Two Months

Dear Penelope,
This has been another big month for you, for starters you've discovered sleep in a big way. In fact it's something of an embarrassment when I talk to other parents of small babies. They ask how you are sleeping and I have to say just fine and then I think that they are jealous of me for having such a wonderful baby. I don't mind though, I'm getting some sleep.
You slept more than five hours for the first time when you where five weeks old. I was shocked when you woke us up at 5.20 am and not 3 am. Your Nanny was staying with us and at first I thought that she had feed you in the middle of the night, but no, you'd done it all by yourself, sleeping right through.
Life still goes a bit wrong for you in the afternoon though. You never manage to sleep much more than about 45 minutes at a time during the day unless I'm holding you or you're in the sling (ergo). This has led to me shopping for long periods of time so you'll get a nap in.

You're big enough now that you find the mobile above your cot interesting, which is wonderful. We can leave you there for a little while we have to get something done and you won't scream.

Last week you were immunized. You took the needles themselves pretty well and were asleep five minutes later. That afternoon was a different story though. You just screamed and screamed. You would stop feeding to scream. It took a long cuddle on the couch and some panadol to get you to calm down.

You're growing so much and I can't remember it all. The best thing of all though is your smile. You give the biggest grin with a dimple in your cheek. It just makes mine and daddy's day. It's taken me more than a week to write this, so I'd better finish before you're three months old. We love you.

Growing baby

For the first time, Penelope has some things that are now too small for her. There were two really cute bodysuits that some friends of ours bought while they were in the USA, but they only fit up to 4.5 kg and she now is 4.7 kg as of last Tuesday. The biggest thing though is that she's grown out of the smallest size nappies that I made for her. I didn't really expect them to last much more than a month and that's pretty much how long they lasted. She's now in the next size up, thank heavens that I made them ahead of time. These should last a while, until she's about 6 months old with any luck. I haven't made any of the next biggest size yet, don't even have the fabric yet, so I have to get a move on with it. I'm going to get some really girly PUL for the next set, there's some great stuff at NappiesCovered.
I've actually been able to get some sewing done lately. Penelope's dedication is this Sunday and I've made her a dress for it out of fabric leftover from making my wedding dress. It's a pretty simple design, I took a jacket pattern, shortened it and added a gathered skirt. I'm almost finished, just hemming and buttons to go. I have a huge collection of buttons, but I don't know if I have what I want for the dress. I really hope I do, because the local sewing stores have really dismal button selections and the nearest Spotlight is in Queanbeyan and I've already driven out there once this week.
Mr b^3's mother R was down for a couple of days this week, which was really nice. She hadn't seen Penelope since we were in the hospital after she was born. The first night R was here Penelope performed a magic trick and slept through the night, from 11pm to 5.20am. She hasn't done it again, but I wouldn't expect her to. It's quite a feat for a baby to sleep through at five weeks. Funnily, I felt worse after that night than after the night before when she was up for a feed at 3am. Then again when she has a feed at 3am, she can usually be relied upon to sleep until past 6am instead of forcing you up at just past 5am.
I'm not really looking forward to the end of daylight savings this weekend. Penelope shouldn't be too affected because she's got blockout curtains. I don't though, so I'm not sure if I will be able to get back to sleep when the sun rises at 5.30am instead of 6.30am.
The girl is waking, so I'll stop here.

One month

Dear Penelope,
You were a month old this week. Has it really been only a month? On the other hand, has it been a whole month already?
Your daddy and I have had a lot of learning to do the past month. Lots of learning about how to care for you and to keep you happy, while not going insane ourselves. You've been really good about helping us with that. In the past week or so you've figured out that one feed in the middle of the night is perfectly acceptable. For this I would like to thank you.


Your days go like this. You wake up at about 6 or 7am and have one last feed in bed with me while Daddy gets up and gets your nappies washed and your formula ready for the day. After a thorough burping, I'll put you down in your rocker and get up. I usually make it through breakfast and if I'm lucky I'll make it to the shower before Daddy leaves for work. In the morning you're usually pretty quiet. Feed 100mL every three hours or so and I can work on the computer or rest. Some mornings we go out to mothers group or the health clinic. At some point in the afternoon, it all seems to go wrong for you. You get grumpy and have trouble settling. You usually end up in the ergo for a while in an effort to get you to have some sleep so you're not overtired later.
When Daddy comes home from work, he'll take you for a while, to hold you and try and calm you down. He swoops you through the air and lifts you right up to the ceiling. Sometimes you like this, sometimes you could care less.
Three evenings a week, you're nanna comes over to see you when she's finished teaching school. She is absolutely nuts about you, I'm pretty sure that seeing you is the high point of her day many days. Often you're unco-operative and are sound asleep when she comes over, but given your grumpy afternoons, this usually doesn't last long. If she's lucky, you'll be due a feed when she's over and then she can have a good cuddle.
Later in the evening you'll be given a bath. The first few baths you screamed through, but now you seem quite content with the warm water.
At some point in the evening you stop being a grump and get the idea of sleeping. Often you'll go 4 or 5 hours between feeds overnight. You'll usually wake for a night time feed at about 3am. I wake up and go get you, check your nappy and tell Daddy to go and get a bottle, then put you down on our bed while I go and wash my hands. When I get back, I put you on a pillow across my legs, put the towel over my shoulder and give you your formula. Daddy goes back to sleep beside us. The most tricky bit of night time feeding for me to figure out was getting you back to sleep. What currently seems to work is wrapping you back up when your sleepy and then lieing you down between us and lieing down beside you. I can then grab twenty minutes of sleep while you settle yourself down into a deep sleep with me near you. When I wake back up, you've conked out and I can carefully pick you up and tuck you into your cot. With any luck you'll stay asleep until morning when we start again.


You're absolutely beautiful and we love you so much,
Mummy.

Birth - Part 2

When I left off I was up to having started the Syntocinon. The next two hours were the most painful of my life. I've had major surgery a couple of times, I've had me some pain and I thought that I might be able to cope with it, but nothing is like labor. With surgery it generally only hurts really bad if you move. With labor, there is nothing you can do about it, there is only so much that positioning and heat sacks can do. You can't postpone it or get around it, it just comes and rips your guts out until there's nothing you can do but scream. This of course is posterior labor with Syntocinon, the double pain whammy. I tried the nitrous for a while but I hated it. I couldn't breath as fast or deeply as I wanted to and to keep the tube in my mouth meant I couldn't yell.
After about 2 hours of this I finally said the magic words "I want an epidural". I had dilated out to 5 cm by this point and I could take no more. Another friend of mine had had to wait more than an hour for an epidural when she wanted one, this I was kind of afraid of. Mind you she wanted it at 2am and had to be transfered from a birth centre to the hospital. Blessings be the anesthesiologist turned up only 15 minutes later and I had the epidural in about 10 minutes after that. Epidurals are wonderful, mine wasn't even to begin with, my right leg went completely numb and immovable while my left was only lightly numbed and I still had a window the size of my palm on my hip, but I didn't need to scream anymore. It was about 2pm when I had the epidural. Something funny, when I was sitting over the bed for the epidural to be put in, Mr b^3 was sitting in a chair at my feet, when I had a contraction I managed to squirt amniotic fluid onto him. Not much and it was the only mess he got in the whole thing.
After the epidural was put it, I could just lie back on the bed and rest for a bit. The anesthesiologist came back at about 5pm to even up the epidural. I was really thankful for this, he didn't really need to, the pain relief was enough, but he said that he was a perfectionist and even though it looked like I was going to be fine from there on in, it wouldn't be good enough if I needed intervention.
I had dilated out to 10cm by 5pm but this is when we found out that she was posterior. Because it's much harder work to push out a posterior baby I was to lie on my left side for a while to try and get her to turn around. I was also told at about then to stop using the clicker for the epidural at about 6 pm to let it wear off enough that I could feel to push.
I started to feel like pushing about 7 ish I think. She was still posterior, but I didn't mind. Pushing contractions felt so different to the dilation contractions. In as much as it is possible, I was having fun. I wasn't afraid of having to work harder, just so as it didn't hurt as much as before.
I was pushing really well and everything looked like it was set. The midwife started to lay everything out for the birth and we were ready. Our OB turned up and wanted to do one last internal exam to check everything out.
We deliberatly had not written a birth plan. We had gone into the birth with no expectations as to what was going to happen. Instead, we had learned all we could about everything and we would see what would happen. The only firm conviction I had was that I didn't want any narcotics, I didn't want to go silly. This I got. However, we were down to the last half hour or so, just a little pushing and we would have our baby. The birth suite was nice and quiet with just the OB and the midwife with Mr b^3 and I. Everything was ready and it really looked like we could have some expectations as to what was going to happen.
Then the OB did the exam and felt her nose. He told us that she was what was called deflexed. At that point I had another 'oh shit' moment. I had read about this only the previous week. Mr b^3 hadn't read about it and I don't think I had mentioned it to him so he had to wait for the rest of the explanation. Penny was presenting brow first. Babies are supposed to be born with their chins tucked into their chests, coming with the crowns of their heads coming first, all tucked up nice and small. Instead Penelope had put her head back and was coming brow first. This adds about 4 cm to the diameter of baby that needs to come out. Theoretically if the baby is really small and the mother has really big hips and a pretty decent epistiotomy, it is possible to give birth vaginally to a brow presentation baby. Penelope was not a tiny baby, there was no way she was going to be born vaginally, she was stuck on my pelvis and we needed a c-section.
Suddenly there seemed to be about 2o people in the room getting me ready to go down to theatre. It all went into a confusing mess. Mr b^3 got overwhelmed by everything and sillily I was more worried about him than about me. He ended up sitting outside of the theatre were he could hear everything, but he wasn't feeling well enough to be in the theatre with me. In the theatre the epidural was turned right up and a bunch of other drugs were added. The OB did see if she could be born with forceps, but that was really a no go. There was a screen put up so I couldn't see what was going on so I didn't know that they had started until a couple of minutes in. When she was out they didn't lift her up high enough for me to see if it was she or he and I had to ask them to do it again. She was passed to me after a couple of minutes, that's us in the photo. I couldn't hold her for as long as I wanted to because I started to puke, so I had to send her out to Mr b^3. And thats it for the birth. The girl is one month old tomorrow, so I'll post about that next.

The birth story.

Today is my first day home alone with the girl, so I'll take the time that I can get to the computer while she's asleep to at least get this started.

To begin at the beginning, we rocked up to the hospital at 4pm Tuesday afternoon (the 13th). At 5pm I had prostaglandins applied to ripen my cervix. I was no where near going into labor myself so we had to start from scratch. On a geeky note, normally prostaglandins are put in as a gel, which can be a problem if things go to fast and need to be stopped. I got a new thing called Cervadil that has the prostaglandins on a piece of tape that can be yanked out if needed.
At about 7pm I started pre-labor. Nothing particularly dramatic or consistent, I could knit most of the way through the contractions. We got about four and a half hours sleep that night between the excitement and my being a bit uncomfortable. At 5 am the Cervadil was taken out because you can only have it for 12 hours and the contractions started to be a bit stronger and more consistent coming about every 6 minutes or so. The Cervadil could have put me into labor proper, but it didn't. At this point we were moved from our room on the maternity ward to the birth suite. The Cervadil did move things along enough for my waters to be broken at about 8am. The hook for that doesn't look anything like a crotchet hook by the way, maybe like a special tool for weaving.
Having my waters broken definetly started things and we were off into the first stage of labor. Pretty quickly I was really uncomfortable on the bed and had hoped into the shower, sitting on a chair. I had told the midwife we had in the morning that I wanted to use a swiss ball and she said that I could use it in the shower, which was wonderful. The contractions had really ramped up after my waters where broken but I could still keep on top of them. They were about every 4 minutes and lasting about a minute each. When one started I would hand the shower nozzle to Mr b^3 so he could concentrate the heat on my lower back while I held onto my lower belly. I remembered hearing of a singer who had managed her labor pain by singing her scales, so inspired, I would sing one note through a contraction, concentrating on keeping the note constant and to keep singing and to not let it slip to moaning or screaming. We kept on this way for about 3 hours pretty well. I was still pretty happy between contractions, though was having to concentrate pretty hard during them.
The OB came back to examine me at about 11am. I was only about 3cm dilated at that point, which wasn't going fast enough, so I had to start on a Syntocinon drip. I'd asked a friend who'd had an induction a couple of months ago if she had any tips. She said "If they start you on the drip, pray." Really encouraging. I had to be continually monitored on the drip, so I couldn't stay in the shower. I opted to try on the swiss ball with a heat sack. This didn't work so well partly because it was hard to keep the sack in position. My OB and the midwife were apologetic that I couldn't stay in the shower, but I had to be monitored.
We found out a couple of hours later that Penelope was posterior (her spine against my spine). Posterior labor is more painful than anterior labor and is about a 1 in 500 occurrence. Syntocinon makes labor more painful because it stimulates strong contractions. You can probably see where this is going.
Thats it for today. Stay tuned for more.

The other side.

Her name is Penelope Anne. Her entrance into the world wasn't the easiest, but she is adorable. The short version of her birth is induction, waters broken, Syntocyn drip and posterior labor, epidural, get through 13 hours of labor only for her to get stuck at the very end and end up with an emergency c-section. In the next couple of days I'll write up a more detailed birth story for those who are interested and so I have a record before my memory goes.
I'm not going to be doing uni this year after all. I'm not sure if I mentioned it here but I was planning on starting my Dip.Ed in secondary education this year. I was supposed to start classes last week, but while we were in hospital, I decided to pass on the nervous breakdown. If she was a couple of months old, I think I could do it, but I'm not going to try and kill myself by doing uni with a newborn. Plus I want to enjoy her now, she's the most important thing I have now.
Sorry this is a bit disjoint, but I wanted to give an rough outline of what has been going on. There will be more detail later.

Before

40 weeks. We go in for the induction this afternoon. See you on the other side.