Parker's Birth Story

We were encouraged in our birthing class to write out our birth story after the baby is born, to share with the group, as well as to help us remember. Although, it seems to me, from the countless (and mostly unsolicited) birth stories I've heard in the past few months, many from 10-30 years ago, the mother never forgets a single detail, but whatever. So, since I have to write it, I thought I might as well publish it. But, I don't actually expect anyone to slog through the whole thing (yes, I know it’s long), this is just where I'm saving it.


So, for most everyone, I'll start with the Reader's Digest version:

Wednesday, 8/25

1:30pm Weekly Dr's Appt

2:00 Admitted to Birthing Center

5:00 Start induction

10:30 Pain Starts

Thursday, 8/26
1:30am Epidural!
4:30am Start Pushing
8:17am Parker makes his appearance!

Saturday, 8/28
3:00-ish Finally make our way home.



But, if you want all the sordid details, here you go...

At my 39 1/2-week check-up, the Dr. checked my progress, I was at 2-3cm dilated, and she was confident that I would go into "spontaneous labor" "soon". I've heard enough baby stories to know that "soon" could mean any time between now and September, but she seemed confident that I would have the baby in the not to distant future. So, I went home, and I waited....and waited...and waited for the pain to start. I didn't know what was actually happening, but if there was one thing I'd learned from the classes and countless books, labor hurts, and you'll know it's the real deal when it hurts.

So, the time comes for my 40 1/2-week appointment. I decided that Keith should probably come to this appointment. I was having what seemed like almost constant Braxton Hicks, but I hadn't had a single painful contraction, so I obviously was a LONG way from spontaneous labor. So I thought it would be good to have Keith there so we could start the induction discussion. I drove downtown to pick Keith up from work and we headed over to the hospital. When we got there, my blood pressure was high, not crazy-high, but a little high for pregnancy, and certainly higher than my normal just-high-enough-to-keep-you-alive level. When the Dr. checked my status, I was a full 5cm dilated. Dr. Warwick wasn't really sure why/how I was so dilated without being in labor, but she thought it would be a good idea to have me admitted for some monitoring, and probably inducing to get the contractions started. All of a sudden, it was much more real, we’re having a baby today!

We headed upstairs and before you know it, I was hooked up to a baby monitor on one side and an IV drip on the other. Once the monitor was up & running, we discovered to everyone's surprise that not only was I already in-labor, my contractions were only 1-2 minutes apart and fairly consistent. We met with the on-call Dr who decided to get the show on the road. My blood pressure wasn't going to hurt the baby, but there wasn't any compelling reason to keep me pregnant at that point. So, just before he left for the day (around 5pm), they started the Pitocin drip, and we continued to wait for the pain.

There is something very strange, and not at all as described in the books, to be sitting in a hospital room, just waiting for the pain to start. I had tried to keep an open mind as to what my labor & delivery would look like, but never in a million years would I have included, "sit painlessly in the hotel room for six hours, eating dinner and watching Transformers". Every once in a while, the nurse would up my Pitocin level, so by 10 or so, we'd gone from 1 to 6. I still wasn't feeling anything, but the contractions were much more consistent (at least according to the little read-out). Mostly, we sat around listening to the baby’s heartbeat on the monitor, until he moved, and then the nurse would have to re-position the monitor. I think she spent 50% of her time re-positioning the baby monitor since he kept moving. I think she must have used an entire tube of that gooey stuff on the monitor, if only it cured stretch marks, I’d have a perfect tummy!

Finally, around 10:30, I started to feel the contractions, and when they came, they came with a bang. In the time it took to do one lap around the hall, the pain had gone from non-existent to the level that I couldn’t walk. Once the pain started, they did another exam to check my status, as of 10:30, I was still at 5cm, but the pain was ramping up. By midnight or so, the pain seemed like more than I could handle, during each contraction I came to the absolute decision to get an epidural, but then during the brief down time, I'd decide to hold out a little longer. I felt pretty wimpy to be asking for pain meds only an hour after the pain started, but I just wasn't sure I could handle what I was experiencing then, let alone once labor really "got going". Finally, around 1, I told the nurse I was ready to talk about pain meds. We tried the bathtub, which helped a tiny bit, but not really enough to notice. The nurse started discussing my options and the pros & cons of narcotics to "take the edge off" during the middle part of labor. I really just wanted to skip all the intermediate stuff and go straight to the epidural. Not only was I not so excited about the side-effects of the narcotics on myself and the baby, I didn't want to take the edge off, I wanted the pain GONE entirely. I'm not convinced how tactful I was in expressing this thought to everyone around.

Before we started any drugs, the Dr's did an exam, just to check my progress. I was expecting to be around 6-7 or so, but I was 90% effaced and 9cm dilated. Suddenly, the pain level made more sense; I'd gone almost all the way through Transition in under 2 hours. So, they called the Anesthesiologist and she got started setting up...slowly. By this point my contractions were right on top of each other and I was in so much pain I couldn't see straight. I understand enough about anesthesia to know that even once she starts the meds, it will be 15-20 minutes before the pain subsides, and I wasn’t sure I could survive another 15-20 minutes like this. And that count-down wouldn’t even start until she GOT THAT STUPID NEEDLE IN MY BACK, which seemed to take FOREVER. It took all the willpower in my system not to scream “JUST PUT IT IN, PUT IT IN!!” (Afterwards, I was talking with my dad, when I told him who did the epidural, he said, “Yeah, she’s good, but she’s slow.”, so I guess I wasn’t making it up). But eventually, the drugs started working and the world was a little rosier.

By this time I was almost 10cm dilated, and mostly effaced, but there was a small section that still needed to thin out before we could start the pushing. According to the Dr, the baby’s head was still bobbing around a bit, so they didn’t want to break the waters for fear that something could slip in underneath. So, they decided to just pierce the waters bag and let it drip, to see if his head would push down enough to finish opening the cervix. At this point, Keith & I both took a nap and had several hours to catch up on our energy for the “big event”. I woke up around 3 or 3:30, I wasn’t feeling pain, but there was definitely pressure, so hopefully the baby was getting closer to ready. I was 10cm and pretty much completely effaced, so the Dr broke my water. (Turns out Parker had had quite a pillow, judging by the volume of water that came out, the Dr even got wet). We did a few “practice pushes”, and at 4:30, we woke Keith up to start pushing. The contractions weren’t painful (praise the Lord for epidurals), but I could feel them, so I knew right when to push. We tried several positions, but I preferred the squat bar. My left leg was complete dead weight due to the epidural, so I had to tell Keith to lift it up for each contraction when I was just on my back. With the squat bar I could control things a little better on my own (pretty much everything was out of my control at this point, it was nice to have SOMETHING I could control).

Eventually, they upped my Pitocin level to get the contractions a little closer together & stronger. About two hours into it, I felt like we hadn’t yet gotten anywhere. The contractions were getting MUCH more painful, and I was exhausted from the pushing, but it seemed like the baby’s head was just moving back & forth & back & forth. I could actually feel his head come forward when I pushed, and then retract back again after. We had a 1st year Resident from the UW working with us through the delivery (no one could ever remember her name, just that it “rhymed with spaghetti”), with every push she’d say “I can see his head, he has a lot of hair”. Of course, I was convinced she was lying because 1. NOTHING was happening, she was just trying to make me feel better, and 2. How could she see his hair, it was supposed to be blonde!

But eventually, after hours of pushing to the point that I was beyond exhausted, we were almost there. I was vaguely aware that they were getting ready, the room was slowly filling up with people and equipment, but I wasn’t really aware of anything outside of myself. The contractions were so painful (even with the epidural) that I couldn’t see straight, and I was so exhausted that I couldn’t even open my eyes. Keith was a great trooper holding my hand and trying to help me out. Unfortunately, I was too exhausted to really care who was there or what they were saying. Fortunately the epidural was working well enough to keep me from telling him that! But finally little (or not so little) Parker was born, I could feel when his little head finally popped out, I had to hold there for a little bit, then they let me deliver the rest of his body. It was the most amazing and exciting thing to see his squirmy little body put down on my chest, and his full head of dark brown hair (where did that come from?!?!). He seemed a little purple, and he wasn’t making much noise, but I thought that no one else seemed too concerned about it, so I figured it was fine. After a couple minutes, the baby nurse took him away to get him cleaned up and make sure he was okay, and then I noticed that his cord was cut already. I wasn’t sure how I had missed that point, but it didn’t really matter (only later did I hear that his umbilical cord had been wrapped around his neck fairly tightly, so they’d had to cut it before I could deliver his body. This was probably why it had taken so much pushing, and also information that it was better that I didn’t know until several hours later when Parker was sleeping peacefully next to me). Once they got Parker to let out a good cry (they put him on the cold scale), they did let Keith trim the cord. Good thing we weren’t too married to our birth plan!

I remember in my birthing classes they said “you won’t even notice when you deliver the placenta, you’ll be too distracted with the baby”. Well, I was distracted with the baby, but I wouldn’t say that was entirely true, it was still fairly painful, but still nothing compared to the 14” head I’d just delivered. But eventually, I was all stitched up, Parker was pinking up, and we were free to spend a little time together as our new family.

We expected that we’d be sent home the next morning (Friday), but we actually were kept at the hospital until Saturday afternoon. Parker was having a hard time getting the hang of the whole eating thing, and I wasn’t supplying enough food to keep him going, so they kept us there until we had a plan working to keep him fed. We were eager to get home, but it was good to have that extra night of help from the nurses to get him feeding better. I’ll never again joke about how hospitals kick you out practically before the ink is dry on the birth certificate. The hospital really did a great job of taking care of us and setting us up for success in feedings (even though it still has proven frustrating to no end).

Welcome Parker!

Welcome Parker Scott Kruger!
Born: Thursday August 26th, 2010  8:17am
Weight: 8lbs, 8oz
Length: 19 3/4"
Head Size: 14.17"

He's a little purple in this first picture, he had some trauma at birth, but he pinked up pretty quickly.

Parker's first Sudoku.

Ready to go home (finally)!

With his cousin Nora, who came and said, "Momma said if I wash my hands I can hold the baby.  Did you know, he's my cousin?!"

Overdue

We're waiting....

Today's Project

Denise very kindly gave us one of her gliders to put in the baby's room.  I've been contemplating re-covering it to match the room since before we got it, but hadn't done it yet.  Mostly because I've never re-covered anything before, and this didn't seem like the sort of project I wanted to leave half-finished if the baby came early (which clearly isn't happening).

But, this morning as I was in bed not sleeping, I thought that re-covering the glider might be a good project for today.  So I headed off to the craft store as soon as they were open (it was an early morning for me and I never quite made it back to sleep).  I quickly found a fabric that I liked, actually, I re-found a fabric that I already knew I liked, I'd found it originally when looking for curtain fabric.  But at $17.99/yard, I wasn't sure I really wanted to make that sort of commitment.  Especially since this project had the potential to go horribly wrong, and who needs a $50 "learning experience".  So, finally I bought a small amount and thought I'd try it out just on the footrest.

Well, look how cute that turned out!?!  Of course I have to do the whole chair now.  The only problem being that I'd already used my 50% off coupon on the footrest fabric, and I'm still not willing to fork over the $17.99/yard, no matter how cute.  So, being the resourceful, classy girl that I am, I head out to the recycle bin (waiting on the side of the road for pick-up), and dig through until I find my JoAnne's circular that I'd thrown away a few days ago.  Of course, it didn't have a 50% coupon (40% off was the best I could do), but that's better than nothing.  So I made my second trip of the day to JoAnne's (thankfully it is less than 5 blocks away), and two hours later I had this:

I haven't quite figured out what to do with the armrest covers.  We may just live without, the current covers are snapped into place, and I can't find an easy way to work around that, which is what I did for all the other pieces.  Of course, I was almost completely done before I thought, "Guess I should have tried to match the stripes from top to bottom, oh well!"  But I did do a fairly fantastic job of pattern matching from the seat to the footrest (completely by accident).

The good news/bad news of this fabric is that it's an indoor-outdoor fabric, so it's not really washable, BUT it's fade-proof (not that we'll need that feature) AND semi-waterproof.  So hopefully we should be able to wipe all the baby-puke off fairly easily.

On Leave

It's official, as of 3pm on Monday, I am officially on Maternity Leave!  Well, technically, I'm currently on pregnancy leave, Maternity leave doesn't start until the little guy makes his appearance.  But the main point is that I didn't have to get up and go to work this morning.  So, of course, I was wide awake at 6:30.

I don't know why this surprises me, but I'm having a little difficulty acclimating to not-working.  My to-do list for the day:
Get up
Swim
Make potato salad
Balance checkbook
Bed Bath & Beyond
Babies R Us
Safeway
Fold Laundry
Start Dinner
Pay the bills
Vacuum
Rest

Perhaps I'm not fully grasping onto the "take some time at home to rest before the baby comes" concept yet.  But I do fully intend to do everything before lunch so I can spend the afternoon on the air mattress in the back yard.  But something tells me I need to temper my expectations just a little.

Where, exactly, did I go wrong? ...part 2

As I might have mentioned (once or twice), my garden this year has been a huge disappointment.  Of the probably 100 seeds (of varying types) I started in the house, I got exactly four total plants (all basil).  My tomato plants still don't have a single fruit on them, and my peppers, watermelon, lavender, and flowers all gave up before they started.  The upside-down pea seeds actually turned out okay, and we did enjoy several weeks of sugar snap peas. 

But the strangest thing I seem to be growing is a carrot-tree.  I'm not sure what went wrong with these, but about half my carrot seeds seem to have mis-understood which part of the plant is supposed to grow, so the green part is 3-4 feet tall, with a root that would be considered pathetic even on a non-root-vegetable. 

I paired it with one of my semi-successful carrots for a little perspective:
The carrot part:

The not-carrot part:

Anyone see something wrong with this picture?

Diapers, Diapers, Everywhere!

 We (well, I) are fairly determined to use cloth diapers.  It seems like they can't possibly be that much worse than disposables, once you get used to it.  And it just seems like a lot of garbage for one little creature to generate.  So, I sent in my order last week.  I even sprung for the organic cotton version (okay, it was only $4 more, but still, and it didn't seem that much more expensive than the one container of diapers I bought at Target last week.)  Plus did you know it takes 1/3lb of pesticides to  grow one cotton t-shirt?  Dianne dropped them off this week (handy having someone in "the biz"), look at the super-cute containers they came in:

Of course, they will NEVER again fit in these little packs, so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with four cotton envelopes, but they are pretty cute.

I got my no-residue detergent and I'm ready to start the multi-step process of turning the diapers from large, nonabsorbent cardboard into tiny, absorbent diapers.  I'm only one wash in so far (good thing baby's not moving too quickly), but it seemed the perfect time to try out my new clothes line!

I was super excited when we first moved here to discover that we already had a clothes line put up between our porch and the back fence.  Of course, it was only after we put it up that I realized it was actually a dog run (who needs a dog run in a fully-fenced back yard?!?).  It worked okay, but I could only reach about 2/3'ds of it and it was too short to hold an entire load of wash, so it went on Keith's to-do list to make it a little more user-friendly.  He designed a fantastic new layout, and it's much less obtrusive in the back yard (since the dog-run ran directly over my vegetable garden).

Nesting?

I don't think this is the "the baby's coming soon" kind of nesting, but I've had enough people ask me the "you're stocking the freezer?..." question, that I thought maybe I should do a little cooking.  Because, let's face it, I don't have time for cooking right now and it's not going to get any easier AFTER the baby comes.  So, in just over 4 hours this afternoon, I (with a lot of chopping help from Keith) made 12 dinners worth of meals, with plans for 3-4 more as I make our dinners this week.  This way I at least know that we'll have enough food to get us through the first few weeks.  Although, there are 3-4 of each entree, so if we go straight through them Keith may never again ask for Ham & Potato casserole.

Unfortunately, I don't think it's the real-deal nesting, seeing how in real nesting, along with the panicked need to finish, is an accompanying burst of energy that was lacking in this process.  For the last hour my refrain was "just don't stop, just don't stop, you can finish if you just don't stop moving."  (Since I'm now in-front of the computer, I obviously have stopped and there will be no more cooking today, guess it's cereal for dinner).

Baby Update

I went in for my 37-ish week appointment today.  The Doctor told me that he's doing fine and there's no way he's coming early.  Okay, she didn't actually use those exact words, but I could read between the lines.

Her actual words were "he's measuring a little large, but I'm not concerned because he hasn't dropped at all and you still have a ways to go".  Guess I don't have to be concerned about cancelling out on the dinner plans we made for next Friday.

It is finished.

For the second time in just over a year, Keith has finished re-finishing the back deck.  No, we're not over-particular deck owners (not by a long-shot), it just so happens we've owned two back decks in the past year.  Each in a sad state of disrepair.  Hopefully now we can take a break for a while.

We had hoped that this year's project would be a little less daunting than last years.  Just pressure wash the deck, stain it, and call it a day.  Two week-ends later, we're done.  Which worked up to a point, until...  Well, the top railing is pretty sad, we probably should sand that...  And you, know, actually all the railings are pretty sad, we should probably sand them all.  And before you know it, a 2-weekend project has become a 2+ month project.

But now it's done.  Special thanks to Hume who came over for several hours to help out on Saturday morning, saving Keith several hours on Sunday afternoon.  (Or perhaps we should thank Rochelle for leaving town for 2 weeks so Keith was bored enough to come over.)  As it was, we ate dinner on Sunday at 8:30 since I knew there was no way in heck Keith was going to come inside until it was DONE.

I did it myself!

Part I:

My toenails have been the topic of much discussion lately.  Mostly because up until yesterday they were bright orange, but also because I'm pregnant.  Nearly every exclamation on the color was quickly followed-up with the question, "did you do it yourself?"  Now, that's a silly question, of course not, I haven't painted my own toenails in years (okay, that's an exaggeration, but not by much).

Although I generally have the ability to paint my own nails, I seldom have the inclination, and the ladies at the shop do a much better job, while also scrubbing, buffing, and massaging, so why should I bother.  But, the way everyone looked at my feet, then my ever-increasing belly, and then asked the question, I took it as a personal challenge...could I actually do it myself at 8+months pregnant?

Turns out I can.  Glad that question is out of the way so I can go back to having it done by professionals.

Part II:

I also actually hung up my paintings, all by myself, and with only six holes in the wall (four were required).  Not that this is the first time I've ever hung a portrait, but this is the first time I've ever tried to do it the proper way.  I actually used a level, a step-ladder, AND a stud-finder.  (and by the way, the only reason for the two extra holes in the wall was because the stud finder was lying to me).

I'm not entirely certain yet how I feel about the paintings, but I did a bang-up job of putting them up!

Three More Weeks!

Baby's room is getting ready!

As am I:

We've got all the basics in the nursery, Denise gave us a glider last weekend, so now all we're missing is a diaper pail and a few odds & ends.  ...and clothes large enough to house me & the baby at the same time.  My wardrobe is quickly shrinking to the point that my only requirements in the morning is that my outfit be clean-ish, and not make me more uncomfortable than I already am.  It really is a wonder that anyone can walk at all when they are this top/front heavy, you'd think we'd fall over.