Thank you to everyone for their sweet congratulations and well wishes. I’m approximately nine weeks along and deep in morning sickness territory. Ugh! How did I forget how much this is not fun?

Better question - how did I WORK through this last time?

Its all I can do to drag myself around the house, chase Owen (he’s VERY mobile, but not walking quite yet), and fall back into bed. I am alive still. Barely.

Well it might not be that bad, but sometimes it feels like it.

I have my first doctor’s appointment on Friday! I hope you all are well. I’m going to go sleep again.

I’m terrible at keeping secrets. I suppose I just like everyone knowing all my business! Well, except I don’t.

Anyway, today Owen is eleven months old. And Lord willing in nine months or so he’ll be a big brother.

That’s right, I’m pregnant again. About five weeks along. I know you’re supposed to wait until you’re ‘out of the danger zone’ to spill the beans, just in case, but I only managed to make it to seven weeks with Owen before I told everyone. And almost all of my family already knows (sorry brothers, I am telling you on Friday, so, don’t be sad). Don’t worry, they don’t read this.

Or if they do, they hide it well. I suppose I’ll find out soon enough if the irate phone calls start coming in.

So yes! A new little one is on the way, Lord willing. We’re very excited, and opposed to last time when we honestly just wanted a baby and didn’t have a preference boy or girl, this time we want a girl.

But still, healthy baby and healthy mommy are our main goals.

We just got the bills for our hospital stay when we had Owen, and a bill from our birthing center.  Turns out everyone wants tons of money from us.  Hooray!

Insurance doesn’t want to pay for any of Owen’s bills, because they say he’s an ineligible dependent (even though we had our paperwork in on time) and the birthing center billed us over $2500 (less than half covered by insurance) for EXTENDED OFFICE VISIT and PROLONGED SERVICE.  Oh, so I’m supposed to be paying for my midwife to sleep in another room and leave me alone for hours and hours?  If I’d known I had to pay MORE than what we agreed/signed off on to actually USE the facility for giving birth in and spending more than, oh, 6 hours to do so (no idea on actual time length before they considered it ‘prolonged’) then I would have just gone home.  Or gone to the hospital hours earlier.

I’m so mad I can barely see straight.

It has been a while since I posted here, and there is a GOOD REASON, I promise. On March 31st, at about 4 am (or maybe earlier) my water started leaking. As I had been expecting to carry my baby late, and for my water to most likely not break until after labor started, as has been the case for my three sisters and my mother, this caused no end of hubbub in my house. Hubby promptly tried to get everything done that hadn’t been done already to make ready for the baby, which was sweet and cute. He also ran out to the store to buy me snacks and juice and things we needed in the house.

I had to wait until about 4 pm for the first contractions to become noticeable, and it wasn’t until 1 am April 1st that we decided it was time to make our way to the birthing center. An April Fools day baby?! Maybe! Spirits were high at this point.

We were met at the birthing center by my midwife and her assistant, and my sister who was to take pictures and video and record the event. Settling in, hubby coached me admirably through contraction after contraction, after contraction. We tried the birthing tub for a while, but I got too used to the water so it seemed cold after a while, and it was not that much more comfortable than being out of the water. I labored in the bed, in a rocking chair, on the toilet… on a birthing ball… in the bed…

Hubby and sister ate a few times, but I was having trouble keeping water down. I didn’t throw up, but was nauseous and got heartburn from the water. I burped a lot. The midwife and assistant… slept a lot. Frankly, I’m not sure why they were even there. They monitored my temperature occasionally and the baby’s heart rate, and that was about it (besides telling me I was laboring beautifully). Hubby wasn’t sure what he was doing, but winged it marvelously and kept me sane through the pain. My sister was a GREAT help, as she’s had 12 kids of her own, so she was able to suggest things we try, etc. Midwife… not so much. In hindsight it is incredibly disappointing to think we’re paying her for basically… not much.

The sun came up on April 1st.

The sun went down again. My spirit is low at this point, as I’m purposefully not looking at a clock, but when the sun set I was pretty sure that meant this had been going on for quite some time. My contractions were as close together as three minutes for a long time, but sometimes as far apart as 6. Eventually, as the evening drags on, the contractions spread out to as far apart as ten minutes again. I am exhausted, the pain is worse if anything, and the contractions are far apart and lousy. Hubby falls asleep standing up at one point, and snoozes against the wall sitting up between my contractions. I also fall asleep between contractions, making my connection to Time very vague.

We talked about having an April Fool’s Day baby.

We talk about how now it is most likely impossible for us to have our baby on the 1st, as its nearly midnight.

I am discouraged. I lose it, cry my eyes out and tell hubby I can’t do it anymore. Hubby is worried, but hides it well. I’m bundled back into bed to try to rest, and midwife comes back into the room (yes, she’s been spending up to an hour at a time OUT of the birth room, coming in for a few minutes at a time and sometimes chatting with my sister about kids. Assistant spends time sleeping on couch when she’s not getting baby’s heart rate or my blood pressure) to ask me if I want to try staying at the birth center for a little while longer or to go to the hospital where they can try getting the contractions closer together with Pitocin. After a few vaginal exams by the midwife over the course of the day, she determined that the baby’s head was not presenting correctly (part of the reason the pain was so bad, and my labor was going nowhere). Owen’s head was not tucked in like it should have been, and was off center to the cervix.

Exhausted emotionally and physically, I make the decision to go to the hospital with the promise of an epidural once I got there. Hubby goes to get car, and cries when he’s out of sight. We are worried, and he has not really slept since 7 am on Monday morning (after working at his mom’s house all weekend, moving things). It is now approximately 1:45 am, Wednesday. I had a nap on Monday, but haven’t been able to eat since dinner Monday night.

At the hospital they have to try 6 times to get an IV into me, leaving me with bruises and blood dripping, but the anesthesiologist takes over from the nurses and gets the IV started at long last. Since my water has been broken for over 24 hours they start me on penicillin as well as the Pitocin and a saline drip to re-hydrate me. The baby heart rate monitor is hooked up, and I am happy to hear the baby’s heart still going strong. The epidural is started, and I almost immediately feel better. My left side numbs up almost completely, and my right side is numb for a few blissful contractions where I feel only the muscles moving and no pain. Incredible! They make me lay on my left side for a while and my right side becomes painful again, but not nearly as much as it had been. I bear it.

Nurses come in and go out - the doctor arrives and checks me… it seems like everyone who enters the room feels like they need to conduct a vaginal exam on me, and at this point I simply don’t care. I think they said that Owen’s head was anticyclical (can’t remember exactly). He’s wedged in pretty good.

The nurses have trouble keeping Owen’s heart rate on the monitor - every time they find it and then let go of the monitor, it loses the beat. Frustrating! They end up using a scalp monitor and find out that he’s descended further and they want me to try a few pushes. I do. They make me stop. The doctor comes in again as it becomes clear that as contractions hit me the baby’s heart slows dramatically. I am scared when I hear that precious sound ticking so slowly, and I pray so hard that it doesn’t suddenly stop.

Doctor says, “We have to get him out right now,” and asks if I want a c-section or to try a vaginal birth with forceps. I choose forceps, and boy am I glad I had an epidural! A few minutes later Owen David is born, and the feeling… emotionally I was so incredibly happy to hold that wiggly little boy! But he was so small!

5 pounds, 12 ounces, 18 inches long. The smallest baby born in my family! He was a little early, but not much, considered full term at 38 weeks.

Time to deliver the placenta… and thank God that the doctor read my file because the umbillical cord had a velamentous insertion, which means that the blood vessels have a weak attachment to the placenta. The blood vessels are usually wrapped up nicely in a thick covering, but in these instances the covering ends before the vessels reach the placenta. Usually this is a gap of about an inch. This means that the doctor should not pull on the cord to help the placenta out, because it could detatch easily and lead to hemmorrage.

So the doctor reaches in and got the placenta out… and behold he said those words. Those words you don’t want to hear. “I’ve never seen one like this before.”

Turns out the blood vessels were uncovered for about 9-10 inches! They showed me the placenta but I don’t know what they’re supposed to look like so it didn’t make that big of an impact on me other than it looked gross. This placenta problem can also lead to complications like, low birth weight and pre-term birth. I should have been monitored via ultrasound throughout the pregnancy for baby size, but my midwife didn’t do that. More scarily, in these cases if the water breaks it can break across the vessels and kill the baby. God is good that my water only leaked, it didn’t all go at once.

More later, but this is the birth story of Owen David.