Poodle POV: Thing

Where should I begin?  The humans have been behaving strangely for a long time now.  I was angry when we moved to this hot place and our house had no carpet.  Oh, how they laughed the first few times I tried to run around and fetch my toys.  It is NOT funny when I run into walls! They are so immature.  

But then things got even stranger.  The blonde one started growing.  And growing.  And growing. This made it really difficult for me to find my comfortable spot in bed or on the couch. I thought this was really inconsiderate on her part.  

Just when I thought she couldn't get any bigger, she and the bearded one left the house for nearly two days and then came back with...Something.   

I don't even know how to describe this thing.  It is small like another dog...but it isn't a dog.  It smells a lot like the other humans, but it doesn't look like any human I have ever seen.  It can't walk, or talk, or really do anything for itself at all.  As far as I can tell, the only purpose of this new thing is to make noise.  Lots of noise.  

When The Thing first arrived I did what I could to avoid the noise.  But the more it was around the more I began to notice that it needed my help.  I mean, those humans are always trying to kill me so I don't know why this new thing would have it any different!  

They have this terrible habit of putting it down and walking away.  Who just walks away from something that can't do anything for itself?  It was asleep recently and they put it in a large cage in the bedroom with me and then just left.  Fearing the humans were just too dumb to realize this was a mistake I got out of bed and found them on the couch.  No matter how many times I got their attention and went back to the bedroom, they just would not follow.  They weren't dumb, just evil.  

Not long after that the blonde one left the thing alone on the couch and walked into another room.  Again with this?!  What is wrong with them?  I don't know much about The Thing, but it certainly looks capable of rolling around.  I immediately sat behind it on the couch to keep it in place.  I am going to have to really be on my guard to help the humans keep this one alive.  

And though the presence of The Thing comes with NOISE and at the expense of my regularly scheduled walks, it is worth it.  Why?  Well, it is forever spitting out this really smelly food.  If I just sit close and wait I get all kinds of extra little treats throughout the day.  Awesome.  I believe The Thing and I will make a great team against those idiot humans someday.

Yup, Just More Pictures

In the first two pictures Rosalind is wearing a baby wife-beater tank top.  It is supposed to be 3-6 months, but the head hole is tiny.  Instead it is more of a wife-beater dress.  Though the name sounds terrible it is actually cute.  In the last picture it looks almost like she is smiling, but that is the face she makes right before she crinkles up and gets ready to cry.  Very confusing.  

I Am Now Ambivalent About Vomit.

Greetings to those of you in the real world!  To all of you who don't exist in a place where it has become normal to sit and let an 8 1/2 pound blob spew on you ten or twelve times before deciding to change shirts, or to be thrilled if you manage to sleep any longer than 2 1/2 hours at a time, or cry at random intervals for no reason at all.  It must be nice where you are!  

Despite all of that, it really is pretty okay in this world as well.  Now that I am feeling a bit better about things I can write this post with a bit of perspective and humor.  Had I written it last week it would have lacked those things.  I don't know if anyone knew this already, but tiny newborn humans are HARD!  I wasn't fully aware of this before.  They look so cute and small and sweet, but really they are just a bag of demands with very little reward built in.  

They don't smile.  They don't laugh.  They don't hug.  

They cry.  They poop.  They eat.  They puke.  A lot.  And when you try to fix these things for them, they cry harder.  Thankless.  

And if I am being honest with you, I didn't transition to this very well.  I have cried more in the last 24 days than I have in the last ten years combined.  A mixture of "what does she WANT?" and, "I don't know what I am doing," along with, "what happened to life as I knew it?" and finally a raging batch of hormones on top of virtually no sleep.  It is a wonder the human race continues.  This must be the evolutionary reason behind accidental teenage pregnancy.  

Just since last week things have started to improve.  Now that the house is warmer she doesn't mind being naked, which makes most diaper changes easier.  Now that Daddy makes the bath water instead of Mama it is much warmer and she actually likes baths.  Now that the Prevacid is kicking in she doesn't cry and arch her back for three hours after she eats.  The last two nights she has only woken up twice and gone immediately back to sleep.  We figure we better try to enjoy this time since we will wake up soon and she will be all grown up.

 

Gratuitous Baby Pics

Here are some more Pictures of Rosalind Cate.

I think she's trying to do some push-ups here.

Thunder Thighs

Our daughter is a fountain of spit up.  We do a lot of laundry.

Fat Man in A Little Shirt

Yesterday I completed the Fast and Furious Duathlon, and because I understand that the audience of this blog is now fully focused on a certain infant I will be brief in my description. The format was a 2 mile run, then an 11 mile bike ride, another 2 mile run, and finally another 11 mile bike ride. My total time was 1 hour 52 minutes and 32 seconds, I placed 82nd out of 153, all four miles were each run in approximately 8.5 minutes, and I averaged 37 minutes per bike ride. The wind was the culprit for the slow bike times, it was a gale, anyways I finished in the middle of the pack and was proud and happy to do so. Oh, and one anecdote. I began the race by getting my shoe stepped on, it flew off, was kicked by someone, and so I began the race in dead last on my butt putting on my shoe.

Bet You Can't Guess the Subject of This Post.

I know not everyone wants to see pictures of our kid everyday and nothing else, but you'll have to deal a while longer because our families really just want to see pictures.  Also, we do nothing else right now.  

Top Ten Most Awesome Things About the Arrival of My Daughter That Have Nothing to Do With My Daughter:

1.  Sleeping on my stomach.

2.  Scalding hot showers.

3.  Being able to pee on a normal human schedule and feeling satisfied at the end.

4.  Just the regular amount of indigestion, not mutant pregnancy indigestion.

5.  Deli meats.

6.  A whole side of my closet rapidly becoming available to me again.

7.  Being able to see my blind spot in the car.

8.  Nobody asking me if I will fit in the restaurant booth or school desk anymore.

9.  My belly button is nearly back to resembling an actual belly button.

10.  No more commentary from strangers on my condition.

Cute ruffly pants, unhappy baby!

Birth Story Part II or More Than Anyone Wanted To Know About My Body

Not long after getting in the tub the midwife came to check me. I had stalled. I had to get out and go for an hour long walk outside. So we did. And then we came in and I labored inside on an exercise ball for a long, long time. They were no longer checking my progress, but just waiting for me to feel a "sudden urge" to use the bathroom. Everyone seemed to think this would happen in no time at all. No matter how much I wished it, I never felt a sudden urge. Finally I was told to go back out and walk some more.

I cried.  The back labor was awful and I had just hit a wall. 

We went and walked and Sergio talked me through everything. I didn't really like to be touched throughout the labor, and I was really nonverbal, but Sergio did whatever was asked. He also made me eat and drink even when I didn't want to, and allowed me to moan and yell in public even though I am sure that was slightly embarrassing. In fact, writing about the crying and yelling over a week afterward makes me almost want to pretend I didn't do any of that, but labor is terrible and I did all of that stuff and more.

After the walk I asked to be checked because I figured if I hadn't progressed any then I was giving up. I was nine centimeters. They thought I had just the tiniest bit of a cervical lip holding her back. Not long after that the head midwife came in and felt around and decided I should push while she did this so that she could help push back the cervical lip, and then I could start pushing. The baby was still high and it would probably take longer than normal, but I could try. Anything that was different from just sitting through contractions was a welcome change.

I pushed by squatting on the floor and holding onto one post of a four post bed (I am sure you all totally wanted to know that). Sergio sat behind me and supported my back. I pushed well, I think, but not well enough. The midwife and the assistant thought that "showing" me where to push would be helpful. This is very painful. Very, very painful.

I yelled a lot.

Our parents had been in the waiting room since the wee hours, and by this time my brother and sister-in-law and their kids had made it as well. The yelling did not make them feel good about what was happening on my side of the door.

So I pushed...and pushed...and pushed. Often with the "help" of a midwife or assistant. We would make good progress and then the baby would slip back some.

This went on for over two hours.  If you don't know what happens to your anatomy after two hours of pushing, well, count that as a blessing.

Soon the baby's heartrate started faltering. On top of that, my contractions began slowing down because I was so tired. It was like my uterus gave up or something. And that is when the situation officially became an emergency. The midwife mentioned using a vacuum in order to motivate me to push her out on my own (as if motivation was my problem), but all it did was offer me some relief that it might be over soon. I think at that point she knew it had gone on too long. That someone had lost control of the situation. She called their cooperating physician over from Baylor. She came within minutes. And she meant business.

They had me on my back on the bed within seconds, and despite my fervent pleas that they not do it, I was being held down with my legs back by both midwives, Sergio, and the office manager from upstairs. Through this the doctor was snapping at me that I had to push hard if she was going to try the vacuum because really I needed to be transferred and this had better work! Or something. She also snapped at the midwives and everyone else who wasn't on the same page as her. She had control of the situation, though, and I appreciated that. She told the midwives the baby was not stuck on a cervical lip, but was in fact stuck behind my inverted tail bone. I think this might explain the horrifying back labor, but that is only my theory.

The next few minutes are a blur of long needles meant to numb me for an episiotomy, the doctor putting far too many hands in places that that many hands don't go, a vacuum doing much the same thing, and finally a wicked episiotomy. I also vividly remember feeling like the doctor was angry with me because I could no longer tell her when the contractions were starting. I was so beyond any pain I have known that I couldn't feel the contractions anymore, and my reaction was to feel guilty. I wish I could do this part over again just so that I could kick someone in the face.

I say a blur because even though I was still unmedicated and totally aware, the only thought I really had room for in my head was, "just cooperate and it will be over." And yelling.

And soon it was over. A warm, slippery, crying human being was dropped on my chest. Relief!

Until they sewed me up. Those local shots never did do anything except hurt like hell to have done. I asked how many stitches it would require and was told, "um...ten...at least." I didn't ask for the final tally.

The next thing I knew there were teary mothers in the room. Not because of the baby, but because of the total trauma of having heard all of that from the next room, seeing a doctor barrel through the door, and not receiving any information about what was happening. Nobody was really able to focus on the baby until a few minutes later.

She was perfect. Dark hair that almost looked curly. My hands. Sergio's ears. A complete stranger that was somehow familiar. We took her home six hours later. This was the only part of having her at the birth center that happened the way I thought it would.

Here, look at the cute baby! Click on the arrow, it is a slideshow.

Rosalind Wears Cool Onesies and Might Be Strung Out

Birth Story Part One

I woke up at about 3:30 am on Sunday morning and couldn't get back to sleep. I hoped it was sign of something, but nothing was happening physically. I got out of bed and looked up birth stories and videos online for four hours until Sergio got up. By the time he got up I thought maybe, perhaps, if I wished really hard, I was feeling something. Something only mildly unpleasant and not at all on a rhythm, but it was something.

Sergio and I decided to have breakfast and then go for a hike to see if we could make something out of this. We walked for about two miles and were encouraged to find the contractions got worse with exercise. Then we came home and I took a nap and we were encouraged to find that the contractions continued through sleep. It probably wasn't false labor, but we weren't entirely sure that it was going to turn into active labor either. I won't get into the early signs of labor, but if you know about them, I didn't have any. We attempted to time the contractions, but it was impossible.

We decided to take one more walk before bed and I was discussing whether or not I was going to go into work the next day if this was still going on. As I stepped up to the door I felt a really strange and sudden sensation. Before I could identify what it was, water was dripping all down my legs. At this point Sergio and I had a funny little exchange where he kept questioning whether I was sure rather than unlocking the door, and I kept telling him I was dripping and to unlock the door already!

We called the midwife at 8:30, who told us to see if real contractions started and to call back at ten. Within ten minutes the real contractions had begun. By ten they were mostly regular and painful, but when the midwife talked me through one she said I needed to wait for them to be more painful.  Awesome.  Then she got on the phone with Sergio and told him what to look for before calling back. She expected to hear from us around 2 am. At 1:45 I got really frustrated at a contraction and did a bit of yelling and at that point Sergio decided to go ahead and call. The midwife did not make me talk through a contraction this time, but just told us to come on in.

We got to the birthing center a few minutes ahead of the midwife. When she arrived she checked me and found that I was five centimeters. I was pretty happy with that since I had only been laboring about five hours. I was also encouraged because the first five are usually the slowest and labor would probably pick up now. I could almost see the end of this thing! Probably before the sun came up even! Since I was feeling a little out of control of the contractions I asked if I could get in the tub. It was heavenly.

I wish the birth story continued like this. I wish I could say that things continued to progress and I labored in the wonderful warm water and then I pushed for ten minutes and out came my daughter. That is how I imagined it should go.

But no.