5 weeks on the labor train… and counting
19
APR
2011
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by meaganmoving in Uncategorized
i am convinced that my children hate me before i even meet them. i’m anticipating a record setting rough teen years if they are making the trends this early.
my darling son gave me PUPPP at 28 weeks and i had to suffer through until 38 weeks. for those of you who don’t know PUPPP… it is when little mignons of satan climb into your body through the scatchs on your stretch marks and take up residence. they bring little fiery wands of Hell with them and the wickedist batch of fiberglass insulation shards– just to make sure you itch and burn at the same time. the good news? there is no cure. the best my doctor at the time could do for me was sending me off to walgreens with marching orders to buy out the entire stock of benadryl. benadryl naps? awesome. benadryl comma for 10 weeks straight? = a great time to read the entire twilight series. team edward 4 eva and eva! if you think edward and jacob look good “sober” you should try checking them out in a solid 4 week benadryl haze (all while eating your 1000 hot pocket because you can’t operate the stove for fear of falling asleep on top of a burner mid- meal preparation).
my most glorious moment of my pregnancy with baby j was when i called my husband in tears at 10 in the morning begging him to come home. no, i wasnt in labor. i was wielding a disposable razor hoping desperately to shave my legs after weeks. i asked him to come home because i felt it was either shave my legs or check myself into the nearest psych ward. i itched so bad that i was afraid if i went to shaving i’d take my leg right off in an effort to relieve the itch. needless to say, my husband promptly left work and came on home (to this day i don’t know why he didn’t bring home a bulk bottle of prozac with him to crush up in my morning coffee). i got shaved legs that day. it was a small victory. i am pretty sure i didn’t shave again until the day of delivery as i didn’t want my husband running out of leave days.
and then on 21 december, my most precious and perfect little man came into the world. was it worth the itch? i’d say yes because today i sit here 36 + 3 days pregnant with my daughter.
on thursday my son will turn 16 months and i am convinced that if just the act of getting pregnant again didn’t secure a place in crazy-town for me, then the birth of my daughter 16 months after my son will definitley do it.
this little chick has upped the ante in miserable pregnancies too. she didn’t even bother waiting until 28 weeks to bring on the PUPPP. she sent teeny-tiny monogrammed invites to the mignons a little after 20 weeks to move right on in. i am very thankful that she at least laid down some ground rules that they would only be inhabiting my stomach strech marks. aside from the fact that i am down at least 13 layers of epidermis more than usual on my stomach, the PUPPP has been rather tolerable. or maybe the memories of my last torture are just so raw that my PUPPP PTSD won’t allow me to feel pain. either way, i’ll take what i can get.
in addition to hopping on the PUPPP wagon a little prematurely, this sister decided she was going to bust a move on out of my uterus at 31 weeks. um, no. after a solid thursday afternoon of brutal contractions that weren’t going away, i decided that i’d better make a visit to my dr. the midwife hooked me up to the nst machine and viola!… just as i had said… contractions lasting a minute every 3. the midwife came back in after a sweet 20 minutes of agony and said “ooohhhhh you are contracting close together” no shit sherlock. i was told to go home, lay down, do not pass go, do not collect $200. (and stay that way until 36 weeks).
for the next 3 weeks i did exactly as the doctor ordered. i laid, i lazed, and i lost my marbles. i was instructed to go to the hospital if i had more than 5 contractions and hour. my daughter must have quite keen hearing even in utero because guess how many contractions i had every hour from 31 weeks to nearly 34? 5. that’s right. not 4, not 6, not 5.5, just 5. i guess jerry and i will have to start spelling words instead of saying them when she is approximately 1 minute old to keep her from catching on.
after the 35 week mark, i was allowed to have as many contractions an hour as she wants as long as they don’t get worse. already an overachiever, i’ve been in “latent” labor now for nearly 3 weeks. as “latent ” labor was explained to me– “sometimes you just need to contract for weeks and weeks before your cervix starts to dilate” super. most people who don’t have a penchant for incubating difficult children have non-painful contractions for a week or two. then, there are those of us who have super stubborn cervixes and super stubborn nuggets. i’m on week 5 total of *painful* contractions and my cervix is sitting at sweet 2+ cm. this could go on and on til 40.5 weeks. damn, i need some ice cream just thinking about it.
seriously though, i wouldn’t trade either of my nuggets for any less stubborn kid (and easier pregnancy) on the planet. God gives us the perfect children and i realize just how lucky i am. i’d rather suffer for 40 weeks than not have these miracles at the end of my sentence gestation.
God is good all the time.
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and no, i don’t mean the whale sling they have to bring in to get my weight at my prenatal appointments. incidentally, having 2 kids back to back is about as good for the waistline as staring in the remake of Super Size Me.
yep, that’s me after two back-to-back pregnancies. i guess i’ll have to see a colorist soon.
what i actually mean when i refer to tipping the scales is the unnatural phenomena that happens to pregnant women around 35 weeks. i am so used to seeing myself in the mirror that i guess i didn’t notice the slowly forming “i am *bleseping* miserable” that showed up on my face. or maybe my sausage toes and fingers (and don’t forget the chipmunk cheeks) are startlingly noticable to the people i run across. twice just today i’ve heard a variation on the theme “you look like you are about to pop!” yeah, i feel like it too.
it must be so much the big pregnant elephant in the room that people can’t stop the words from coming out of their mouths. i could have sworn that i read a chapter on this in the secret code of women.
speaking of reading, i have been glancing back through jenny mccarthy’s ”belly laughs” from time to time to remind myself i am not the only person who has ever been nearly 37 weeks pregnant. if i could have just one wish today, i’d wish that i had half the notoriety of jenny mccarthy, so people would listen to me break it down for them. jenny does a rock ‘em, sock ‘em job of telling the pregnancy story, but what about the myriad of ‘ish that happens after the baby is born?
i get it that as new mommy’s we are enchanted with these little miracles that we’ve been growing from a seed to a watermelon over the last 10 months. i was indeed smitten and over the moon with my little nugget, but no matter how tired i was i never lost conscientiousness and cognitiveness about the crazies that were happening to my body. if you got pregnant after me and we are friends, there is a good chance i already tried to send you a smoke signal about this body drama. if you are not pregnant and thinking about getting pregnant… read at your own risk.
the very first thing i noticed and WHY did no one tell me about this: spoiled milk. i wish to you that i was just refering to coming home from the hospital to realize that you can’t have your fruity pebbles because all the milk in your house has gone bad. but, no. i am talking about the eau de toilette that oozes out of the pores of bfing women. i remember going to the va for a drs appointment a week or so after j was born. i would swear to you that everyone within a 10 foot radius had to get up a move because i smelled like a gallon of old milk left out all day in the middle of summer. it’s gross, it happens, and no amount of perfume or bathing will get rid of it. it does go away eventually, but it’s not pretty folks. just not pretty.
the next and MOST DISTURBING thing about the post partum period is the uterus flopping. i cannot confirm that this is a symptom that faces all women or if it’s just c-section women or if it’s just lucky weirdos like me. i swear to you, it is so disconcerting that i am thinking about writing a screen play and submitting it to stephen king. this shit will haunt your dreams. after i had my son i had to lay flat on my back for a week or so because of the c section pain. once the c section pain subsided, i was able to go back to the side lay position that i grew so fond of during my pregnancy. the thing i was not prepared for? the uterus flop. i don’t know why this happens (my best educated/scientifically unfounded guess- that your uterus pushes all your organs out of the way and it takes a while for everything to get back to wear it belongs). all i know is that when i rolled over to my side i LITERALLY FELT MY UTERUS flop to the side i was laying on. i am exceptionally glad that i have internal organs and that they all function correctly, but i do not now or ever care to have knowledge of their day-to-day movements. *shudder* you’ve been warned.
i won’t even get into the night sweats because they are just like what they sound like. my only suggestion for anyone who will eventually be post-partum is to sleep on a towel so that when you wake up soaked to the core- you can ditch the towel and sleep on dry sheets or another dry towel. you don’t need pnemonia in addition to taking care of a newborn.
now that we have covered the utterly disturbing, we can cover the downright commical: the caverness belly button. my belly button never became an outie because i swear my skin was so stretched to capacity that there wasn’t enough spare skin to let it go out. however, after my stomach went back to normal (only far more bulldogs face looking), my belly button had to be a full 4 inches deep. i was certain that keebler elfs were spalunking in there. what the hell they were hunting for i will never know. the inside is all bruised looking too and there isn’t much that can be done to make you feel better besides make sure that all of your mirrors only catch the top 1/3 of your body.
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after labor addendum
02
MAY
2011
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by meaganmoving in Uncategorized
ok, it has been a minute. one of my bffs rolled into town with her wee nugget this week. we had a ton of fun and i got lots of baby snuggles! (when waiting for labor, i assure you that baby snuggles are absolutely the best medicine). i miss them already and they’ve only been gone 5 hours.
this week while she was here, we were talking about all of the after labor joys that i mentioned in my previous post. there were 2 that its pretty egregious that i looked over. here they are for your reading pleasure:
1) bells palsy- first of all, you need to know what it is. http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/library/bells-palsy/DS00168.html
i had NEVER heard of anyone getting bells palsy, but you know i got it. because j was in the NICU for 8 days, i didn’t notice anything wrong with me since i was too busy worrying about him. (not to mention that in every picture of us as a family i was wearing a surgical mask) after getting the baby home and bringing my anxiety level from a solid 10 to a 2, i started realizing that whenever i smiled only half my face would move. i was straight swollen up like rosie o’donnell (on a good day) and thought perhaps my chipmunk cheeks were causing some facial anguish. 2 days after getting j home from the hospital we went for newborn pictures. my parents were in town so they went too. at one point during the pics my mom said to me “why are you smiling like that?” i thought i was smiling normally and brushed it off. and then, we got the pictures back. whoadies. um, WTF? only the left side of my face showed any form of emotion. as for the right side, it was completely paralyzed.
and that is why you will only ever see pictures of me and my newborn with my head down…
i really don’t remember when it went away, but thankfully it eventually did. throw a paralyzed face on top of a fresh 40 lbs of baby fat and you know i was feeling my best.
2) chin hair- don’t lie. if you have ever had a baby you know about the chin hair. this one unfortunately is a bleed over from pregnancy. sometimes it gets banging early on and keeps rearing its ugly hairy head for months after baby. i had nearly resolved myself to carrying around a little belt loop tweezer set so that i can could pluck everytime a random 1/8 inch newbie popped up on my chin
i used this earlier in life on my unsightly upper lip hair and unibrow, but it works fabulous on chin hair too. just fyi. don’t be embarrassed to get some. it’ll change your life. it doesn’t say this on the bottle, but for me it helps to slow my hair growth. i mean, really, i was plucking 2 times a day. it was getting out of hand. now, i pluck every two or three days. its AMAZING. i’m still convinced that estrogen is a biznitch and does cruel things to women, but at least sally hansen has my back.
so there you have it. these are two more of the things you should really know before your mini-home skillet pops out. don’t say i didn’t warn you.
i’ll be back this week. wait for it…
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alright. it’s official. if baby c isnt born VERY soon she is going to be coming out with a full-set of permanent teeth and a drivers license. and no, after this last 8 weeks of naughty behavior she will not be getting her own car… not even a barbie hot wheels car. (or at least not until she comes out and gives her mommy lots of good snuggles to recitfy the naughtiness).
today i woke up in a fowly fowl fowly mood. merely waking up on the wrong side of the bed is for chumps, i straight woke up on the wrong side of the house. i guess it’s the two week haul. it’s not like i am carrying around an exceptionally large amount of extra weight or anything– i just HATE waiting. when you combine the waiting with a couple of weeks of contractions with no results, it does not a happy mommy make. i really had some grand ideas about how i’d get out my aggression. first, i decided that i wanted to go for a run, but that wouldn’t work because i’d either only be able to run 5 steps or this child might have fallen smack out onto the concrete. the next idea i had was to put on my boxing gloves (pink gloves, of course) and do some boxing. that plan would probably have worked if i had a boxing bag. i don’t have a bag though and i don’t think my hubs would appreciate me being the crap out of the walls. my last idea and the one i inevitably acted on was to get a massage. whoop. it was a good call.
after my amazing massage, i thought i’d go mall walk. i did not arm myself with fresh white tennis, but i did see quite a few mall walkers who were pimping the white chucks. my thought? i’d go look for some keds for jackman and maybe all the walking (and jiggling) would shake me right into labor. i walked and walked and walked and walked, i looked in every store and no keds.
i almost never even bother to go into children’s place, but i did today. they were having a killer sale and it was like comedy hour on their tee-shirt rack. i also found adorable beige and navy saddle oxfords. my choices were size 4 or size 7. i went with the size 7s. we will be putting those little pretties on jman’s chub feet come winter. i am so excited.
so after all the mall walking (almost 3 straight hours), i didn’t find keds or labor. oh well. no surprise there. tomorrow is cinco de mayo. after becoming a texas resident, i feel very compelled to celebrate cinco de mayo every year. my daughter decided not to come beforehand, so i have been warning her that i’m going to burn her right out with the hottest salsa in town. watch out cici. feel the burn.
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