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My baby boy is one year old today! Although I cried looking
through Jack’s baby pictures last night because they really do grow up so fast,
today I am looking forward to the future and celebrating because I am LOVING watching
Jack get bigger and seeing his spunky personality develop. I am enjoying each
new month with him more than the last.
Today I wanted to write down Jack’s birth story and share
pictures from this day exactly one year ago in Decatur, Georgia. If I don’t do
it now I probably never will, and I want to make sure I get these pictures
posted somewhere.
At 3:30 in the morning on February 25, 2018, I woke up
suddenly in the night. This wasn’t unusual for me—I’d been waking up suddenly
in the night every night for weeks needing to empty my bladder and get a little
snack to stave off my ever-present nausea. At this stage in my pregnancy I was
in pain pretty much 100% of the time. To ease the jabbing pains and cramping in
my abdomen, I drew myself a bath. By this point in my pregnancy I was averaging
about 3 pain-relieving baths every day, with one usually happening in the
middle of the night.
As I sat in the tub, I felt my belly tighten and I lost my
breath. Again, this was not unusual for me. I’d been having Braxton Hicks
contractions all day and night every day
and night for about a month. They always gave me shortness of breath and were
very uncomfortable. For whatever reason, this time I decided to time them. Must
have been instinct.
I very quickly realized that these contractions were coming
at regular intervals and lasting longer than usual. By the end of my first hour
timing them, the contractions were painful, coming every 5 minutes, and lasting
about one minute. If you’ve ever been pregnant before, you know that this
satisfies the 5-1-1 rule, and you should probably think about getting your
pregnant belly to the hospital asap. But for whatever reason, I thought it
would be a good idea to take my sweet time. My other first-time-mom friends had
labored for hours at home before going to the hospital, and I didn’t want to be
one of those rookie first-timers to rush to the hospital too soon and then be
turned away. So I woke Jared up to let him know it was about to go down, and
then we spent probably another hour packing up the car and “getting ready.”
Silly girl. There is no need to “get ready” to go have a baby. The Instagram
moms who look perfectly coifed as their newborn baby is handed to them must not
be real humans. My curled hair and makeuped face were a thing of the distant
past by the time I got to the delivery room.
By the time we got in the car and started driving to the
hospital, I knew I had waited too long and my heart started to sink. The
contractions were quickly becoming closer together and were already unbearable.
I cried when we got to the front desk and found out that they had never
received my pre-check-in forms and I’d have to spend another half hour filling
out paperwork before I could be admitted. And WHY do they not just give you the
epidural immediately upon checking in? There was another couple hours of changing
into robes, having my cervix checked, getting hooked up to monitors, and
sitting around (well, Jared was sitting around—I was writhing in agony) before
the anesthesiologist came. I thought I was going to die. The worst part was
that I didn’t even get a breather between contractions because I had this
unbearable pelvic floor pain and pressure that kept getting increasingly worse
and never went away. Even after I got the epidural and the contraction pain was
minimized a bit, the intense pelvic floor pain persisted. No one could tell me
what this pain was or why upping the epidural didn’t help.
After a couple hours of the pain and pressure getting worse
and worse, I asked a nurse to please check me, which is not something I would ever have willingly asked unless I felt like
the baby was about to claw its way out of me like Renesmee in Twilight. I have
a condition called interstitial cystitis that flares up and causes intense pain
whenever someone checks my cervix, epidural or no. The nurse mentioned that it
probably hadn’t been long enough, but when she checked me I was dilated to a 9,
and then minutes after that as I screamed for her to check again she was like, “Whoa,
yup, he’s crowning. Time to push. They wheeled me into the delivery room and
skipped the “practice pushes” they had been talking about up until that point.
(What even is a “practice push”?)
The doctor who delivered baby Jack was an on-call doctor I
had never met before. Then again, I had never even met my real OB before (I only ever had appointments with his PA) so that
didn’t bother me. Her name was Dr. Sutton, and she was very kind and encouraging.
I must have started pushing around 11:30 in the morning. I’d had friends say
things like, “If you have an epidural, your contractions won’t feel painful—it will
just be a little pressure,” and, “Pushing out a baby is like pushing out a big
#2.” Nope to both of those. The contractions were excruciating (pretty sure my epidural
didn’t really take), and the pushing felt like nothing. Literally. When I’d
push it just felt like I was straining and my face was turning purple but
nothing was actually happening. I remember looking at the clock after over an hour
of this exhausting, excruciating pushing and thinking to myself, “Hey, that
would be cool if baby was born at 12:34.” Nope again.
At one point Dr. Sutton actually left the room to go deliver
another baby because I was taking so long. That was discouraging because I
realized that I probably wasn't even close if she felt comfortable leaving me
to go deliver a woman who had just barely started pushing herself. Jared
thought that I was killing it at the whole labor and delivery thing because
whenever someone would ask if I wanted to take a break through a contraction, I
would cry, “No, I think I can push again.” In reality I would have LOVED to
been able to take a rest. I’d been up since 3:30 in the morning and pushing for
what felt like forever and sick and tired for months. But the pain was worse
than the exhaustion, and I knew the pain would only go away once I got this
baby out of me, so I kept pushing, even through sobs of, “I can’t do this, I
can’t do this anymore, make it stop,” between contractions. And of course, the
pain never stopped between contractions because I was having that nasty pelvic
floor issue.
I never once felt like I was making any progress. When the
nurses and doctor started saying, “You’re almost there! Just a couple more
pushes!” I was certain they were lying just to keep my morale up. Finally,
after 2.5 hours of pushing, Jack Lambert was
born at 1:14 p.m. I think my first words as they handed him to me were, “Wow,
it’s like an actual person!” (no duh.) He weighed 7 lb 8 oz, was 19 inches long, and
caused quiiite the tear.
I was in for a rough recovery and some pretty exhausting
days and nights with my colicky newborn, but in that hour after Jack was born
and me and Jared had some alone time with him, we were in heaven. I couldn’t
really move much during my two days in the hospital, but hey, it was so nice
not to feel sick anymore and to be able to enjoy food again.
We love our Jackelope so much. He has changed us for the
better, and even though life isn’t always easy with a baby, we are happier
people for having him in our life. Happy birthday to the most adorable little
firecracker—our cute, spunky Jack Lambert.
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