RUS's Birth Story

For those who are interested, here's the timeline of RUS's birth:

On October 13, around 12:30 a.m., I wake up to pee and notice that I'm having contractions. This isn't anything unusual, as I've had on-and-off irregular contractions for a couple weeks now. But when I go back to bed, they keep coming. I try to sleep until about 2:30, when I finally decide to get up-- I wanted to time the contractions and see if they were regular or not. Turns out they are coming about 4 minutes apart and lasting about 45 seconds. I would have thought something was happening except for the fact that the contractions are totally painless. I am just sitting there like, "Oh, there goes another one."

Around 5 a.m. they start to get farther apart again and I decide it was just a false alarm and go back to bed and sleep until about 8:30 a.m. I was pretty determined not to just sit around waiting for contractions to happen, so J's mom and I head out and run some errands. We get home around lunch time.

At this point, J and I decide to take a walk. We walk for maybe 10 minutes, during which I have several contractions. These are about 2 minutes apart, but they are only lasting 30 seconds. They still don't hurt. We get home, and decide to call the birth center just to ask them what they think might be going on. While J is calling, I am sitting on our exercise ball, and all of a sudden I have a whopper of a contraction. I have to stand up, walk around, and I'm about in tears because the pain came out of nowhere.

J tells the midwife at the birth center that we can get packed up and to the birth center by around 1:30. We load up all the bags (bags that have been packed for an entire month, by the way) and get on our way. We arrive at the birth center around 1:20 p.m. and the whole way there I have contractions that are about 3 minutes apart that I could not talk through. We wait for a few minutes before going back to an exam room to get checked. The midwife listens to the baby's heartbeat through a contraction and says the baby is handling the contractions perfectly. She was going to check me there, but I am having contractions so close together that I don't have time to get up on the table, so she decides we should head upstairs to the birthing room to do the check instead.

We finally get upstairs after a few contractions, and at this point I have no idea how long anything took. But when she does the exam, I am 8 cm and the baby is at +2 station (so it is about 2 inches below my pelvic bone). Immediately after she checks me, I flip over to my hands and knees, a position from which I do not move until after the baby is born. I work through a bunch of contractions-- really painful ones-- by focusing on my abdominal breathing, working to relax everything I can, and keeping in mind that every contraction has a beginning and an end. I'm totally oblivious to everyone in the room except for a midwife near my head who is telling me what is going on, and J, who at some point got on the bed with me and started massaging my hands.

I never consciously decided to push, but during several contractions my body pushed a little here and there, and then shortly after that I started having serious pushing contractions. J said it was maybe 3 pushes and one really long big one and the baby was born at 2:04 p.m., just about 45 minutes after we parked the car in front of the birth center.

The midwife who caught the baby slid him under my legs so I could hold the baby and I got to be the first to find out the gender-- I held him to my chest for a moment or two and then pulled the baby away and saw immediately that it was a boy and shouted, "it's a boy!!"

We just held him and stared and all that for about an hour and a half before J helped weigh and measure him-- 7 lbs 1/2 oz and 19 1/2 inches long. We left the birth center around 7:30 p.m., about 6 hours after we arrived. I was so glad to be in my own bed, and with all the comforts of home around me. We called everybody and even talked to my parents on the webcam that same night. It was absolutely amazing.

This is the picture they took at the birth center right before we left to go home.

Yep, Still Pregnant

I've gotten a few queries in the last few days so I thought I'd give everyone a quick update. I'm still pregnant. Here's a picture to prove it.The picture was taken a few days ago but I still look pretty much the same. I'm three weeks more pregnant than I was when R was born, but I feel 1000 times BETTER than I felt when at the end of my last pregnancy. I pretty much feel normal, except for the big belly. Seems like baby is going to hang around awhile longer!

An Afternoon at the Park

We went to the park the other day after getting R from day care, and I remembered the camera, for once!

This is the park that is just around the corner from our house, and it's really nice because the play structure is the right size for R. It'll get too small before too long, I know, but for now it's perfect. She's gotten really into the swings the last few park trips. She could swing for-EVER.

 

And of course a gratuitous belly shot (37 weeks-ish).

Baby in Daddy's Arm?

We had another class at the birth center today: a mother-infant assessment class. Because you are discharged from the birth center shortly after the birth (between 4-6 hours after mom and baby are both stable), they go over a lot of information about what vital signs you need to track and things to keep an eye on, and so on and so forth.

We brought R with us because we weren't able to find a sitter to stay with her at home. At one point the instructor was talking about taking Mom's pulse. J, who was holding R at the time, asked her if she wanted to feel Daddy's pulse. They found it, and R felt it for a bit and then said, with some astonishment, "There's a baby in Daddy's arm!"

Belly Pictures--beginning of month 9

36 weeks (just starting month 9)

and, for comparison, 36 weeks (starting month 9) with baby #1.
(The picture below was taken 2 days before R was born)

Baby Noises

We took R to our most recent appointment at the birth center, which was not something we were really planning on doing, but in retrospect, it was an *AWESOME* idea, especially now that the pregnancy is well-established.

She loved looking at the pictures on the wall-- there are several posters of the pregnant lady cut in half-- you know, the kind where you can see how big the baby is at different points in the pregnancy, as well as how squished all of the internal organs are (it's really striking, the difference pre-pregnancy and at 8-9 months pregnant). Several times she informed the midwife that there was a baby up there.

But the best part was when the midwife listened to the baby's heartbeat through the doppler. It crackled a lot at first as she was trying to get the right spot. The baby was moving around a lot and as soon as we heard the heartbeat, it would pull away again and we would hear the static. Whenever we heard a little bit of the heartbeat we would tell R, "do you hear the baby?" "That's the baby's heart beating!" etc.

Well, in the car on the way home from the office, we were talking with R about meeting the midwife and listening to the baby. She called the doppler the midwife's "secret." We asked her what the baby's heartbeat sounded like and she goes "kkkrrrrcchhh!" A fairly good imitation of the crackly static sound the monitor made for the most part. Since then on more than one occasion we have heard her say things like, "baby goes kkkrrrrcchhh!" Quite funny.

Belly Pictures--beginning of Month 8

33 weeks (just starting month 8) with baby #2

32 weeks (just ending month 7) with baby #1
and, for more fun comparison, here's my last belly pic, from about 5 weeks ago.

More Belly Pictures--A Comparison

26 weeks (almost 6 months) with baby #2

as compared to 27.5w (6 months) with baby #1

It's amazing how much bigger you look the 2nd time around. I wonder if this will hold true through the entire pregnancy or if things will shift around and eventually end up looking different.

First Belly Shots: A Comparison

15 weeks (3.5 months), baby 1

16 weeks (3.5 months), baby 2

19 weeks (4.5 months), baby 1

20 weeks (4.5 months), baby 2

Wash your hands, Baby

We spend a lot of time talking to R about the new baby and explaining that there's a baby in Mommy's belly. She loves to lift up my shirt and look at my belly button (which is completely flat right now-- it doesn't poke out at all, it just flattens out!) and say things to the baby.

The last two days she's spent a lot of time telling the baby, "Wash your hands, Baby, Wash your hands, wash hands, Baby" or "Baby in dere!"

I have no idea why she thinks the baby needs to wash its hands, but she has said that on more than one occasion. Maybe she knows something we don't?

I can't wait until the baby's movements are strong enough for her to feel through my belly. Right now it's still early enough that only certain movements, at random times, are strong enough for someone else to feel from the outside.

Halfway there!

Some news I haven't talked about on here yet: we're expecting a second baby sometime in mid-October.

We're thrilled! It's hard to believe we've already reached the half-way point in the pregnancy though. Be prepared for lots of baby-related posts in the near future, including a few I've had lined up waiting until I was ready to start talking about it on here.

Summer... again

It's summer again, and lately I've been thinking about how different this summer is from last summer. Last summer I was hugely pregnant. This summer I have a 1-year-old roaming my house.

Since R turned 1, just two weeks ago (although because we had three different birthday parties for her, it felt more like a process of turning 1 rather than a single momentous occasion), I've been reminiscing a lot about what it was like last summer, being pregnant, anticipating labor, and looking forward to having a little baby at home.

This is R just a few moments after she was born and wrapped up in a blanket--June 12, 2007.


After R was born, we had tons of friends and family in town visiting. Some of those same family members--J's parents and my parents, for example--are coming to see us again this year. Last summer, though, they made last-minute flight arrangements to come out and meet R and help with new baby stuff. This summer, they're coming, of course, to see R, but also to help us pack up our house in anticipation of our cross-country move.

Last summer, early in June, we made appointments to meet pediatricians--one of whom, uncannily, predicted I would give birth within two weeks, despite the fact that I was only 35 weeks along. (I gave birth exactly a week after meeting with him). This photo was taken, I think, a day or two before we met with the pediatrician.


















This summer, we took R to get her 1-year shots amidst worries about autism and vaccines.

Last summer, when our families came to visit, we were in a sea of sleep deprivation, adjusting to a newborn, and trying to "follow the baby's cues". This summer, we're wrestling with establishing R's schedule and sticking to it, which is kind of funny since I have never been the most schedule-oriented person (although J definitely is a creature of routine and habit).

What a difference a year makes in terms of sleep. Last summer, I was nursing round-the-clock and J and I were lucky to get 4 straight hours of sleep. This summer, R has started sleeping through the night starting around 6:30 or 7:00 and going until 6:30 or 7:00 the next morning. We're now working on getting her naps to be consistent--we haven't been very successful on that front yet--she naps every day, and usually gets about 2-2.5 hours of nap altogether, but it's not consistently at the same time nor for the same length of time. Sometimes she'll have two naps, sometimes just one really long one, etc.