Posted Monday, April 21, 2008 3:33 PM
Today is my first day back at the office and the official end of my time at home with Audrey. I had a little countdown going on for the past two weeks -- 10 days until I won't be home all the time any more, 5 days until I won't be home all the time any more, 2 days...until finally I put her down last night and realized I was out of days. I definitely enjoy working and part of me couldn't wait to get back to my usual routine, but I'd be lying if I said it was easy looking in at her sleeping last night and realizing that our uninterrupted mommy and Audrey time together was over. If I could bring her in with me and carry her around on my back all day, I totally would. She would babble and coo, smile her giant gummy smile at everyone, maybe laugh (she laughed for the first time on Saturday, though we haven't had a repeat performance yet) and then she would scream bloody murder when it was time to eat and everyone would marvel at the set of lungs she has. Okay, so my back couldn't take that all day and she happens to still hate being in any carrier, but it's nice to imagine.
Until then I'll just be clicking on my iPhone every once in a while to see her cute little mug and try to keep myself from harassing the nanny with my phone calls. Any suggestions for making the transition a little easier?
Posted Tuesday, March 11, 2008 10:49 PM
Our baby makes my cat sick. Literally. She's completely terrified of going near Audrey, but the two times that she has been brave enough to approach her? She sniffed her, looked at her, and then promptly went into the dining room and puked. Another time when I was in the baby's room feeding her, she looked in at us, turned around and...guess what? Puked. It's terrible!
We should really have known from day one though. Click below to see of video of poor Madeline's reaction to getting her very first glimpse of Audrey.
Posted Tuesday, February 26, 2008 7:47 PM
Audrey finds this world currently unsatisfactory
My baby has gone on a sleep strike. Or a happiness strike. Either way, she is suddenly so intensely fussy that I thought I was going crazy. She refuses to sleep during the day which would be fine if she seemed happy to be awake. But, she seems to hate being awake. Hates her bouncer. Hates her swing. Hates my bed. Hates her crib. Pretty much, you put it in front of her? She hates it. She likes 1 thing and one thing only -- eating. Every second of the day.
I was a little nervous that my usually happy baby was developing into a permanently fussy baby, but then I was looking around online and found some info about "wonder weeks" which I'd never heard of before. Maybe the same as a growth spurt? Weeks in which baby is going through a heavy development period and reacts with fussiness. This is actually a great breakdown of the wonder weeks:
Wonder Weeks
Armed with this knowledge, I now feel much better about facing the rest of this week!
Posted Tuesday, February 19, 2008 11:36 PM
My daughter hates carriers. We have a Kangaroo Korner pouch sling and a recently purchased Ergo carrier and both of them cause her to go into inconsolable fits of rage. Maybe she's still a little too young to really be comfy in them? She's 4 weeks and we did get the infant insert for the Ergo and, as far as I know, slings are supposed to be a go from birth. I'm totally bummed as I was having beautiful visions of myself wandering around the kitchen actually getting things done with her happily dangling in front of me. But, I've never seen her so angry as when we tried to put her in the carriers -- it produced her rarely heard, but greatly feared terradactyl cry. The horror.
Anyone have to wait a couple of months before their baby enjoyed being in a carrier? I'm hoping this isn't a lost cause!
Posted by
Bump Kate
Filed under: gear, Audrey
Posted Friday, February 01, 2008 3:44 PM
We took Audrey to her first pediatrician appointment this week. The great news is that not only is she back to her birth weight in less than 2 weeks, but she's gone right past it! Birth weight was 7lbs 10oz and she's now at 7lbs 15 oz. All with just breastfeeding. Such a load off my back because I was constantly concerned that she wasn't getting enough and it's so hard to tell when you can't measure what she's getting.
The bad news is that my husband and I realized what total newbies we are. We went to the Dr's office without the little booklet with her info that they gave me at the hospital specifically to bring to her pediatrician. AND we went without the diaper bag. It was all packed and ready to go, but we somehow left without it. Granted, she was a little terror while we were trying to get her ready and we're running on about 3 hours of sleep a day but still, so embarrassing. Especially since she needed her diaper changed twice while we were there. Luckily, the pediatrician and nurses were super nice and didn't make fun of us too much. Just a little. But who could blame them? We may as well have walked in there and said "hey, we found this baby outside and thought you'd know what to do with her." Lesson learned though. I vow to never forget that bag again. Her next appointment is on Thursday. Let's see what I forget this time.
Posted Tuesday, January 29, 2008 11:33 PM
Baby Audrey is finally here! She was born on Sunday, January 20th at
5:39 pm after about 12 hours of labor total (about 7 of that being
active labor).
I
woke up on Sunday at about 5:45am and I instantly knew that something
weird was going on. About 3 seconds later and I felt a gush of water
and ran to the bathroom. I’m pretty sure I haven’t moved that quickly
in about 4 months. My husband followed me in and I told him, no doubt,
my water broke. We called the Dr’s office a few minutes later and the
on-call doc (who would later deliver Audrey) told me to wait about 2-3
hours to see if I started feeling any contraction. So, we tried to busy
ourselves and I called him back in 2 hours to tell him I was having
contractions but they were totally irregular. Since my water had
broken, he said we should come on in to the hospital to monitor the
baby and see if we couldn’t get something going. This whole thing was a
TOTAL shock since I had an appointment that Friday where my doctor had
basically said there was not a thing going on and she’d surely see me
at my next weekly. I guess the baby had other plans.
We got to
the hospital, checked in and I was immediately hooked to a bunch of
monitors and examined. Our baby still hadn’t dropped and was still
sunny-side up. At my last appointment my doc had asked me to mentally
prepare myself for a potential c-section, but it definitely wasn’t what
I was hoping would happen. They then told me that they wanted to start
me on Pitocin to get the contractions going – they wanted to give me
the chance to labor for a couple of hours to see if she’d drop or turn
so that I could deliver vaginally. I hemmed and hawed quite a bit about
the Pitocin because I really didn’t want to be induced. The on-call
doctor was really great about talking it out with me and it basically
came down to the fact that we were on borrowed time now that my water
had broken. They started me on Pitocin, admitted me, and put me in a
birthing room where my husband and I watched – before all was said and
done – about 5 or 6 hours of an America’s Next Top Model marathon. I
think I may be able to convince him to watch the next season with me. ☺
The
contractions were pretty rough. I have a high pain tolerance -- I
thought anyway -- and I handled them pretty well for quite a while but
after 2 hours or so I said I’d take the epidural. I’ve heard that Pit
can make the contractions worse so that may have played a part. I’m
totally squeamish about both medications and needles so getting the
epidural was NOT fun. The nurses were really great though in talking to
me the whole time so that I was distracted. After I got the epidural,
it was like nothing was going on. The contractions were barely
noticeable at all. They brought in a doctor who is apparently skilled
at turning babies and she gave it a shot but the baby wasn’t turning
and still hadn’t dropped at all. They said that we would give pushing a
try for a while and see if we made any progress – if not, it was going
to be a c-section. I pushed for probably about 30 minutes or so and the
doctors were also pushing to try and get the baby down, but nothing. At
this point, they took my temperature and discovered that I had a fever.
Everything moved at lightening speed after that. They all suited up and
we went in for the section.
Like I said, I’m super squeamish
about medication so the section was rough for me just because of the
numbing of my lower half. I was shaking like crazy and I’m not sure if
it was from the different medication or the fact that I was giving
myself a mini panic attack. The procedure itself went by very very
quickly but my heart rate was sky rocketing just because I was so
panicked. Plus, no one had showed my husband where to get scrubs so I
was freaking out that he was going to miss everything. He ran in and
about 4 minutes later Audrey was born. Any bit of panic I had about the
medication, needles, etc just totally vanished when I heard her for the
first time. Seriously, the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard. The
doctor said my heart rate went down immediately. They showed her to me
and I knew she was an Audrey instantly (we had been going back and
forth on names.) She was 7 lbs 10 oz and loud and HUNGRY. She was
screaming her heart out but when they brought her over to me and I
talked to her she quieted down immediately. Just totally amazing.
So,
even though the birth was not even kind of what I had been hoping for
as far as trying to go without meds and delivering vaginally, it really
didn’t matter about 1 second after I heard her little cry. If anything,
I wish I’d gone a little bit easier on myself and gone with the flow a
bit better instead of obsessing over the meds and the delivery method.
She’s healthy, happy, and that’s what really matters. She had to be in
the NICU for the first night because I had a fever and they had to
perform some cultures before bringing her up to me which was a little
disappointing because I desperately wanted to spend time with her and I
also wanted to start breastfeeding. Luckily she passed the first 24
hours so they brought her up early and told me a I had a special
visitor. Best surprise ever.
Posted by
Bump Kate
Filed under: Audrey, Birth
Posted Tuesday, January 08, 2008 3:36 PM
Probably not, but I do kind of feel like I have them maybe just a little bit. I'm almost 38 weeks PG (38 weeks tomorrow, to be exact!) and I had the absolute WORST week of my pregnancy last week. I had horrendous, terrible back pains all week. Not just general back aches or a random back pain here or there but searing sharp pains that would go down my lower back, were constant and felt... just...inhuman. They were so bad during my commute home on Thursday night that I was convinced I was going into labor and that it would indeed be the stuff of nightmares. I went to see my OB the next day for my weekly and she said it looked like the baby was in the posterior position, meaning she had her back to my back. Unless she turned before delivery I'd be blessed with back labor. Great!
I left feeling pretty defeated and miserable. Seemed like there was nothing I could do but leave it up to fate. Later in the day, Nest Lori recommended that I check out a site called SpinningBabies.com. She said they have advice on how to get breech and posterior babies to turn. She also said some of the advice is a little hokey but there might be something useful in there.
I did think some of the advice was a little much (I'm really not going to draw a map of where my baby is on my stomach, because I have no clue half the time) but I found a couple of positions and exercises that I was willing to try. The one I was most hopeful for was a new sleeping position -- still on my side but with a slight variation that they said would use gravity to encourage the baby to turn.
The next day, I swear, I woke up and felt so much better. No back pains at all. Didn't have them all weekend, in fact. Not only that, but when I look down at my stomach, she's clearly back in the same spot that she had been in before last week. Another reason I was convinced I was going into labor was that her positioning looked different last week. I wasn't seeing the same big movements in the front that I was used to and now they're back!
For me this was one of those moments where I realized that I do have SOME control and influence over what's going on in my own body and that I shouldn't leave everything up to the doctor. I can only hope that this is an indication of how well this baby will listen to me once she's out!
Posted Thursday, December 20, 2007 7:30 PM
We went to the last of our baby prep classes last night -- baby CPR. It was actually a tot-saver class and covered a lot more than just the basic CPR techniques. The instructor went over things like basic newborn care and safety and toddler safety. It was, by far, the most useful class we've taken.
BUT. In addition to teaching us some very useful things, the instructor also managed to scare the living daylights out of every single person in the class. She was pretty intense and seriously knew how to close out a story. She'd be chatting along, telling us some nice tale in which we were all characters in a pleasant and calm hypothetical situation and then she would inevitably end the story abruptly with some variation of "and then you turn around and your baby is dead." I'm not exaggerating when I say there was a woman in the class who gasped at the end of pretty much each of these stories. It turns out that our instructor had actually found her own baby daughter lying blue on her bed and had to give her CPR. She was already an RN in a pediatric unit at that time, but that situation changed her life and made her want to teach parents how to help their babies in emergency situations. You could really sense her passion for the topic and my husband and I were both really grateful that we had such a thorough instructor. I have no doubt that I'd totally panic and probably forget some of what I learned in a real emergency, but I feel confident that I'd at least have some idea of what I need to do if the worst case scenario actually happened.
It was fascinating to see how we all turned from relatively normal and calm people into super vigilant (we need a latch for that door! what about that Ikea lamp -- that thing's not steady! you need to start putting your change away!) freakazoids. Welcome to parenthood!