Our little Oliver made his debut unexpectedly on May 21, seventeen whole days before his due date.
Originally I was due June 7 and my sister-in-law was due on June 9, also with a little boy. Then just a couple of months ago her due date was moved up a few weeks so we figured there was no way we'd have our baby before her c-section on May 22 (not that it was really a competition... but it kind of was).
The week leading up to his birth, Jason kept telling me he had a feeling this baby was going to come early. I kept teasing him that there was no way the Lord would let a baby be born into a house where tools were consistently left lying around the house (in particular there were a couple of saws and a hammer on the floor I'd been hounding him to pick up). Wednesday night, Jason finally picked up all the tools and three hours later my water broke. I woke Jason up, we threw some last-minute items in the hospital bag (that I had just finished packing the night before), and we headed to the hospital.
We were disappointed and shocked when the nurses checked the fluid I was leaking and told us it wasn't actually amniotic fluid. I was positive I hadn't just peed my pants and they couldn't tell me what else it would be. Pretty much the only reason we agreed to leave the hospital was because I already had an appointment scheduled with my doctor two hours later. So Jason and I headed home to get in a quick nap before the appointment, which turned out to be the last two hours of decent sleep we've had since. We were at the doctor's all of ten minutes before he did the same test, confirmed it was amniotic fluid, and sent us straight back to the hospital.
The nurse started me on Pitocin at 9:15 in the morning to get the contractions going more regularly. Around 12:30 I was dilated to a 4 and asked the nurse for an epidural, which was AWESOME. After they started that going I took a nap for an hour or two until I started feeling the contractions again. By then I was dilated to an 8. They put some stronger medicine in the epidural so I really couldn't feel anything but a little bit of pressure. I was shocked when the nurse said it was time to push. We pushed once or twice until she could see Ollie's head. Then she called the doctor and we had to wait FIFTEEN MINUTES for him to drive to the hospital from the clinic. It was one of the longest fifteen minutes of my life.
Once the doctor got there though, everything happened so fast. I pushed a couple more times and honestly didn't even know the baby had come out until I heard him crying and suddenly he was in my arms and I couldn't believe that this little miracle was mine, was ours, that we had created an actual human being out of nothing. It was the most incredible, surreal moment of my life.
The birth was the easiest part of the whole process, as it turns out. Two hours later, as the epidural wore off I found myself in the worst pain of my life because they'd given me medicine to keep me contracting but my body wasn't expelling the blood the way it should have. Once my nurse figured out what was wrong (did I mention I had two nurses who were absolute ANGELS during this whole thing?) she pushed twice on my abdomen to get the excess blood out and I felt instantly better, though that whole night and even the next day was still a little bit of a nightmare between trying to rest and learning how to breastfeed and getting to know my brand-new baby boy and getting my stomach kneaded and needing the nurse's help to get to the bathroom every two hours. Turns out, the visitor restrictions due to COVID turned out to be a blessing in disguise because I was NOT in the mood to entertain people.
By Saturday when they let us leave I was feeling much better, and we even had Jason's family over to meet Ollie for a few hours on Sunday. But then Tuesday morning I woke up shaking uncontrollably with a fever of 103 degrees. I begged Jason just to let me sleep it off (mostly because I was afraid going to the ER would mean another COVID test, which let me tell you, was worse than labor) but he wasn't on board with that and so at 11 that morning I found myself in yet another hospital gown hooked up to another IV. We were at the ER for 5 hours while my mom watched Ollie (she didn't complain too much) and they ran bunches of tests before discovering a massive blood clot that took the doctor at least thirty minutes to remove. Again, I had incredible nurses and doctors. Our experience at this hospital was a million times better than the experience we had last summer at the hospital with Jason. They loaded me up with antibiotics and sent me home again, and luckily we haven't had any issues since.
The last six weeks have been surreal, easier than I expected in some ways but harder in others. I underestimated how hard it could be to get up every two hours all night long, and how difficult it would be to get anything done during the day while taking care of a newborn because even though he sleeps literally all day, whenever he's sleeping all I want to do is rest. I didn't know how easy it would be to love this little boy, or how anxious I would get to hold him after he'd been out of my arms for only an hour. I didn't know the pure joy that motherhood would bring me, and I often wonder how Jason and I ever thought we were happy before our little Oliver joined our family.
Originally I was due June 7 and my sister-in-law was due on June 9, also with a little boy. Then just a couple of months ago her due date was moved up a few weeks so we figured there was no way we'd have our baby before her c-section on May 22 (not that it was really a competition... but it kind of was).
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| Dayna and I a little less than 2 weeks before we had our babies |
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The nurse started me on Pitocin at 9:15 in the morning to get the contractions going more regularly. Around 12:30 I was dilated to a 4 and asked the nurse for an epidural, which was AWESOME. After they started that going I took a nap for an hour or two until I started feeling the contractions again. By then I was dilated to an 8. They put some stronger medicine in the epidural so I really couldn't feel anything but a little bit of pressure. I was shocked when the nurse said it was time to push. We pushed once or twice until she could see Ollie's head. Then she called the doctor and we had to wait FIFTEEN MINUTES for him to drive to the hospital from the clinic. It was one of the longest fifteen minutes of my life.
Once the doctor got there though, everything happened so fast. I pushed a couple more times and honestly didn't even know the baby had come out until I heard him crying and suddenly he was in my arms and I couldn't believe that this little miracle was mine, was ours, that we had created an actual human being out of nothing. It was the most incredible, surreal moment of my life.
The birth was the easiest part of the whole process, as it turns out. Two hours later, as the epidural wore off I found myself in the worst pain of my life because they'd given me medicine to keep me contracting but my body wasn't expelling the blood the way it should have. Once my nurse figured out what was wrong (did I mention I had two nurses who were absolute ANGELS during this whole thing?) she pushed twice on my abdomen to get the excess blood out and I felt instantly better, though that whole night and even the next day was still a little bit of a nightmare between trying to rest and learning how to breastfeed and getting to know my brand-new baby boy and getting my stomach kneaded and needing the nurse's help to get to the bathroom every two hours. Turns out, the visitor restrictions due to COVID turned out to be a blessing in disguise because I was NOT in the mood to entertain people.
By Saturday when they let us leave I was feeling much better, and we even had Jason's family over to meet Ollie for a few hours on Sunday. But then Tuesday morning I woke up shaking uncontrollably with a fever of 103 degrees. I begged Jason just to let me sleep it off (mostly because I was afraid going to the ER would mean another COVID test, which let me tell you, was worse than labor) but he wasn't on board with that and so at 11 that morning I found myself in yet another hospital gown hooked up to another IV. We were at the ER for 5 hours while my mom watched Ollie (she didn't complain too much) and they ran bunches of tests before discovering a massive blood clot that took the doctor at least thirty minutes to remove. Again, I had incredible nurses and doctors. Our experience at this hospital was a million times better than the experience we had last summer at the hospital with Jason. They loaded me up with antibiotics and sent me home again, and luckily we haven't had any issues since.
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