On the evening of December 7, 2013, I was having ziti at home in Clarksville, Tennessee, with my husband, Anthony, and my mother. My mom had been visiting for a few days already due to threatened inclement weather in Little Rock, where she lives and where I grew up. In fact, inclement weather was all but promised on this night, the night before my scheduled induction of labor.
Given the cold, the snow and the freezing rain, I was grateful for the date on the calendar: DECEMBER 8, so my mom was able to be at the birth of her first granddaughter. Though the weather here didn't occur as forecasted, I'm pretty sure CNN used the words "ice rink" to describe Little Rock.
Around 7:00pm, I got a call from my hospital. Since the weather was looking pretty bad (seriously, the roads were absolutely perfect the next day), did I want to come in NOW TONIGHT and get things started. "Well, uh, I mean, yeah. Can I finish my dinner?" The nurse chuckled and said that would be fine, so I did. Anthony and I spent the next hour or so finishing up little things. I took my final pregnant photo for Instagram, changed into more comfortable clothes and brushed my teeth. Anthony packed up electronics (that we barely used, I really liked the peace of the silent room in the nighttime) and moved the carseat to the center of the backseat.
The drive to the hospital was surreal. My husband and I knew we would never be in the car as childless adults ever again. We were leaving that hospital with our baby. For a few minutes, I panicked about the horrible mistake we were making. We had only been married a year and a half! We needed more time to get to know each other! HE IS GOING TO THROW THIS BABY I HAVE BEEN WORKING SO HARD TO BUILD FOR HIM RIGHT UP INTO THE AIR AND SHE WILL HIT THE CEILING AND DIE SO WHAT IS THE POINT OF HAVING CONTRACTIONS AND PAIN AND PUSHING HER OUT?!
Then I remembered how small her pink, fuzzy socks were in the white wicker basket on the coral farmhouse-style table beside her crib, and how I'd known it belonged in her nursery the moment I laid eyes on it at an antique shop in West Monroe. I exhaled, I looked at the love of my life sitting next to me, and a few nervously excited tears fell. We were already parents, and this was going to be awesome.
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When we arrived at the hospital, I excitedly tried to explain to the nurse how my induction was actually scheduled for the following morning, but I had recieved a phone call--- and she tiredly cut me off, holding up her hand and saying something to the effect of, 'you see this computer, right?' Emotional as ever at 41 weeks and 2 days pregnant, I handed the admission paperwork to Anthony and walked back to the waiting room, having decided not to deal with Rude McSnarkyface, RN. Around 8:30, another nurse found us in the waiting room and asked us to follow her. She was neither rude nor snarky, and I welcomed the change.
The Labor and Delivery room was massive. I was given a quick tour (bathroom, shower, the place we will clean your baby, your monitoring machines, your bed) and told to change into a hospital gown. I emerged from the bathroom holding my gown around my convex form and asked Anthony to tie the straps for me.
Some time passed, and we talked about anything but why we were in an enormous hospital room waiting for who-knows-what to happen who-knows-when. He asked if I knew how to help him bind-off the final stitches on the hat he was knitting for the baby. I begged him to either fix or shut off the flickering television. At around ten, my nurse returned, and attached the fetal monitoring system to my belly. "Are you the one who wanted to finish her dinner?" she asked, with a smirk. "I don't blame you, it might be a while before you get to eat again."
The midwife came in to do a digital check, and told me she'd be surprised if I had the baby before the following night. I balked, but kept quiet because I wanted to get things going and prove her wrong. She started my IV of pitocin and offered me Ambien, so I could get some sleep before the curtain rose. Surely reading the trepidation on my face, she assured me Ambien was safe. I swallowed the pill and waited for something to happen. In the meantime, my sweet husband alternated between rubbing my hair, massaging my feet, and rambling about anything off-subject he could think of because he knew it would keep me calmer.
I don't know when I drifted off, but I do know it was 2:40am when I woke up in a puddle. I was mortified, assuming my bladder had finally gone on strike and I'd wet a very public bed. I woke my husband so he could help me unhook from things. I took off my socks (yeah, that much fluid), asked Anthony to buzz for the nurse and waddled to the bathroom. Looking down, I noticed a pinkish color and a little bit of a yellow gunk floating in it. Only then did I realize my water had broken. "Not brown," I thought to myself, "what a relief."
When the nurse arrived, she asked about the color of fluid while she changed my sheets and handed me a clean gown. I explained, and she said the yellow may have been meconium staining, but it wasn't enough to worry about if it was yellow. A midwife joined us and checked my progress. I was 4cm and fully effaced. "Now we step up the pitocin and wait!"
Wait we did until about 8am. Let me tell you, contractions are rumored to be pretty lame when they happen naturally. When they happen with the help of pitocin? Holy crackers. It truly felt as if my body was ripping in half to better facilitate turning inside out. I knew from the movie Juno that my baby had fingernails, and I was sure they were digging into the walls of my poor, distended uterus, trying to stay in for the rest of the 42 weeks nature suggested she might have. The anesthesiologist came a few times to offer an epidural, and I remember thinking of him as a siren, trying to steer me away from my pain-medicine-free birth plan, at the weakest moments.
I refused epidural medication until my midwife informed me there was a bubble of the amniotic sac left, still filled with fluid, blocking the opening the baby's head needed. She suggested the bubble be popped with a hook, and informed me that my contractions would likely become much more intense after that had happened. Having breathed through contractions with the unrelenting help of my wonderful husband, who coached me perfectly, matching my hees and hoos and haas, I decided I was going to need an epidural if my contractions were going to get stronger than they had been.
At this point, Anthony called my mom, who had spent the night at our house so someone would have slept. She told me later that he said, "You need to come now." Without saying hello, or giving her an update or anything. Just "you need to come now." I think he explained things after his initial panic wore off, but I really enjoyed hearing about this phone call a few days after the ordeal had ended. I only made fun of him for a few minutes, promise. My mom arrived quickly, but the transition from her not being there to being there is blurry. I was kind of pretending she was sitting on the couch in front of the window the entire time.
The anesthesiologist came back and told me he wanted to make me as comfortable as I wanted to be. A massive contraction, the hardest one yet, rocked my entire torso the moment I sat up to have the needle put in my back. I clutched Anthony's arms and buried my face in his chest, doing my breathing exercises as much as I could without moving, and focusing on the pain instead of trying to distract myself. Once in, the epidural medication started to do its work. The timing of that contraction told me I'd made the right decision.
I needed three doses of the drugs to get to the point the anesthesiologist described, where I could feel contractions and not register them as painful. I was numb, and it was glorious.
The midwife came in to pop the bubble in the sac, and told me it would be any time now. Anthony changed from his pajama pants to his jeans, as if he wanted to look somewhat put together when the baby arrived.
Having been about 6cm dilated when the anesthesiologist came into the room at about 9am, I expected it would be a few more hours until it was time to push. I relaxed, I tried to sleep a little, and we all waited.
At eleven, the midwife came back to check me again, and said she could see my baby's head and that it was time to push. My epidural was turned off and feeling quickly returned to my legs. Anthony grabbed one thigh and my mom grabbed the other, and I pushed through three contractions. A total of nine pushes and twenty minutes. In fact, I pushed so effectively (what a strange thing to brag about) that I was told to stop and wait for the OB to come catch my daughter. Queen's "Break Free" was playing from my labor playlist when my daughter was finally born. (Admittedly, I'd been having Anthony skip songs that were making me cry and I have blocked out which songs they were. I can only just now listen to the song from the end of Knocked Up, and the baby is more than eight weeks old.)
At 11:49am on Sunday, December 8, 2013, I had my first baby. She was immediately placed on my chest and I marveled at her little body through terrified, joyful tears. Her one-minute APGAR was good, and her five-minute was even better. She weighed 7lbs12oz and was 22 inches long, and had quite a bit of dark hair. One of the first things anyone said after she was born was, "She certainly doesn't look overdue!" I remember thinking how silly it was to comment at all. She was HERE! Give her to me!
After a few minutes of marveling at this teeny person we made together, Anthony walked over the the warming station and watched as the pediatric nurse snapped her tiny little hospital bracelet on and slipped the "baby lojack" onto her ankle (the hospital doors lock if it's taken off or leaves the ward. Probably overkill, but I was grateful for the security.) He brought her back to me and assured me she had ten fingers and ten toes. I loved that he'd actually counted.
From Day One, my daughter has loved hearing me and her daddy sing. She practices laughing in her sleep, and it's the nerdiest, wheezy "huh-huh-huh" laugh there ever was. The horror that overcame her during diaper changes subsided around week five, and now it's just a really awful way to wake up.
I'm still deciding whether to use her name here, since I can't ask her permission. She is such a good baby. The first few weeks were pretty rough, but I have, mercifully, forgotten most of the details and am left with only the satisfaction that we made it. My little family is the most incredible thing I have ever been part of, and I am certain having a baby wasn't the mistake I worried it was for those few minutes on the way to the hospital. Anthony has agreed not to toss her into the air until she can hold her head up completely on her own. We shall see whether he gets to do it before she's eight years old.
This blog will primarily be written While She's Asleep. I plan to do reviews of baby products I like, tell stories about life with my beautiful, silly little girl and the man I love who is suddenly the father of my child. I'll talk about cloth diapering and breastfeeding, and other parts of new mom life. I'll probably include some recipes and post occasionally about the raised-bed vegetable garden we plan to plant this spring.
But for right now, it's all baby, all the time.
Now I have to go. She's starting to stir and I really want to hold her and kiss her chubby little cheeks.
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