The First Week Back

Overall, the transition to work and daycare went well. I actually had butterflies on the first day back! It felt like the first day of school for both of us. After three months at home, it was just a bit of sensory overload and a challenge to adjust to a new routine. I was nervous about how the first morning would go, but of course everything went fine. I dropped her off at daycare, and I think I was just in too much shock from the whole day for it to really hit me. I walked around the rest of the day in a daze. Each day after that, though, it got better, and now I feel like I've been back at work all along.

Many moms describe feeling guilty when they go back to work, either guilty about leaving the baby with someone else or guilty about WANTING to go back to work. While I wouldn't say I was itching to go back to work, I knew it was what needed to happen so I made the best of it. So I felt very little guilt, but I did miss Amy Grace a lot :) It was like having baby withdrawal! I've been going over to nurse her at lunch, though, which has been a great thing for the both of us.

As the days have gone on, it's gotten SO much easier. I never really got cabin fever at home, but it's nice to be back in the swing of things again too. Plus, I'm only working 30 hours a week and have Wednesday and Friday afternoons off, which has been GREAT. Since we are paying for that daycare time anyway, Amy Grace stays there on those afternoons while I clean, go grocery shopping, or do whatever else I need to around the house so that we can all enjoy nights and weekends more. Yay for that!

House of Pain...

Well, on Friday our little Nublette started coming down with the sniffles. This was somewhat to be expected, as lots of kids get sick right after starting daycare (or so I hear). We took a quick trip to the doc as I mistook her sniffles for wheezing. (It sure sounded like wheezing, but the fact that it mostly happened when I nursed her - aka, when the only breathing she could do was through her nose - should have clued me in. Oh well. She was fine.) In any case, her cold worsened over the weekend, but Amy Grace remained in good spirits and was quite the trooper! We've taken to calling her "Dragon" as well (I forget how that started), and it was pretty funny to hear our little Dragon actually sounding like a dragon. Perhaps she's been spending too much time with Star Baby. There's nothing quite so humorously tragic as taking care of someone with a cold who does not have the motor skills nor verbal comprehension to learn how to blow her own nose.

In any case, Brent started coming down with AG's cold on Monday, and I bit the dust on Tuesday. Now we are just one big, not-so-happy-right-now family of snifflers and coughers. Here's hoping everyone recovers by the weekend...

Serious Case of Mommy Brain...

Well, it is Day 2 of being back to work (more on that later), and I just gave everyone in the office a serious laugh. I heard a text arrive on my cell phone (thanks Holly!) and thought, "hmmm, I need to put it on vibrate." A quick search yielded no phone. So, I called my phone instead and got down on my hands and knees to search under my desk. No matter where I looked, it sounded like it was so close by! Not in my purse. Not in my pumping bag. Not in my pockets. What??

After about 4 calls to my phone, I went on the other side of the cubicle wall to see if it had somehow scooted under to the other side (completely unlikely). Our office manager saw me and asked what was wrong:

Me: I can't find my phone!
OM: What? How can you tell it's ringing?
Me: I keep calling it, and I can here it, but I can't find it.
OM: (Comes to my desk) Oh!! I thought you meant your OFFICE phone! I mean, there have been a lot of moves and I thought maybe it had gone missing.
Me: (Laughs) Hah! No, my cell phone. (Puts hand on belly by accident). Oh, wait...oh no, this is so embarrassing!
OM: What?
Me: I stuck it in my waistband this morning because it falls out of these pants pockets easily. Ok wow. Nevermind.

This was all made doubly embarrassing by the fact that I was able to stick it in my pants waistband so easily because I am STILL WEARING MATERNITY PANTS for my black dress pants. Hah. :)

Learning to Let Her Go

"I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of him. So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life he will be given over to the Lord." ~ I Samuel 1:27-28

Ever since Amy Grace was born, I've had to return to over and over again to this verse as a reminder of to whom our beautiful daughter truly belongs. Earlier in the chapter, Hannah (Samuel's mother) was barren, but prayed to the Lord for a son within earshot of Eli the priest. If she had a son, Hannah promised "to give him to the Lord for all the days of his life" (v.11). The Lord granted her request and she gave birth to Samuel. Once she had weaned him, she returned to the temple to fulfill her vow by entrusting her son to Eli's tutelage.

Though I doubt Amy Grace has priestly apprenticeship in her future, this verse anchors what my attitude should be towards her and God as I grow in mothering over the years. It helped through those first couple of rough weeks of breastfeeding and out-of-control hormones, as these words reminded me that "our" daughter is not really ours, but the Lord's, and we do not have to rely only on ourselves to care for her. The more I trusted God to provide for His daughter, the more I could relax and follow His direction and not worry about what to do or making mistakes. In Phillipians 4:6, Paul writes, "Do not be anxious about anything, but in prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God." This exhortation is no less true in parenting, but with all the books, research, advice, etc, swirling around out there in our fear-driven culture, that truth can get lost pretty easily unless you're focused on God's promise to provide.

More importantly, however, this verse reminds me that even at this young age, we must remember that God did not grant us Amy Grace to make us happy or fill some void by keeping her close to us. He entrusted us with His child to raise her up in His word and His truth, so that she may one day have a husband and family of her own - and most importantly, a life of her own. I've told Brent several times how much I want to be nothing but excited for our daughter as she grows up - not sad that she is no longer a little baby we can hold in our arms, but joyful to see her experiencing new things, from kindergarten to marriage. But I can also see how easily that goal is lost, as it is oh so tempting to want our cute, cuddly babies to stay that way. And as much time as they require, there's also a sense of pride and purpose that they need us so much, and I can easily see how a selfish desire to keep them needing us could color how we parent. However, I know that if I continue to turn to the Lord to keep my heart grounded in the fact that Amy Grace belongs to the Lord, not to us, and that one day she will be grown up and gone (and that that's a GOOD thing), I can mother her out of a desire to meet her needs, and not out of a desire for her to meet mine. And I'm very thankful for that.

The First Six Weeks...

Hard to believe that our little Amy is over six weeks old now! It has been a whirlwind since she was born, but also a lot of fun. Some of the highlights from her first six weeks in the world:



Milk-induced drunkenness:


First Iron Bowl party (2 weeks old):


First trip to the farm, complete with "extreme nursing" (nursing in a sling while riding on a golf cart on bumpy roads) (3 weeks old):


She is a wonderful baby, and such a joy to raise! We have been very blessed that she isn't colicky and seems to have naturally distinguished her days and nights, and sleeps for long chunks of time at night (like 3 and 4 hours. For an infant, sleeping "through the night" is actually defined as five hours at a time). We are spending the next 6 weeks (until i go back to work) getting her ready for daycare by spending more playtime in the crib and bouncer and getting more of a routine for getting up, naps, and bedtime. She has just started smiling a lot and it's so much fun to interact with her now that she's more responsive to everything. Can't wait to see what the next few weeks bring!

Reflections on the Birth

I wrote my last post quickly, in hopes that I could get most of the details down before i forgot them, but i also wanted to take some time to reflect on the more spiritual and emotional aspects of the experience. So here goes...

When I first found out I was pregnant, I never could have envisioned that by the time our baby was born, I would be such a strong natural birth advocate. I knew next to nothing about the advantages of natural birth, nor the upsetting state in which American maternity care finds itself. When Brent and I first discussed it, I wasn't sure if I'd want an epidural or not. However, before our wedding we had decided not to use hormonal birth control - instead opting to work with my body's natural rhythms - due to a bad experience with it and our growing conviction that it was not God's design for us to introduce artificial chemicals into my body in an attempt to make things more convenient for us. (And after living through the one month I was on it, I'd call the crazy mood swings I felt ANYTHING but convenient!) This decision planted the first seeds of my journey into natural childbirth. I wondered: "If we don't want to use mess with how I get pregnant, should we really be messing with how I deliver a baby?" So, I began researching epidurals and the health risks to mother and baby. The more I discovered about the negative aspects of epidurals and all of the interventions that tend to go along with it (especially induction and augmentation with Pitocin), the more I became convinced that this was something I wanted to do. It felt so similar to when we began researching hormonal birth control, and realized that something that is so accepted and common in our culture DOES affect your body in very significant ways that are often denied or downplayed by the medical community.

Over the following months, the more I learned, the more committed I became to pursuing a natural childbirth. (And the more I tried to talk everyone's ear off about it!) Of course, I wanted the best for myself and our baby and believed that I could achieve that by allowing my body to do what God designed it to do. However, avoiding the side effects of hospital interventions was the least of my motivations. The more God developed my view of childbirth - as He surely did - the more I began to see it as a way to grow in giving up control to Him and going through a challenging experience with faith, rather than fear. Genesis 3:16 reads: "To the woman he said, 'I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children." While this verse is often interpreted as a punishment for Eve's sin, I began to wonder if, in reality, it was "a gift in a black box," as a local ministry says of what we call "negative" circumstances. In the Garden of Eden, sin altered mankind in such a way that we could no longer live in perfect communion with a holy God in a perfect world. However, Brent and I believe that God uses those times of imperfection, and dare we say, outright struggle, to grow us closer to Him. What if the struggles of childbirth are not a punishment for our sin, but rather a blessed opportunity to grow closer to our Lord? The more I came to believe this, the more I knew I did not want to spurn the blessing God was offering me in this experience, however it turned out. I wanted to have the birth that HE wanted me to have, and to give that control over to God.

Looking back, I had a much more difficult labor than I ever imagined when I was pregnant. Two days of stop/start labor, plus 22 hours of steady labor at home, followed by 10 hours of labor at the hospital. When we finally got some rest, neither Brent nor I had really slept in about 72 hours. Sounds like one of those horror stories that women tell unsuspecting first-time pregnant women, doesn't it? Funny thing is, it was one of the BEST weeks of my life and our marriage. We were on cloud nine for several days, and staring into each other's eyes while slow-dancing during labor nearly brought both of us to tears several times. It is still hard to describe the feelings of love and oneness that passed between us that week, and especially that night in the hospital. Though my labor was not easy by any means, it was the best thing I ever did, and was exactly the labor that God intended for me. Considering how slow I progressed (it took those 22 hours at home to get just from 3 to 5 centimeters!), had we gone to the hospital earlier or pursued interventions, I feel CERTAIN I would have ended up with a c-section, as most OBs make fear-based decisions, and I was way, WAY off the "labor curve." As it was, we trusted the Lord with every step and honestly, at the time it didn't feel that difficult at all. At times I even remember being almost euphoric during contractions!

Going through my labor taught me a lot. The neat thing is that the key ways to get through labor - mainly, relaxing through the contractions (rather than fearing and fighting them) and focusing on getting through them one at a time - are how we should approach life as well. I have a tendency to get overwhelmed by focusing on the "wind and waves" and the difficulties that lie ahead; if you focus on how hard labor will get, the same thing will happen, and fear will set in. Brent did a great job of reminding me to stay in the present throughout the whole experience, as there were definitely times when I got overwhelmed or frustrated that I wasn't progressing as fast as I wanted. From now on, all I have to do when I face tough times is to remember the lessons I learned during Amy's birth. And that, perhaps, is one of the great blessings that God intended for women in childbirth. We have a lot to be thankful for!

Amy Grace's Birth Story

Amy decided to start making her entrance into the word in the wee hours of Tuesday November 11th - ironically, her official doctor due date! I woke up late Monday night/early Tuesday morning with pretty mild contractions, though they were strong enough to wake me up. We'd been practicing timing the increasing Braxton-Hicks contractions throughout the weekend, so the stopwatch was on my nightstand, and I managed to roughly time them in my half-asleep state. They continued for 2 or 3 hours at 9 minutes apart before fading completely away by the morning.

Brent and I went in to see the doctor around 9 am on Tuesday, as it was standard practice at their office to see you on your due date if you hadn't delivered already. I'd been just a fingertip dilated and 50% effaced the week before, but apparently those early morning contractions had been doing their job - I was now 3 cm dilated, but still 50% effaced. I was hooked up to fetal monitors to check on Amy's heart rate and track any contractions. Her heart rate was strong and steady, but in that entire 30 min or so, I didn't have ONE contraction! The last test was an ultrasound. The doctor was concerned about possible low amniotic fluid levels and a big baby (despite there not being any indication of that and me not even having passed the ESTIMATED due date yet). Had my fluids been low (or the weight been very high), she might have pressed for induction at this point, but luckily they were right on target and Amy "weighed" in at 8 lbs 4 oz. That was just what I expected, though these weight estimates can be up to 20% off and are known to be inaccurate most of the time. We were sent home with an appointment to see the doc again on Friday if I hadn't delivered yet. At this point, we decided that it as best for me to go ahead and stop working, since it seemed I could go into "official" labor at any time.

Late Tuesday night, I experienced the same sort of thing that I had the night before - mild contractions around 9 min apart. Strong enough again to disturb our sleep, but not increasing in intensity, duration, or frequency. Yet again, they faded away by Wednesday morning. As we had no idea when labor would really start, Brent stayed home with me and tracked the contractions that I DID have (there were a few throughout the day, but nothing ever built towards labor). However, in the evening things started to pick up. At this point we were spending pretty much all of our time on the screened in porch, watching movies to pass the time between contractions. They would start to build, but any time that I got frustrated or upset, they'd fade away. I'd say that consistent, active labor really started around 10 pm, but I peaked out about 1 am while taking a bath, with contractions about 6 or 7 minutes apart and increasing in intensity. Though neither of us slept much at all that night, the contractions did fade some as morning approached. We saw the sun rise Thursday morning, and around 6 am we dragged ourselves to McDonald's for breakfast sandwiches. Since I'd read that midwives often recommend having some wine when labor drags on and on, I had a couple of glasses with breakfast and managed to sleep for an hour or two in the papasan chair. I'd discovered by this point that lying down during a contraction made it a LOT worse, so the chair helped elevate me a little bit.

We spent all of Thursday on the porch, still watching movies and episodes of Friends. My contractions were much more consistent throughout the day, and we were starting to think that perhaps it would be time to go in soon. Around 4 pm, however, Brent was taking a nap (it's a lot easier to stay awake when you're the one IN labor! we'd been up for so long by this point!) and I was draped over the exercise ball watching Shrek as the contractions seemed to be fading away again. I got super frustrated at this and was none too pleasant when Brent woke up. He talked to me about being positive again and needing to "get back on the horse", and at this point something clicked in my heart to really commit to having that baby soon. My contractions picked back up and over the next 4 hrs or so, edged to 6 min apart, then 5, then 4. By this point I was pacing back and forth between contractions and would stop and sway my hips or dance during one (we were watching various music videos by this point) - moving my hips helped a LOT. I was also very focused on not fighting my body, and used a technique called "horse lips" that I'd read about in Ina May Gaskin's Guide to Childbirth, where you exhale through loose lips during a contraction to help keep everything in the pelvic area nice and relaxed. It sure helped! Eventually we made the decision to call the doctor. My doc was on call that night, so we gathered up all of our stuff and headed in. Since I hated sitting or lying down during a contraction, I knelt backwards on the seat and hugged the seatback all the way there. Thankfully, things seemed to slow down just enough during the car ride to make it bearable.

Once we checked into the hospital, we found out I was 5 cm dilated and 100% effaced! Halfway there! They put me on the monitors for 15 minutes and briefly hooked me up to an IV to get antibiotics as I was Group B Strep positive. (If you have an epi or are induced, you have to be monitored constantly and have an IV the whole time, which really limits your movement and options during labor.) They also took my blood pressure, which was slightly elevated, but didn't concern the nurse as that's really to be expected when you're IN LABOR. However, my doctor - who had been touchy abut my blood pressure for several weeks at this point - decided to recheck it DURING a contraction and of course got a very high reading. She ordered additional bloodwork and instructed the nurses to check my BP every 15 minutes, but they assured us that they really weren't concerned about the reading. I also assured the doc that I had felt fine - no headaches, blurred vision, etc - to which she replied that that didn't really matter, I could still have a seizure anyway. (My next check was well within the range of normal).

Over the next couple of hours we were pretty much left to ourselves. We had a fabulous nurse that assured us that I was doing great, and would come in every once in awhile to make sure everything was ok. We spent the time slow dancing or just walking around the room (writing this almost three weeks later, it's a little hard to remember exactly what happened!) When the nurse checked me again, I was at 7 cm and the baby had dropped slightly (she stayed pretty high right up until labor). They all thought I'd be pushing her out by about 2:30. Around midnight, my water broke while Brent and I were slow dancing to one of the mixes he'd made me when we were dating - THAT was quite the memory ;) At my next checks I was 8 cm, then 9 - almost there! Labor was pretty intense by this point, and all I remember is being draped over the elevated head of the bed and moaning my way through each contraction. At this point, either the nurse or the doc realized that I still had part of the amniotic sac left intact under the baby's head, and the doc broke the rest of it for me and checked me again - and said I was only 7 cm. (By the way, it's well within the range of normalcy for the water bag to stretch your dilation some, and then for it to "snap back" once it's fully broken). But the doc didn't believe I'd ever been at 9 cm, and all of a sudden started saying I'd "fallen off the labor curve" and wasn't progressing fast enough...that maybe I'd need a Foley catheter (to measure the strength of my contractions, in case they weren't hard enough) and an epidural, or some Pitocin to move things along (which makes labor a LOT more painful and hard to handle without an epi), or even a c/s as she still thought the baby might be "too big".

At this point, I fell apart emotionally. I'd been in hard labor for HOURS and here comes the doctor telling me that I might not be able to have the natural birth that I wanted. I started crying and tensing up, which of course made the contractions hurt worse as well. I don't remember much from this time period, but the doc agreed to come back in half an hour to monitor my progress and we'd make a final decision then. Brent helped me get into the shower - I was hoping that the warm water would help me relax again - and asked me what I wanted to do, but I was so upset that I was shaking so bad I couldn't even talk. The water did help calm me down, though, and after speaking with the nurse (who assured us that we were doing great and she didn't see ANYTHING abnormal about what had happened that night), we decided that if it came to that, we'd opt for the Pitocin next. At this point, Brent left me in the shower with some applesauce to regain my strength, and deep down in my soul I decided that we were JUST GOING TO DILATE ALL THE WAY. I started yelling and moaning all sorts of things - not really from pain, because I still would better describe contractions as very intense energy that has to be discharged from your body somehow, and making noise is a great way to do that. But I went from being a little apprehensive about the last stage of labor and the birth to welcoming it! Sweet Brent came and got me out of the shower shortly before the half hour was up and wrapped me in a warm towel to keep my body from getting too shocked from the cold. The doc came back in around 5 am, and lo and behold I was at 8.5-9 cm. I had dilated almost 2 cm in 30 minutes! Once she left, the nurses leaned over and said "THAT just saved us. Good job!" Brent followed my doc out in the hall and let her have it for being so negative when there was NO reason to start making fear-based decisions, especially when she hadn't been there laboring with us all night like the nurses had (we hadn't seen in her in like 4 hours), and the baby had been doing fine all along. While she insisted that she needed to tell me all of the options, he told her that she should discuss those with HIM, not with the emotionally and physically strung-out woman that's been in labor for like 3 days at this point. I'm so lucky to have someone who will stand up for me like that!

It was now time for the shift change, and our sweet nurse that had supported us all night had to leave, but kept assuring us that "Daphney was on her way!" and that she had all kinds of tricks up her sleeve for natural birth. At this point I was leaning headfirst over a rocking chair while the nurses held the heartrate monitor on me (since I hadn't been able to stand sitting down through the monitoring for hours at this point) and I kept yelling things like "COME ON AMY!! WE'RE GETTING TO 10!!" (Another technique I'd read about in Ina May's book: visualizing and saying what you want to happen). Brent came back in and I think was a little shocked at the whole scene :) Shortly after this, Daphney (our new nurse) said that she had a way for me to lie on the bed while laboring that had proven very effective for her other mothers. I was wary about lying down, but as Brent said, I just needed to let the contractions intensify even more, even if it was hard. So I lay down on my left side, and after some span of time, Daphney said I was fully dilated and could start pushing! I never felt the "urge to push," so she told me how and I pushed for 20 min with Daphney and Brent each holding my legs back. The baby crowned, and Daphney had Brent call the doc and delivery techs. She told me to quit pushing at this point, which is next to impossible if you don't have an epidural! I managed to hold on for a couple of minutes, but just as I saw the doc entering the room, I couldn't help it anymore and pushed once more - and out shot our precious baby!! Daphney and Brent delivered her together, which had a sense of justice to it as well, since the doctor that didn't believe I could deliver her without intervention wasn't even there. But 75 minutes after she tried to tell me I couldn't do it, I pushed out our 7 lb 11 oz baby - with no conehead to speak of, and a hand up by her shoulder to boot!! Funny how she wasn't "too big" after all :)

Amy was born at 6:18 am, started nursing immediately, and was absolutely perfect in every way :)