Sister

Brother

Dora

and Baby Z (That’s a hint, BTW)

(If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about go here.)

Kick.  Kick, kick. KICK. POP!  It is 11:45.  I have been somewhat asleep.  Not all the way of course because what woman 10 days past her due date can truly sleep?  I know immediately what has happened and I am grateful for the waterproof sheet underneath me.

“Will….Will.  Wake up.  My water just broke.”

Will wakes from his blissfully un-pregnant slumber.  “Huh? Wha?”

“My water just broke.  I need your help.”

He sleepily starts to rise and promptly lays back down again.  “I’m going to need just a minute.”

I wait until the ashen look leaves his face and he steels himself for the long night he and I both know is ahead.

A few minutes later I am standing in the bathtub with liquid dripping down my leg while Will changes out sopping sheets for dry ones and a few minutes after that we are finally back in bed.

A call to our midwife garnered this advice, “Go back to bed.  Try to get some sleep.  Labor will start soon.”

Sure enough 30 minutes after my water broke the first rushes start.  They are small, barely noticeable but it is early yet.  Will gets back out of bed to set up the birth pool because once things get going we know there won’t be time.  Sister hears the pump and stumbles sleepily downstairs.  She’s excited and there’s no sending her back to bed so we have her go to the couch instead.

One am and all activity ceases.

In the morning I give our midwife a ring, “Uhm you know when you said labor would start soon.  Exactly how soon is soon?”

There’s no point is changing our day so we get up and have breakfast.  I start some laundry while Will plays with the kids.  Around 10:30 we head out for a walk thinking that might help and discover a garter snake near the house.

The walk does nothing.  Spicy food perhaps?  We head to a local Mexican restaurant for a nice lunch.  Contractions?  Nada.

My water has been broken long enough now that to stave off possible infection I begin taking Vitamin C and Echinacea every hour.  I am, of course, in contact with our midwife this whole time but there’s not much to tell.  She suggests castor oil and I flatly refuse.  What about cohash?  Almost as yucky but okay.

Continuing our day of non-laboring fun we shoot some pool, play 20 questions and a round of Settlers of Catan. (Sister wins).  To bed we go.  No baby but it’s been the most awesome family of 4 day ever.

Saturday, July 18th

I continue taking the cohash in the morning but it’s been almost 33 hours now since my water broke and though there’s no sign of infection obviously we want to be as safe as possible. 

“If you hit the 48 hour mark, we’ll have to go to the hospital.”  I know she’s right though I hate to admit it.  Will heads to Walgreen’s for castor oil and by 3pm I’ve taken my 3rd dose of the nasty stuff.

Somewhere in there it occurs to me that perhaps labor hasn’t picked up because I’m busy trying to be a mom instead of a pregnant woman so as much as I wanted them to be there for the birth Grandma comes to pick up Brother and Sister for a night at her house.

Finally, finally around six real contractions start.  They’re not super strong but they are regular and growing consistently longer and stronger.  Yay!  I think about doing a happy dance but with the kids away Will and I settle in to watch a movie instead.  Air Force One for the curious among you.  Nothing like a little espionage to get you in the mood to have a baby.  Or not.  Harrison Ford is just beginning his quest to re-take the plane when the contractions start to fizzle out again.

“We need to go for a walk.”  I tell Will.  He hides his disappointment and we head out for a leisurely stroll around the neighborhood.  “Around” the neighborhood might not have been the best route choice.  Half a mile from home and I am stopping every few steps to cope.  Back at home, Harrison continues outwitting the bad guys.  I breathe through each rush as it comes but with 6 minutes left on the ticker, I’ve had about all I can take of Harrison’s antics.  It’s time to concentrate on baby.

We go downstairs.  There is much walking and kneeling and leaning and swaying and pretty much whatever else I think might help.  Around 10 Will fills the birth pool and about 20 minutes later I’m groaning about how old I am and how hard this is and being generally negative.  The doula in me says, “Hello, transition woman.”  The rest of me says, “Shut-up.”

I slip into the pool hoping our midwife arrives soon because I’m definitely feeling that pushing urge and yet something isn’t quite right.  She walks in the door at 11 and immediately checks me.  Or tries to.  “I’m sorry but I need you to get out of the pool.”

What the heck?  Tiffany’s been my midwife before.  I know she can check me in the pool. “What is her problem?,”  I think to myself.  Soon I know.

“Uhm, I’m feeling a nose.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means the baby is presenting face first.”  She pauses, “It means we may need to go the hospital.”

“Nooo.”  It comes out as a pitiful request.  We’ve gone through so much to avoid that scenario.  I can’t bring myself to accept it now.

Will speaks up.  “Can’t you, you know, move the shoulder back or something?”  (In his mind he is referencing a similar situation from “All Creatures Great and Small” in which a cow is having difficulty and the vet manipulates the calf into a better position.  Only later do I learn this underlying information which is fortunate because had I thought at that moment Will was comparing me to a cow bad things might have happened.)

She looks at him for a moment, “I suppose I could try.”

At least two strong contractions have come and gone during this exchange and a third is on the way.  I am told to turn on hands and knees with face down and bottom up.  The contraction subsides and she checks me again.  Three more rounds of this and I’m declared complete.  “There is still a little lip but you can push slowly.”

I need to be back in the water so the three of us move as a unit across to the pool.  The contractions are so strong now there is no choice but to push.  Will is behind me supporting my arms.  Tiffany has the baby.  She brings her to the surface of the water.  Her tiny face is swollen and a little blue but with a bit of oxygen the color quickly returns.  The moment is heavy with relief and euphoria.  It is 11:35. ~ 35 minutes since Tiffany arrived, 5 hours and 35 minutes since labor really began and just shy of 48 hours since my water broke.

You know how babies will sometimes just go and go and go and then, suddenly drop off to sleep without warning.  That pretty much sums up bedtime tonight.  Dora hasn’t been sleeping all that well and basically, that means that I’ve not been sleeping all that well.  At first I thought she was teething (and maybe she was).  Then I was sure she wasn’t getting enough to eat during the day (toddlers often don’t) and that she was compensating at night (and maybe she was).  Now I am camping on a completely different theory:  she’s lonely.  Even though her crib is in the same room with Will and I, this highly social creature wakes up and in her groggy, disoriented state perceives the dark around her as vast and empty.  And really who could go back to sleep with that thought in her head?  She is only just now one year old and thinking back to when Brother was that age I realize that I did not expect him to sleep alone.  In fact, we had a rather large family bed until he was almost 3.  I’ve only been trying to push her toward crib sleep because of the new baby’s impending arrival.  But it’s not right.  She’s not ready and I know only too well the sleep problems that arise from pushing a child too soon.

So, all of that leads to tonight.  We are fortunate to have a master bedroom with a rather large sitting area to one side.  This sitting area has been functioning as the “nursery”  But tonight we rearranged the our bedroom furniture from a very cute and ordered “master bedroom with a nursery” to a messy hodgepodge of “sleeping space and everything else”.  First Will removed the up/down side of the crib, then we jammed it up against the side of our bed.  Everything else was rearranged around that.  It may not be traditional but it’s necessary and I know in the long run we will all be better sleepers because of it.  All this change got Dora pretty wound up so even though she was extremely tired  it took a good 45 minutes for her to get to sleep but she did it eventually (and suddenly) and I think it is a good beginning.

*Side Note #1:  If you think that at one year old Dora should be sleeping all the way through the night every night then you either A) don’t have children B) got darn lucky with your own children or C) are lying to yourself about what your little one is doing at night all alone in that room way down the hall.

Side Note #2:  Some people buy those co-sleeper contraptions that fit on the side of a bed but unless space is an issue I suggest saving your money because first of all those little beds cost an arm and a leg and second they are so little that past 9 or 10 months they are completely unusable.  A regular crib works fine and lasts much longer.   In our case, the crib we have converts to toddler bed so it was easy to take the side off but with Brother we used a regular crib and fastened it to the frame of our bed and it worked well too.

Since I was nursing when baby #4 surprised us by his presence we weren’t sure of the due date so we went to see Barbara.  She gave us these.

and a due date of Nov 18th … you know, because having a newborn in the mix will really make the holiday season go more smoothly.

She also told us our baby to be is a boy (which, for the record, I knew already).  Sister and Brother are both pleased with this information.  Sister because it means that she won’t have to share her room with another sibling and Brother because he likes things to be even.

She also told us that Baby is super healthy and perfect in every way.  (She didn’t use those exact words but that’s what she meant.) but she also informed us that we have marginal placenta previa.  Probably everything will be just fine because it’s still so early in the pregnancy but later we will make a trip to see Barbara again to be sure.  Other than that all is well.

As a bonus for you, here’s a baby picture that Sister drew for me when we returned.

.

She’s almost nine months.

She crawls (sometimes cruises). She can sit well on her own.

It was time to graduate from the kitchen sink to a real bathtub. 

SHE. LOVED. IT!

Oh, if only that enthusiasm could be transferred to her siblings.

This picture reminds me of another one from a few years ago.  I was taking shots of my, then baby, nephew while his parents made every effort to extract a smile.  The baby was cute but the parents were even better.  I couldn’t help turning the camera on them instead.

Somehow I never posted my Buckaroo haiku on the front page ~ not certain why.  Anyway, today I found the perfect picture accompaniment from Dora’s early days and had to share.

baby in the house

bleary eyes for tiny toes

a worthy exchange.

**In case you were wondering about those two blue bumps, they’re my knees.  I’m laying on my back, balancing my 3 month old up in the air with my legs while taking pictures and saying “cootchie coo” repeatedly.  Yep, we’re all about the safety around here.

Due to a slight paranoia, for the longest time on this blog my eldest daughter has been known as Sister and my son as Brother and that seemed oh so sufficient and clever back in the day when we were NEVER going to have any more children.  Never?  Ha!

So finding a bloggy name for our littlest has presented a bit of a conundrum.  She’s been “Baby” up to now but how will that go over when she’s not a baby or what about when another comes along?  (Yes, we are planning on having more)  Calling her “Littlest” presents the same problem.  She needs a moniker that won’t get usurped by another.  She needs a name she can keep.  But what?  Soon after the birth Brother declared he did not care for Baby’s given name.  He would call her “Dora” instead.  Not wanting to jump on the Nick Jr bandwagon I resisted using his choice here.  Now however I’ve convinced myself that “Dora” can easily be explained as short for “Adorable”.  Since she’s all that and more … Internets, meet Dora.

.

Consuming baby love

like the intoxicating beverage it is.

Can’t get enough.

Drunk all the time.