it, but because that is just what happened.  And I’m pretty sure wishes and hopes never induced labor, so we will keep hoping he comes soon.  I’m hoping for exactly 10 days.  In 10 days we will be at 39 weeks exactly, which seems to be the magic number in terms of development, but we shall see.  After all, unless doctors force them, babies tend to do whatever they want.

Hope your day is as blissful as mine.

-Liz

PS- I always enjoy looking at our stats, especially how people found our site and search words they used.  And I just noticed that this week 4 different people found our blog by searching for the phrase “cute stuffed zombie”.  How strange and random is that?

Hosptial Tour

          Last night we went on the hospital tour to check out the maternity section.  It seems a little early to be doing stuff like that, but the tour at our hospital is only Wednesday nights and with our Bradley Birthing class starting in just two or three weeks which will also be on Wednesday nights, it was either do it now or wait until the first week of January.  And with S due January 23^rd ish, that seemed a bit late, so we decided to get it done.  I’m glad we went, we learned a lot of good information about where we are supposed to go, and how the whole big event is going to work. 

            We were on the tour with three other couples, all of whom where much further along than S, all of the women were between 28-36 weeks, and all of them were expecting girls.  In many ways, we were the odd couple.  For two of the moms, this will be their second child, so they both each had a little girl with them, both little girls were probably about 3 years old.  And before we started walking around and seeing the rooms and such we sat and talked and asked questions and the whole time the two little girls were running around like crazy giggling and chasing each other.  It was pretty cute, but it did make me nervous for my future as a parent because they whole time that they were running circles around us shrieking, I was thinking, “Dear God, someone shut these little monsters up or have them play some where else.”  They were loud and distracting and the nurse giving the tour wasn’t a super loud talker. 

            We learned during this talk a few surprising things.  I think that the thing that surprised me the most was that in the state of Texas your baby has to be given a Vitamin K shot to aid in blood clotting, and an antibiotic eye ointment to prevent eye infection.  If you refuse to let them do this, then they have to call CPS and CPS will at the very least start a file on you.  I think that it goes without saying that as a lesbian couple in a state like Texas, we just cannot risk having CPS get involved with our child in any way.  They also said that their C-section rate was about 30%, which I guess is ok, I don't have much to compare that to.

            Next we got to see the rooms.  The rooms weren’t that exciting, especially after our previous tour of the Birthing Center, where each room was nicer than even any hotel I’ve ever stayed at and nicer in some ways than my own house.  Each room did have it’s own bathroom and a cot for “Dad” to sleep in along with a glider, a TV (and I have my fingers crossed for room 12, which randomly gets HBO even though it isn’t supposed to) and all of the other stuff you would expect in a maternity hospital room.  They did say that S would have to been in the bed when it came time to start actually pushing, but that they can lower the bed almost all of the way to the floor and have a bar she can use for support if she wants to be squatting or on her knees or anything like that.  They also told us that we can video tape the birth if we want, but all of our video has to be waist up sort of stuff, no actual videos of the baby coming out.  Not that we want a video of that, yuck, but I thought it was weird that it is a state law that you couldn’t take video of it.  The nice thing about the room is that it is set up so that once the baby is born it doesn’t leave the room hardly at all.  I think she said that they have to do two basic tests on the baby before it leaves but other than that, it is in the room with you the whole time, which is nice.  They seem to really encourage skin to skin contact with the baby and breastfeeding and establishing a bond with your baby right away, all things I support.

            The other thing that the nurse really seemed to stress was that they will do whatever they can to let you have the experience you want for your birth.  So if you wanted to bring in fans, aroma therapy, music, or whatever, you can do it.  The pregnant ladies discussed playing music for a minute and one was wondering aloud what song she’d want to give birth to.  I suggested Salt-N-Pepa’s Push It, which no one thought was very funny, to my surprise.  I think that would be a hilarious song to give birth to.  But I guess they were all thinking that they wanted something soothing and soulful like Enya or something like that.  Well, that is just so not us.

            And lastly, the most exciting part was when S asked the nurse if I could be on the birth certificate, and she said yes!  She said that we would have to fill out some sort of form/paper work to make that happen, but that I could be on the birth certificate too!  I’m so excited, I didn’t think that it was even possible for that to happen, because again, we are in Texas, but I guess it isn’t a big issue.  Yay!  So excited to be one of baby Jude’s official parents!

**After some basic googling on this issue, I just don’t see how what the nurse told us about being able to put my name on the birth certificate is true.  It doesn’t appear to be legal in Texas to do this from what I can find, so I don’t know what she is talking about.  Erg.  We should have asked more questions.  In the end we need a lawyer anyway, so hopefully we can get the ball rolling on this and find out for sure one way or the other.

-Liz