they run off ahead
independent from me now
both are growing up
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Posts tagged as:
babies
French women don’t like me. Nor do French- Canadians. Seriously, I’m not making it up. We went to the park yesterday. It was much too beautiful a day to be wasted indoors. The girls love to swing more than anything else, so that’s where an entire hour of our time was spent. Occupying the swing between The Bella and Goobie was a small girl being pushed by her mother, a blonde about my height and fifty pounds lighter [READ: skinny bitch] who spoke to her in French. I listened intently because I have an obsession with foreign languages as spoken by the natives. It was beautiful, except for those words that called for a decent amount of spit to be gathered in the back of the throat- when she spoke those the wind seemed to be determined to make sure her saliva ended up in my eyes.
They left to run around the rest of the play- ground and eventually she returned carrying her daughter on her hip and followed by another blonde skinny bitch woman and another small child. As they began to push their daughters beside where I still pushed Goobie they started to have a very animated conversation in French. I decided to push Goobie from the front to avoid the impending double spit attack.
Now I don’t know what they were saying but I know it was about me. I just know it. I mean I swear I could see them blowing their cheeks out and stomping around to imitate my substantial girth and point and giggling at me out of the corner of my eye. No, I’m not being paranoid – they did! I just can’t prove it is all…
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I awoke @ 7am with my water broken, I believed. J. wasn’t buying it. There was no pain: no con- tractions that I felt: nothing. My due date wasn’t for a week, and the day before @ the OB had determined that I was 3 centimeters and 50% effaced. No way was he buying it. When I started moaning and grimacing like the women on TV, then he’d take me somewhere.
I sent him to Krispy Kreme to get some donuts and hot chocolate. I took a shower and I leaked. I ate 4 donuts and leaked. I drank and leaked. “Maybe it’s just pee” he offered. “Dude, I am not incontinent!” I shot back indignantly, but went to the bathroom just in case. I kept leaking. He wanted to have sex. No! My water was broken!! I finally convinced him of that and we went to the hospital a little before 9am.
They checked the fluid and it was amniotic. I knew what the hell I was talking about. I gave J. a look that plainly said with all the malice I could give him in a glare: “I am not incontinent.” They admitted me. He went to get my hospital bag. They put my I.V. in. I bled over a pint, all over the nurse and the floor. What can I say? I’ve got awesome veins…
I laid there. For hours. They wouldn’t let me eat. Just in case. Just in case of what? I was pissed. And hungry. My hair was a mess. J. went to Taco Bell for a Grilled Stuft Burrito. They had just come out and we were addicted. I made him eat it in the car so I didn’t have to endure the sight and smell.
At 4pm they started me on Pitocin. Dr. B, my OB/GYN wouldn’t let them start me sooner because he was golfing. No time for babies being born! Gotta get to that 12th hole! They maxed me out by midnight. I was stuck @ 6 centimeters. Hadn’t budged since 2pm.
I was having contractions. Strong contractions according to the monitor. But I felt nothing. No pain, no discomfort. The attendant looked at the hills on the chart and at my nonchalant expression. “You’re not feeling any of this?” she asked me @ one point. “No.” I was starving. I asked for food. I was offered ice. I don’t want no stinkin’ ice. J. snuck me a bag of Cheese Nips. Not enough.
I was bored. And so hungry. I asked for an epidural. Anything to get me off of my back. Horrible decision that was. It was the worst pain I’d ever felt. Daggers in my spine, stopping and plunging a little deeper at every vertebrae. I cried. I held on to J. and buried my face into his shirt. They told me I wasn’t bending forward enough. How the hell was I supposed to curl up like a cat with a stomach the size of a beach ball? Huh?
The epidural caused pains in my side. Horrible, shooting pains. The anesthesiologist came back and put another drug directly into my IV. I was comatose in minutes, around 3am. I was awoken @ 6am when the nurse needed to check my cervix. 9 centimeters. I couldn’t feel my legs. Except for a bit of tingling.
At 7am I began to push. Dr. B. showed up. He told J. how to count and left. I pushed. Around 8am J. saw hair. He also made heinous faces that made me believe I’d never get laid again. But he was doing good. An awesome coach.
By 9am, the baby still hadn’t come to crowning. She was obviously stuck. I told them that her shoulders were big. They said it was her head coming out. “No, I’m talking about what’s still in there!” They ignored me. Pay no attention to the crazy laboring lady people! The nurse whispered to J. around this time, as I found out later, that the baby was not coming out and he needed to turn me to another position.
The had epidural run out. I was feeling everything completely natural. I rolled. It hurt. I cried. At 9:30am Dr. B. came back, in scrubs. He saw my epidural was gone and had it refilled. He stuck a vaccum extractor on the baby’s head. It popped off. 4 times. They held my legs back. I pushed. The baby wasn’t moving.
They pushed J. away. He stood against the wall, in tears. I reached for him, but he was too far. I stopped pushing. I gave up. They tell you that you can’t resist the urge to push. I did. He was my strength and he wasn’t there…
We had a severe case of shoulder dystocia. They called in another nurse who applied fundal pressure. She climbed on the bed, took her fists and pushed as hard as she could just under my navel to help the baby’s shoulder’s slide past the pelvic bone. Bella was born @ 9:47am.
J. laughed through his sobs and said she was huge, like a Christmas ham. The nurse called her a sumo wrestler. I couldn’t see her. They took her to the warming table. She was purple and had black hair, but that’s all I could see. Before they laid her down, I saw that her entire body was tensed as she started to cry except for her left arm. It hung limp and lifeless.
10 lbs. 14oz. 21 1/2 inches long.
An original apgar of 5 and a second one of 8.
Not breathing very well.
My mom came in. She’d been yelling and demanding entrance in the hallway. They printed the baby’s footprints on J.’s shirt and wrapped her in a blanket. They gave her to him. He brought her to me. I held her and saw nothing but cheeks. Huge cheeks. She was adorable.
They had to take her to NICU and place her under the oxygen hood because her lungs weren’t working properly. Probably the stress of labor. J. went with her. My mom stayed with me.
When I finally was able to hold her again, she wasn’t swaddled. She had a shirt on, but I saw that only her right arm had been sleeved. Something was still wrong with that arm.
No one knew what. Supposedly. They gave her X-rays, exams and tests. No one knew. Supposedly.
A week went by before I myself on the internet found out what was wrong. A Brachial Plexus palsy, better known as Erb’s Palsy. A birth injury caused by excessive force and traction during delivery on a baby’s neck, shoulder and spine. A tearing of nerves.
She was beautiful. Gorgeous. Chubby and happy. But imperfect. It was heart- breaking. Gut- wrenching to deal with. J. stayed hopeful the arm would move any day like we had been told. But I despaired.
She was diagnosed @ 2 weeks. She began physical therapy @ 2 months. It wasn’t until she was 3 months that she showed any movement. But it continued. And the arm became better and better. Today, as a four year old, it’s rare that anyone notices The Bella’s arm. It functions the same as the other, it’s just not as strong. And the range of motion isn’t so good. She works on that continuously, by means of weekly occupational and physical therapy.
She’s an awesome kid. With a bright future. She’s already determined and strong willed and I don’t think her ‘disability’ will stop her or slow her down in the least bit. No gymnastics. Therapy for the rest of her life. A possible surgery in the future. But she’ll be fine. I’ll make sure of it.
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We went to the Children’s Museum this morning.
$30 for me, The Bella and Goobie. We’d never been and I thought to myself while signing the credit card receipt: “Ooohhh, this had better be worth it.” It was.
They performed ‘Hey Jude‘ to the tune of ‘Mary had a Little Lamb‘ on the karaoke stage and worked with mixing primary colors in the science lab. They swabbed the deck in the pirate ship and raced trains. We created glittery collages and hid rubber dinosaurs in the rice box to freak out the next unsuspecting children. Hehe.
We made bird feeders. One of them consisted of cookies, raisins, cheerios and Cracklin’ Oat Bran on a string. Goobie ate more herself than she left for the birds. The other one was a Peanut Butter and bird seed covered pine cone. That one was mine, I ended up doing all of the work while they licked organic peanut butter off of the knife.
In our living room, instead of a wall facing the front yard there’s a set of picture windows from floor to ceiling. I placed their artwork there for the neighbors to ‘ooo’ and ‘ahh’ over because, you know, my toddlers are such awesome artists.
I hung the bird feeders in the front yard. We have yet to see one flippin’ wing flap out there. Ungrateful bastards. We worked hard on those things, and not for our own benefit, but for theirs. It’s really not that damn cold.
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I am a co-sleeper.
Goobie still shares our bed, at almost 27 months old. Well…in actuality, she owns that bed. There’ll be no getting her out of it anytime soon, and I’m fine with that.
Last night, she and I stayed awake until almost 11pm [call the mommy police!], her watching the same episode of Curious George over and over and me rereading The Amber Spyglass.
I let her play with the Barnes & Noble gift card I use as a bookmark as I read. We invented games with it like sticking it to our foreheads then shaking from side to side until it fell off and hiding it in the pages of the novel and crumpling all the pages while fighting to find it first.
She told me knock knock jokes in her 1/2 coherent 1/2 baby jabber speech.
“Knah Knah.”
“Who’s there?”
“Sibmeelanns!”[READ: She was attempting to say Silence of the Lambs, imitating a knock knock joke her father told her]
Sometimes she would put her head back and laugh as loud as she could before getting the joke out and I’d laugh hysterically.![l d51107fee43da63c94f6d240ff35ab8d [Read:***]](http://bp1.blogger.com/_5sc0RWX2YFQ/R30pOWXZ5YI/AAAAAAAAADo/nEqsna-3TBk/s1600-h/l_d51107fee43da63c94f6d240ff35ab8d.jpg "[Read:***]")
We ate Tostitos. She would take one bite of a chip and sneak it back in the bag when I wasn’t paying attention. I figured it out after biting into a particularly soggy one myself and noticing that when I glanced at her, she was never holding the same one twice. She would beg for some of my ‘dohdah’ [READ: soda] and knock her favorite Pablo off of the bed when I’d refuse, only to freak out about his wellbeing a few moments later, scramble down to the floor and kiss him all over his face while saying his name repeatedly in an apologetic tone.
Eventually, I closed the book, turned off the light and put on Benny & Joon. She took her place in the crook of my elbow, Pablo in the crook of her own and, was asleep in minutes.
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