A beautiful baby boy

We have a son! A healthy baby boy! We named him Benjamin Michael Wright! Ok . . . now I can tell the stories . . . I just had to say that! Wednesday April 8, 2009 Todd woke up early to go and play racquetball with my dad (5:30 am). He had a lot of fun and my dad won most of the time, but that is ok. We then went to the hospital, arriving at 8:00, they checked me in and started my I.V. and gave me a drug to start my contractions, not that I wasn’t having any, but it helped them along. Then we waited . . . .we had plenty to do though. There are always consent forms to sign and stuff like that. After a few hours, Todd and I were playing skip-bo, when suddenly I felt like I wet myself . . . it turns out, my water broke! Just as we were debating if it was that or peeing the bed, the nurse came in, so she checked, and yes my water had broke! That is when the pain began . . . and did it hurt! When they told me it could take up to an hour to get enough fluids in me to get the epidural, I told them to start, I didn’t want to wait. I am a whimp, but at least I know it and I enjoyed the epidural very much!

Honestly, I don’t know how doctors get paid so much cause my doctor stopped by and checked me before I started pushing, and then left the room. The nurses practically delivered him until the end of me pushing. I pushed for a little over an hour before Ben was born. What was hard is that I could see the head, but I just couldn’t get it out, and every time I had a contraction, his heart rate would decrease, which is BAD! So finally my doctor comes in and has me push, and then tells the nurse to call the NICU (or in other words the newborn intensive care unit) that scared me a lot. So she said that I would have the baby in about ten minutes, or I would have to go in for a c-section. My doctor got on that typical green gown and the gloves, and got ready to go. That scared me too. They were all talking about how they thought the cord might be around his neck or something like that and I was getting really worried, I started to cry, but Todd was my strength, and he stayed positive, at least for me, and I pushed some more. The doctor tried vacume extraction, which is where they put a little suction cup to the baby’s head and while you are pushing, they try to help by pulling the baby out too. Well . . . it kind of worked . . . The first time the doctor got it hooked up and started to pull and it slipped. Blood splattered everywhere! All over her face, like in the movies when someone cuts an artery, all over me, the mirror and lights on the ceiling, and across the room. I would hate to be a janitor there! She hooked it up again but it slipped again and by then the head was coming out a bit better. I ended up having an episiotomy, and Benjamin was born. The doctor hurried and cut the cord and they took my baby to the other side of the room. He wasn’t screaming like they do in the movies, and so again I got scared. But they cleaned him up and rubbed him down and he was fine. Todd and I were both crying out of joy and amazement that we had a baby, and in a lot of ways it didn’t feel real to me . . . but it did at the same time. Todd went and told the family while they weighed him and cleaned him up some more. He weighted 7 pounds 1 ounce 19 inches long. Perfectly healthy and sleepy

You know . . . I don’t really feel like a mom yet . . . like I know I am, and Ben is proof of that, but I don’t think it has hit me yet that I am a mom. In some ways it just feels like a new job, there was a little adjustment, but nothing to horrible. Taking care of Ben isn’t too hard, right now all he does is eat, sleep and poop, so if he is crying I know how to solve it. But I hear that after the first 2 weeks of life, they start crying for no reason, and that doesn’t go away for the first 2 months of life. I am a bit nervous for that. easier. Now we are just trying to get into a routine, but little things change every day. Ben is really good about sleeping 2-3 hours between feedings, especially at night, so I generally only have to get up a couple times in the night to feed him. It hasn’t been to bad, and I have occasionally found myself falling asleep while nursing Ben. He doesn’t mind cause he eats and I sleep, we both get what we want!