Old jeans + fabric markers + Fray Check = And I think I figured out how to put it on Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/pin/413275703275935414/
2 Comments
Pre-baby, I had every intention of swaddling Gregory for the first 1 or 2 months. It seemed like an excellent idea in addition to being super cute (fun to do with dolls and stuffed animals). But since Day 2 of Gregory's life, he's been a champ at working his way out of his swaddle. After a few days of us trying to swaddle him and him breaking free, we gave up. But when his colicky period rolled around, swaddling was one of the few things that helped calm him down, so we started trying to do it again. However, unless someone was holding him, he would still manage to squirm his way out of his swaddle in a matter of minutes, no matter how tightly we tried to make it or which blanket we used. I wanted to swaddle him to help him sleep, but I didn't like want him to get all SIDSy. It got so frustrating that I wanted to resort to tape or an ACE bandage to tie him up, but that seemed less societally acceptable, so I resisted the urge.
Then a friend gave us some Swaddle Me swaddlers that use Velcro to strap babies down. Yay! It worked brilliantly. Such a life-saver. But here's the recent development: Gregory has figured out how to--I kid you not--get the swaddlers off. He doesn't break through the Velcro, but he'll slowly inch the swaddler off his shoulders and down his arms until he's free. For example, the other morning, at 4 a.m., I heard some smacking coming from his room. I went to investigate and found him sucking on his hands with his swaddler all scrunched up around his middle. But hey, at least it doesn't cover his face when he breaks free, so I'm still happy. If I had a nickel for every time someone told me to sleep when the baby sleeps, Gregory would have a pretty hefty college fund by now.
But no matter how many times I heard it, I always recognized "sleep when the baby sleeps" as great advice and had every intention of doing it. But a few weeks ago, Gregory decided to trade in sleep for colic. So... Now I cry when the baby cries. And he'll be paying for his own college. When I was pregnant, I read somewhere that new moms lose an average of 200 hours of sleep during the first year. "Wow, that's a lot," I thought. "Bwa ha ha," life chuckled slyly.
The other day, I realized that I'm already more than halfway to the 200-hour mark. "Yeesh," I thought to myself. Then I turned to Gregory. "Look, kid," I said sternly, "I have no intention of becoming an outlier here. Let's get it into gear, shall we?" "Bwa ha ha," Gregory chuckled slyly. 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. |
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
Categories
All
|