I'm Baaaaaaaack!

Well, at least, I hope I am.

It's been almost three months since I've blogged.  Terrible.  And also?  I miss it!  I miss having this record of our lives!
Aside from life being busy, my computer cord disintegrated (literally, the wires completely broke apart), AND my phone was close to not working.  I have a new phone now (the difference in camera quality is amazing), and a borrowed cord.  So I'm hoping to have fewer excuses about my blog negligence.

In that span of time, we had Easter to celebrate, somebody had her second birthday, and toddler school ended for the year!  These are all things I want record of in the ol' blog, so don't hate me too much when there are several random posts (that I will back-date) catching me up.

Cross your fingers for good naps, and cooperative technology!

I'm Still Here...

Long time no post, huh?  Life has been kind of crazy around here at casa de G.  See, a certain little miss just stopped. sleeping. 

Like, she went from 12 hours straight per night, to just a few hours a night.  She wakes up and it is darn near impossible to get her back to sleep.

Ok, sometimes we can get her back to sleep, but put her down?  No, not ever!  The second you put her in her crib, she's back awake and crying.  And I'd be happy to share my bed with her, but she's not down for that either.  We even tried to get the hang of side-lying nursing.  We got the hang of the nursing part, but my hopes of her drifting off and peacefully rolling onto her back so we could all sleep were quickly dashed.

I blame the teeth.  There's definitely two little teeth coming in there on the bottom and they're messing with our lives.  Ruby's sleep got great when she figured out that she liked to suck on her fingers until she was asleep.  Yeah.  She doesn't do that anymore.  Or pacis.  Anything that goes in her mouth goes to the sides, I think those darn teeth are just hurting her.  And it's changed the way she nurses.  I don't know what she's doing to my right nipple, but OW.

So forgive my absence, blog-land.  R also won't nap without me holding her in my arms, so between that and racing to my bed the second I actually get her to sleep in the evening, I have little time for blogging.  Or anything else for that matter.  Sheesh!  The words, "this too shall pass" are definitely my mantra lately!

Mind Dump

I kind of abandoned the ol' blog this week.  Oops!  We actually had stuff to do!  Anyway, this will just be a post of randomness.

I'm watching the closing ceremonies of the Olympics, and I'm really bummed out about it.  I really enjoyed these games (I always do, but I liked them being in London).  Four years seems like too long to wait for another.

Related to that, we celebrated Braidy's "birthday" this week.  Four years ago Keith brought her home from the shelter.  It was 8/8/08, and we watched the opening ceremony of the Beijing games with out brand-new-to-us doggie.

I LOVE summer.  I like the sun, and being tan, and enjoying the outdoors.  We rarely get summer in Washington, so when it happens, I usually embrace it.  This year though, we've been kind of stuck inside.  It has been record-breaking heat around here, which you can't really take an infant out in.  It's not like I can lay by a pool with her, right?  Oh well.

The other crappy thing about heat?  Ok, actually there's two.  First, Keith keeps the fan pointed at our pillows.  It completely dries my contacts out and gives me a headache every day because my eyes hurt so bad.  I ask him to move it so it's not in our faces, but it is a constant fight and I just don't understand why he'd rather have his head cool than his wife free of pain.  The other one is: nursing.  When it's hot as Hades out, you get really sweaty with that tiny little hotbox pressed up against you all throughout the day.

I mentioned in my week in iphone pictures post that we were pretty busy this week.  Tuesday is our usual baby class day, but for August we're going on Wednesdays.  That's because Tuesday mornings we are taking a Kindermusik class.  Thanks to our baby class, we got a coupon for a month free of classes!  In the summer they do month-long camps, so we get a free camp.  I wasn't sure what I'd think of it, but it turns out it's pretty fun.  Ruby was alert and attentive the whole time.  And then she napped when we got home.  It's a win.  Plus, there are two ladies (and their babies) in our class that we took hypnobirthing with.  A nice surprise.

Wednesday, not only were we going to class on a different day, but we've also moved up to the "big girl class".  That's right, the 3-6 month class.  Ruby was the youngest baby in there.  Those other babies are so big!  It was neat though, I can see what she has in store.  It was also freaky because all of the mommies were talking about sleep regression and teeth.  Eek.  Also, the Wednesday class is facilitated by a different person than my beloved Tuesday lady (who has been out of town anyway, in London of all places, lucky!).  Fortunately, I really liked this other facilitator.  She went off on a rant about how parent-centric our culture's parenting style is, and how ridiculous that is, which I was totally digging.  The only boo is that big girl class is at 9:30am, instead of the more reasonable 12:30 that the 0-3 class is at.

Thursday I conquered my fears of being trapped in one seat with my active baby for 2+ hours, and went to the movies.  The fancy theater here does mommy matinees on Thursday mornings.  They don't turn the lights all the way off, and turn the sound down.  Babies and strollers and noise and all that is welcome.  Plus, they give you a menu for the concession stand and a "waiter" takes your order and brings it to you!  Nice!  Even better, Ruby did great!  She nursed/slept/sleep-nursed most of the time.  And I got to see Ruby Sparks, so, yay.  A bunch of us ladies and babies from our baby class all went together.  It made me feel like a real human.  And afterward we went to lunch at this health food cafe where I had the most delicious quinoa salad.  Ruby was so tired from our whirlwind of a week, she fell asleep in the middle of our bed at 6 that night.

We were totally lazy on Friday, which meant I wanted to get out of the house on Saturday.  Ruby seems to do better when we get out too.  So we decided to go to this small-town festival nearby.  Yeah, it sucked, aside from the elephant ear we ate.  There was an insanely loud band, a ton of ill-behaved teenagers, and a woman who stole our elephant ear so we had to wait for them to make another.  Boo.

This is a really long post.

I use too many commas, but I can't stop.

In a moment of nostalgia, Keith bought Drumsticks at the store and I want one.

Finally, those pictures above are of Ruby rocking out the tummy time today on her Boppy.  Ruby really hates tummy time which makes me so stressed out because of the flat spot on her head.  I hold her a ton, but I really want her to like tummy time so we can do it a lot and she can learn to roll over!  Today was a step in the right direction.  Both Keith and I got some really good, long sessions out of her with no tears. Keep it up little girl!

Ok, that's enough, yes?

Back to the Hospital (and more lessons on mommy-instinct).

We were discharged from the hospital on Saturday afternoon.  That day, we came home, put Ruby into her first cloth diaper (yay!), loved on her, and fed her constantly.  My poor, poor nipples.  But that's another story.  =)

That first night was SO HARD.  They don't prepare you for this, but Ruby cried inconsolably the whole night long, unless she was eating.  We were at our wits end.  We ended up doing the very last thing I'd ever considered a possibility in our family: sleeping with her in our bed.  But, ahhhhh, peace!

I didn't mention this before, but while at the hospital, they did a routine bilirubin check on her.  It was borderline high, so they did a blood test.  She was still at the high end, but she passed the test.  On Sunday at home, I thought she kind of looked yellow.  Keith kind of thought so, but we weren't really sure.

All of her clothes were too big.  She was only 6lbs. when we were discharged.

Maybe we should have called the pediatrician.  But we didn't know!  And we didn't know what we didn't know.  Besides, we had an appointment the next day for our post-partum check up.  She seemed fine, so we figured that was the place to ask.

Totally unrelated, but a funny story, my aforementioned nipples were dying.  Girl likes to nurse, and my milk hadn't come in yet, so she was eating all. the. time.  I'd heard of these gel pads, called Soothies, so in desperation, I sent Keith out to get some.  He sent me a frantic text saying, "Target is all out!!!  They don't even have any in the back, what do I do?!?!"  It was pretty funny.  And don't worry, he found some, thank goodness!

Anyway, Monday my milk came in and life got a lot easier!  A full, well-fed baby is a happy baby.  I got Ruby dressed in a cute outfit, and off we went to the hospital for our post-partum check up at 3:30.

The nurse started by doing a scan to check her bilirubin.  The scanner kept getting an error.  She decided we'd weigh her and try again in a bit.  Ruby was put on the scale, and she was down to 5lbs.11oz.  The nurse wasn't too happy about that.  She started talking about supplementing and formula... two things I didn't want to hear.  Especially since things seemed to be going well now that my milk was in.  The nurse gave me two bottles of formula and some tubing for a possible supplemental nursing system, because I did not want to do bottles yet.  She also wanted to do a weighed feed, so I sat in the nursing chair and fed my girl.  

While Ruby was eating, the nurse stepped out to see if she could get a different bili scanner.  I was fighting tears due to a combination of post-partum hormones, and feeling like a breastfeeding failure.  The nurse came back in with another, more experienced nurse (from the get-go, I'd kind of felt like our nurse didn't know what she was doing).  They scanned Ruby once, while looking at how yellow she was.  The other nurse proclaimed that the error code the scanner was giving, was an error because her bilirubin was too high for the machine to read.  Crap.

At this point, they called our pediatrician.  Of course, since Ruby was only 3 days old, we hadn't even had our first appointment yet with the pedi.  So the nurses came to get Keith to give the pedis all our info.  Apparently, the plan was that Ruby would need to go upstairs to the lab to get blood drawn to see what her bili level was, and then we needed to go to the pediatrician so that they could decide how they wanted to treat her. =(  Of course, we'd been assigned the last appointment of the day at the post-partum center, so all of this was done in a big rush.  I was struggling to keep it together.

The good news was, Ruby gained two ounces in just that one feed.  So the nurse proclaimed that we did NOT need to supplement until further notice.  We never have had to, so take that, nurse.

We left, rushed upstairs to a horrifying blood draw (they didn't properly warm her foot, even though I told them it wasn't working, so they had to squeeze the hell out of her to get the blood out, and it was totally awful).  Then we rushed off to the Redmond office of the pedis, because that was the only one that had an appointment for us (5:50pm, the last one of the day).

We got there, met a really nice doctor, and she checked Ruby out.  She said looking at her, she was pretty jaundiced, but the lab hadn't called back with the results.  She told us she was pretty certain Ruby would need treatment.  It would either be bili blankets at home, or she'd have to be hospitalized.  My heart kind of stopped at that.  My new baby might have to be hospitalized already?

The doctor's office was closing for the day, so the doctor sent us off, and told us the on-call night doc would let us know what to do once the lab results were in.  We were still on the way home when we got the call.  Ruby was going back to the hospital.  Her bilirubin level was 21.  Too high for the at-home blankets.  The doctor told us to go home, pack some things, and they'd be waiting for us on the 4th floor at Evergreen.  I hung up and cried.

We did as the doctor told us, but had to make arrangements for Braidy too.  We didn't end up back at the hospital until 9:00pm, but sure enough, they were waiting for us.  

Ruby went right under the bili lights.  

She didn't like it, she wasn't being held!  She cried a lot.  The nurse suggested a pacifier, which I did not want to introduced until at least 3 weeks old when we were into our breastfeeding groove.  Keith was all for it, and the nurse told me to not look at it as a long term thing, but something to get through the next 24 hours.

I'd be lying if I didn't say I wasn't a little bit happy that she spit it out more often than not, but it did help her a little bit.  The other issue I ran into was feeding.  Ruby was only allowed to be out from under the bili lights for 30min every 2 hours.  If she got hungry in between, I wouldn't be able to take her out and nurse her.  The nurse set me up with a pump when I said no formula, and said if I got enough milk, we could go that route.  I didn't want bottles either, so the nurse taught us how to finger feed her with tubing and a syringe.  So it went, every 2 hours around the clock, I'd take her out and we'd weigh her, then feed her for 30min, weigh her again, put her back in, pump, soak the pump parts in my little dishwashing tub, finger-feed her (because she'd always take it, and then be full until next time), clean my pump parts, and then maybe rest until the next time.

The doctors we had there were really great.  After the first night, her levels had gone down, but not enough.  They were also really concerned with how much milk she was getting (because it flushes out the bilirubin), so we were doing weighed feeds around the clock.  Luckily, I had good milk, and she was gaining nicely.  But since her levels weren't as low as they wanted, we ended up having to stay two nights.  

We were finally discharged.  The past two days had been really hard for this first time mom.  Luckily, we'd had great nurses and doctors, and beds to sleep in in Ruby's room.  I never left her for a minute.  We were sent home with instructions to follow up with our pedi for more bili checks.  After about a week of every other day blood draws, Ruby was proclaimed in good health.  Phew.

On the way home from the hospital.  It kills me that she's already outgrown that sleeper she's wearing, and it's too big for her in this picture.

This was the second time in her first week that I wished I'd trusted my instincts.  I knew she looked yellow.  If we had called the pedi, maybe her levels wouldn't have gotten so high?  I guess we'll never know.  But I do know, from now on, when I have a feeling about something, I need to act on it so I'm not kicking myself later.

Ruby's First Day (and a lesson about trusting your Mommy-instinct)

After Ruby was born, it seemed like our family arrived almost immediately.  Like, they came in as Keith was still giving her a bath.  I found out later that he'd told our parents right away when she was born, so they all just came over to the hospital.  That was ok, but I wouldn't have minded a little more quiet bonding time.

The on-call pediatrician from our practice came to check her out, and said that everything looked and sounded great.  So we kicked back, held our baby girl, and ate pastries that my dad had brought from the French bakery.  Yum.

There was a shift change for the nurses.  In walked a woman that seemed so familiar to me.  Our previous nurse introduced her as "Jennie".  Then it hit me.  I said, "Are you Jennie Turner?"  She said she was.  I told her, "I used to babysit your children!" and told her what my maiden name was.  She remembered, and we laughed at the coincidence.  An exceptional coincidence, because that doctor I'd recognized the night before while we were walking the halls?  Yeah, that's her husband!  We told her about how we'd seen him too, and couldn't believe what a small world it was.  Jennie was a great nurse, and really good with breastfeeding/latching help.  She also brought be some Medela lanolin, which I was really thankful for, because it was much nicer/easier to put on than the Lansinoh I had.

A short while later, a woman with a big machine wheeled into our room.  She introduced herself, and said she was there to do the baby's echocardiogram.

What???

Obviously we were all kind of shocked, and told her that we knew nothing about this.  In turn, she was shocked.  She told us that usually the families were expecting her, and that the doctor had heard a heart-murmur, so she ordered the echo.

WHAT???

We explained that the pedi had told us everything sounded good, and was she sure she had the right baby?  She looked down at the chart, must've read the name in her head, because then she started spelling our complicated last name out loud.  Yep.  Right baby.  Our name is impossible to confuse with any other.  It felt so wrong and weird, but I mean, she had OUR chart.  It couldn't be a mistake then, could it?

She wheeled the machine and Ruby's bassinet over together and started the ultrasound of her heart.  Ruby had had SO many ultrasounds at Maternal Fetal Medicine, including a fetal echo, that I still just couldn't believe she needed this.  Ruby didn't really love the procedure, she kept scooting herself across the bassinet.  We thought it was pretty funny that she was so mobile.  My mom kept scooting her back.  The sonographer didn't seem like anything was out of the ordinary when doing the test, other than that we hadn't known about it.  The whole 30min she was there, we kept talking about how strange it all was.  Finally, she was done, and left.

Nurse Jennie came back in to check on us, and we mentioned what had just happened.  She was very suspicious also.  She wanted to find out more.  Pretty soon after that, though, her shift was over.  Guess who was our nurse now?  Australian Nurse Jenny!  She was back, and very excited to meet Ruby.  Nurse Natalie wasn't with her, but she actually came back to meet her too, and congratulate us.  Anyway, as with any shift change, Nurse Jennie filled in Nurse Jenny (ha!) on how things were going.  She also told her about the echo.

When Jenny had a moment, she came to talk to us about what had happened.  She was pretty mad.  That kind of thing shouldn't be sprung on brand-new parents.  She also vowed to find out what had happened.  My mom had gone out to get something (I actually have no idea what...), and when she came back in, she told us that she'd overheard Nurse Jenny having a heated conversation on the phone.  It turned out my mommy-instincts were right.  Ruby wasn't supposed to have the echo.  The pediatrician had ordered it for the WRONG BABY.

What the hell?  Seriously?  How does that even happen?  Also, we were hoping that the baby that needed the echo got it!  Nurse Jenny was heated, telling whomever she'd been talking to that we should not have to pay for that test (no kidding).  She told us she'd been working on it, and would keep us in the know.

Later in the afternoon, the phone rang in my room.  It was the pediatrician.  Instead of apologizing, she launched into this story about how the sonographer should have done something when we were suspicious, and that she "wasn't trying to make excuses" but it was really busy and there were a lot of babies, blah blah.  No apology still.

Then she goes on to tell me, that she'd been talking with the charge nurse, and the sonographer had actually seen something during the echo, and so she recommended I have the test sent on to Children's to be read by the radiologist.

What???

I asked her what the sonographer had seen.  She wouldn't tell me!  She said that the techs are not supposed to "read" the scans, and she'd only gotten the information second hand from the charge nurse, so she couldn't tell me.  I told her that I would need to know what was seen on that scan, before I would consent to having this (very expensive!) test completed.  She told me ok, that they'd hang onto it until tomorrow.  If the discharge pedi heard anything when she came to examine Ruby, they'd send it on.  Then she finally gave me an incredibly half-hearted, not really believable apology and hung up.

I filled everybody in on what she'd said, and Nurse Jenny was still mad on our behalf, and went to go talk to the charge nurse.  The nurse came and talked to us, and I think still wanted to send the scan (I'm having trouble remembering now).

The next day, the new on-call pediatrician (who was much nicer than the one before!) came to check Ruby out for discharge.  She said all was great.  I'd assumed that since all was well, they wouldn't even think of sending the scan on to Children's.  But they did anyway (I think they had the day before, but I'm not sure).  Everything turned out to be fine, and the hospital assured us, and has since assured us many times, that we will not be billed for the echo.

In the end, Ruby was fine.  The procedure didn't hurt her in any way.  But I look back on that experience, and really wish that I had trusted my mommy-instincts.  I immediately felt that something wasn't right when the sonographer came in.  In hindsight, I should have insisted we confirm with the pediatrician that the scan was necessary.  I guess the thing about parenting is, you're always going to question your choices.  I just wish I had trusted myself, and now I know I need to.

After all that mess was taken care of, it was all about wrapping up our hospital stay.  We were sent to a baby-care class that morning (which was mostly about breastfeeding, which I thought was cool).  Keith's friends Jesse & Heather came to visit us.  I put on real clothes for the first time in two days, and we packed up our enormous amount of stuff we had there.  Note to self: for the next baby, pack light!  We hardly used anything we'd brought.  Oh well.

Finally, it was time to go home.  They were actually letting us leave with a baby!!!  We got our girl all dressed, and the nurse helped us put her in her car seat.  Once they removed the baby lo-jack, we were good to go.  Leaving the hospital was emotional for me.  Actually, just typing it out is making me tear up seven weeks later.  But I knew what a momentous thing it was that our girl was born.  We were leaving the place where our first baby came into the world, and we'd never have that experience again.

But...  This is what we get to experience now. =)

Oops. Catch-up.

So... yeah.  This here ol' blog hasn't been updated since 28 weeks.  Um, if I were still pregnant, I'd be 43 weeks today.  Oops.  I love blogs though, and I'd love to be able to keep up, especially to record the life of our little girl.  So I'm going to try.  But that means I have a lot of catching up to do.

So, after our appointment at MFM, it became clear that our little Freebie had some growth troubles.  Dr. G had me on that nasty protein powder.  In March, our girl got an IUGR (intrauterine growth restriction) diagnosis and things got real.  He wanted more monitoring to make sure that she was still better in than out.  Yikes.  He said our goal was to "make it" to 37 weeks, which would mean that Freebs would be born in April, before my 30th birthday.  Holy crap!

In March we also had a slew of baby classes.  Breastfeeding, and an all-day baby care class.  That class was funny.  The most memorable thing for me was that we were given fake babies (dolls) and had to be responsible for them all day.  Which meant that when we went to eat lunch in the hospital cafeteria (the food was not bad!), we had to take our fake baby with us.  Ours sat on the table between us.  We got weird looks.

April came, and with it, my residency at Evergreen Hospital.  By that, I mean, I pretty much lived there, I was there so often.  We started out 5 week Hypnobirthing class that first week.  I was skeptical going into it, about the whole hypnosis thing, but left that first class feeling really encouraged!  I really enjoyed the whole series of the class, but I was nervous that I wouldn't be prepared, because I was likely to miss 2 out of the 5 classes with my potential IUGR induction looming.

Speaking of that, April started my bi-weekly NSTs (non-stress tests - monitoring of baby's heart rate, and my uterus to see if it was contracting).  Every other week I also had an ultrasound, either growth, or a BPP - Biophysical Profile, to check on the Freebs.  Spring Break was the 2nd week, and baby actually kind of failed an NST.  She went off of the monitor for longer than they like, so I was ordered to have 3 NSTs that week.  See what I mean about living at the hospital?  I was making good friends with my NST nurses.
That week, coming home from the hospital, I got onto 405 and got hit with a barrage of rocks, cracking my windshield.  Wtf.  I couldn't get the license plate of the truck, because I needed to get out of the way of the debris, but I saw that it belonged to a construction company.  After much sleuthing, I found out I could file a "rock claim" with the company, to see if they'd compensate me for a new windshield.  Not only did they, but I mentioned that I was pregnant & would like it taken care of quickly, and I had a new windshield the NEXT DAY!

The following week I spent 4 more days at the hospital.  My wonderful co-workers threw me a little shower, with many a wonderful, practical gift.  I also had my 36 week appointment with midwife Shana, where we went over my birth plan.  Oh yeah, I also had to have the lovely Group B Strep swab, so I consented to an internal exam.  One centimeter dilated, 70% effaced.  I asked Shana about the MW schedule, because I was still so paranoid that she or Michelle would not be there to deliver my baby and I'd be stuck with an OB.  Yikes.

I made it to 37 weeks!  Freebie had a HUGE growth spurt.  She grew 20oz in two weeks, which meant...  NO MORE INDUCTION!  Yay!!!  Dr. G said we could go on our own now, woohoo!  I still needed 2x weekly NSTs, but no more ultrasounds until 40 weeks if I made it that far.  Phew.  Keith and I kind of secretly hoped that she'd be born that following weekend though - so she & I would share a birthday (and, bonus!  Michelle was on call!).  Alas, I spent my 30th uneventfully, with swollen feet and pizza.  =)

That Monday, I noticed that I was missing that bowling ball between the legs feeling.  Also, baby girl was stretching and poking out body parts quite uncomfortably right under my ribs.  She'd been at 0 station at 36 weeks, but I felt kind of like she'd moved back UP if that were possible.  I also had the realization this week, that I didn't know her position.  She'd been head-down for a while, but was she anterior (ideal)?  Sunny side up?  That Tuesday at my NST I had to have an AFI (fluid check), so I asked the sonographer which way baby was facing.  Ugh.  She was facing out my left hip.
I went to see Shana right after, and the first thing she said was, "So...  Feel like you're going to have a baby any time soon?"  I told her no, not at all, and that I felt like baby had moved up.  She measured my fundal height, and I measured on track for the first time ever.  Shana said that that was probably because Freebie HAD moved up.  She also told me that the position was transverse, and showed me some exercises I could do to turn the baby (and avoid some painful back labor).  I left my appointment in such a funk.  I felt like this baby was never going to come out, and I'd be induced at 42 weeks.  Keith met me at the hospital for our last Hypnobirthing class, and I was almost in tears because I was so convinced that she was never going to come.
Turns out, I couldn't have been more wrong!  Freebie's birth story is coming up next!