Labor and Delivery, Part II

Okay.  So it's 2:30 a.m., we've each slept about an hour, and we're watching Friends.  Oh, and the contractions have basically stopped.

We decided we would go ahead and go back outside for a few more laps around the parking lot.  The contractions came back, at least a little bit, and then would subside, and then came back again.  It was now nearly 5 a.m., and no longer dark out.  We decided that it was time to go to the hospital and find out what was going on, because we're just not good at waiting and not knowing things.

It was a drive I'd visualized a number of times in the previous few months.  I thought about it during the trip to each of the last several doctor's appointments, since the practice's office was part of the hospital complex.  And I thought about it on the way to and from work, since the routes overlapped a bit.  And oddly, I'd always assumed a middle-of-the-night drive: no traffic, dark out.  I'm not sure whether I absorbed too much culture, or that I remember my parents leaving for the hospital at 2 a.m. when my baby brother was born (I was 12 at the time).  In any event, that five minutes was about the only period of any length during the entire process that went about how I imagined it.

Alright, so we're at the hospital.  We're calm.  We're nervous.  We're freaking out because the labor can't decide whether it wants to proceed or not.  When we got upstairs to the evaluation room, the midwife on duty examined Sarah and determined that she was just shy of the threshold where they keep you, but thought we were close enough.  She called our doctor, who asked that we stay there and wait for her to arrive.  So we ended up sitting in the evaluation room for several hours.  We were exhausted at this point, we both were hungry, Sarah was getting a little dehydrated, Peanut was all sorts of discombobulated and not behaving properly for the montiors.  And then the doctor came in and told us to go home.  She cautioned us before she examined Sarah that this particular midwife is known for being overenthusiastic in her estimates of labor progression.  Then she sent us home to rest and wait, and to come back when "you can't stand it anymore."

So at 9:30, in the midst of a bright, sunny day, we headed home.  It was a very odd experience.  We thought we'd be leaving with a baby.  We'd been there through sunrise, so all of a sudden the day had started (though it was Memorial Day, so everything was rather quiet).

Most of that day (Monday, May 25) was quiet.  Sarah had some contractions, but nothing particularly intense.  We tried to sleep for a few hours in the morning.  We played some games.

While we were napping, we missed the only phone call that could possibly distract us that day.  Two weeks earlier, some of you may recall, our car had been stolen while parked near campus.  We had assumed it was gone for good (Civics are the most stolen car in America, and it's because they have very interchangeable parts), and went out and bought a new (to us) car.  But during our nap, the Baltimore police called to let us know that they'd found our car!  [ed.: "Found" may imply that the police were "looking" for the car, when we suspect that someone saw the car parked in front of their house with no license plates and informed the police of a suspicious vehicle.]  Because it was Memorial Day, I could not get anyone on the phone back to confirm what was going on, and it would take an awful lot of work to actually get the car back (another story for another time), and we didn't know if it was drivable, but it was good news about the car!

Maybe Peanut sensed our happiness, because it was not long thereafter that Sarah's contractions picked up in intensity.  Now, as I mentioned yesterday, her labor had not been textbook.  Instead of the contractions starting at 15 minutes apart and getting progressively closer, they'd been about 2-3 minutes apart for over 24 hours.  So with the increase in intensity the contractions actually slowed down, but now they were real.  By 6pm, after another round of prep and the first half-hour of Back to the Future, we were back on our way to the hospital.

From here things seemed to go really fast.  They took us upstairs.  The nurses didn't believe that Sarah would stay, because she looked too calm.  Then the midwife did an exam and they were amazed that she wasn't screaming bloody murder based on how far along things were.  They checked Sarah in.  The anesthesiologist did the epidural, after which Sarah wasn't in much pain.  At about 9 p.m., the doctor came in and said she would check in again at midnight.  We tried to rest with the lights down.  Because of the medicine, we were both able to a little bit.  Finally, we realized we couldn't sleep, and put on bad television.  As I recall, we ended up watching part of Leno's last week on the Tonight Show, with Mel Gibson trying to do a redemption interview after his divorce.

At 12:30 the doctor came back, took one look and said, "time to push!"

[ed.: Gory details here.]

Then, at 1:31 a.m., Nicholas arrived, screaming his little head off.  I don't think he stopped until they wheeled him out of the room an hour later for his bath.

From Nicholas Is Born

The Labor and Delivery Story, Part I

With Nicholas's birthday coming up, I've been reading over our posts from last year around the time he was born.  In doing so, I realized that we never told The Story, or, What Happened the Day (and Two Days Before) Nicholas Was Born.

So, to set some context.  The due date for Peanut was May 22, a Friday, which came and went with no excitement whatsoever (so little, in fact, that we managed not to mention it on the blog).  That Sunday, Sarah woke up and thought her stomach felt funny, but couldn't quite place why.  So we went to church, then to our friend Eddie's for an already planned brunch.  Towards mid-afternoon, Sarah noticed while resting her hand on her belly that it was tensing up in rhythmic waves at relatively predictable intervals.  Hmmm, we thought.  So we timed it, to see if it might be real.  And sure enough, the tensing up lasted about 30 seconds, and occurred every two to three minutes.  Holy cow, we thought, Peanut might actually be on his way!  (Though of course publicly we still referred to "its way.")  On the other hand, this was not "textbook" early labor, which involves contractions every fifteen minutes or so.  But we just hoped that would speed things up; this was back in our naïve pre-parenting stage, you see.

We had already arranged to play games and have dinner with Sarah's parents, and we went ahead and told them to come up.  Every book, every mother, every class instructed us that early labor is characterized by three things: pain, anxiety, and boredom at the slow passage of time.  Might as well play Ticket to Ride, right?  Sarah at this point was uncomfortable but not in pain, and the social time made life move a little quicker through the evening hours.

Once Sarah's parents left, we figured we should get things set to go for the hospital for when the time came, so we did our final preparations of bags and snacks (for me), the kinds of things we couldn't have packed earlier because we used them frequently.  It was a nice evening, so we headed outside to walk, both because it helped Sarah feel better as things progressed, and because walking is supposed to help things progress.  We were very grateful that we'd decided to leave the city, because we felt no worries wandering our complex's parking lot at 10pm (or 11pm, or midnight ...), or the parking lot of the small office park next door.  I have no idea how far we walked that night (May 24 to 25), but we spent hours doing laps, then coming back inside.  As the night went on, the contractions got more intense.  At some point (maybe 9pm or so?) we called the doctor to check in, and she told us to come in "when you're starting to have to really work through" the contractions.  She also said she thought she would see us that night, in large part because the contraction timing was already at a place where you'd normally go to the hospital.

At some point we decided to try to sleep a little while, maybe at like 11:30, but I don't think either of us fell asleep for more than a few minutes at a time between then and 1am.  Sarah woke up with somewhat more intense contractions, we went walking again, and then decided it was time to think about heading to the hospital.  We went back inside and took showers (not knowing when we'd get the chance again).  I had something to eat, since I was allowed and am generally a pansy about these things (Sarah acquiesced because she'd rather be jealous of watching me eat than have to deal with a cranky father-to-be).  We put on an episode of Friends as we did our final final prep (using the counter on the DVD player to track contractions) and steeled ourselves for what was about to happen.

Sometime around the ten-minute mark the contractions began to subside.

[Stay tuned for the rest of the story tomorrow, including the surprise ending!]

Breastfeeding Thoughts: Can Dad Get Change for His Two Cents?

I posted in the comments to Sarah's post last week on the decision whether to breastfeed or formula feed, but I have some thoughts I wanted to share from the father's perspective.

First, I will stipulate that this was one of the hardest decisions about Nicholas (well, at the time, Peanut) for me to offer my thoughts.  It's a strange position to be in.  To advocate breastfeeding, which seems like a logical choice for the baby's sake, is to ask your wife and the mother-to-be to take on completely the most time- and labor-intensive task of the first few months of the baby's life.  Fortunately, we worked hard to talk things through (I know, that's shocking about us) and make a reasoned and informed decision, which Sarah enumerated pretty well.

I suppose that as a father, the most persistent emotion I felt about feedings was helplessness.  There were several points when Nicholas and Sarah struggled to make things work, and I could only encourage Sarah to breathe and relax, and remind her that we could switch to formula if she truly felt things weren't working.  But I couldn't actually make the decision for her.  And there's not much you can do for a baby only a few days old to get him to feed properly.

More significantly, I felt helpless because I was missing out on bonding opportunities, or at least thought I was.  In the "movie version" of having a baby, what people look forward to is feeding time.  You get to bond with the baby, and he's awake, etc. etc.  But with breastfeeding, only mommy gets to feed the baby (at least for the first month).  So I couldn't even help out a little bit.  I couldn't take a nighttime feeding to help Sarah sleep (though I did do diapers, and lots of time trying to get him back to sleep).  I couldn't take a daytime feeding for fun.  I couldn't take a feeding for Sarah to go out for an hour (as she mentioned).  It was an entire portion of Nicholas's life—and that first month it's a pretty signification proportion—that was entirely cut off for me.  So that wasn't fun, and I enjoyed being able to give him a bottle (of breast milk) once he got to about four weeks old.

As for the breastfeeding advocacy groups that Sarah mentioned, I will add just a few things, one of them an anecdote that explains part of our position.  Two things bugged me about the breastfeeding advocacy we heard, mostly through the class we took at the hospital as part of the baby prep package.  First was the demonizing of formula.  For me this was galling because I knew that I was formula-fed as a baby, and so were my brothers, and we all turned out fine.  [ed.: Yes, he's willing to admit that every once in a while.]  Not to mention that probably half of the parents-to-be in the room also grew up on formula.  The second part that bothered me was that no one ever bothered to explain how to breastfeed a baby.  The 2-hour session was mostly propaganda about how wonderful breastfeeding is ... how beneficial for the baby, how wonderful for the mother, how awesome for bonding, and did we mention that if you give your kid formula it'll end up with gills?

Now, about that anecdote.  This was where the rubber met the road, and the propaganda failed us until a little pragmatism arrived.  I can't seem to find anything we wrote on the blog about this incident at the time, but it's possible.  Anyway.  In the hospital, Nicholas spent his first night trying to nurse for five- and six-hour shifts.  Each time, the nurses would announce that he was "cluster feeding," and we should roll with it.  Can't mess with the baby's breastfeeding schedule, because baby knows best what he needs.  Which was a nice sentiment, but Sarah couldn't sleep at all, Nicholas wasn't sleeping because he was nursing so much he never got full enough to rest, and I couldn't do anything.  Sarah's milk would come in within about three or four days, but it hadn't yet, so Nicholas simply couldn't get enough food by nursing forever.  On our last morning in the hospital, the final shift nurse we had came up with a brilliant practical solution: give him some formula.  I'll wait for you to stop gasping.  Now, she figured out a way to do it without giving him a bottle, by using a little feeding tube that they use for preemies.  He nursed as usual, he got nutrition, he FELL ASLEEP!  Within a day, he was getting plenty of milk from Sarah, and everything was fine.  But the dogma of breastfeeding almost kept us from even getting out of the starting gate.  Instead of trying to deal with an actual problem, the nurses simply repeated what they "knew" to be true: baby knows best, just breastfeed and everything will be fine.  But not so much.

So those are my thoughts, for what it's worth.

Car Saga

I'll give you the end of the story first: I drove home tonight frightened that I, like my father had done 25 years ago, would total a new car on the drive home from the dealership. I can't print what was said when the car arrived on a flatbed tow truck, but let's just say my mother wasn't particularly concerned with my father's well-being at that moment.

Anyway, with that as preface, we have purchased a car. It's a 2006 Accord, with under 26,000 miles on it. About the only fault with it is that it has an automatic transmission instead of a manual. We both enjoy driving stick-shift, and so this is rather disappointing, but the car is really quite nice in every way, and we didn't want to wear ourselves out searching (potentially in vain) for a manual Accord.

Even so, we're pretty exhausted. We've spent much of the past two days car shopping, hopping from one dealer to the next, and dealing with all manner of bad salesmen. From the one who insisted that we could get a car seat into a 2-door coupe, to the one who thought we'd spend more on a Ford than a brand-new Accord, we have seen just about everything. But we're done.

As long as we can get loan paperwork signed with our bank before labor starts. Tick-tock, tick-tock ...

Priceless

We decided on a pediatrician! Oh, but it's not just anybody with Disney photos on his wall. We found a Jewish pediatrician who's married to a Catholic with an art historian daughter and another daughter who is, in his words, "anal."

And he makes jokes comparing Jewish and Catholic guilt. We are so golden.

Preparing Katia

There are only a few things left to do on our “Preparing for Peanut” list, but since it has rained for most of the last six weeks, anything involving the car kept getting pushed off. But thanks to a couple short breaks in the rain, these have now been checked off.

Installing the car seat took a grand total of 3 minutes. Since our cars are too old to have the latch system, installing the base for the infant carrier consists of the complicated process of wrapping the seat belt over it and pulling until tight. But when we put the carrier onto the base we realized just how tiny our car is. We put the car seat in the middle for safety reasons, but it turns out it has to go there anyway because it won’t fit behind the front seats. It seriously sticks out between our seats! And we got the smallest version of the infant carrier. I swear car seats are made for minivans and SUVs.

While we didn’t realize just how small our backseat is, we were well aware that our trunk was too small to accommodate the amount of baby-related stuff it will need to haul. (Keep in mind we live on the third floor, so things like the stroller are going to have to live in the trunk.) To increase space in the trunk we decided to finally remove the CD player that hasn’t worked in 4 years. That took about 15 minutes (although it did require Joe to climb in the trunk to reach one bolt, and no, I didn’t close it on him) and I’m now not sure why it took us 4 years to get rid of it.

So Katia is now ready for a new little passenger:

Nursery—Phase 3

The nursery is now complete!!! Well, there are a couple pieces missing (like a diaper pail and hamper), but they won’t make a big difference in the appearance of the room. The dresser drawers are loaded (although the clothes need to be de-tagged and washed) and really all we need now is the baby.


Grandma Kathleen made the quilt above Peanut's crib. All of her pieces are wonderful, but I think this is my favorite yet. You can see a close-up in the MD Baby Shower folder in The Peanut Gallery--the details on the animals is amazing. We bought stain to make the holders match the crib, but haven't had a chance to actually stain them.

This picture makes the space looked cramped, but it doesn't feel that small. And it is the only way to get all the elements of the nursery in one photo. The crib and dresser also match much better than it appears here--the flash just bounces off the crib more because it was closer.

The dresser/changing station.

We are very excited! Although having everything ready makes it even harder to wait for Peanut.

The Nursery--Phase 2

We put together Peanut's crib and reading nook tonight (with only one run to Lowe's to replace a broken wingnut and zero cursing), so here are pictures of the nursery in its newest phase. It really is amazing how quickly it is coming together.

Peanut's crib (courtesy of Grandma Alice and Grandpa Richard):

(And, yes, we have now added a bedskirt to the registry. Oops.)

The reading nook (courtesy of Uncle Mike and Aunt Melinda):

This is absolutely adorable and I really can't wait to use it. Talk about an inspired present.

The nursery as a whole:

You can't see the one wall that is still bare, but the dresser is on its way, so we are close.

Nursery: Phase 1

We made visible progress on the nursery today because my mom helped Joe move the last remaining bookcase and the maintenance guy came over with insane screws that allowed him to put the curtainrod screws through a metal bracket. But it is starting to look like a nursery, even though it is missing essentials like, you know, a crib. :)

The curtains I made are green jungle leaves with lions, tigers, hippos, giraffes, elephants, and monkeys. Here is a close up:

They actually remind me of curtains Peter and I had in our room when we were little, even though the colors are very different. I think they must have had similar animals on them.

And here is the nursery to date:
The stuffed animals are all ones I had. Many of you will recognize Stanley the Stegosaurus, my beloved companion from birth. The rocking chair was Joe's mom's when Brian was a baby. And the quilt on the chair is one that was in my room as a baby. Most of the other stuff on the shelves were presents from my college friends for Peanut. This picture is from the doorway and the lamp is against the other wall, so it really is a small room, but absolutely perfect for a nursery. And it is now starting to look the part.

Taking Shape, If Only in Our Minds

The nursery that is. Today was centered around nursery-related tasks and although the room itself doesn’t look all that different than it did this morning, plans have been set in motion. We spent all afternoon looking at dressers at three different furniture stores and have finally chosen one (that hasn’t been discontinued)! I swear we weren’t being all that picky—it is just absurdly difficult to find a simple dresser. But for the first time in months we encountered a salesman today who was happy to show us all the options that met our criteria and help us make an informed decision, rather than investing all his energy trying to convince us that we had deluded ourselves and what we REALLY wanted was whatever the most expensive thing was in the showroom.

So anyway, we now have mental pictures of the crib and dresser that we are inserting into the almost-empty nursery. And we finished putting up blinds in there when we got home and then I spent the evening finishing the curtains. The quilt my mom is making will go over the crib, and the bookcase and rocking chair full of my assortment of stuffed animals are sitting out in the dining room until after we clean, and that really is all that can fit in that tiny room. And so the mental picture of the room as a nursery is complete, even if the room itself still only has blinds, one leftover bookcase Joe needs help moving, and a bunch of trash from shortening the blinds. In fact, I noticed this evening that we’ve started referring to that room as “the nursery” pretty consistently, whereas we had been alternating between nursery and office.

I realize this post is taunting since I’m talking about a mental image I can’t share. But a lot of it will come together physically in about a week (assuming the maintenance guys can help us figure out how to put up the curtain rod given the stupid metal braces around the window), so we’ll post pictures then.

And now, after an amazing normal-person weekend (in addition to doing all this household stuff, we spent yesterday at the D.C. zoo with friends and their 22-month-old daughter), I somehow have to get my brain back into gear for a 10-hour day of meetings and seminars at school tomorrow. Ick.

Finished!

I finished Peanut's blanket! (And only broke two needles on my sewing machine doing it. Oops.) Here are some pictures:

Front:

Close up of the prints:

Back (nice, soft fleece):

Both:

If you look closely there are all sorts of imperfections, but I'm still really proud of how it turned out. Next step, curtains for the nursery.

One Step Closer

Last night, in a spur-of-the-moment decision, we started stage 1 in getting our apartment ready for Peanut's arrival. Joe and Allison moved furniture while I scurried around moving little things and consulting the floorplans I had drawn up. And the result is that our bedroom is now successfully half bedroom and half office, the office/nursery is now fully into transition (no desks, but still bookcases), and the rest of our apartment is a complete disaster area. Our goal is to have the office empty before we go to New York for the shower in a week and a half so we can put baby stuff directly into the nursery, set up the crib, etc. If we get ambitious we may try to install the blinds and curtain rods in the nursery before then as well, while the room is empty.

I have to say, even though the apartment is currently a wreck, it makes me really happy to finally be getting ready for Peanut to join us.