My mom gets to smirk about this one

In every family of more than one child, inevitably one is sweet and cooperative, and one is hell on wheels. Starting from a VERY young age, I was the one sporting said wheels. Always. The stories of me as a kid always revolve around my stubbornness, independence, disregard for rules and consequences, and so forth.

Fast-forward to now, when I get to go head-to-head with...the exact same qualities in my own child. The "I do it myself!" attitude is in full swing (not the words yet, but they aren't far behind). He is endlessly frustrated with the fact that he isn't quite tall enough to do EVERYTHING on his own. But he is finally tall enough to climb up onto chairs and couches by himself. He thinks this is enormously amusing. Now the whole house is his personal bounce house. The ONLY thing we absolutely will not agree to is letting him stand UP on the furniture and walk around.

Of course he stands up every single time. It doesn't seem to matter what the tone of my "No!" is. He helpfully now says "iiiit DOWN!!!" to himself. We have tried physically sitting him on his butt again, we've tried removing him from the couch, removing him from the room, and we have even removed the movable chairs (though the couch has to stay). His response is the same: he crinkles up his nose, then smirks (dimples and all), then giggles, and runs/jumps/flops and does every cute and/or dangerous thing he can think of OTHER than sit down.

I have yet to see any shred of evidence that he is taking us seriously.

:)
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The Conversationalist

Grant's verbal abilities are starting to really take off. He's mastered dozens of words, as well as at least 9 animal sounds (when you ask him what sound the animal makes). His favorite word right now is, of course, "No." He's really good at it. A couple of days ago I was putting something in the trash and he very helpfully reminded me, "no, no, no!" I wasn't supposed to touch the trash!

Today he surprised us twice with new words. First he brought me an empty juice carton and pulled on the cap. When it didn't come off he handed it to me and said "tuck!" (STUCK!). He said it again at the park when he was interested in one of the bolts that held the park bench together. He tried to twist it and said "tuck!" Then tonight as Shane was giving him goodnight hugs and kisses, he spotted one of his favorite books on the couch. He started pointing over Shane's shoulder and said "Lilla! LILLA!" He wanted Shane to read Goodnight Gorilla before bed!

We got him a little kid-sized table and chairs for his play area and he loves it. We got some play pots and pans that he and Sarah play with for ages. He has also tried coloring with crayons a few times and really likes that too. Things are getting more fun by the day.


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A nice spring day outside

Today was one of those wonderful but rare spring days that wasn't too hot, wasn't raining/hailing/tornadoing, and wasn't a workday.

We had a nice long walk in the stroller in the morning, a lot of playing, and then Grant had his first ride on the new toddler seat attached to Shane's bike. He loved it. He didn't show any signs of being scared. After a few minutes he started smiling and saying "mamadadamamadadamamadada" which is what he has been doing lately when he's really happy. Next time we'll take pictures.

He has been actively trying to learn new words, and has just started trying to repeat words that we ask him to say. He gets pretty close to saying them some of the time. He has learned: clock, no (of course), dude (which Sarah taught him), dirt, open, out, toast, and several more. He brings me the Seuss book "Hop on Pop" and he says "BOP!" and when we have burritos for dinner he says "booboh!" He's hasn't made up his mind which word to use when he wants out of his high chair, so he says a combination of out/up/off and it sounds like "Ouwuft!"

He is so happy, and so smart, and so much fun to be with.
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How Fast a Year Goes By

I just noticed it's been 1 year and 2 days since I posted last. That sucks. So much has happened. I have the best of intentions, but...

Quick toddler update:
He runs, he makes silly faces, he climbs, kisses, pretends to feed his toys, loves music, and has a great sense of humor. He says more than a dozen words, at least three of them new as of this weekend. He now says "waba" for water, "nana" for banana, "this" "that" "off" "up" "bath" and most recently "Lo-la" for stroller. "bwoo" for blue, and this weekend he held a tissue up to my nose and told me to "bo!" (blow). There are many others, and he learns so fast!

More to come...
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14 pounds of cuteness

Still trying to catch up...but you know what they say about the whirlwind of the first couple of months with a baby!

I need to post:
- details of the snowstorm the first week after Grant was born, the subsequent power outage and living in hotel rooms for a few days while trying to recover and care for a newborn.
- the awesomeness of this kid and the discovery of his amazing little personality.
- my MRI and the impact on my little guy.
- the many introductions to people such as his great-grandmothers, Auntie Trisha, and many others.
- his trip to the pediatrician for his 2-month checkup and first shots (Wah!).

But for now we will entertain ourselves with this adorable video of Grant "talking" to his play gym toys:



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Our Birth Story (Part 2)

... continued from previous post.

[ This is Jen comforting me at the Birth Center. There was a chance she had been exposed to the flu, so she was wearing the mask as a precaution. ]

So we all went over to the hospital in an awkward caravan of vehicles and some confusion about where to go and where to park. I remember thinking how stupid it was that the midwife kept trying to talk to me and ask me questions. I was still hallucinating. Everything had strange colors and patterns on them that I knew weren't real. I also had hubble-telescope-ish stars and colors superimposed on everything around me.

The trip across the street to Baylor was mercifully fast. Soon I was in a room in L&D with the nicest nurses I've ever met. They said the nicest things about how hard I had worked and they were going to help me and I could have hugged them all. The midwife had come with us to the hospital, and everyone there was very natural-birth-friendly, so they were very kind and sympathetic to the situation and the delirious condition I was in.

I wish I could have hugged the anesthesiologist gave me my epidural. How sweet he was, to warn me about a needle stick in my back, when it was laughably inconsequential compared to the galaxy-level pain I had been in for almost 11 hours!

He said, "You will feel your feet will turn warm and tingly." And I did!
He said, "your legs will start to feel numb and fuzzy." And they did!
He said, "do you feel that contraction?" I didn't! Hooray!

Despite the blissful pain-free state of the lower half of my body, I was still really really loopy. I think the midwife and nurses might have been asking me questions to distract me from what was going on in the action zone, but I'm not sure. It seemed silly to ask me about drug allergies and such when I might not have been able to correctly tell them what year it was.

[ In L&D, with a swollen face from all the IV fluids and trying to answer questions about stuff. ]

Then things got more serious. There were a couple of contractions during which I was told to push, so I did. Since I couldn't feel any of those muscles anymore, the pushing seemed kind of imaginary, but apparently it wasn't. I can't remember how I knew that she had to use the forceps to turn him, but that was what was happening. When it was almost time for another contraction, the doctor looked at me very calmly and said, "This is your last contraction. If we can't get him out now, we have to do a c-section immediately."

Somewhere in the back of my loopy brain, I knew that this meant things were getting dicey and dangerous, and I had to put everything left in me into that last contraction. I heard Shane and Jen encouraging me, and a lot of people telling me to keep pushing. I was really scared, and time had speeded up again, and I couldn't think of anything but getting the baby out so that I could see that he was okay.

And then all at once the room erupted into noise and motion. There were shouts of "yay, he's here!" and in only a split second I saw him. I saw his head and I saw several people with their hands on him. He was instantly rushed across the room from me, and I couldn't see him. I couldn't hear him either.

I completely fell apart. I was crying hysterically out of relief, fear, joy, more fear, and "where the hell is my baby." My whole body was exhausted and shaking, and my vision narrowed to a little tunnel. Various faces appeared at the end of the tunnel to say things to me, to reassure me, I think, but I couldn't really hear them.

It seemed like an eternity passed. Finally the one sound that penetrated my brain was him crying. Jen was next to me and said that was him crying and that he was beautiful and perfect and healthy. I think I was hysterical for a while again and kept saying I wanted to see him. I knew Shane was over there with him and it scared me that so many people were hovering and working on him.

[ Daddy watching over our sweet, angry baby as the team worked on him.]

Then Shane brought Grant to me (he says it was really only about 5 minutes, but it felt like forever). He was fine...healthy, beautiful, and perfect. I was able to breastfeed him right away, which he took to instantly with no problems. His poor little head was VERY cone-shaped, and a little bruised from the rough ride, but it was nothing to worry about. I remember being really annoyed with the blood-pressure cuff that was on my left arm because I couldn't bend my arm right to reach Grant. The nurses were understanding and took it off.

[ He had a few bruises from the ordeal, but they disappeared within a day or two.]

My mom arrived right about then. She was able to see and hold him too. She had given the big kids breakfast and taken them to their mother's house. We had hoped they would be coming to the birth center to meet the baby at that point, but Jen had let her know that the situation was no longer kid-appropriate.

We held him and I fed him and soon we were in a regular room. I can't say enough nice things about the nurses and techs at Baylor. They were so nice and helped with everything, from my pain and immobility to making sure that Grant was with us almost constantly.

[ I could not have imagined a more beautiful baby.]

There are many many details that I either don't remember or never knew about. There are several key facts that I learned either from listening to the doctor give her report to the nurse, or from Shane and Jen later:

1. The cord was wrapped around Grant's neck pretty tightly during the birth. It hadn't been that way long, so it didn't impact his growth or restrict his oxygen, but it gave everyone a scare and was part of why he had to be whisked away immediately.
2. He had to be suctioned, a lot, before he started crying. It reality it was a very brief amount of time, but it felt like forever to me.
3. I lost a LOT of blood. I didn't learn this until well into the next day when they started giving me iron supplements. The doctor said that if this had been a few years ago, they would have given me blood transfusions, but they are more reserved with those now. As a result, I felt very weak and looked ghostly white for the first week or more after the birth, and enjoyed the yucky gastric effects of iron supplements.
4. I suffered some significant collateral damage, and received a lot of stitches. The doctor worked on me for nearly an hour, which a had barely noticed because of the epidural and because I was busy bonding with the baby. The only other thing I have to say about that is...ouch.
5. Sometime after the birth, they gave me morphine, and boy howdy that was funky. My mom called several people to let them know about Grant, and I talked to some of them. If you're one of the people I talked to while high as a kite on morphine, sorry! The doc told me that as the morphine wore off I might feel itchy all over, which I did. I am more certain than ever that a narcotic habit is not in my future.

There is a lot more to this story, but I will have to spend some time with Shane and Jen putting it all back together before I can add any updates. While this certainly didn't go as we had originally hoped, I still have no regrets. We made every effort to have a natural birth, but it was in Grant's and my best interest to intervene at the end. We have a beautiful, healthy baby and I'm alive to enjoy him. And despite my fears, we experienced nothing but the best support and care from everyone at the hospital, with no judgment about our decisions or pressure for things we didn't want. Also, the medical intervention didn't in any way interfere with our bonding with Grant. I was instantly so in love with him that it took my breath away, and I regularly cry when I look at him from the magnitude of it.

I am immensely grateful to the birth center team, the doctors, the many people at Baylor, and of course Shane and Jen and my mom. Thank you.

With that, I will end with some adorable baby pictures.



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Our Birth Story (Part 1)

Long before we even became pregnant, we planned and prepared for a completely natural birth in a non-hospital setting. Our reasons were many and well thought-out. This isn't the story I will tell here, but the bottom line is that we wanted a natural birth for the health and safety of both me and the baby, as well as the emotional and spiritual benefits that accompany a birth that is viewed as a profound but natural process that usually does not require a clinical approach.

We read, exercised, attended childbirth classes, and arranged for a midwife-attended birth at a freestanding birth center.

The pregnancy continued flawlessly.

We came very close to having the experience we had hoped for. In fact, we had about 95% of the experience we wanted. However, at the very last hour of our labor, we needed medical intervention. Although it is difficult for me to write this story, it's not because I was disappointed or felt cheated of anything. These were the hardest and scariest hours of my life, and I have no regrets.

Our original due date was February 1st. I had started to dilate slightly about 3 weeks before then. The midwives felt that Grant would certainly come a little early. We waited not-so-patiently. I had about a million Braxton-Hicks contractions, but nothing escalated. When the due date came, the midwife talked to us about our plan of action if labor didn't start during week 41. We talked about the natural methods of encouraging contractions and we did them all. As the week went on I started to get really scared that I would end up having a C-section, which was my worst nightmare (I recognize that it was my lifelong fear of surgery in general that was fueling that, but still, I literally had nightmares about it).

By Saturday the 6th, I was frustrated, crying, tired, scared, all of it. I was down to my least appealing option: castor oil. I was fearful of this method for a lot of reasons, but I decided to take a very small dose and see what happened. Whoa Boy.

My mom was staying the weekend with us (having planned to do so when we thought there would be a baby by then) and she and I were watching a movie. Shane had gone out to meet friends for a drink. About 9 pm, 4 hours after the castor oil, the laxative effects of the oil kicked in and I was fairly uncomfortable. About an hour later, I started having big, painful cramps very low in my pelvis. At that point I didn't think I was having contractions, because my belly wasn't really squeezing like it did with the BH contractions. Also, we had been taught so thoroughly about timing contractions and false labor and blah blah blah, and these pains were only about 30 seconds long and came very irregularly. I was in a lot of pain, though, and it wasn't long before my mom had seen enough and texted Shane to come home.

At this point in the story my tracking of time gets very weird and based only on a few points of reference. After helping me get through a few contractions, Shane called the midwife. Apparently she could hear me yelling in the background and said to bring me in to the birth center. At some point she talked to me on the phone and tried to ask me some questions but I couldn't really focus on what she was asking. We got in the car at 1am and the birth center was only a couple of miles away. My mom stayed at our house with the older kids who were asleep long before all this started. I'm so glad she was there, because it would have been chaos to try and get them up or go through with any of our other contingency plans for them.

Once we got to the birth center, the midwife had to start an IV to give me antibiotics since I was beta strep positive. It only took a little while to get the antibiotics in and she capped the IV so I could get up and walk around. The pains were still coming relentlessly every 3 minutes or so, making it hard for me to regroup and stay focused in between. Eventually we managed to get some music on and I sat on the balance ball for a bunch more contractions. I really relied on Shane sitting with me and helping me stay calm. At some point the contractions got a little bit longer and slightly further apart, maybe about 5 minutes apart. It was better like that for a while. Once in a while the midwife checked my dilation but I didn't listen or care what the result was. We were making progress, which is all I cared about.


Shane was awesome through all this. I could stay focused on his voice and his face, and he took care of everything else, like getting juice and letting my mom know what was going on, etc. Sometime during all this, our friend Jen came to help us. She was absolutely awesome. She helped with everything, and her energy was calm and strong. I was so glad to have her there, and to know that she was giving Shane some support.

I don't really know what time it was when my water broke. It seemed inconsequential at the time. What I remember more clearly was that at some point I lost the ability to pee (sorry for TMI). So the midwife had to put in a catheter a couple of times, which meant I had to lie down on my back for a few minutes, which seemed like the worst possible thing to do.

This next part is where I get even more fuzzy on the timeline... Sometime in the early hours of Sunday morning, I heard the midwife tell me it was time to hold on to the massive square wooden bedpost, squat down, and start pushing. I didn't really like that idea, but once we tried it, it felt like the right time. About the same time, they started giving me more IV antibiotics as well as fluids, though I'm not sure why.

There were many, many, many of these squats. Sometimes the midwife and sometimes the assistant sat beside me and tried to move a lip of cervix that was caught on the baby's head. They all said I was pushing with incredible strength and they couldn't believe how great I was doing and blah blah...but each time the contraction ended, the baby slipped back up a little and not much progress was made.


Hours passed. Many squats were done. Well-intended promises that we were almost there were made. Later I found black-and-blue bruises on my wrists where I had hung onto the stupid square bedpost so many times.

We pushed. And pushed. I started to hallucinate (I'm not kidding).

They said they could see his head each time I pushed, but that he wouldn't come. My legs were shaking and I couldn't hold myself up on the bedpost anymore.

Sometime around 8am (I think), the midwife called and asked one of the doctors that they work with to come over and take a look at me. She came, and within a matter of seconds told us that he was in "transverse arrest" which later I learned basically meant his head was turned the wrong way, and was hopelessly jammed up against a too-small arch in my pelvic bone.

She put me on the bed and tried to use her hand to gently turn him. I know I screamed, and I saw stars and flashes of light in front of me.

I remember her saying that she had to turn him, and soon. She said I would need to be taken across the street to the hospital to have an epidural for that. Later Jen told me that she said to try and turn him without an epidural would be "unkind."

to be continued...
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