So, I might have a stomach that hangs down to my knees, saggy, hard as a rock boobs that spew milk out at the mere cry of an infant, huge black bags under my eyes, but this all means nothing. I am going to be so ready for bikini season! I’ll tell you why…. I have decided that an entire week of holding your butt so tight that the muscles throb, you get muscle spasms, and all the wine in your wine refrigerator can’t loosen it, has to have a silver lining, right? Don’t you think after a few more days that I’ll at least be half way to a killer butt? Seriously, what exercise or work-out machine could possibly do as much as an entire week and then some of this little exercise born out of necessity could do this much? Darn it. I don’t have before and after pictures.

Warning: This was initially going to be a witty and brilliant post, but I have to admit - there was nothing witty nor brilliant about this birth or it’s recovery, heck, even the entire pregnancy. Hubby calls it the pregnancy from hell, and that’s darn accurate.    

I checked into the hospital at 8am, and he gave me a dose of Cervidil. I started contracting regularly (3 mins. apart) at 11:30am. They just got closer and closer together until 12:30 when the doctor came in and said I was still a 1.5 and he wasn’t convinced I was in genuine labor yet, so he gave me another dose. After that it was crazy - they were intense and 1 minute apart for um yeah, the rest of the labor. The doctor told me that her head was pressed against my tailbone and it was prolonging the process and was also very painful. Finally at 5 I had progressed to a 3 and they were sure it was real labor so I got my epidural and my water broke. At 5:30 the epi quit working, or so I thought, and I began to feel increasing pressure. At about 5:35 I started telling hubby the baby was falling out of me. I had this nurse the entire time that was just a pain the arse. She was very, very unsympathetic and she would not believe a thing I said. The entire time she was totally condescending towards me and acted like this was my first babe and I was exaggerating my pain. When I was huffing and puffing and saying the baby was going to fall out, she heard me out in the hall and said “You were a 3 a half an hour ago. You are fine, she is NOT falling out.” I said very loudly to hubby “You will have to catch her because she is going to be born now, I swear it.” The nurse again called from the hall “Well, I will check you if you insist, but you are not having the baby so calm down. I think your epidural just quit working.” So she waits 5 minutes out in the hall chatting to someone, comes in and checks me and gets this funny look on her face and screams to another nurse “Oh my gosh! Call the doctor, this baby is almost out!’. If I wouldn’t have felt like hell I would have laughed in her face. Anyway, the doctor arrived at 5:45. I pushed once and her head crowned, that’s how low she was. While I was pushing her heart rate dropped and didn’t start to come back up. The doctor looks down and says to the nurse “Turn that monitor off. Now! She has this cord around her neck good.” I looked up and the nurses were looking down and then looked up at eachother with this bad look on their faces and I thought for sure she was a goner. That was the scariest moment of my life I’m pretty sure. The doctor cut her cord before she was even born to release it. One more push and she was out - at 5:47, 2 minutes after the doctor arrived. She was really blue and didn’t cry right away, and I forgot to ask if she was even a girl, I just wanted her to be alive. After about a minute she finally started to cry and turn red and I was just so, so relieved.

Grace is beautiful, absolutely beautiful! She came out swollen, but I could tell she was totally looking like her Daddy. Once the swelling went down it was even more obvious. She looks a lot like Forest, but Forest is a spitting image of his Daddy-o so it makes sense.

She’s an incredible baby. She just fits in so perfectly amongst the chaos. The first day we were home she and I were in the bedroom together after I fed her and the boys both came in, along with hubby. We were all sitting there talking and it was kind of loud. She just looked up with the most amazed look on her face and you could just see her taking it all in. It was the happiest and most alert I’ve seen her. It was almost like she was thinking “Yep, I’m home. This is what I’ve been hearing for 9 months!”

She is an excellent nurser - my best thus far. She nurses about every 1-2 hours during the day since birth. At the hospital she was doing that during the night as well, but since we’ve been home she’s been giving me 3 hour stretches at night which is really nice! She seldom cries unless she is ready to eat. What a blessing!
I am having a much harder recovery than with either of the boys. It’s crazy, I thought I would feel so much better. The after-pains are killing me - the nurses all told me to expect that with third and subsequent children. And with her being on my tailbone that entire time, she bruised it bad and also gave me this incredibly huge hemorrhoid. I will spare you adn won’t go into details, but I’ve never had anything like it in my life. Going to the bathroom that first time took six hours and I literally almost passed out. It was truly like birthing another child! It didn’t help that I was on Zofran every 8 hrs. for the week following up to delivery, and was constipated before giving birth.  It was just horrible all the way around. Add to that that I hadn’t slept for probably about 2 weeks previous to giving birth because of the sickness and nerve issues that I was just so exhausted I was ready to fall over. I still have not slept more than 5 hours a night since she arrived.  So I’ve been avoiding sitting down as much as possible and saving the sitting down time for my babes. Instead of I’ve been hanging out in my bed with my kiddos, reading lots and lots of books to them and magazines to myself, trying to distract myself. I’ve almost run out of reading material. I’ve read more Guideposts and Redbooks than one ever should in their lifetime. I started reading about Tiger Woods and Chevy grills, so thank goodness I’m starting to recover because seriously…

All ready to go home: (And by the way, that carseat cover was worth every penny I spent on it - it’s soooo pretty!)

There’s something just a little bit unnerving about standing over the trash, cutting off all your beautiful fingernails because you know you’ll be in mega pain in a few hours and you don’t want to claw your husband to death.

If you don’t see me here for a while, I’m not out camping in some Sea Pines rentals, visting Marine Land, or watching soaps and eating Key Lime Pie (Karianne, shame on you for hooking me up with Schwans - they have to die for desserts!). I’m having myself a wee babe.

I had my 39 week appointment today. I am 1 1/2 cms. dilated, and he stretched my cervix. (Can we say youch?!) He said that we will try an induction on Sunday. He doesn’t want to use Pitocin - just try the Cervidil. Doesn’t want to force a babe out that’s not ready to come out, which is fine by me, because I don’t either. But I am hopeful, because that is all it took the boys to come out, never needed any Pit. The reason he had pity on me and accepted 1 1/2 is because I am moderately dehydrated (not enough for fluids, just encouraged me to keep sipping), losing weight, and having the sharp, shooting up the crotch nerve pain every time she moves. I can’t sleep with it, it’s that bad. Which btw, he explained it’s a nerve… sometimes during pregnancy the babe gets on this nerve and you have a pain or two here or there. But once in a blue moon, the babe will drop onto the nerve and pinch it between it’s head and your pubic bone. If it drops onto it when it’s dropping into place, it’s pretty much pinched until birth. Which basically explains why I feel pain every friggin time she moves. He said he knows it’s heck, and he wants to get me better…. soooo… I’m really hoping that the next time you hear from is either tomorrow and I’m taking a break and posting something random, or Monday evening when I’m home with my little Princess Peach .(What Forest has decided he is going to name her.)

My mom was here the other day, and in anticipation of her watching the boys while I am having the babe, I showed her how to use our television. These days, with so many pieces of equipment hooked up to them, and remotes being so complex, it’s sometimes impossible to figure how to turn someone else’s television on! I still don’t know how to turn my IL’s on! Anyway, she was giggling at the fact that I still have to use my mini-screwdriver to turn ours on. Seriously though, the thing works, so I’m not buying a new one! If I did have to buy a new one though, I’d buy a plasma flat screen complete with a plasma mount. I’m still waiting to hit the jackpot so I can do that though, as there are literally about 50 other things with a higher priority rating on our ‘to buy’ list.