#new-mom

Tomorrow will begin my last week on maternity leave. All I am left with is this bittersweet feeling. It felt like just yesterday I was forty weeks, throwing in the towel, hoping she would come before the scheduled induction date. Every contact nap, every morning smile over coffee, every sleepy milk drunk look, and every dirty diaper is heavier than what it use to be. I would be lying if I said…

Christmas day, my favorite holiday started out like any normal day. Right around 2:30 p.m. contractions started. These started out just like all my previous contractions, feeling just like period cramps but spreading up to the top of my stomach. The top of the stomach would feel like it was pushing the baby down, right where he needed to be. 

A friend told me that a warm bath would get rid of contractions if they were "Braxton hicks" contractions, so that's what I tried. I sat in the tub for about thirty minuets timing my contractions, and they were all about 8-10 minuets apart. This time I had a feeling that something was different. My dog (a one year old Shepard collie mix) didn't leave my side. This was a little unusual because she normally does not go into the bathroom, but here she was, laying right next to the tub. I called my husband in and told him that if I was still having contractions by five, I wanted to go to the hospital just in case. At about 4 p.m. my contractions jumped to 3-5 minuets apart, and the pain from each contraction never fully left. the pain would die down, but pick right back up. I knew it was time! 

We got to the hospital at 5:15, I walked into the lobby and went for the wheelchair. My husband parked the car and ran in to help me. Two months earlier we had a birthing class, they walked us through the hospital and took us step by step on what was going to happen when we came in to have the baby. I'm not sure if he was nervous or excited, but my husband forgot all of the information. Lol! I had also preregistered with the hospital to make my entrance a little easier, and I was signed up for an induction on the 26th. They led me to my room, gave me the hospital gown to change into, and checked to see how dilated I was. everything seemed to go very smoothly, I was five cm and 100% effaced. I was on my way! 

Fortunately I was the only one up there not to get a c-section; unfortunately we had to remind every nurse that walked into my room that I was doing a vaginal birth. By 6 p.m. They had me all hooked up to the monitors and the IVs and they said that the anesthesiologist would be in to give me the epidural as soon as she was done with the c-section. From there the pain of my contractions grew to a 10 on my pain scale, and I was about to get up and find that anesthesiologist! I had my husband playing me piano music to give me something to focus on (I'm a pianist) and we had "Pirates of the Caribbean" playing on the tv.

Right around 9 p.m. the anesthesiologist finally came in to give me the epidural. They had me sit up and wanted me to relax my back. That wasn't exactly possible. They didn't wait till I was in the middle of a contraction to put the needle in my back, she just did it when my back gave the opportune moment. It was a weird feeling, i felt them putting the tube down into my spine, and the sharp little pain that happens when they brush a nerve. Within a minuet I felt the sweet relief of the medication. Then my body started to numb. It went from my feet to about half way up my chest. I couldn't move anything but my arms and head. The nurses put in a catheter, and came to check how far along I was. By this time I was about 7 cm. It felt so weird to not be able to move my legs, I would sit and stair at them with no results. The gave me two and a half bags of fluids, a bag to increase my heart rate (my heart rate had decreased a little bit) then a bag of pitocin (sp) because the epidural had started to slow my labor process. I had three hours of relief and rest before my contractions came back full fledged. I told the nurse and she said I was just feeling pressure, not pain, and that I just need to press the little button that they gave me. 

AT 12 a.m. It was finally time to start pushing!! The doctor was in the hospital sleeping, and they were only going to call him when the baby was ready to come out. That made me a little nervous but I trusted that they knew what they were doing. They had my husband on one side helping me hold my leg, and a nurse on the other side. The nurse wanted to tell me to push, then I would do three sets of ten second pushes. I wanted to push from the start of my contraction because I felt like it gave me a running start. instead of arguing on when to start pushing I would just start when I wanted to and kept going till the end of the set. I felt the baby's head moving down with each push. You know that pain you have when you have a huge poop you're trying to get out, and it's to the point that you're body is trying to help you get it out. imagine if that poop was twenty times larger, and instead of having a small canal to get it through you have a foot long canal to push through. I started asking when the doctor was and they had to remind me that it wasn't time yet. After about an hour and a half of the worst pain in the world they called in the doctor. 

The doctor came in and set up his working station. By the time he was ready the baby's head was almost crowning. I pushed for another fifteen minuets and then the doctor started cutting. We had never really talked about an epesiotomy (sp), nor did he ask if I wanted one. I felt him cutting me but the pain from the baby took my attention off everything else. I feel like he cut me about 4 or 5 times, but I never had the courage to ask. Then I felt like the doctor stuck his hands into me and pulled out the baby's head and shoulders. I saw him suctioning out the baby's nose to get him to breath, and he was telling me not to push but I had no way to stop those contractions that kept going. The doctor quickly pulled out the rest of the baby and quickly cut the umbilical chord and passed him to the nurse. Right after the baby was pulled out I heard a huge gush of blood hit the floor, then I felt the placenta start to exit. My husband bent over and kissed me on the head, and with a few tears in his eyes said "good job baby! He's finally here!" 

My attention then turned to my baby boy. I felt the world slow down as I waited for that first cry. It felt like it took forever before I finally heard him. I remember that all I could do was ask why he wasn't crying yet, but they had everything under control. Next came the stitches. Since my epidural wore off I felt every stitch the doctor made. It felt like he was there for twenty minuets working on me. They asked if I wanted to hold the baby but the pain was too bad for me to trust myself with a baby in my arms. I simply watched as my smiling husband held our newborn. we studied his face, and just took joy in finally being able to see him for the first time. 

After the doctor and nurses got me all cleaned up I finally held my baby. he was so much lighter than I thought he would be. He felt huge while I was trying to push him out, but now that I could finally see and hold him, he was tiny! 

There are almost no words to describe what it feels like to be pregnant. you have another human inside of you, growing for the next 9 months! The first month, most people don't know they are pregnant. Some people get sick right away, but I didn't. My husband and I were with our youth group on a trip when I thought I was starting my period. we stopped at a gas station, i went to the bathroom, and there was a spot of blood. My husband and I had been trying to have a baby for a year, so in order not to get my hopes up, i treated it like the beginning signs of a period. We got home four hours later and my period had not started yet. I decided to go ahead and use a pregnancy test, just for fun. Right after I put it on the counter, my husband came in a picked it up. I was finally pregnant!

About a month after that the morning sickness started. I felt like my body thought that food was actually poison! Some mornings I even threw up the water I drank a few minuets earlier. My morning sickness lasted during month three and four. All my baby let me eat was bean burritos, with no onions, from taco bell. Other than being sick, I didn't feel pregnant. I didn't gain weight, in fact I lost ten pounds! (I started out overweight) I kept feeling that maybe the baby had died, or there was something wrong; but there wasn't. =)

Month four I started gaining some weight, but people didn't know I was pregnant until month six. Along with the weight gain came the acid reflux, that wasn't fun. Funny things happen to you when you finally get your baby belly. It's eagerly awaited, then when you finally get it you realize that your life is slowly changing. Buckling my seat belt and driving started getting interesting. Instead of reaching over myself to buckle, I started having to pass the belt to the other hand. It got increasingly hard to get up and down out of the car, I'd have to push the door open with my foot then grab what I could to lift out. By the end of the pregnancy my stomach touched the steering wheel. It terrified me ever time I drove; i couldn't imagine what would happen to the baby if I got into an accident and the air bag went off. People didn't understand why I stopped driving, but I did what I thought was safest for my unborn child. 

The first time you see you baby on an ultra sound, it takes your breath away!! At month four we got to find out the gender of our baby!! Some people like to wait and find out, but I'm impatient. we went and found out that we were having a baby boy! 

Month five, six, and seven passed very similar to month four, except I was getting bigger each week, and more scared of giving birth. Of course being scared wont do you very much good, because it's too late now. I made the decision to get pregnant and giving birth is just something that I would have to do. Also things got harder to do, and I could no longer pick things off the floor. If I dropped something, it stayed there. 

Many people work until they give birth to their child, and I congratulate them on that accomplishment. I had already made the decision to be a stay at home mom, I am lucky enough for my husband to have a job that makes it possible for me to do this. It also made since financially for us. After I added everything up, it would be cheeper for me to stay at home with the baby than for me to work. I decided to quit my job at month eight. driving to and from work was getting hectic, getting on and off the chair at work was really hard, (I was a bank teller and we had chairs that were almost taller than me plus a bruised tail bone) I couldn't get a good nights sleep, and my job was going through a merger, so it was either quit or stress out. The reasons don't really matter, and I can sit here all day and think of things, it was just an opportune time.