“So anyway, I had a baby last week.” Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions
On March 31st, I did some chores, went to a kid’s birthday party at Chabot Space and Science Center, and picked my mother-in-law up at the airport. My mucus plug had fallen out the day before, and I was feeling pretty good after a few weeks of feeling increasingly pre-menstrual. I took these things as good signs. Also good signs were contractions that were a better organized than what I usually had, plus some fluid leakage. We went through the day with me writing down my contractions in a little notebook. After we got back from the airport and I gave Seamus a bath (the poor kiddo got carsick from cake and the winding road from the museum to OAK), I called Kaiser. The Labor and Delivery nurse said hey, come on down and we’ll check you out. We had dinner and packed Seamus up to stay the night at Grandma’s hotel, then packed ourselves up just in case they admitted me. We left at ten and got to the L&D desk in San Francisco at eleven.
They got me into a room and started checking my fluid to make sure it was amniotic and not an uptick in leukorrhea or anything boring like that. I knew I was a fingertip dilated as of my prenatal on Wednesday, but alas, no further progress had been made, and my contractions were petering out from seven minutes apart to ten, plus they were getting weaker. But my water had apparently broken - it was most likely a small break, high up. Unfortunately, it had likely broken nineteen hours before, which was putting me awfully close to that twenty-four hour limit that OBs seem to like for delivering after the sac breaks. So we decided to start a low dose of pitocin to ramp up my contractions (“right now you’re too comfortable, we want them to make you uncomfortable”) and get T/M moving. They started the drip around 1:00 AM, and I napped till 4:30 when my water REALLY broke. I labored walking and on a yoga ball for about an hour while our wonderful L&D nurse L, helped Patrick brace me and encourage me. T/M had been head-butting my pubic bone for at least a month, and the nerves around it lit up with every contraction. The muscle pain is a distant memory now, but the memory of pain around my pubic bone lingers. I asked for a light epidural to help blunt that, Patrick called our friend Lo who had offered to be our doula, and the anesthesiologist came in. My epidural went in at 5:30 AM, Lo arrived at 5:40 AM. And by 6:30 I had gon from 3cm dilated, no effacement, -3 station to 10cm, fully effaced, +1 station and ready to push. I started pushing around seven (my legs had fallen asleep, d’oh), and by 7:12 AM we had a little boy on my chest, getting dried off.
Meet Tristan:
Tristan at a few hours old. Photo by Lorraine Mulvihill.He was 20 inches long and 7lbs, 14oz. Smaller than Seamus, which means I had to do some emergency shopping for 0-3 sizes, of which I had three outfits. I now have six, and he’s outgrowing them fast. He weighed 9lbs, 2oz at his last weigh-in, and measure 21.25 inches, which makes me think they didn’t get a good measurement after his birth, because who grows over an inch in two weeks? He had a tied tongue that we decided to clip, and now he’s nursing like a champ. I left the hospital 12 hours after delivery to sleep in my own bed, and am itching to get cleared to exercise.
Seamus is very sweet and gentle with Tristan, mixed with a good chunk of acting out toward Patrick and I, which is to be expected, but does make for rough nights. It’ll get better. We’re trying to give him a lot of good experiences right now in the form of adventures and playdates and classes. He graduates from preschool next month, so the summer will be all about being in the world with Mama and Tristan, with some adventures on his own (science camp! whoo!) before he starts Kindergarten. But for the most part we’re doing pretty well. Tired, but well.
Friday, May 25, 2012 at 12:18PM 
