10 minutes: Go!

Six and a half months later...

I am starting to run low on my freezer stash of breastmilk, so I've started pumping before I go to bed. There has been no alarm setting to pump in the middle of the night like there was with LG. There is no compression to get every last drop of milk out. I just start the pump and go for ten minutes (more, if there is more). I thought instead of paying bills, clipping coupons, or doing Facebook or Pinterest, I'd put some sort of update up here.

Our baby girl, who we'll call NT in the context of this blog, came the day after my last blog post, at 37 weeks 4 days--the same day in the pregnancy as her older brother. Apparently my body has an eject timer. I woke up at 7:30am that morning, got up and sat on the toilet, and felt some sort of internal pop or a drop, which I noted as interesting. Right about then LG found me, and he had pooped in his Pull Up (he did that a lot in those days, as well as trying to change it himself and getting it everywhere). I took him upstairs to change him, and just felt like I couldn't handle sitting down and doing it right then, so I woke up AD and told him about the pop/drop and asked him to change LG. I got in the shower and AD came to discuss what might be going on; I was starting to feel a little achy/crampy, so I told him to go upstairs and start breakfast--I'd finish showering, we'd have breakfast, and regroup from there. Well, the contractions started, breakfast got left half-cooked on the stove, LG went to the neighbors, and set off for the hospital at 8:34am. Luckily the rush hour traffic was headed the opposite direction and we made it to the hospital in 9 minutes at 8:43am. I think I had three pretty intense contractions in the car. I had another while we were waiting for the elevator. When we got into the room I really felt like I needed to sit on the toilet. While I was there, I had another contraction and started screaming. The nurses rushed in and ordered that I come out of the bathroom and get on the bed. They checked me and I was at 8cm (read: transition). The nurses got busy calling all sorts of people in and hooking up the fetal monitor. I had one or two more contractions and the on-call doctor was getting suited up. My OB was the on-call doctor from our practice and was luckily in the office (right next to the hospital), and got there just in time to relieve the other doctor. She checked me and told me I could push. Three pushes later, NT came out all in one push like a water rocket (the pop/drop was my water breaking, but her head was so low it had corked all of the water so there was no leakage prior to birth). She was born at 9:13am, 7lbs 12oz, 22+ in, with a very nicely shaped head that was covered in dark brown hair.

Okay, so that was about 20 minutes of typing, but a good stopping place. More to come at my next nighttime pumping session (maybe...)