Doogie is born, part two.

I’ve heard that the Eskimo people have dozens of words for snow. I don’t know if it is true, but it makes sense that something with which you are very familiar would lead to very specific descriptive terms for what seem like minute details.

Maybe it is because the experience was new and unfamiliar to me, then, that I seem to lack adequate vocabulary words to describe birthing my third baby. Painful, obviously, and certainly intense, but neither word seems enough. I don’t mean to sound overly dramatic, but the overwhelming agony and then immediate ecstasy of your birth made up the most vulnerable and absolutely present moments of my life.

Surrounded by the nurses and medical student with your Daddy at my side, I suddenly felt I was drowning, swamped and gasping for air in the crushing pain of delivery. For the first time, I felt out of control, and I cried out again and again as the waves of pain crashed over me one on top of the other without relief. The pressure was overwhelming and indescribable, making it impossible to think about the past or the future or anything but surviving that very instant. 

The only moment I remember hearing any hint of anything but absolute calm and serenity in the nurse’s voice was when she called out from the room a second time.

“I need the doctor in here-- right now, please!”

I caught my breath for a brief moment, and desperately pleaded with her. “Please, is he almost here?” I begged, my voice whimpering from the pain.

“He’s coming as quickly as he can. He’ll be here very soon,” she answered, full of compassion. She assumed I was referring to my doctor, who had yet to arrive.

But here is the thing. I wasn’t asking about my doctor. It didn’t matter much to me in that moment if he made it or didn’t or who was in the room at all. I just wanted my son.

I needed YOU.

All at once, my pleas were answered. I tried for a moment to follow the hushed suggestions from the nurses to pant, to hold off delivery just long enough for the doctor to arrive, but it was futile and lasted only an instant.

“I’m pushing!” I called out. It was not a declaration of intention. It was simply a desperate announcement that, without my permission at all, my body was doing what it knew how to do. Without any input from me, I was having a baby. 

You were—FINALLY!—coming to meet your Mama.

Resigned to the fact that you were not waiting for anyone, the nurse pushed the medical student into position and confidently looked up at me.

“One push, honey, and your baby will be here.”

The Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, and I have none for that moment.

I won’t lie to you, baby child. It was physical agony unlike anything I have ever experienced, but only for a moment. An instant later, you were here! Pink and screaming and perfect and then you were on my chest and every bit of that pain in an instant was just love. LOVE. It was incredible, unbelievable, perfect.

It was 1:24pm.

The doctor bounced into the room the very moment it was over (“I didn’t know we were doing it like this!” he said, surprised) and dashed over to the clamp the cord and assume all kinds of doctor-ly roles from the clearly bewildered and relieved medical student.

(A day or so later, when he came to check on me, I asked that student if that was his first delivery. He ducked his head sheepishly and nodded. Look at you, Doogleberry! Setting the precedence for awesome from your very first moments!)

The most incredible thing about your birth was how instantly amazing I felt. As soon as you were out and in my arms where you belonged, I felt energized, pain-free, and ecstatic to have such a gorgeous baby. Eventually I handed you off to your beaming Daddy, who took you to the corner of the room to see you weighed, (9 pounds 6 ounces!) measured, (19 inches long!) and wrapped up tightly.

There was some difficulty with the third stage of labor as the placenta did not detach as quickly as we would have liked. I am so grateful for my doctor, who, after missing the main event, was patient and confident and full of compassion. I nearly crawled backwards up the bed as he pressed heavily on my stomach in downward motions, apologizing repeatedly for the pain as he worked to ensure we could avoid infection and hemorrhage. He repeatedly offered IV pain medication, but I declined. I wasn’t trying to be a hero, but narcotics make me insanely drowsy (I’m such a lightweight) and all I wanted was to have you in my arms the rest of the day without falling asleep.

In the end, everything worked out perfectly. The doctor’s skill and patience paid off, and we wrapped up everything without resorting to the horrible sounding procedures the doctor had warned might be necessary if it took much longer. I stayed on the pitocin for several more hours to ensure contractions were successful in clearing everything out, and once he was done kneading my stomach I immediately felt fantastic again.

And how could I not?! Just look at you!

The two and a half weeks since you were born have been amazing. Circumstances at our house have been hectic—nearly everyone we live with has had some sort of health scare or another—but you have been window of peace for me. You are soft and sleepy and wonderful, and my recovery has been a breeze. I feel wonderful, I have healed quickly, and the constant pelvic pain that plagued me throughout pregnancy is completely gone.

And you? You are my dream. Your Daddy adores you, your siblings are over the moon, and Mama is dizzy in love.

Welcome to our family, Doogenheim. It’s going to be a wild ride.

Doogie is born, part one.

Early in the morning on Tuesday, December 10th, Daddy and I headed into the hospital buzzing with excitement to meet our baby boy. I changed into one of those oh-so-stylish hospital gowns—pale, non-descript in color with a dizzying geometric print all over it, nearly identical to those worn by patients in every hospital I’ve ever worked in. Who designs that fabric anyway?

My cheerful nurse started the IV and hung the Pitocin to start contractions, and Daddy and I talked and laughed and reveled in our growing excitement until the contractions became strong enough to interrupt our conversation. I stood at the side of the bed for a while and swayed my hips back and forth, and your Daddy pushed hard into my lower back to ease the pain. Before long, I climbed back up into the bed where I could rest between contractions.

And here is where I gush about how much I love your Daddy. This pregnancy and birthing business is not easy on the man that I married. Medicine and hospitals make him anxious. Three times now I have been lucky enough to have relatively easy, uneventful pregnancies, and all three times your father has spent the ten months from when I happily told him a baby was coming until the day we took our baby home tempering his excitement with a healthy dose of worry. But on the day that you were born, when I closed my eyes to let the waves of pain wash over me, I fell in love with your Daddy all over again. He was calm and patient and unendingly helpful—getting me ice chips and cool washcloths and very literally fanning me with the homemade fan Bug made for me to take to the hospital. I sat in the bed with my legs bent, and he dutifully pushed my knees toward my body during every contraction, pressing my hips just enough toward the back of the bed to ease some of the pain. He is just the very best man. Try to be like him, ok?

Once labor progressed enough to be distractingly painful, I wasn’t terribly social. I found, sort of to my surprise I guess, that breathing slowly and audibly through my nose like I do during yoga was calming during contractions. The waves of pain never lasted more than 5 very slow breaths, so I counted my breathing to manage each one.

I had epidurals when your sibings were born, and those births were beautiful and perfect and I wouldn’t change a thing. I am grateful beyond words for the advances in modern medicine that allow me the privilege of walking out of the hospital healthy and with beautiful babies. That relief for the excruciating pain of childbirth exists is a beautiful miracle. On the day you were born, I had agreed to the epidural when we arrived at the hospital, but I had also considered the idea of skipping the medication this time. My thoughts weren’t part of some social statement or exercise in self-punishment, it was just that I was nearly positive I could do it without that extra intervention. Delivering your siblings happened quickly and uneventfully, and I figured I could avoid giving the anesthesiologist a thousand of our hard earned dollars if things went well. (You know, high deductible plans and whatnot.) The thought of suffering through a contraction or two hunched over and trying to hold perfectly still while the epidural was placed was just enough motivation to keep me focused, and before I knew it (about five hours from the time we arrived at the hospital), I was dilated to seven centimeters.

From delivering the Bug and Mr. Baggins, I knew that the transition portion of labor typically goes very, very fast for me. With both of your siblings, I went from seven centimeters to having a screaming baby on my chest in about 45 minutes. My experience with you was no different, only this time I was experiencing everything without the benefit of pain relief. The advanced stages of labor were incredibly intense. I remember looking at the clock at 1:00 in the afternoon, wracked with the pain of strong contractions coming one on top of the other, and saying to your daddy, “he’ll be here by two. I just know it.”

I was right.

While I had been nearly silent for the first 5 hours of labor, I found myself moaning and crying out quite a bit in the last 30 minutes. The nurses (who were AH-MAZ-ING) called for our doctor to come from his office across the parking lot to get ready for the big event. Swamped with something at the office, he sent his medical student (who I had met at my appointment the day before) because, as he put it, “things might go fast for her.”

That proved to be the understatement of the year.

To be continued...

Welcome to our family, Doogleberry.

Dearest Son,

You are freshly bathed and smell of lavender and milky baby breath, and I am watching you sleep beside me on the couch, swaddled in the softest blanket and dreaming whatever new babies dream. Your little chest rises and falls softly, interrupted by the little hiccups and chirps of a little one still unfamiliar with life on the outside.

I love you.

And I don’t want to forget these little moments, sandwiched as they are between the constant hum of family chaos—Mama and Daddy referee sibling scuffles and orchestrate the frantic rush of dinner time, bath time, tooth brushing, and pajamas while adjusting to a new little person in our family. It’s the happiest kind of circus, but the days run together and smoosh together in an indistinguishable blur. I look at the clock at night and cannot believe the day is gone with so little accomplished.

But then, I snuggled you most of the day, and that’s something.

You are the perfect addition to our little family. You have a little nose and chin that look just like your brother and sister did when they were born, and a dusting of soft blonde hair all over your head. You make all kinds of little grunting and snorting noises when you are awake, and the sweetest sighs and soft hiccups while you sleep. You love eating and sleeping and hate to be bathed and you sound like a lamb when you are happy and a lion when you are mad. You are perfect. You are a dream.

And so I’ll write it all down—even though I missed a chunk of time on this little blog—so that I can remember what it was like to juggle my three babies when they were small and we lived in a borrowed space and nothing was the same as it was 10 months ago before we found out you were coming, before we sold our house and moved, before job changes and preschool and all kinds of other little life changes flipped our routine upside down.

***

I did a lot of reading and thinking ahead of time about what your birthday might look like. I didn’t have any real agenda other than doing my very best to leave the hospital with a healthy baby in my arms. Working in the field that I do has long-since scarred me with the knowledge that there are no guarantees in this world, that scary, hard things happen every single day to people who look a lot like me, and that real life very rarely shakes out exactly the way we plan it. All I really wanted from the experience was to get you out of the deal.

But I’ll admit it, around 3 days after your due date had come and gone without even the slightest hint of baby-action, I was getting a little restless. My mom had been in the hospital, my Bandie had died, and your Daddy had made an extremely rare and therefore unnerving trip to InstaCare all in the days after you were theoretically supposed to be here, and guess what! Still no baby. 

So I ate an entire pineapple with the dimmest hope that the crazies on the Internet were right and it would put me into labor. (Hint: nope.) I lumbered awkwardly on the elliptical and took long, painful walks (waddles?) up and down the hills near Nana and PopPop’s house.

And still, no baby.

 And so, even though I had sort of hoped to avoid any unnecessary intervention, my doctor and your daddy and I decided it was probably best to give the whole process a bit of a jump start.

Spoiler alert: turns out you were worth the wait.

To be continued...