I have the cutest 7 month old ever

This one’s more a testimony to the size of Hunny’s boot than it is the size of Aidan…

Happy chappie

This ones my favourite

I contemplated the title to this entry for a couple of days. Somehow joking about your own death doesn’t pack a punch, but joking about your child dying does. Funny that. But he didn’t die. Not even close. And thankfully, for the most part, I knew that he wouldn’t at the time.

Aidan gave us a big scare this past Easter weekend. When he got his first cold I thought I couldn’t possibly cope with more than that. But we got through it, and I felt stronger for that. Then when he got another cold/flu thingy and he ended up on antibiotics a month later I went through the same cycle: thinking that I couldn’t possibly cope with anything more than this, but as we emerged out the other side, feeling quite chuffed that we did.

Well, after last weekend I should feel positively pumping. So here’s a chronology of events. Warning for the squeamish – mention of blood, vomit and poop included

Saturday
10:30 AM: Drop Aidan at his Ouma’s (Afrikaans for granny) so we can go and do our monthly groceries uninterrupted, and because Ouma likes having Aidan to herself for a bit, and because he likes it too. He’s a little fractious when we leave, but he’s having a bottle and needs a nap, and we’re confident that Hunny’s mom can handle him

11:00 AM: Hunny’s mom phones while we’re sitting in some pointless and frustrating traffic resulting from a local craft market that doesn’t have easy enough access to it’s parking. I can hear Aidan crying in the background. MIL says he won’t settle and he’s vomited up his whole bottle and his morning porridge too. We do a quick about turn and race back.

11:15 AM: I’ve never seen my child this inconsolably unhappy before. He’s calm for a few minutes, and looks exhausted. Then he writhes in agony and contorts his little body, crying his heart out. We pack up his things and head straight to Sunninghill Casualty.

11:45 AM: Aidan has slept in the car chair on the way over, and seems more peaceful as we sit in the waiting room. As we are called though, he vomits again.

12:45 PM: The casualty doctors have given him some Buscopan for the cramps, some anti-nausea stuff, and some Stopain. They think its colic. We’re not 100% convinced, but he’s calm and he’s not vomiting or cramping. We go home.

14:45 PM: Aidan has had some water and some formula, and a nice long nap. But then he wakes up crying. I try to comfort him. He vomits all over me. Alwyn phones casualty and they say bring him in again.

15:30 PM: The doctor examines Aidan again, and sends him for x-rays.

16:00 PM: The x–rays show much gas but no obstructions. After Aidan vomited up the last of his stomach contents he seems happier, but is still cramping intermittently. Doctor still thinks its colic, and that I gave him too many fluids, and that’s what triggered it off again. Then he does a poo nappy. It’s red. Very red. You can smell the blood. I call the nurse. I assure her he hasn’t been eating beetroot.

16:30 PM: After doing another red nappy, Aidan seems happier, but the casualty nurses aren’t. One says dysentery. The others agree. I’m horrified. Where could he have picked that up from? Don’t children in poverty stricken villages in third world countries die from that?

16:45 PM: The nurses descend on mass. Taking bloods from his right foot. Inserting a drip needle into his left foot because the vein in his left collapsed. They’ve spoken to the Pediatrician on standby, she’s booking him in. I’m worried but trying not to let it show as I hold my child down for people to stick needles into him. Hunny is trying hard not to hit the doctors that don’t seem concerned enough or sympathetic enough.

17:30 PM: We’re in an isolation ward because of the dysentery thing. When I ask the nurse how he might have contracted dysentery she tells me about the virtues of hand washing. Aidan is on a fluid drip, antibiotics are on their way. He hasn’t cramped or vomited since the two red nappies. He’s dead tired but still trying to be charming for the nurses.

18:30 PM: The antibiotics are in the drip only a few minutes before Aidan kicks the needle loose and screams in pain. The nurse disconnects the drip, says she’ll be back in a few minutes to re-insert the needle. Hunny has gone home to feed the dogs and return with supplies. I’m staying with Aidan through the night, they let one parent stay. They provide a bed. Well, that’s what they call it.

19:10 PM: The night shift nurse introduces herself, says they’ll be back in a few minutes to take Aidan to reinsert his drip. My mom and sister have arrived to offer moral support. I nearly break down when I see them, but manage to pull myself together.

19:30 PM: Hunny arrives back with MacDonald’s, asks the nurses when they’re planning on reinserting Aidan’s drip needle. They’re busy, they’ll be there just now

20:15 PM: Finally, they take us to the procedure room to reinsert the drip needle. Only one parent can stay. I can’t leave my child, so it’s me. They scour his chubby limbs for a spot. The two good ones (his feet) are ruined, so they have to try a hand. Somehow this seems much worse than a foot to me. She manages it first time though, no mean feet. I can’t see a vein there.

21:00 PM: Mom and sis have gone, it’s just Hunny, Aidan and I in our isolation ward. Aidan’s finally falling asleep when the standby paediatrician arrives. She gets off on the wrong foot. “What’s the problem? Persistent high fever?” I start to loose it. No, I say. He’s been vomiting. Then she starts off about “… the thing with rotavirus” I cut her off. No-one has said rotavirus, they’ve said dysentery. She does a quick recovery by grouping the two together, and I stumble some kind of excuse-apology about it being a long day and everyone asking the same questions again and again. She carries on speaking, to Hunny only. I put my head on the bed next to my child and listen. Why is everyone writing down his symptoms if no-one is reading them?

21:10 PM: Aidan’s first blood test results arrive while the pead is still there. She explains them to us. She’s actually okay, I just wish she’d read the file before she came in. He’s not dehydrated, and has negative counts for bacterial infections, so the antibiotics are probably a waste of time. She’ll give him one more dose tomorrow just in case. No food for Aidan tonight though, I’m wondering how I’ll get him to sleep on an empty tummy.

22:00 PM: The ‘bed’ is a fold out armchair thing that looks as uncomfortable as it feels. Hunny’s just left, and Aidan and I are settling down for the night.
Sunday
04:45 AM: Aidan is awake and chipper. Not another symptom since the two red nappies the day before. Nurses came and went throughout the night, checking his vitals. We both got some sleep, but Aidan more than me. His bed was more comfortable. I could feel the bruises forming on my hips if I stayed in the same position for more than half an hour.

06:00 AM: I can’t distract him anymore, the boy is HUNGRY. I give him 50 ml’s he gobbles it down and cries with betrayal. I give him another 50 ml’s. He’s still not impressed.

07:15 AM: Hunny arrives with coffee for me and yoghurt for Aidan. I leave Aidan under his dad’s watchful eye while I wash-up and apply some make-up, so that I don’t look like the sick one. We give him some yoghurt at 8, he loves it:

11:45 AM: Hunny’s folks come to visit. His mom is so concerned that he’ll relate the terrible experience to her. I assure her that he won’t remember, and if he does then my betrayal is more memorable: I held him down for people to stick him with needles. I have the memory of my mom doing the same during a particularly bad bout of gastro when I was about 5. I couldn’t believe it at the time, my mom holding me down for the nurse while she gave me an injection. We’ve come full circle.

14:00 PM: We’re still at the hospital, but it’s looking likely that we’ll go home today. The paed will visit us later.

14:30 PM: We’re clear to go! The last bloods and cultures came back. The paed explains then to us. They tell us nothing. Negative for all the common viruses they check. Negative for bacteria. Paed doesn’t think he’s contagious. It no longer appears to be dysentery. We don’t know what it is, but further testing is deemed unnecessary.

15:00 PM: We’re home. Aidan and I take a nice nap together. It feels so surreal.

Two days later my relief at having a healthy child back has given way to frustration at not knowing what caused this. If I don’t know what it was then I don’t know what I can do to prevent it from happening again. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t dysentery. He was missing the major defining symptom. He never had diarrhea. He had also righted himself within 5 hours of the start of the symptoms, before the antibiotics had been administered. All forms of dysentery seem to have an onset of days. I’ve googled his symptoms and come up with one plausible but incomplete theory. I know I’ll need to let it go, but I’m not ready to just yet.

But my son is okay. If it weren’t for the 3 prick marks you wouldn’t know it ever happened. We have learnt one thing from this though: trust our instincts. Neither of us was convinced about the colic theory. We should have pushed harder at the first casualty visit.

And I’m proud of us. We made it through this. Back to the title of this post, I confronted a major fear of mine. Since he was born I have been harboring a fear of taking Aidan to the emergency room. Because then they might admit him. And I didn’t know if or how I would cope with that. Now it has happened, and I coped, and it’s not so scary anymore.

One of the most frequently asked questions to new moms who return to work is “So what did you do with the little one?”. If you say he’s at crèche, that’s usually followed by “So was it difficult dropping him off on his first day?” My honest answer: “Not really” I knew he was in good hands, and I was going to pick him up in a few hours, and I thought that he might benefit from someone a little more creative and entertaining than his mom for a bit.

What was difficult was at the end of the week, when he came down with his first fever, and then the next week, when he was full-blown sick with a cold: sore throat, phlegm in his throat & lungs, coughing. That’s what was difficult to handle. Then I did feel like an awful mother, subjecting my baby boy to that because I was selfish enough to go back to work.

He has recovered now, and without the use of antibiotics, thankfully, but not before he infected me, my mom and his dad. When I mention this to anyone else with small children in crèche or nursery school, they all smile knowingly and say “Ah, crèche syndrome”. My head knew it would happen, but my heart didn’t realize how awful I would feel when I couldn’t make my little boy better right away. That and knowing that I subjected him to the germs in the first place … Well, it was a rough week.

Now the poor boy is subjected to so many temperature checks that I swear his bum cheeks squeeze together when he sees the thermometer coming. Yes I know I could take an armpit temp, or get a fancy ear or forehead or dummy-shaped thermometer, but my reference book says bum temp’s are the most accurate, and if I’m not going to be a stay at home mom I must at least be accurate. I take his temp when I know its fine, and when I know it’s not. I obsess about it if I put him to bed without a temp check, and then do one at his midnight feed when I’m supposed to be doing my best not to wake him up completely. *sigh* At least he’s healthy again, for now.

Anyway, for June, and any other readers who are into photos of gorgeous baby boys, here he is. Click to enlarge.

Shew! What a busy month! Or has it been longer than that since I last posted? Maybe it has … So I’m back at work. I have also learnt that my work has added my blog to the list of blocked websites. It’s all you work colleagues reading the posts I haven’t been posting recently, I just know it. Love you guys

Since I last shared my life with you I have lost some wisdom, quite literally. And I felt so brave about it. I dropped Aidan off at his first day of crèche and dutifully took myself off to the dentist to punish myself for being a terrible mom who leaves her 4.5 month old baby at crèche so she can selfishly return to work. I started him at creche a week before my return to work, because I had important stuff to do like go to the dentist. And also to get us into the routine.

The dentist confirmed my suspicions. My wisdom teeth, which had been sitting comfortably in my jaw, had chosen the rip old age of 29 to make an appearance. The problem was that they were sitting so skew that they wouldn’t be able to do this on their own and hence would require the services of a maxillofacial surgeon. My dentist promptly scheduled me an appointment with one for the following afternoon, and off I went.

Dr Surgeon confirmed that my teeth were indeed very skew with one lying almost totally horizontal, but that they could be removed under local anesthetic. Here’s where my bravery came in. Instead of allowing myself time to ponder over the decision, I said “all right, lets do it now”. And right there and then he shoved some needles into my gums and grabbed some pliers and out they came.

Well, that’s the short of it. The experience was a little more traumatic. When I close my eyes I can still relive the feeling of the scalpel cutting against my teeth, and the ripping feeling as Dr Surgeon told me to ‘return pressure’ as he was applying all his strength with one foot against the chair to remove my most stubborn right not-so-wise-skew-growing tooth. And the feeling of relief mixed with ewe-gross as it starts to break free. Followed by the not painful but still disturbing feeling of someone stitching your gum pieces back together.

But hey, I did it. This from the chick that was too squeamish to try a natural birth

Aidan loved his first week of crèche by the way, and his care-takers loved him.  Apparently he was a happy smiley baby for them all week long. Not so much the following Monday when he developed a fever, but that’s another story for another day.

I’m not vocal about breastfeeding habits. That’s because I’m a bit of a prude when it comes to mentioning certain body parts on a public forum, but I have been breastfeeding Aidan. It was pretty successful after the first few chaotic days of figuring it what, where and how much were behind us. In fact, in his first 8 weeks the little guy was gaining more than 400 grams a week on average. For perspective, the norm is 100 – 300 grams. There were two weeks where he gained 500 grams, so I guess that’s proof that breastfeeding was working for us.

Then in week 8 thinks started to slip. A couple of factors influenced this, including Aidan’s first round of vaccines, but mealtimes became a stressful situation as Aidan refused to take a full feed. We pushed through and things got back to normal after two trying weeks. It was a horrible time for me as my little guy actually pushed me away screaming after a half feed, something that was very hard for me not to take personally. But like I said, we got over it.

Then things started going wrong again last week. I decided t give it a week to sort things out and see, before we tried offering him some formula. I had planned to keep up the breastfeeding until Aidan was 4 months old, and then most likely swap him onto formula when I went back to work. I occasionally even considered the noble intention of expressing at work and keeping it up till 6 months, but that was a fleeting idea and not practical. Books and magazines like to tell you how you can make breastfeeding and going back to work, well, work. How you should lobby to get a breastfeeding room set up in your workplace and etc. Well that’s not going to happen at my work, so it’s my car in the parking lot or a stall in the bathroom. I bit exposed and unhygienic respectively. Not to mention that my breastpump isn’t the quietest on the market.

That week ends today, but I gave in early. We gave Aidan a bottle of formula yesterday afternoon and he gobbled it down with no ill effects. And though he had breast again at bedtime, he slept for 7 hours last night. That’s not seven hours between feeds, which was his previous record, that 7 hours of sleep, 8.5 hours between feeds because he wasn’t at all inclined to go to sleep last night – do they put vitamins/caffiene in formula?

I’m still a little hurt that he doesn’t seem to want what I have to offer anymore (though he’ll take breastmilk from a bottle fine – salt in the wound) but I’m going to cut my losses now and make the swap. It will allow me stop worrying about whether this feed he’ll get a full meal. It’s a concern that raises itself every 3 hours, though my going into the situation stressed probably doesn’t help matters. And I can stop watching what I eat. I can have a good strong cocktail. I can go horse-riding without having to make sure I have some top-up milk expressed because that always diminishes my supply. I can put my fat arse on a diet and shed the rest of this weight. I don’t have to go and sit in another room to feed Aidan when we are at friends or have friends over. Aidan should go longer between feeds on formula, and hopefully that will mean only one night feed in future. And it’s easier for dad to feed.

In return for these benefits I miss out on giving my son the best nature has to offer, and I loose the status of being sole provider of food for him. It’s a tough choice, but in the end I think we both, no make that all three – this isn’t a happy situation for Hunny either, can do without the tension around mealtimes. So it’s the end of an era. And funny to think this was such a tough decision for me, because initially I wasn’t convinced I wanted to breastfeed at all.

I can sit!

With even a smidgen of concentration left to smile

- a decrease in size of an organ caused by disease or disuse
- undergo atrophy; “Muscles that are not used will atrophy”
- any weakening or degeneration (especially through lack of use)

I suspect my blogging ability may have fallen victim to creativity atrophy. It’s been more than 4 weeks since I last blogged. I know this because we took Aidan for his second round of vaccinations this week. The vaccination dates are 4 weeks apart and the last post I wrote was in part inspired by a very grumpy baby one day after his first round of vaccinations, though I hadn’t realized that was the cause at the time. Somehow if felt very personal when he didn’t want to feed, but I know better this time.

I didn’t want this blog to be a journal. It was intended to be a place to exercise my creative juices. I knew I would be drawing posts from personal experience, but I was hoping to present that experience in such a way as to make it an adventure or maybe a reflection, not just an account. Lately I have found that I can’t produce much other blow-by-blow accounts of my experiences with motherhood, so I haven’t gotten round to putting any posts to keyboard. The problem is, the longer I leave it, the worse it gets.

I read many journal type blogs, and I enjoy them, but that just isn’t what I had planned for my little space of the interwebs. I was going be a writer. I was going to produce something that was practice for the novel I want to write one day, the best-seller that will free me from the 9 – 5 and allow me to pay off the mortgages of my family. I suspect my family will have paid off their mortgages the hard way before I produce a best seller, but hey, we all need a dream, right?

So, lets just get back on the horse shall we? The longer I wait for creative juices to return, the less likely that becomes. What you’ve missed while I’ve been away:

- Aidan is now 12 weeks old, 6.85 kg’s and 62 cm’s long. He has blue eyes, chubby cheeks and a button nose. He loves his hands, he tries to stuff both of them in his mouth at once. He does a technical ‘sleep through’ on occasion: 6 hours between feeds, once a night. It doesn’t feel like a sleep through to me. He’s a happy friendly guy who still manages a smile even when his tummy hurts or he’s waging internal wars on nasty vaccine gogga’s.

- I’m still in the worst shape of my life. I can hide it enough so that people remark that I must have lost all my baby weight, but I know the truth. 4 stubborn kg’s still to go, but so much more work to be done to put things back in their correct places.

- I’ve been back on a few horses a few times, but my own only once. He was reasonably behaved, but time hasn’t worked any miracles, he’s still the same nutty creature he was 10 months ago.

- We’ve celebrated our first Christmas as a family, but the spirit was missing. I’m not sure what went wrong. I suspect that Hunny & I have both realized that Christmas no longer belongs to us anymore, but Aidan was too young yet to appreciate it, so it kinda slipped through the cracks. But lest you think we are terrible parents, we did buy him presents and entertain him excitedly tearing off the wrapping paper on his behalf.

- Hunny’s spider bite, remember that? It’s finally healed. It took six and a half months, regressions caused by infections, and several roles of plaster gauze and granuflex, but at last it is done. The scar looks like a bullet wound scar.

- I graduated from my part time studies, top of my class. Proof that you don’t have to succumb to baby brain.

We have had an extraordinarily blessed year, and for that we are most thankful. Thank you God for being there in the bad times and the good times too, even if we forget you then sometimes.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Aidan is 8 weeks tomorrow, much makes it almost December, but it still feels like the beginning of October to me. It’s like my life just stopped right there. Now I hardly have cause to know what day of the week it is, let alone what date. It’s quite sad actually.

Things are well here. My gorgeous little boy is growing great guns (6 kg’s now, and rapidly outgrowing clothes) and we are getting out and about quite a bit, to more places than just the clinic for his weigh-in’s and vaccinations (ouch! Poor boy) and the pediatrician for his check-up. So I can’t really complain, but I do feel like complaining sometimes. Like at 2 AM in the morning when Aidan’s cries wake me and Hunny practices his new skill of sleeping through them. Not his fault at all, it’s not like he can whip out a boob and feed the boy, but at 2 AM when I’m dog-tired sometimes I need to be angry at someone. It usually wears off by the time Hunny wakes in the morning.

Being home all day alerts you to some new things, like how much of an arse your neighbour is. The one with the 5 howling dogs, a squawking parrot and the car he seems to work on all day, that still doesn’t seem to be able to idle hence him perpetually revving it. And how much I miss aircon.

Someone I know asked me the other day if I was glad I did this, glad I had a baby. It was a good day and I answered “of course” without thought or hesitation. She has 3 young, and planned, children of her own. She said it took her 9 months to be able to say that. At the time I was shocked that she had said that. I’m not so shocked now. This is a huge djustment. Life happens in three hour segments. You can’t rearrange them yourself, you are at the mercy of an infant. If he decides not to sleep for this three hour stretch but rather to cry, well then there is nothing you can do about it. For someone used to controlling and planning their days, this gets a bit heavy after 8 weeks. When I sit down with Aidan for his fourth feed of the morning and all I have managed so far is to dress myself, swallow some breakfast and pack the dishwasher, I find myself thinking “I have no life”.

As a teenager I was convinced that I was alone in my feelings, that no-one else could possibly feel like I did at that time. As an adult I know better, many moms must feel like this, so please don’t judge me for expressing it. Sometimes really I wonder if am up to this task. Everyone keeps telling me what a great mom I am, and sometimes I accept the compliment, but other times it doesn’t sit at all well with me, because I know what thoughts are running around in my head. How could a great mom be thinking these things. How could a great mom be totally frustrated with a crying infant? He can’t help it, and surely he can feel that vibe off me? That’s usually when I reply “I am just doing the best that I can”, which is mostly true. I have my limitations – I know that, but we can always do better, can’t we? Some days I see all the potential for mistakes in myself that I am trying so hard not to repeat of my parents. Sometimes I can feel my temper bubbling beneath the surface. Heaven help us both when he can actually walk and talk.

This is all a bit raw, but it needed to make its way out before it started poisoning my insides. It’s not that I don’t love my son dearly; it’s just that some days this is hard. Really hard.

Continued from the previous post: Why I have joined the masses of people who don’t like hospitals…

I can be quite naive sometimes. Not having stayed in a hospital since in childhood to early to remember, I thought it would be quite novel. Stay in bed all day, have food brought to you, order it of those little mini menus, have visitors and flowers. Well now what’s so bad about that? Especially as I wasn’t going in because I was ill, this should have been quite fun in my opinion.

By 11 PM on the first night, I had changed my mind. Hospitals are noisy places, especially if they are as busy as the one I went to happened to be on that particular week. By my last night there they had amassed 18 babies, and it’s not a big hospital. I think that was capacity.

I also didn’t anticipate the loss of dignity of being prodded and checked all night long. Not the staff’s fault, they were just doing their job, but well, I just hadn’t expected it.

Summed up, the day staff were great, I met two very helpful nurses, and the rest of the ground staff were cheerful and friendly. The night staff: a little less so. I drew the card for the ‘first night on the job’ nurse who twice dropped my bed instead of lowering it gently, not going down well with the C-section. She then said “I’m sorry, it’s my first night on the job”, which, well, she shouldn’t have. I’d rather not have known. And the nursery staff were thin on the ground and not very sympathetic to a worried first time mom.

With 18 babies and 16 moms (2 sets of twins) the attendance alarms didn’t stop ringing. The hospital rooms had two beds each in them. Nights one and two I shared with a lovely friendly mom of twins. Her babies where in incubators due to being born a bit premature, so she didn’t have them rooming in with her. I felt a bit bad for her sharing a room with me because I had the crying infant who wasn’t feeding too well, and she could otherwise have been getting some sleep.

But then the final straw for my camel: on night three they moved my roommate to another room, maybe it was at her own request – I don’t know, and moved in a new mom fresh from theatre for her c-section. So she had the nurses in and out all night checking on her. Well, I hadn’t slept much the first two nights due to being check on (night one) and feeding problems with Aidan (night two) and now on night three I get awoken every time they check on my new roommate, because the night staff aren’t very subtle about doing their jobs. And the door creaked. Each time they left after checking on my roommate I’d get up and fix it so it didn’t creak, and then a few hours later the nurse would leave it in its creaking position again. Well, night three wasn’t a great one for sleep either.

Thankfully I have the most wonderful husband who was at the hospital by 7 AM each morning to hold his child while his mom stole a shower or an hour’s sleep because by the end of night two I felt so much animosity towards the nursery night staff I no longer wanted to take Aidan to the nursery at all.

I was ready and packed before the doctors did their rounds on my discharge day, so eager was I to flee my captivity. I think I would have had a serious melt down had the doc’s decided that either Aidan or I needed to stay in even a few hours more.

But they didn’t. And it’s never felt so good to be home as it did that Saturday.

Four weeks on we are doing well. Aidan isn’t the totally non fussy calm baby I had kinda hoped for, but he’s a great kid. He has some colicky / reflux symptoms, but It’ll just take some time for his digestive system to mature, and we’re weathering that storm okay for now.

And he’s just ever so gorgeous, see for yourself:

It’s been three weeks to the day since Aidan made his grand entrance, so I figured I best record that experience before I forget it all in a sleep deprived stupor. That and June’s been prodding me to post something

The worst part of the C-Section, as predicted by me and probably because I thought it would be, was the drip needle in my arm. I was doing great till they put that in. It hurt, and then I had a reminder in my left arm for the next 45 minutes or so that I was just about to go into theatre and get a giant needle stuck in my back and have my belly cut open. My coping strategy for these things is usually denial, so the reminder wasn’t appreciated.

Hunny had a blast though, running around in his green suit (surprise! They had a size to fit him, I think it was 3 XL) taking pictures of everything.

While he was having his fun, I was in a bed in the waiting area which looked surprisingly like a corridor, and I became a temporary display on the head nurses tour of the labour ward for prospective future patients “And then they’ll wheel you out here while you wait to go into theatre, just like this young lady”. I didn’t mind that though, she was a really nice.

And then things stated to happen, I was wheeled into a theatre that was smaller than I expected (not sure why I was expecting something huge, probably a TV misconception), in a room full of woman. One of the reasons I choose a hospital a bit too far out of our way was because I met the loveliest gynecologist there, and she was a she. An added bonus that I wasn’t expecting was that she arranged a theatre full of women too. The pediatrician, anesthetist and all 5 or 6 nurses (who knew they’d need that many?) were female. Hunny and later Aidan were the only males there. It made the experience just that bit more relaxed.

The spinal was a bit tricky; apparently my vertebrae are a tad close together, so the anesthetist had to try a new location after she couldn’t get the needle in at the first one. I had a fleeting fear that they may have to put me out all together, but the second spot did the trick. All this while my gynecologist was attempting to fold me double so the anesthetist could get a bit more room between the vertebrae. Bending double over my enormous stomach was a tad difficult.

The spinal was an interesting feeling. Kinda like I was wearing a really thick pair of denims and someone was tugging on them, while I knew it was actually my flesh that they were tugging on. Odd, but not entirely unpleasant.

Once the spinal had kicked in, everything just happened in a blur. My blood pressure shot up, Hunny tells me, but I didn’t notice that. The ladies got to work super quickly, and just a few minutes later my boy was born.

I spent pretty much the rest of the theatre time watching the nurse and pediatrician working with my boy while Hunny sat between us and held my hand and his.

Here’s our instant family, a few minutes old.

Then Hunny went with our little guy to the nursery for whatever else they do with babies in the nursery while the doc stitched me back up. Runaway was playing on the radio in the background. I loved that song when I was just a little kid and it was the theme song for the TV program Crime Story, I was all of seven years old when that show started. I’m pretty sure it was on way past my bed time, but my folks weren’t the strictest on that, or maybe they just liked to laugh at my efforts to sing along

We were reunited when Hunny brought Aidan back to me once I was back in my room, and we had a great bonding session. He was totally alert for hours after his birth, just checking everything out.

So that was Aidan making his way into this world. Quite pleasant even if not typical. It was only later that night when things started to go downhill…

But I’ll post that at another time.