At naptime on Sunday, I heard very loud noises emanating from Ethan’s room.

Later, after he had been downstairs for awhile, I asked him what he was doing that was making such a racket.

“I don’t know!” He said gaily. This is his goto statement for everything.

“Instead of saying, ‘I don’t know,’ why don’t you stop and think it over, try to remember what I’m asking you, and THEN tell me.”

“Ok,” he said, “I’m going to think about it up to 10.”

“You’re going to think about it up to 10?”

“Yeah.”

I wait. I watch him. He’s squirming around in his seat, playing with the toy in his hands. A minute goes by.

“Are you ready to tell me?”

“NO! I’M NOT UP TO TEN YET!”

“Oh, ok.”

We sit there, one of us squirmy, the other of us, sitting amused and patient.

“Have you remembered up to 10 yet?”

“YES! I GOT UP TO 10!”

“So what were you doing that made so much noise?”

“I was hitting the bottom of my train table.”

“Hitting it? Were you being a builder man?”

“No.”

“A worker man?”

“No, I was making the stuff on the table fall down.”

“What stuff?”

“Blocks.”

“Aha.. so.. you were building tall towers and buildings with your blocks, and then you were hitting the table so they’d tumble down?”

“YUP!”

My son, destruction-man.

James went in to get Ethan this morning after we both slept in to 7am (we usually get up about 6.20). I was a little surprised that he wasn’t up already. He was still in bed, huddled in sweaty sheets with a fever of 102.5.

ARRRRGH!

Just to recap: Last Thursday his school called and reported he had a high fever. I hurried and got him and stayed home with him Friday. Took him to the doctor, who about wrecked her pants at how swollen his tonsils were. Took a rapid strep test, which turned out negative. Took a normal strep test. Results will take 3 days, so she put him on antibiotics. Monday came, test was NEGATIVE! So she said to stop the antibiotics.

And now, 1.5 days later, he’s down with a high fever again.

He was so miserable, was on the verge of tears. It was so sad.

So after the obligatory “Who stays home with him?” discussion, I stayed home with him, James took Jocelyn into school.

I called the doctor when it got to be a more reasonable hour (I decided 8:16 was reasonable. It was agony waiting til after 8:15) and she was stumped. She asked if there were any new symptoms, and honestly, it seemed like it was exactly what was going on last week. So I brought him in, and she took a look, and pretty much said, “Sure enough! He’s sick!” Well, she did say that the tonsilitis could be viral, but with his glands as swollen as they were, they needed antibiotics and broke out a prescription for the stronger stuff.

He was feeling much better once his fever was down. Better enough to point out ALL the RED trucks, construction trucks, and cars on the way to and from the doctor’s office. Better enough to insist on taking the stairs when departing the doctor’s office. Better enough to get all sassy with me 20 minutes into me trying to kill time in Target waiting for the prescription to be filled.

So back at home, things were going fine and he was actually sleeping and I was about to get some actual work done, when the kids’ school called.

Jocelyn was running full out in her classroom when she slipped or tripped or something shiny distracted her and she cracked her head against the “cubbies” (think very small cupboards with no doors, so the kid’s individual bins can go in and out).

The skin wasn’t broken, and she seemed to be doing fine, they reported, but I had better come get her.

“Do I need to take her to the emergency room?” I asked, trying to figure out just how bad it was.

“Her eyes are good, and she isn’t acting strangely, but really I wouldn’t want to make that decision for you.”

So I flew upstairs, put shoes on a barely conscious Ethan, grabbed keys and off we went. I shooshed Ethan a number of times while I tried to get a hold of our pediatrician (she had just seen us this morning. Patience of Job, that woman has. Yoda, I am not trying to be.) Left a message with her service, hung up and tried to listen to Ethan since he was doing so well with me snapping at him to “SSHHHH! I’M ON THE PHONE!”

“I saw a digger Mommy.”

“Oh yeah? A digger?”

“It’s a police digger.”

“I don’t think police have diggers, Ethan.”

“They do. Just one.”

“Aha. …. What does this police digger do?”

“Mommy, it’s digs. VERY FAST. With a SIREN.”

He didn’t limit his conversation to police diggers. I had told him Jocelyn got a bonk on the head. He did his best to reassure me:

“Did Jocelyn bonk her head?”

“Yes, she did, honey.”

“Very hard?”

“It was a pretty hard bonk, yes, but she’s ok.”

“I think she bonked her head so hard that it opened up and all the blood came out all over.”

He’s not the best comforter.

The doctor told me that it’s ok to let her drink and eat, and give her some tylenol for the headache she’s bound to have. I’m to watch for any abnormal behavior, wooziness, vomiting, extreme sleepiness.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the woozy nausea I felt all the way to school meant I had a good bonk on the head.

She was doing fine when we got there. The teachers said that it was definitely a hard bump though, it was LOUD, and it was VERY swollen pretty quickly. In the time it took for me to get there however, it had improved quite a bit. She wasn’t crying or fussing, she was happy as a clam, holding up her ice pack to her head, sitting in the chair swinging her legs back and forth.

It’s now been almost 4 hours from the head bonking and she is still fine, though her head looks nasty. she’s spent this time refusing to eat the dinner I made (very normal), taking her diaper off and insisting that I put it back on fourteen zillion times, annoying her brother by LOOKING AT HIS GEOTRAX TRAIN and tryig to send her mother to an early grave via cardiac arrest by spinning around and around and falling down narrowly missing even more furniture.
I still feel woozy and nauseas. Fifteen more minutes.. and there’s a stiff martini with my name on it. I’m sure alcohol will help the parent trauma.

Yesterday at about 4:15, Ethan’s school called me up and told me that he had a fever of 104.

I prompted dropped everything and ran out the door, calling James on the way to do the same in case he could get there sooner.

Crappy thing is we both work a ways away and it takes us both way too long to get back to the homeish area. So, I pulled up at the school an hour later and tried not to RUN into the school’s office to see my boy. he was burning hot to the touch, and I gave him some tylenol (stopped and got it on the way, thus the hour instead of 40 min.) and then got Jocelyn and started home.

He seemed to perk up a bit on the way home. He was were bleary-eyed, but feel rotten didn’t stop him from pointing out the fire engine that screamed by, or the backhoe we passed. Some things transcend 104 degree fevers, it seems.

I felt kind of bad, because yesterday morning, when I went into his room to get him he pointed hear the back of his neck, and stated, “My neck hurts.” I thought it was odd, and even asked specifically, “How about your throat, does your throat hurt?” but he said no, and pointed again to his neck, not at the nape, but more on the side.

He acted fine all morning, but later when he was brushing his teeth and I had picked him up to stand on the edge of the tub, I thought he might be feeling a little too hot, and even took his temperature just to see. It was fine at 98 degrees, so I shrugged it off and the morning continued as usual and off he and Jocelyn went to school.

Obviously, he stayed home today, and me along with him, and we went to the doctor’s office this morning.

I was a bit nervous, because the last time we were there was for his 4 year checkup, and when he got his 4 yr old shots, well… let’s just say all hell broke loose, and we were picking up the pieces for quite some time. He did very well, although he did ask me nervously SEVERAL times, “No shots, right mommy?” and was visibly relieved when I assured him that no, there wouldn’t be any shots.

The doctor looked in his ears, up his nose, and at his eyes, commenting all the while how there was nothing, nothing at all going on.. until she looked in his throat. She showed me too, and damn, those tonsil were swollen. It’s any wonder the boy can eat anything at all (which, he hasn’t been much). She did a rapid strep culture which turned out negative, and so did the 3 day wait culture next, but said that it looked like strep and she’d be getting a lot of strep cases, and recommended we start antibiotics anyway, and if the culture came back negative, we would just stop the antibiotics. I’m not one to give antibiotics willy nilly (I don’t even buy antibacterial soap), but I went with her recommendation especially since his fever has risen every time the tylenol has worn off. If it comes back negative I am going to kick myself for helping grow a new generation of extra resistant bacteria. yeah, totally having second thoughts now. Argh.

By the time we got home from target (got prescription, and popsicles, oogled over patio furniture) his fever had spiked back up again, right on schedule. He’s been dosed and is in bed napping now.

Jocelyn also stayed home sick on tuesday, after waking up with a fever the night before. She also visited the doctor, but throat was fine, ears were fine, nose and sinuses – not fine. She was diagnosed with sinusitis and is currently on day 4ish of her antibiotics.

It’s just anti-biotic city around here. James pointed out to me that we did have a pretty good streak, which is true, the kids have been pretty healthy since, oh probably January or February. And in Jocelyn’s case, I have a sneaking suspicion that the mac n’ cheese we have thought was “fine” in terms of milk (she is intolerant of dairy, gets all snotty when she has milk protein) in fact, isn’t fine, which would explain all the snottiness on her end for the last 2-3 weeks. Note to self: no more box mac n’ cheese for the young’uns.

Anyway, so I’ve stayed home tuesday and friday this week. Next time – it’s JAMES’ TURN!

What really sucks is that I’ve missed casual friday. I don’t mind (HA! MIND! as if I’d MIND) staying home, but I at least want to make it count, and stay home on a day where I’d OTHERWISE have to PICK AN OUTFIT that has some modicum of fashion sense, instead of throwing on jeans and a t-shirt. Humph.

My friend Linda is home (as in, back in the country) from teaching in Korea, and is here in DC for the weekend, and we’re making tentative plans to get together tonight, and I’m just so tickled. I haven’t seen her in a zillion years.

CAN NOT WAIT.

-amy better not get sick now.

Ever since I posted a sort of photo journey of Ethan through the years on his birthday, it has been bugging me that some of our old photos were AWOL. I looked and LOOKED through flickr and our photos locally and could not find the pictures I KNEW we had somewhere of the day that Ethan was born. The early ones I posted were from when he was a few weeks old.

So finally, I hounded James to dig up HIS old archives and put them on our file server, and I’ve been going through them fairly meticulously and checking them against flickr and uploading the ones that were missing.

The photos taken on day that Ethan was born are now there, however, NOW I can’t find the photos of the trip we took to NY the fall of 2003.

Argh. I think this may be a long process.

and once again, I’m reminded of the couple of factors with flickr that make me not love it with the fierce blazing heat of a thousand suns, like everyone else seems to. I’ve just uploaded some photos ranging from 1999 to 2004 and it seems like everything is always organized by date UPLOADED rather than date TAKEN and that bugs me to no end. I always have to go in to ‘archives’ and specify ‘date taken’ to find anything at all. Oh well.

Didn’t I promise photo bliss? I’ll shoosh now and get to it. some cute baby pictures of my babies. Sometimes it’s hard to realize how much and how many changes we as parents have gone through as well as the kids themselves.. until we look at the photos and say, “Awwww, remember when?”

(OMG look at the red hair! it’s red! oh how i miss thy redness! except that it’s gone from that nice red to a nasty orange color i hate and that’s the entire reason i stopped dying my hair red but STILL! I LOVE YOU RED!)

Oh, right, this was about Ethan. Not my nasty orangey red hair. Carry on.

I wish I had a photo like this one without my hands on his head, but the truth is, I just couldn’t keep my hands off him. Not even for a picture of just him. He was just too beautiful.

And just so you realize just what exactly the sort of man I’m married to …. here is the photo he took of his son’s first shit:

this same man also turned to me a few hours after holding our son and being together as a family for the first time, and said with a little tear in his eye,

“Our son will never know a world without Tivo.”

I only smiled and nodded, too emotional to speak.

My favorite sheets, the first ones I bought for our real live adult bed, the beautiful soft cotton 500 thread count sheets… have finally given up the ghost.

In fact, they probably gave up the ghost about a month before I stopped using them, but I was in denial. The threadbare spots gave way to actual holiness, and not the kind of holiness that brings you closer to God. The kind that brings you closer to MATTRESS.

Still even they they had holes and I’d mended some rips in them, they still had to have some practical use, right? YES DAMMIT I LOVE THEM I’M KEEPING THEM IN SOME FORM OR ANOTHER!

Well, I am always intrigued when I read my Lucy Maud Montgomery books and they talk about braided or rag rugs.

So, fIrst, I tore my beloved top sheet into 1″ strips. Then I crotched myself a nifty bag. I don’t think I have any pictures of my bag.

Both the kids were quite taken with my bag. So next I made one for Jocelyn.

I didn’t think Ethan would like a bag, so I started to make a rug for him to go next to his bed. But when I told him that, he informed me that he wanted a bag too. So I made him one too.

What these bags really need are linings.

I was pretty enamored with my bag for a while. I even stopped using my purse completely. However, the novelty has worn off and the drudgery of digging through the bag for all my crap — well, I’ve lost my love of the bag. I need a bag with pockets – and different sections.

Maybe I could sew up a lining with sections / dividers, but honestly, I am really not that great a sewer. I took the mandatory sewing in home ec. in jr. high, but all my efforts since then, including the stab at quilting I’ve done a few times, have been of my own engineering and thoughts with no real knowledge of the “correct” way to do anything to back me up.

So if anyone wants to throw some sewin’ learnin’ at me, I would be so appreciative.

Still. Cute bag. Love the super-whiteness of it.

Pigtails:

POST-pigtails :

I haven’t done these in a while, though the johnny cakes could probably pass.

Yesterday for some reason, the traffic gods smiled down upon I-66 and there was nothing like the normal backup from centreville to manassas. Which means I arrived at my kids’ school about 15-20 minutes earlier than I usually do.

There? is the big playground, and then a smaller separated playground specifically for the toddlers. I usually get Ethan first and then Jocelyn because it’s easier to holler at Ethan a zillion times to “Come ON, we’re GOING!” in the toddler playground than to holler at Jocelyn. You holler, but she doesn’t listen, and by then, she’s on top of the huge jungle gym hanging from the monkey bars about to plummet to her Dhoom, and I have to climb up there, in heels and a skirt, in about 2 seconds flat to save my baby girl from certain extinction.

Anyway.

So yesterday, I arrive on the big playground and scan around for my son. He is perched on top of a little play coupe car while his friend, JT, scoots it around. My first instinct is to holler across the playground that that’s not safe, but obviously, they are fine, and obviously the teachers let them do that since there they were, doing it, and me telling them not to is just going to go over like water off a ducks back, and they’ll probably do it again tomorrow when I’m not around ANYWAY.

So I go over and do the family whistle thing and he spots me and hops down and hollers, “SUPER SPEED!” and thus, with his fist thrust out in front of him, he runs over to me, trying to knock me over in his effort to hug me and then swallow me whole.

“Hi honey!” *hug hug hug* “How are you doing?”

“Good! I was on the CAR! I can get up there all by myself!”

“Yes, I saw.” *don’t dwell don’t dwell don’t dwell on your son lying on the ground with his head cracked open* “Did you have a good day? Did you make good choices?”

“Yes!”

After a brief talk with the teachers on duty on how he has been doing, we head for the door to go inside and then out to Jocelyn’s playground. On the way there, a voice calls behind us, “Ethan!” And Ethan tosses over his shoulder, “I’m busy! I gotta go!” without stopping. The voice persists though, and I see a little boy from his class run up, so I stop so Ethan can talk to him. He is a smaller boy, I suspect a bit younger than Ethan, and I don’t think english is his first language, so I didn’t quite make out what he was saying until after he said it, and Ethan leaned forward and gives him a big hug. He was asking for a hug, it was so cute. Then a brief, “See you tomorrow!” on both sides, and we again turn and head for the door to the school.

We go inside and then the door peeps open and the little boy sticks his head inside to call out, “I love you Ethan!”

“I love you too, Roberto!” Ethan calls back.

It was just too cute.

Sunday morning found us in the comfy bed in the guest room having a bed party, with the kids climbing all over squirming and kicking and generally too wide awake and too crowded to really snuggle. Something had to be done to take their mind off their desire to kick each other (and us) and then point at each other and state, “He/She’s kicking me!”

So I said, “What should we have for breakfast?”

Jocelyn: “OATMEAL!”

Ethan: “SCRAMBLED EGGS!”

Me: Hmmm… how about some FLAPJACKS!

We’ve never called pancakes anything other than pancakes, so this name struck them as funny.

James: That would be good, some johnny-cakes!

This name struck them even more, Jocelyn especially.

Jocelyn: JOHNNY CAKES! I WANT JOHNNY CAKES!

Me: Mmmm, I could make johnny cakes. Anyone want some hoe-cakes?

James: Ho-cakes?

Me: Yeah, Hoe-cakes. You know, they used to make them on the back of a hoe, out in the fields for a snack.

James: OOOoohhhh. HOE cakes.

Jocelyn: No. No hoe cakes. JOHNNY CAKES I WANT JOHNNY CAKES!

So off I trekked downstairs and made something vaguely resembling Paula Dean’s Hoe-cakes, except that I tried not to use any flour.* So instead of the cup of flour she used, I used a cup of rice flour. And I didn’t have any of the self rising stuff, so I randomly added a teaspoon of BP and a 1/4 teaspoon of BS into the mix. Didn’t have any buttermilk, and also didn’t want to risk Jocelyn’s nose exploding into a newfound river of snottitude (which happens when she has certain dairy), I used soy milk.

Them there’s a lotta changes to the recipe, eh? I mixed them up thinking, ho boy this has a huge potential to go majorly wrong” and spooned them into hot butter to fry. However, they were delicious.

* Um… by the way. We have recently discovered that James is allergic to WHEAT. Yes. Wheat. Thus, the rice flour. Wheat is in FREAKING EVERYTHING. This is going to be hard. Trip to Wegman’s planned for this week.
Seriously, how bad can something be when it was fried in butter to cook?

The rest of the day, Jocelyn still remembered breakfast and would come over to inform us, “I had JOHNNY CAKES, Daddy, I had JOHNNY CAKES, mommy!”

I told james I should have taken a picture.

“Why?” he asked with a puzzled look.

SO I COULD POST IT ON MY BLOG OF COURSE!

With Ethan, James we decided not to know the sex of the baby, so that when he was born, it would be a surprise. This was fun and all, but when I discovered myself knocked up a second time, I let him know I couldn’t do it again. I needed to know. I NEED THE 411!

So we knew that the odds were pretty good that we would be having a little girl, which suited us both just fine. Even before the 20 week ultrasound when they tell you the sex, I really felt that the baby was a girl. At first we thought, we’ll find out but we won’t tell anyone the sex. But THAT wasn’t going to happen, so we decided we wouldn’t tell anyone the names we were thinking about. Which was good, because there were SO MANY. I don’t think we REALLY decided until pretty close to the birth, at least, *I* hadn’t, James wasn’t too fond of all the outlandish girl names I was dreaming up. We wanted one of our grandmothers’ names which is hard because we liked them all. Coupled with Jocelyn, we settled on my maternal grandmother’s name, Grace.

Early on, I had misgivings about the birth. It is not that Ethan’s birth was a fiasco or anything, but it really wasn’t what I wanted. He was large, and he was breech, so the doctor scheduled a c-section. We woke up one morning, went in, and had a baby. The operation was fine, the anesthesia was NOT. I didn’t really feel mopey or depressed about it afterward – I think that can happen to some mothers who have c-sections, because they have the idea in their head of how the birth will go and then when it doesn’t come out the way they want, they mourn for that lost experience. I totally knew what was going to happen BEFORE it happened, so you could say that I was able to mourn before the birth, so that afterward I was resigned and able to move on.

Still, it was a disappointment, I mean, I never had my water break, never even felt any contractions, it was so clinical. I was determined, DETERMINED, to have a VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Caesarian) with Jocelyn.

My doctors were fine with having that goal, but pretty much told me that the chances were slim. Ethan was born just above 9 lbs, and second babies are generally even bigger. They told me that if I really wanted a VBAC, I could not gain any weight. So throughout the pregnancy, I was very careful and only gained a total of about 5 pounds (I was pretty overweight, so it’s not that dramatic, really).

So much anticipation as the due date drew closer. My mom arrived, as she was going to be the Ethan care-giver when the Big Day arrived. She came a week before the due date and was planning on staying until a week after. Of course, due date came and went with no sign of Jocelyn making an appearance. I began to really despair. Plus, I had to have the baby before my mom left!

I remember going in for my appointment the day after my due date, and not being at all dilated or effaced and the doctor telling me that it was time to schedule a c-section. I started to cry (hey I was pregnant, I was allowed!) and I think that softened him up a bit, and he stopped talking about the c-section. However, when I got HOME from the appointment, there was a message from the nurse telling me they had scheduled me for a c-section in a few days, and if I hadn’t gone into labor by then, then I would come in for the c-section.

I was really devastated, but I must say, that kicked my ass into high gear. I walked. I walked. I walked. I walked. I think I may have even JOGGED. I wanted to go into labor SO BADLY, that I went to the drug store and purchased.. the dreaded castor oil.

Let me tell you, that stuff is VILE. It was pretty difficult to just get that stuff down (and I mixed it up in some juice) but that is how determined I was.

In case you don’t know, the way castor oil works, is it sends an alarm to the entire digestive tract, “EVACUATE! EVACUATE! EVACUATE! CODE RED! EVACUATE!” — that’s the gist of the message. So, while your intestines and bowels are busy evacuating everything, they’re contracting and spasming a lot. So this is where your uterus notices all the hubbub and decides, “Hey, I can do better than THAT!” and begins to contract.

I took it in the evening, and only got a few hours of sleep, as most of the time was spent lugging my huge ass and stomach out of bed and going to spend some quality time on the toilet. And it was on the toilet at about 4am, March 9th, 2004 that my water broke.

At first I was a little unsure whether I was diagnosing myself correctly, after all, there had been a lot of evacuation that night, so who knows what had decided to evacuate, could I be peeing and not even realize it? But as I stood up and walked around, felt the water gush out of my Princess, I knew that this Was It.

I was excited, but still, I knew we had a ways to go. Mostly, I was just SO excited to have HAD MY WATER BREAK and be going into labor with the help of castor oil ON MY OWN and hopefully have NO C-SECTION.

I went in and woke up James, and my only regret is that I didn’t hop in the shower before we left for the hospital. Remember.. no sleep.. night spent on the toilet.. I was NOT feeling exactly daisy fresh, but off to the hospital we went, letting my mother know of course what was going on.

I remember being excited and pleased as a couple of contractions hit in the car on the way to the hospital, but I knew they were nothing too major. Still, I had to concentrate on them because they could sure pack a whollop.

We got to the hospital, hoo-hawed around in triage while they made sure my water had actually broken (“Here let me just stand up for you. Got any rain boots?”) and then was admitted. We spent a little while waiting for my doctor who was finishing up a c-section (this one was a different one that the one who had examined me earlier in the week).

I was given an IV practically before I was even inside the hospital itself and quickly got a baby/ contraction monitor in the belt-thing-around-my-stomach. The contractions were there, but not very significant and were starting to peter out. So my doctor wanted to get me outfitted with an epidural, baby monitor (the kind that goes up my hoo-ha and attaches to the baby’s head) and drip some petocin in me to keep the contractions moving along.

Now, I’ve seen plenty of “Birth Story” on TLC, and I know that petocin can really bang out some contractions, and I was pretty excited about just being there, “Hi, this is me, LOOK, I’M IN REAL LIVE LABOR and OH is that a CONTRACTION I feel? I THINK I MAY BE IN HEAVEN!” – that was me.

Plus… don’t tell anyone, but I was fucking scared of getting the epidural. Don’t get me wrong, I had no illusions of going au naturel or anything, but the last time was so horrific, I really was in no hurry. Once again. Just happy to be here. Please hold your applause until the end.

So I begged and pleaded with my doctor to hold off on all that and let me walk around and try to keep the contractions going, and she agreed to let us do that for an hour. James and I walked around the floor as I felt the contractions start to fade into hardly nothing. 45 minutes later, we were back in my room and had the nurse tell the doctor that we were ready. BRING ON THE DRUGS!

So next came my biggest fear. Epidural-Man. I laughed and joked with him as I always do when I’m so totally flippin nervous and scared, and it was soooo not a big deal. I mean, it was awful, YOU try getting a needle that big, but the local anesthetic he gave me before the big huge needle apparently worked MUCH better than when I got the epidural with Ethan, because I have hazy memories of promising him my newly born child, as soon as I got her vacated – that is how great a job he did.

So I got the epidural which promptly made me lose all feeling in my legs, which made getting comfortable pretty impossible (you try rolling over with dead legs). Things started off pretty good, the petocin was doing it’s trick with the contractions, and I was progressing along fairly well. The morning I remember watching a lot of VH1 with James and wishing I had showered. I was fine with James going off to find food, and pestered the nurses to bring me more popsicles, which was the only thing they’d let me eat: “KEEP EM COMING!” was my motto.

The Epidural-Man was my good friend that I would praise and try to entertain whenever he came to give me more of whatever they had dripping into my epidural. It’s funny to think of how I seemed to want him to like me, and I didn’t want to put him out, whereas later, I believe I may have expressed threats to strangle him with my IV tube if he didn’t give me MORE DRUGS NOW.

So, yes, when afternoon came along, I grew more and more conscious of the contractions. I can’t really offer a lot of specifics, because in that blessed way Mother Nature has of making sure we will do it all AGAIN someday, it’s all kind of hazy. I remember how I tried to work through the contractions in the beginning, which was The Wrong Way. James held my hand, and I told him to tell me to relax, which he did, and I tensed up every muscle in my body as I tried to breathe like they do in the movies, (gasping hee-hee-hee). It took so much energy and yet I could not help the impulse to just…. tense up. I realized that if I kept this on, I WOULD NOT be able to do this, I would collapse in a tired puddle and die, and that’d be it, no Amy, no baby, nothing.

I remember begging the doctor for drugs, and she would consult her chart and nod and agree and then I’d have to wait an agonizing billion hours 10 minutes for the Epidural-Man to come and put more Elixir of Life into my epidural. It would seem to work for a while, if I held very still, and didn’t think about it too much, but it never lasted very long, and I would be back to holding James hand and tensing every muscle.

I remember James getting that funny look on his face.. not like, he didn’t WANT to stand there and say things over and over to me, but I could tell he felt silly, and that he wasn’t sure if he was helping very much. I realized that I really needed help, really needed to change the way I was handling the contractions. I realized this tightening every muscle thing had to go, what I really had to do was figure out how to relax relax relax, and so that is what I told him to do. I asked him to just keep talking, never stop, telling me to relax, and even pinpoint specific areas of my body, like my shoulders, my neck (remember, I couldn’t feel anything downstairs, so those were already relaxed) and he got over feeling silly pretty quickly and I would look into his big brown eyes and listen to every word and try to keep all my muscles relaxed.

It was like, giving in to a fight. As a contraction would hit, my instincts were to fight it, and the only way I could do that was to tense up. My uterus was in control, and I didn’t want it to be in control *I* wanted to be in control dammit, and in a way, when I finally figured out the right way to handle the contractions, it was like giving up, giving control over, letting go of that control. It was hard. I’m a very controlling person, and I wanted to fight that pain so badly, and I would have, if it hadn’t been for James staying with me every minute of it, telling me to relax, let go, breath, you’re doing wonderful, relax, loosen your shoulders, relax your neck, i love you honey, relax, breath deeply, relax your arms…. over and over, throughout every contraction.

I remember our friends Kurt and Ann came over during this period in the afternoon. The contractions had been going on for a while at this point, and when they first came in, I remember chatting with them for a minute, but as soon as a contraction came, it was as if they disappeared, and the world was only filled with James and me and the pain and the fight and the need to control. Then it would be over and everything would snap back into focus and I could ask Ann how work was going, etc. Eventually though, I forgot about them and just tried to rest in between each contraction.

So. Contractions. Tough tough things, eh? I didn’t really think about the epidural. I guess I just figured that the contractions were getting so much stronger.

Evening came, and I could feel the baby descending. It was a really weird feeling, and it gave me a strong sense of urgency. It hurt, and it felt so strange, and I didn’t know what to do, and I remember calling out, “SHE’S COMING, SHE’S COMING!” only to be checked, and told placidly,* “Yes, it looks like she is descending now, I think you might be ready to push in another hour or so.”

ANOTHER HOUR OR SO? I DON’T THINK SO! Not with this pain! Not with this basketball trying to squeeze downward! I begged her for more drugs, but she said no, that the last dose I had should be fine for now.

(My classic TV/Movie moment of the wife yelling obscenities at the husband is coming up. Just so you know.)

Well, I was NOT FINE, and I could NOT HANDLE this feeling, this pain, it was too much, there was no urge to fight THIS pain, all I could do was lay back and try not to move, lest the basketball do.. something.. anything.. please don’t do anything, basketball, just DON’T DO ANYTHING because it HURTS SO BAD.. This is when I begged James to call the doctor.

“Call her! I need drugs! I can’t take this! I can’t!”

He was sweet, and in his simple minded imbecile husband way, knew through the simple logic that the doctor was not likely to agree to drugs now, when she had refused then just 2 minutes ago, and didn’t want to “bother” her. He tried to tell me no, that the doctor had already said no.

“JAMES! I DON’T CARE! IT IS NOT GOING TO HURT ANYONE TO CALL HER! CALL HER! I NEED DRUGS! SO SHE MIGHT SAY NO AGAIN, I DON’T CARE JUST FUCKING CALL HER!”

James called her. (smart man!) She came and looked at me and pretty much immediately gave the OK for more drugs. It’s funny, because she was right, I HAD gotten a dose not long before, and I should have been good for a while longer. But that didn’t occur to me then. I just wanted the damn drugs.

Very shortly after the Epidural-Man came and gave me more drugs (no effusive efforts to be funny and charming this time. I don’t think I saw him, just the blessed syringe of The Nectar Of The Gods in his hands) chaos broke loose.

I was finally feeling comfortable, after a long time of feeling every contraction, and I had gotten in a position where I was comfortable, when a slew of people came in, and demanded that I turn over onto my side. I tried to tell them that I had JUST gotten comfortable, when they just started pulling and moving me, turning me over on my side and I realized that gee, there were a lot of people in the room. The doctor came in after a few seconds and informed us that the baby’s heart rate had dropped, and they wanted me on my left side to see if that helped her. They watched for a few seconds, and when it didn’t, they put an anti-contraction medicine in the IV and began frantically prepping me for surgery. Relief flooded over James and I when after about 20 seconds (when the anti-contraction meds kicked in) the heartbeat returned to normal.

Still, as she descended, something was cutting off her blood supply, and so into the ER I went.

What did I feel at this poing? Totally fine. My baby’s heartbeat dropped. I wanted to get her out of there, VBAC be damned. Plus, I had what I wanted. My water broke. I spent the entire day in the hospital, breathing through contractions for pete’s sake. It wasn’t the perfect birth scenario, but I no longer felt “cheated” out of those birth experiences, and what mattered was the health of our baby girl.

SO!!! There we are (ok me, but James was right next to me) on the operating table, and there was this light right above my stomach. The curtain is up of course, and I can’t see what’s going on, but I can totally see murky reflections in the cover of the operating room overhead light. I’m kind of jazzed about this, because when I went through this with Ethan, they offered to let me watch in a mirror, but I was too caught up in the awful feelings of the epidural to take them up on it. So I didn’t want a mirror, but I was totally watching what they were doing in that reflective light. I saw them reach down with the scalpel, and so was a little shocked when I FELT THEM CUT INTO MY STOMACH.

“OW OW OW OW PAIN OW PAIN OW PAIN!”- these were the only words my brain could force my mouth to sputter out, and I applaud the brain on such concise coherence!

The Epidural-Man was no dummy, and he saw that I was watching in the lamp, and quickly turned it so that I couldn’t see in it. I think they all assumed I was just watching them and freaking out, but no. I was not. I FELT THEM CUTTING.

“OW OW PAIN OW OW OW PAIN!” – again, yay! go brain!

Every so slowly and calmly, the doctor asked, “Now, do you feel pressure or tugging, or actual pain-” just as she did something with her scalpel.

And I cut her off as I hollered, “PAIN! PAIN!” They believed me this time, because I couldn’t see what they were doing, but hollered just as they started to carve me up again. So, after they finally got it, that my epidural was NOT working (OH MY GOD! THIS EXPLAINS SO MUCH! I WASN’T JUST HAVING SUPER STRONG CONTRACTIONS, I WAS TOTALLY FEELING EVERYTHING WHILE ALL THE DRUG HAPPY JUICE EVIDENTLY WAS FOCUSING ON NUMBING MY TOES INSTEAD OF MY UTERUS!) to their credit, they did spring into action.

The Epidural-Man informed me that there was no time to check/adjust/reinsert my epidural, that instead, I would have to be put out with a general anesthetic. This means that I get to go to sleep during the entire operation. Nothing sounded better to me! With Ethan, I was pretty bored during the whole post-baby-removal, the 40 minutes where they have to carefully stitch everything that they sliced through on the way to get baby. So having a little nap was fine with me, plus, scary epidural needle? Not my idea of fun. 2 babies = 2 epidural needles, NOT THREE.

So out I went, and when I woke up, I was covered up in a blanket for the inevitable weird post-anesthetic shivering, but sitting in a rocking chair right next to me was James with our new daughter, Jocelyn Grace.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

10 lbs, 23 1/2 inches. She came out fine, despite the fact that the cord was looped around her neck TWICE. She was a beautiful pink baby with newborn gray eyes and loads of dark brown hair.

A while back, I posted one of my (yes, there are many, people) crappy mom days. You remember, the one with the spanking?

Amalah posted about one of her bad days. I’m all in agreement with writing it out and letting other parents know that everything is not just supposed to be all rainbows and roses all the time. This stuff is HARD, and it can definitely wear you down.

I posted a comment with a link to my crappy day post, so if you are here for the first time, hi 🙂

-amy