The Aftermath

Thanks to you, my blog friends, for keeping up with this saga and for your cheering on :). We're happy to have been spared by the tree gods too. All four of us.

Baby P is still sleeping in her car seat, so I'm currently viewing the Spring collection from Precocious Toddler. The highlights are fuzzy pink scarf, jeans so big the waist falls down and dancing skirt with built in shorts. Uneven pink rubberbanded pig tails will be all the rage.

This is as deep as it gets for a while. I'll probably be on blogging hiatus. But I'll still try to check all of your sites. I do, after all, need something to do with those 15 minutes of free time every day.

Happy President's Day!

When a tree falls in the back yard

The domino effect is set in motion.

It was about 8 a.m. on a Wednesday morning and the wind was blowing almost hurricane force. I was on the phone with my husband who was telling me I shouldn't be driving the toddler to nursery school in that weather. Knowing that I rarely listen to anyone's advice, he was asking me whether I had decided yet about taking her. I didn't know, but I did feel a little anxious at the prospect of forging through the wind with my nine months pregnant belly and a toddler at my side who just might be light enough to be carried off by the wind.

I was looking out our bedroom window and glancing at the weather report when I saw the trees lining the entry to our back yard swaying so fiercely they started to bend. Crack, crack, CRACK! I saw the biggest tree in the yard coming down fast in 3-D heading straight toward the bedroom window.

I jumped up from the bed and let out a little shriek as I saw the tree fall in both the Southern and Western bedroom windows, pulling down all the wires attached to the back of the building. The power went out. The phone went dead. My heart was racing as I nervously approached the windows to see where the tree had landed. It missed the building corner by about one foot. Its massive trunk spanned the entire path to the back yard, laying at a southwest diagonal.

We were staying home that day. I snapped at the toddler many times as her curiosity drew her to peer out the back windows at the monstrous tree corpse. The wind was still howling and I heard a lot of cracking and whistling. I thought how ironic it would be to have a tree kill me after surviving nine months of pregnancy. More importantly, I thought how I might have to kill someone else if my lovely girl met that fate.

So we waited for Con-Ed to come and restore our power. We waited all day and all night. The refrigerator was warming up and I cooked stew by candlelight to use up the food before it spoiled. We waited two more days for the power and the super tried to relight the boiler a few times to give us bursts of heat and hot water.

Finally on Friday late afternoon we were restored. That night we went through all the food and got rid of almost everything. Except for some frozen stuff which we had "preserved" by boxing up with ice packs and such and leaving on our fire escape. There were some cheese enchiladas which were still very cold, although not frozen. We ate them.

At 4 a.m. I woke up and had terrible indigestion. I knew I shouldn't have eaten those enchiladas. After a few Tums and some pacing, I tried to go back to sleep. My stomach just wouldn't calm down. After a couple of fitful hours, I gave in and sat up. Contractions were coming again, just like they had been on and off in the last couple of weeks. But they kept coming. I couldn't really be in labor, could I? I tried to sleep. I really wanted to sleep and I felt like total hell.

Little Beauty came in to wake us up at her usual 7 a.m. witching hour and my husband went with her to the living room. I didn't want to alarm anyone, but I felt sick. Finally around 9 he came in and I told him the story of my unhappy tummy. Oh and by the way, I was having contractions. He went out for Pepto Bismol and fetus was going crazy. I wanted to puke or something just to get those cursed enchiladas out of my system. I barely ate anything. We had no decent food.

Finally we realized that this was the real thing and that I was going to have to endure giving birth with tomaine poisoning or whatever it was. Jesus. As if it's not bad enough. By 12:30 I acquiesced and let my husband call in the reinforcements to watch our daughter. The pain was getting intense. 2 p.m. came and I was almost in panic mode, ready to kill the reinforcements if they didn't show up soon. They did and we rushed off to the hospital, contractions coming one on top of another.

We were admitted and I was hooked up by 3:30. After a very rough couple of hours, our new baby was born at 5:24 p.m., Saturday, January 21st. A beautiful girl, 8 lbs. 2 oz., 20 inches long. And we went with a "P" name--an amalgamation of two names that we liked. She's a lovely baby and big sister is adjusting a little more each day.

Now we are four.

The End is Nigh

I was reading one of the books I bought several months ago for entertainment and the second page was already deep into 16th century English dialogue. There's a little mention of one character's end being nigh. So I though it an apt way to describe my pregnancy--despite all the dramatic plot points, the end is nigh.

The baby did turn around (thank God or whoever else you want to credit) after we employed lots of different turning techniques. Who knows if the baby just decided to turn on his/her own or whether one of these strange things made the difference. The lingering smell of moxa has almost cleared from our master bathroom (um, it smells like an illegal substance, actually, so we'd like it clear before all the relatives come over to coo over new baby). We've thankfully put away all the hot/cold packs and various headphone-for-lower pelvis contraptions.

According to the latest doctor's visit, the baby has not only turned, but has now firmly wedged his/her head into my pelvic outlet so there shouldn't be any more crazy gymnastics. Although, I must say baby still enjoys a good moonwalk over my lungs and such. I'm at least 1 cm dilated (probably more by now given the increasing number of contractions), so the clock is truly set. I just don't have any clue when the alarm will ring. Very soon, I suspect.

The official due date is January 31st. If I make it that far I will be very surprised. But I am so relieved that the baby has come to realize the benefits of exiting the right way that I'm not even that worried about labor anymore. I know, I'm delusional. But, hell, the chances of it being any longer than last time are pretty slim, so I know I can get through it.

Anyone got any good baby names? I can't really reveal anything, but let's just say that we're stuck with a couple of nasty little letters to work with. The worst one is "P".

Flat cakes and belly bulge

A lot has transpired since I last wrote here. I'm 37 weeks pregnant now which means I have about 3 weeks to go, theoretically. The baby had finally turned head down, the way it should be for delivery, and then there was the last two weeks.

I've been feeling a lot of activity--kind of an excessive amount. It hasn't been too comfortable either since the body parts are getting larger and my belly is stretched taut, I mean almost snapping taut. I didn't believe that it could be more so than last time, but it's about three times worse and my skin will forever be showing it. Sigh.

Anyway, we were pleased that the baby had finally turned down to prepare for his/her grand entrance (or exit, however you look at it). Then we got into a little fender bender where we were rear-ended in stop-and-go traffic. It really wasn't a big deal, but we had to go to the hospital since I am 9 months pregnant and all. After being sent to a second hospital, sent all over the place to find the emergency room and finally directed to the maternity unit, we waited another couple of hours to be seen. They made us sit there for a few more hours while I was given an unnecessary series of treatments including two hours of fetal monitoring, an hour of IV fluids, an internal exam and an ultrasound. Everything was fine. The baby was head down, no bleeding, no signs of trauma.

We carried on with business as usual, confident that all we had left to do now was wait. We had a regularly scheduled appointment a couple of days later where we were offered more fetal monitoring. The doctor must have forgotten or the nurse did or something so after a good bit of waiting we decided it must not have been that important and left.

So we arrived at last week's doctors appointment in good spirits. Our main concern was presenting our birth plan and reviewing it. We did that and were feeling good about the impending birth. Then came the internal exam, my most favorite part of any checkup.

"Hmm," said the doctor.
My face dropped. This is never the reaction you want to hear with 4 weeks left to go.
"Is something wrong?"
She poked further inside.
"Ouch!" I said.
"I know," she replied, "I just need to feel here for a minute."
She removed her hand and peeled off her gloves.
"Well," she started, "I don't feel a head. I feel some smaller parts."
"I can tell you that I have noticed a lot of activity and larger bumps than last time I was pregnant."
"Yeah," she said airily. "I'm gonna have them do a sonogram today just to make sure. You can get dressed."

I sat there for a moment in my oversized paper towel, taking it all in. I looked at my husband, both of us with knitted eyebrows. "Crap," was all I could think. I knew something seemed weird.

Yes, there it was on the sonogram: baby butt down, head up. I knew what that meant. It meant they would want to perform a C-Section. I knew it meant worry and anxiousness, surgery and long recovery. I knew it meant that I would probably not get to hold my baby when it was born and that I might have some complication or trouble healing that would interfere with breastfeeding. I knew it meant I would be shaking in my boots wondering whether the anesthesia would trigger some strange relapse of my childhood epilepsy. I tried to hold them back, but as soon as that technician left, the tears were rolling down my cheeks and the snot was enlarging my nose.

We talked a little more with the doctor and found out that not only was the baby breech (again)
but that I have an anterior placenta, meaning that it's attached to the inside of my belly instead of the back wall of the amniotic sac (as it shows here).

That means having an external cephalic version (where they numb up your uterus, grab the baby's head from the outside and turn him/her into the pelvis) would be much riskier and ill advised.

So what have I been doing then? I have been: to the accupuncturist to burn mugwort next to my pinky toes, sitting with baroque music piping into my pubic area whilst holding a heat pack below and an ice pack under my breasts, laying on my back at a 45 degree incline to raise my hips in the air above my head, putting my head down low and raising my butt in the air while on my stomach side and trying to sit as staunchly upright as possible at all times.

I remain optimistic that the baby might turn before delivery. I'm doing what I can to encourage him/her to do so. In the meantime, I'm trying not to sleep all day long because my almost three-year-old needs her mommy still. I know it's not the end of the world if I end up with a c-section--lots of people do. But for me, it would be a very disappointing end to a long pregnancy. However it may transpire, I will soon get to meet the fiesty little one who's already made an indelible mark on our lives.