A Real Labor Story

Ms Sophia Catherine Grace arrived at 9:51 am Tuesday morning September 15th 2009. You will remember that we were schedule for an induction on Tuesday evening but she wasn't having any of that. My contractions started around 10:30 on Monday evening, they were not anything major so I went ahead and went to bed. By 1:30 they were intense enough to wake me up and my 2:30 intense enough to wake Brooke. We got to the hospital at 5:00 and the next three hours and 51 minutes were such a blur of pain and terror that when they laid her on my chest I honestly thought for a minute that maybe they took someone else's baby and gave her to me. There are not enough child labor classes in the world that could have prepared me for the speed and intensity. I thought that first babies were supposed to take their time, we packed a bag of movies to watch, music to listen to, books to read... that bag sat untouched.
I wish that I could make this post a whitty and funny story about labor but when Sophia came into the world I think that she pulled out my ability to be funny and whitty, either that or it is the sleep deprevation! So we now are a foursome, Brooke is surrounded by demanding, stubborn women... pray for him!

Hurry up and wait

So there is no baby yet, my LilyPie ticker is probably thoroughly confused having spent all this time counting down to something that didn't happen when it was supposed to... Quite frankly I am feeling the same confusion, mixed with frustration and an over surge of hormones makes for a lovely person to be around.

We have everything ready, the hospital bag is packed, the car seat almost installed, the bassinet set up, I have trained my replacement at work, the only thing left is to have a baby. Every night Brooke and I talk to her, tell her that we are ready to see her, Brooke instructs her to swim down, he even drew and arrow for her to use as a road map. Every morning we wake up, one more day of waiting.

I was not one of those women who was "in love" with being pregnant but I did enjoy it. Towards the end people kept asking me if I was SOOO ready for this to be over and I would smile and tell them that I was okay being pregnant, the only thing really bothering me was the pointless doctors visits where nothing would change and I could see that I was really boring him by coming in week after week with no progress.

Then the due date came and the next morning I woke up so over the joy and happiness of being pregnant that I almost wasn't sure how to handle the sudden switch in emotions. I was sure though that now that I was over being pregnant she would get the hint and we would finally get to see her... not so much.

Tomorrow starts my 41st week of pregnancy and I am a cluster of exhaustion and emotions. I go in at noon for a BPP, if she passes then they will let us go until Tuesday night, if there is still no baby then we are scheduled to start a slow induction.

If she is anything like her father and I, she will wait until a few hours before the induction and will make her appearance, letting us know that she is not going to be told when things are going to be done. I will then know that she has inherited the most stubborn parts of her parents, a combination of which could be deadly for someone.

Until then.... we will be waiting.

A Labor Story

As I was standing at my kitchen sink last Monday watching the rain fall inside my house, I was sure that this would be exactly how our labor story would start. Thank god it was simply how week 37 started and nothing more.

I woke up a little after 5 am last Monday and I couldn't get back to sleep, before long I could hear a dripping that was not coming from the downpour outside but was instead coming from our kitchen ceiling. Upon further investigation I found that not only was our kitchen leaking but it was literally pouring in Isabelle's windows.

Let me back up, about a month ago we noticed a bubble in the paint on Isabelle's wall one night while it was raining. I left a note for our landlord and then I never heard another thing about it. Friday I came home and there was a work van in our driveway and a team was on the roof stripping it, apparently there were wood shingle under the other shingles so the whole roof needed to come off. The roofers left Friday night and left their mess behind.

We never saw them again. They were supposed to come back first thing Saturday morning but they never did and despite the four days of rain in the forecast for the next week, they didn't bother to put any sort of cover on the roof. So Sunday night/Monday morning when the downpour came, the only thing protecting the inside of our house from the outside world was some thin pieces of plywood and our attic.

Sadly neither of those held up. So Monday morning Brooke and I found ourselves standing in Isabelle's room watching the rain, inside. It was coming in her closet, the three other walls where wet, the kitchen ceiling was dripping in some parts and pouring in others and the living room ceiling was wet. Thankfully our bedroom and the bathroom were the two areas of the house that they hadn't removed the roof yet.

I called our landlord and thankfully he didn't answer because I was livid at that point. Brooke, who was sick, was less concerned about the water and more concerned about people coming over while our house was messy. So while he went back to bed I used my frantic energy to clean. By the time the landlord showed up shortly after seven, the house looked nice, with the exception of the water still pouring in. I used every trash can and pot that I could find, unfortunately we do not own any five gallon buckets.

By nine am the landlord had been on the roof trying to get it tarped, he was soaked and dirty, his maintenance guy had brought in ten five gallon buckets which were filling rather quickly and a portion of our kitchen ceiling had fallen. All of our towels were soaked, Isabelle's ceiling was sagging and I was standing in the kitchen crying, just knowing that this was going to be how our labor story started. We would have a baby but no home to bring her to....

Brooke ordered me to pack our bags, he didn't want me to be anywhere near the debris from the attic. So we packed our clothes and food and moved out to grandma's house.

That was nine days ago. They took down about 40 percent of our kitchen ceiling and 100 percent of Isabelle's ceiling. They also pulled up all her carpet so they moved her bedroom into our living room, man that kid has a lot of stuff. When they pulled up her carpet we saw that she had hardwood floors. Knowing that she has a pretty severe dust mite allergy, we asked the landlord to leave the hardwood floors. They are too much of a mess to get refinished so he is putting vinyl hardwood in her room instead.

We are still living out north. It is making both of us a little batty not to be in our home especially with the baby looming. She seems to understand what is happening and is quite content to stay put for a little while longer. Last night I went over so that mom could use our computer and I could check on the progress. I got all of the towels folded and the few dishes that were in the sink washed but it seemed like such a hollow victory.

I have sent so much time over the last month working on our home, making it feel more like a home, cleaning and nesting away. All of that has been undone. I cannot see how our kitchen will ever recover. I am looking forward to putting Isabelle's room back together in a more organized way. Currently I cannot see the forest for the trees. I feel anxious that we have a deadline ticking away over our heads and while they have made tremendous progress on the house they have a long ways to go. The new ceilings are up and have been mudded but they are not sanded or painted. Isabelle's room needs so much work, her walls have been treated but need to be painted and they still have to put in new flooring.

I guess that you really should be careful what you wish for. While I never meant for the lack of action during this pregnancy to be seen as a complaint I guess that mentioning it enough got results none the less. This past week and a half has been more action then I needed, ever.

Nothing to see here

I feel like the only thing worse then using this blog to complain about being pregnant would be to use this blog to tell you how fantastic I feel. But I have asked to update so I guess that I will have to.... I am at 36 weeks today and there is nothing to report. Sophia is heads down and doing regular, daily floor shows. I feel amazing.

I am not digging the whole hot and pregnant thing but I am fine when I am not forced to be outside in the heat for very long. I think that my body was made just for this purpose. I have gained a small amount of weight but it is all in my belly, I am still wearing pre-pregnancy clothes with the generous help of my belly band. My feet and hands swell regularly but it is more annoying to look at then to experience.

I think the worse thing is I get more worn out more easily and I keep forgetting it. Call it nesting or call it "there is nothing else I can do so I am going to get my house ready" but I have been cleaning. All of Sophia's clothes are washed and folded and sorted according to size and sleeve length. The bassinet is put together and all the bedding washed. We still have a few more things to work on, things I will probably finish up tonight.

Our house is so clean, Brooke and Isa power washed the front porch yesterday, it was in such dire need of a good cleaning. This weekend I cleaned and vaccuum every room of the house. I need to come up with a system that allows me to do 15-20 minutes a day so that in a weeks time everything gets done but I am not killing myself on a Saturday to do it. I am going to try to cook a few extra meals and stash them in the freezer so that we have extras to eat.

I feel like I should have more, like there should be something that happened that was a complication and we handled it and now.... but there is nothing, I am afraid to say this for fear of jinxing it but everything has been so smooth that if it were not for the shark tale movement in my belly I might not even realize I was pregnant!

It's like that Cosby episode....

There is a Cosby episode where someone has a dream and in that dream all of the men are pregnant. I hate that episode, it creeps me out. So last night we had our third Child Birthing class during which our instructor had all of the support people try on an empathy belly. She warned the men not to be the last one to try on the belly. Brooke went second to last, the last guy had to actually get into a birthing bed with the belly on a show everyone how to push. It was at once the funniest and creepiest thing I have seen.


So here is a picture of my pregnant husband:



And here is one of us comparing our bellies:

Pregnancy Brain

So Brooke thinks that Pregnancy Brain is a term that I made up to give myself an excuse for being such a flake lately. I keep telling him that there is a mutant creature who is feeding on all of my good blood cells so my brain gets the leftovers and that is the medical definition of pregnancy brain. Or maybe I keep meaning to tell him that... hmmm

My cooking skills have been greatly affected by the pregnancy brain. Last week was Brooke's birthday so I decided to make him dinner. I put potatoes on the stove to cook and began to smell something burning, I didn't give it much thought, the burners on our stove needed to be cleaned, something I only remember after turning them on. But soon I noticed smoke, so I checked out the stove and I had erroneously turned on the burner with the box sitting on it instead of the one with the potatoes. The box was on fire.... so I threw it on the floor, instead of into the sink. Stove 1, Skylar 0

After cleaning up that mess and getting dinner cooked, I went to take the cake out of the oven. When I went to put it on the stove top there was a spoon in my way so I tried to move it, but it was stuck, to the burner... melted. Stove 2, Skylar 0

Friday I had my nephews and Isabelle all day long. After a successful trip to Isa's doctor and to the grocery store we went back to the house for lunch. I made Spagetthi O's per Isa's request. After lunch I cleaned everything up and we left. When I got home that evening I found that I had left the burner on low all afternoon, thankfully I had taken everything off of the stove before we left so there was no disaster that arose. Stove 3, Skylar 0

This may be the norm for some cooks but I am generally catastrophe free in the kitchen. The next day when I tried to turn on the burner to remelt the spoon so that I could throw it away, the burner would not come on... so I took apart the stove and fixed the burner and cleaned the thing inside and out. Stove 3, Skylar 1

So while I did manage to up my score by the end of the week, I am beginning to think the cooking related pregnancy brain is the baby's way of telling me to sit down, put my feet up and hire a cook!

Required Update

So my mother tells me that I need to keep up with my blog. I have no problem with this except that I have nothing to report really. We are in the "hurry up and wait" stage of the pregnancy.

She is still kicking, not as hard or as regularly as she had been but my Dr tells me I was lucky she was that consistent to begin with... We started childbirth classes on Monday, four weeks every Monday night for two and a half hours. We are getting a lot of extra information from the Discovery channel. Brooke keeps threatening to rat us out to our instructor for watching it but we cannot seem to help it.

I am in pain, not a lot of big, mean pain (and yes I know it will get worse) but lots of irritating little pain. My ribs are being attacked by the rest of my body and the left side hurts to the touch. My back is so tired of carrying extra anything, it wants to compensate by making me waddle but then Brooke makes fun of me so I am trying to keep from doing that so much.

I am enjoying being pregnant. I am not one of those mothers that is in love with being pregnant but it is pretty cool, feeling her move is amazing, knowing she is with me all the time, that she will recognize my voice, my heartbeat... very cool.

I think that one reason I am not in love with being pregnant is because I have that first time terror that hits me about twelve times a day. I am not eating enough salmon, I bent over too far to pick up that pen, was that movement a normal movement or a help me something is wrong movement... I am still completely terrified walking into the Dr's office that they will not find a heartbeat, no matter how hard she is kicking as I sit in the waiting room. You know, normal things like that.

We went and registered at Babies R Us last weekend and every day I have checked the registry to make sure I have everything I need or want on there. Did I get enough receiving blankets marked, do I have wash clothes on there, did I choose the correct butt paste. Brooke was excited to scan things, once he scanned the bear that makes the womb sounds though he was really pretty much done, I mean what more could we need. We were three isles into the store.

We are looking at vehicles but are both dragging our feet at the idea of making car payments or having full coverage insurance on anything. I cannot believe that when I was little all I wanted to be was a grown up, now I miss the days of blissful ignorance when I had no idea how we got the car or what it cost just as long as I could strap my doll and her car seat into the back.

Now we are towards the end of the pregnancy and before long I will be putting a much more precious baby doll into a much sturdier and more expensive car seat and I want to be sure that we have the safest back seat for her to ride in... for now though we are just going to hurry up and wait!

Movements

I wonder if it is weird that I want to walk around with my shirt up over my belly so that I and everyone else can see my belly move when Sophia kicks me?

Overwhelmed

So Dooce had her baby girl this past week and she posted a video of her new baby. I cannot believe that we are going to have one of these little alien like creatures in approx eighty days. I am not sure how you are supposed to react when you finally get everything you have spent your entire life praying for. I know that may sound like an odd comment to make, I know that we of course spend our time saying "thank you God, thank you God, thank you God." But beyond that, I am not sure how to reconcile myself to the reality that we are having a baby, this isn't a cruel joke, no one else will take this child and raise her.

Brooke and I share custody of his daughter, she goes back and forth every other week. This arraignment can sometimes be difficult but for the most part it seems to work really well. There is a part of me that expects this baby to have the same arraignment, she will be shuttled off to someone else and we will get to see her when they need babysitting or want to have a play date. I will see her about as much as I see my nephews. I literally cannot seem to wrap my head around the fact that this child will never leave our sight if we so choose. She will never spend a single night away from us if we don't want her to, there is no one else that has a say in where she goes, or how we raise her. Yes, I know that she is God's child and that ultimately he will have the say but you understand the general point I am making. She will be ours. God has entrusted her to us.

I have always thought I would make a good mother, I have spent my life literally learning as much as I can from some of the most amazing mothers out there. Now that it is really happening I hope that I can live up to my own expectations, the expectations of my husband, Gods expectations for how this child will be raised. I am so honored, humbled and overwhelmed at the thought of being a mother, of getting to experience my child's firsts, of not missing periods of her life because I move away or because we have to share custody. When she cries for her mom, it will be me.

There is a part of me that cannot wait for this to start but then I have to remind myself that it has already started. She is with me everyday, I can feel her movements and she can here my voice. I am protecting her from everything and she is relying on me for life. We have reached the point in this pregnancy where we can stop holding our breath. She is healthy and if something were to happen and she was born tomorrow she would be okay, small and not out of the woods but she would have a fighting chance.

I know that before long I am going to be complaining about being pregnant in summer, in Kansas and without an air conditioned car but today I am thankful, I am humbled that God chose me to be her mother and I am going to keep protecting her for as long as I can and I will look forward to the day when we will meet face to face and I will have the opportunity to say, "Hello, I am your mother!"

Jumping Jelly Bean

My best friend Tracey calls the baby Jelly Bean which makes me think of a jumping bean, today Sophia has decided to live up to that name. Her movement has been pretty consistent over the last month or so, I feel her just a little bit in the morning but not much. Maybe she will be a morning sleeper which would suit me just fine. In the afternoons she spends an hour or two jogging and doing tai chi and then when I go to bed she wakes up, sweet girl. Several times I have been lying in bed with the remote on my belly and she has kicked so hard that the remote jumps. She is very clever and only does this when I am alone so Brooke thinks that I am insane.

This past weekend was spent in Salina at the Smokey Hill River Festival. Our normal routine was disrupted because I was awake more at night then I ever am and during the day I walked more then I usually do. Sophia I think was a little freaked out because she didn't move much the whole weekend. By Saturday night I was starting to panic a little that I hadn't felt her all day, Brooke kept reassuring me that everything was okay but I enjoy the thrill of the panic. After drinking some tea and lying down for about thirty minutes I started to feel some movement, not as much as normal but it eased my mind.

Monday Sophia wanted to reassure me herself that she was good so she danced quite a bit in the afternoon and evening. Today however I can not only feel her movements but her body parts. I am not quite sure what I am feeling but she is pushing against the top of my belly and I can actually feel the outline of something. A leg, perhaps an elbow, I am not sure but it is at once the coolest and the creepiest feeling. I love know that she is right there and that she can feel me push back but not knowing what I am touching is weird, Brooke hopes that I am not poking her eyeball.

Today at lunch he asked that I not move anymore for the next three months because he is worried that I will move and she will readjust and get the cord caught around some body part. I told him personally I would be okay staying at home for the next three months but shockingly that is not what he meant. So we compromised that I would continue to do what I have been doing and he would continue to worry that she is going to get caught in something. We make a great team of worry warts!

Two Down One To Go

So much to blog about so little interest in being witty... Yesterday was the first day of the last trimester of my pregnancy. There is a part of me that feels like this pregnancy has been creeping along, that part of me is incredibly inpatient and thankful that I didn't find out until the 15th week or I would have made myself and everyone around me crazy by now. Well crazier! On the otherhand, I feel like the end of summer will never come and there is a little part of me that is okay with just being pregnant forever...

My belly is officially and unmistakably a pregnant belly and yet I have not really purchased a whole lot of maternity clothes. They are expensive and awkward looking, that is when I am actually able to find them in Topeka. My friend Jessica told me about the Belly Band which has worked wonders on expanding all of my non-pregnancy pants. Yesterday there was an 8-inch gap that it had to accommodate for, God Bless the inventor of the belly band.

The feet love to swell, it is their favorite pastime. Yesterday I tried to wear loafers, at some point I slipped them off my feet while I was sitting at my desk and then I could not get them comfortably back onto my feet. I am grateful that I am pregnant in the summer when it comes to shoes, I can wear a variety of flip flops and my feet can swell to their yummy little delight.

We are getting baby stuff left and right lately. Brooke has a friend that had a baby boy about eleven months ago and he has been showering us with his leftovers. He has given us a Boppy Swing, a bath tub, a Boppy, a lovely Graco car seat and two bases and a very cool walker that looks like a red corvette. Tracey and Vicki went garage saleing and got us a ton of little clothes and me some very nice maternity clothes. And finally, Shellie took Isabelle shopping and they got some bute outfits and a ton of bibs. Brooke asked me the other day what we were going to register for, I think a car to tote this baby around.

I guess that is really all I had, I apologize for the lack of funny stories, this really is more a techinical update. Stay tuned though, I am sure that a whole summer of giant belly in Kansas heat will produce humor, at least for those around me.

Good Times

So here is my old blog... I thought that I had lost it and it made me sad :( Now I want a link from my future to my past!

Catching up

So I feel like I should go back and catch up on the everything that I didn't write about from the time we found out until now. We found out that I was pregnant on a Wednesday and we met with the Dr's office the next week. At our first appointment we thought we were about 10 weeks. The nurse definitely disagreed, she said that we were at 18 weeks or there were two. That was the first time that I had any morning sickness.

The next day we had our first ultrasound to see exactly how far along we were, seeing the baby was amazing. She is definitely Brooke's daughter, she bounced the whole time. Of course we didn't know she was a she yet.... we got some great pictures and the technician determined that we were fifteen weeks three days into the pregnancy with a due date of September 7th. Wow, I missed the whole first trimester...

Baby History

So I previously had a blog that was all about me moving to Pennsylvania, when I moved back to Kansas it seemed narcissistic to keep a blog going about myself. I kept telling myself that when I got pregnant I would start a blog.

Last December I was talking to my mom about how discouraged I felt about my life, I honestly was beginning to believe that I was never going to have a baby and that I was never going to get married (despite being in a 5+ year relationship). I had seen a show where a women made the comment that she prayed to God to take away her desire to have children if it wasn't what she was supposed to do with her life. She had four children and more then twenty foster children. So I began praying that if I wasn't meant to have kids that God would take away the desire. By the end of January I had come to accept that I may never have kids.

March 11th I found out that I was pregnant. March 19th we found out that I was fifteen weeks and three days pregnant which meant that I was pregnant all through December and January. God truly does work in mysterious ways.

Once we confirmed that we were going to have a baby in September, Brooke and I started talking about getting married. He wanted to get married in the church and I wanted to get married before the baby came. So we talked to our priest who said we could have both. A wedding in May in the church with three months to spare before the baby. On May 24th, 2009, I became Mrs. Brooke Estes.

Now we hurry and wait for the baby, a girl to be named Sophia Catherine Grace...