We found out that we were pregnant with a second child just weeks before our first turned one. We were newly married, had a 3 bedroom apartment and it seemed just great, even though my husband had said "We're never doing this again" after baby #1! I still weighed in at just 10 pounds below my full term weight with baby #1, which was not too difficult to adjust to, since I had been overweight as a teen, but still not a healthy way to start another pregnancy. I told my folks we were expecting, and neither one was very supportive, but we were excited.
What wasn't working for me was living in the apartment complex where we were. It was loud and full of drug abusing tenants, our downstairs neighbors smoked in their apartment, meaning the smoke was coming right up to our place. My pregnancy was pretty uneventful, nice and easy, but the stress of living there, after one of my husband's ex-girlfriends moved in, would have torn our marriage apart so we started looking for a new place to live. At 8 months pregnant, we moved. I had just one month to get the house unpacked and ready for a baby! Thankfully, we didn't have much to unpack :)
At this point, we had no idea that baby #2 was a boy. Our doctor (God bless her) isn't so great at deciphering gender via ultrasound! So at 32 weeks, after she was pretty sure that this baby was a girl, we both clearly saw in the ultrasound that indeed, it was not! I returned the cute crib set that had I purchased and cried for a bit. My husband was pretty irritated that I was upset, mostly because the baby was healthy and that was all that should matter.
40 weeks came and went and we started planning for the baby to arrive at any moment, leaving a packed overnight bag by the door and making sure we had a sitter lined up for our toddler. We walked at the grocery store, and at the local indoor hockey rink. It wasn't enough. At 41 weeks, the doctor decided that we should induce. We scheduled the appointment, sure that we would have a baby before then. On a Wednesday morning at 6 am, 11 days overdue, we went in to the hospital for induction. I was partially dilated to 2, and had been for 2 weeks, but the doc decided that we should start the induction with a 1/4 dose of a tablet that she would insert near the cervix, where it would dissolve and jump start labor. I found out later that this was an experimental drug, only approved for trial testing, but it seemed to work okay in very small doses. I received antibiotics for Strep B, which I had tested positive for, and sat back to wait for labor.
Early contractions started, nothing consistent, until I stood up to use the bathroom and my water broke on the way there! I went potty and hurried back to my bed, where I was checked and found to be at 6. The doctor had left for a meeting somewhere in the hospital and wouldn't be back until 1, with it now being noon. Labor picked up quickly and before I new it, I was telling the nurse to find the doctor because it wouldn't be long now! She paged the doc and my husband and I focused on contractions and breathing. I found that the smell of the alcohol hand sanitizer the nurses used helped me to feel better (ethanol anyone?!) and made the nurse wave her hands near me so I could breath it! Finally, the doctor rushed into the room, sliding on her gloves to do a check, found me at 9 and immediately ran back out to scrub up and get on her gown. She slid back into the room just in time for me to get situated at the end of the bed and we started pushing. It seemed like it took relatively the same amount of pushing as the first baby, its hard to remember. I did have to pause again, for an episiotomy and the cord to be flipped off his neck. Our little boy arrived in the world at 1:55pm, wrinkly and underweight at a whopping 9 lbs, 11 oz and 22 inches long!
He looked like a little old man, all wrinkles and bald. I'm convinced that had he been born at 4o weeks, he would have been well over 10 lbs. If we had chosen to wait for me to go into labor, who knows what would have happened to him. It worried me that he was so skinny, but other than that, he was healthy. My husband and I had our baby all to ourselves, no repeat of our mothers swooping in to hold the baby before he did. Dad got to be the first one to hold his son!
Our hospital stay was pretty typical, but they moved me to another wing of the hospital, just around the corner from the maternity ward. It was loud, there were orderlies up and down the hallway all night and we shared an adjoining bathroom with another room, meaning the loud flush of the toilet kept me up. It was difficult to rest and I was ready to go home after the first 24 hours. Thankfully, the staff let me watch the safety videos and do the car seat check and get on my way. I was so happy to be home in my own bed and finally rest.
Our son had a hard time adjusting and was a very fussy baby. He is now almost 7 (in a few days!) and still needs extra cuddling, probably because I failed to give it to him as an infant. I had no idea how to handle a baby that had stomach issues (probably from the antibiotics, which also caused diaper rash) and needed to be held constantly! It was so different from our first son, who slept for 12 hours at just a few days old (but never slept during the day) and we were still struggling to find our balance as a married couple. Thankfully, he is a loving little boy and we have worked hard to rebuild whatever trust may have been damaged. Much like our first son, I had a really hard time producing enough milk and he lost a pound in weight, so we started supplementing with formula at just over a week old. The story of my difficulty with nursing is another one altogether....
Again, not too much to complain about with this birth, right? I still came away from it with goals about how I wanted the next one to go, what I saw that caused complications later for our son, and goals that focused on what I thought I was physically capable of and had failed to accomplish during this birth. I didn't want antibiotics again (I hadn't had them since I was a very small child), I didn't want to be induced, and I was DAMN sure that they were not going to put me in a room in that wing again!
Thanks for hanging in there. These stories don't mean a lot to anyone else, but they help to shape the picture of why I want to birth at home this time. Still 2 more births to recount...
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