However, here I am, forcing my poor child to sleep (if you can call it sleep) in a flat bassinet with nothing comfortable to speak of, all due to SIDS. Sigh... I'll bet he can't wait until he can excercise his own agency.
If someone told me that the chance of me dying in my sleep was 0.00008, but if I slept on the floor with no blankets and no pillow, I could reduce that chance to 0.000004, I would say, "I'll risk it in my comfy bed, thanks."
However, here I am, forcing my poor child to sleep (if you can call it sleep) in a flat bassinet with nothing comfortable to speak of, all due to SIDS. Sigh... I'll bet he can't wait until he can excercise his own agency.
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From now on, I'm going to put miscellaneous pictures of Gregory on their own page (Gregory) rather than posting them here. You're welcome, uninterested parties.
After a few bouts of false labor during the last week of February (including 10 hours of it the day before I was due), I finally went into real labor at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday evening. It started with a bang: a 6-minute long contraction that brought me to tears. Things mellowed out a bit after that, but we decided to go to the hospital nonetheless. We checked into the hospital at about 9:45 p.m. and snagged the last clean room available. After about 7 hours, I got an epidural (I was 6 cm dilated). It then took 11 hours to make it to 9 cm dilated, and then man, that last cm was so stubborn. There was just one little bit that wouldn’t get out of the way. Finally, at 7:30 p.m., they had to give me a little Pitocin to force things along. I had really hoped to avoid Pitocin, but the doctor basically told me that it was either Pitocin or a C-section. The Pitocin did the trick and I was fully dilated at 8:30 p.m. However, Gregory was still too far up for me to start pushing, so we lounged around waiting for him until 10:40 p.m. And that’s when things got really frustrating. Over the next three hours, I got a fever which made the doctors pretty concerned about infection. Also, Gregory’s heart rate kept jumping up every time I made considerable progress, so we had to keep changing positions and slowing things down to make sure he was coping okay. Then his huge head got stuck behind my pelvic bone. I could tell the doctors were getting pretty antsy, and I was determined not to have a C-section, so I got really frustrated and scared that I couldn’t get Gregory to come out. I asked them to drop the epidural way down in the hopes that it would help me push more effectively. After 3.5 hours, the doctor said that 4 hours was the cut-off point. Naturally, I thought to myself, “I did not go through 30 hours of labor and 3 hours of pushing to have this end in a C-section.” (An economist would’ve called it a “sunk cost”, but it certainly didn’t feel that way to me.) So I really put in a champion effort and finally got Gregory out at 1:25 a.m. After Gregory was out, they set him on my lower abdomen. I couldn’t see him very well, but I heard Gary ask the doctors, “Is he breathing? It doesn’t look like he’s breathing.” The doctors didn’t deny it and, needless to say, I started panicking inside. One doctor finally said, “He’ll be okay. We’ll take care of it.” They quickly clamped and cut his cord and whisked him away into a herd of pediatricians. I found out later that Gregory’s APGAR score had been a 4, which is pretty low. A pediatrician came over to me and explained that they were going to give him antibiotics and take him to
the NICU for several hours. They brought him over to me for a few minutes to say hello/goodbye. We were both pretty traumatized by the childbirth experience, so we pretty much just lay there panting weakly together. Then they took him away again. After he was cleared from the NICU six hours later, they brought him up to our room. And since that time, we’ve all been doing peachy and healthy. Woo hoo. The sleep situation, on the other hand, is an entirely different story…. I'll try not to let this turn entirely into a mommyblog, but for now, this is all that's going on in my life.
Something Gary conveniently forgot to mention before we got married: Henries have big heads.
I pushed for nearly 4 hours. Almost none of Gregory's hats fit his noggin (which is why he's wearing the gender-neutral hospital hat in a lot of the pictures). And yesterday, we got the official word from his pediatrician: He's in the 25th percentile for weight and the 98th percentile for head circumference. (while reading the back of the Raisin Bran box)
Gary: Did you know that 95% of raisins are grown in California? Jody: You can grow raisins? Gary: Yeah, just don't water them. Gary looks over my shoulder as I'm playing on the computer...
Gary: What game is that? Jody: Uh...solitaire. |
AuthorI'm Jody Henrie. I'm the kind of person who would name my first-born son Colby Jack. Because I love cheese. Archives
November 2013
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