we're back!

hamish patrick potter was born on monday, september 22, 2003 at 12:50 a.m. (yes, he missed my anniversary, thank god!) he was 7 pounds and 2.9 ounces, and 18 1/2 inches long. and he's perfect!

hey!

here i am, home, sweet home with my baby in the snugli and back at my computer! how nice it is!

thank you, gretchen, for posting while i was in the hospital.

we actually got home yesterday afternoon, but i didn't have a chance to get online because mark was catching up on work. he said he was going to take three days off when the baby was born... yeah, the only day he didn't work was on sunday, and he spent the whole day in the labour room with me! otherwise i'm sure he would have been checking trouble tickets!

anyway, sunday i woke up feeling some pains, but i didn't want to be disappointed again, so i ignored them. around naptime i was hurting so badly that i couldn't sleep, so i finally gave in and called the doctor. i never said that i was having contractions. i figured i'd explain exactly what i felt and let them come to that conclusion. of course, doctors always tell you to come on in to the hospital, so even when i woke mark up to tell him that he wasn't getting any sleep that day, i was still worried this was all another flight of my imagination.

anyway, we got the kids up from their naps and dropped them off (early) at their cousin's birthday party at the tibbedoux's house. then we headed to the hospital.

the first nurse we had strapped me into the bed of many monitors ™ and checked my cervix. 1 centimeter. i'd been told everything from totally closed to 2 centimeters in the last couple of weeks, so that sounded to me like nothing had changed. so we turned on the football game (i couldn't care less about football, but it was a game being played right down the street from us, and our local quarterback has the same last name as my football coach grandfather, so i was mildly interested) and settled in to wait.

now, usually they monitor you for an hour to see if your contractions are regular, and then they check your cervix to see if you've progressed any. only this nurse decided after an hour that she wasn't going to check me, yet, because she didn't want to see that i hadn't progressed much and have to send me home. so she waited two hours and then checked me. and, shockingly, i was at 5 centimeters!

that was the first time that i started to really believe that it was for real. i mean, i'd been saying it was all day, but finally -- proof!

so, mark called his friend angie to get her to come up and keep us company, and we called a few other people to let them know that, yes, it really was time this time.

you know, we got to the hospital around 12:30ish, and i just laid there, wide awake, watching tv and talking to mark and angie and the nurses, and it was hours before i started pushing, but it really didn't seem so very long. i got a little bored at times, but then i'd look up and realize four hours had gone by since the last time i looked at the clock. kinda odd.

now, the first thing that happened that irritated mark was when they gave me the epidural. i had avoided medication until then, and i was really glad because i ended up being very alert for the whole thing, and i felt really good aside from the pain, but i had to have the epi because of the agreement with our doctor. well, the nurse came in and told mark that he had to leave while they administered the epidural.

it is so not a good idea to tell mark that he has to leave while one of his loved ones receives a shot. especially since i really didn't want him to go.

i still have no idea why he had to leave, but the nurse said that the anesthesiologist wouldn't do anything until everyone was gone. i asked every nurse i saw why that was, but they didn't know. well, it's just stupid, and frankly, it freaked me out. i wasn't scared at all until they said that mark had to leave, and then i started wondering what exactly they were going to do that he couldn't be there. and since i couldn't remember the epidural from seamus' birth, i came up with some pretty scary ideas about what it might be like. i started to freak out, and the nurse had to hold both of my hands.

i didn't get hysterical or anything, though. i controlled myself because i was afraid of them trying to restrain me and making it worse. there's nothing more horrible than being held down for a shot.

anyway, the epidural itself turned out to be nothing. they rub a little antiseptic on your back, there's a tiny poke from the local, and then it just feels like someone pressing his thumb hard on your back for a few seconds. they really shouldn't scare women by making their husbands leave over something so small.

after that, i couldn't feel the contractions anymore, so it was just a matter of lying around waiting. at one point i had some pain, and i told them it wasn't bothering me, but they added some medication to my epidural and it went away.

i was just afraid that if they got me too numb, i wouldn't feel it when it was time to push. that didn't happen. around 11 pm i was fully dilated and i started to push. it was sort of frustrating, because i'd push three times, and only the first seemed to do any good. and then hamish would slide right back to where he was before. stubborn little bugger.

but, i kept pushing. and pushing. i had to take one half-hour break when i had some more pain. the nurses kept asking me if it was pressure or pain, and i kept explaining to them that it was pressure, but it was so much pressure than it was painful. and then they'd ask me the same damned thing over again. i wanted to smack those two. what is so hard to understand about the words painful pressure? it was pressure that hurt like a $%*#!

the anesthesiologist's nurse came back and added more medication to the epidural, and when it had done its thing i started again.

then the two annoying nurses started another trick designed to piss me off. see, i could feel that on some pushes i wasn't pushing in the right area at all. but i was having trouble correcting this. their solution was to tell me to stop pushing "in [my] face." but every time i made a suggestion, like turning over and getting on my knees, they'd tell me no. and everytime i'd adjust myself to something that was helping, they'd make me stop it. they kept telling me not to lift my bottom off the bed. and then, when i told them not to stick their fingers in me to check for the baby while i was pushing, because it was breaking my concentration and screwing me all up, they said ok and kept on fucking doing it! i was getting ticked off.

finally they decided to take a dinner break, and another nurse came in. i told her right off that the other two were pissing me off and that i was going to do what i was going to do. she put up the stirrups, and i mentioned that i'd asked the other two for that two frickin' hours ago. she made some lame excuse and i rolled my eyes. then i put my feet in the stirrups, grabbed the handles that she put up for me, and ignored everything she said.

five minutes later, the baby crowned.

the next thing that got on my nerves was that the baby started to come out, and they told me to stop. i thought they had to be kidding. i could feel him starting to come out, they'd make me stop, and then i'd feel him go right back in. this happened twice. the third time i pretended like i had such a strong contraction that i couldn't help myself, and i just pushed him on out.

tell me to stop pushing when my son is half in and half out. you sit there with a baby sticking halfway out from between your legs and see if you want to stop pushing.

now, i complain, but the time that i was getting irritated by the nurses was really pretty short, and by the time that i pushed the baby out i was so happy that i'd done it, and that i felt so... much... less... completely out of myself than last time, that i was just happy. i was just laughing and talking and repeating over and over how good i felt. i was giddy.

i don't know how i looked, but i did not feel like women in the movies look after they've had a baby. i felt like they could have handed me the baby and i could have walked right out of the hospital and gone home right then.

heh, might have been easier if i had done that!

anyway. i didn't get to hold him right off because they had to stabilize him. i didn't catch the term they used, but essentially he'd had his first bowel movement before he came out, and they wanted to make sure he hadn't breathed that in. which i understand. that's kinda gross and i'm glad they made sure he was ok. the nice thing was that only took like five minutes, and then they let mark go get him and bring him to me.

he started nursing right off, so that was good. i've never had a problem nursing a baby, yet. well, except that they seem to consider me a human pacifier and never want to let go!

after an hour the nurse came and wanted to take hamish to the nursery to get cleaned up and stuff. we just looked at her like she was nuts until she went to get her supervisor, and then we looked at her like she was nuts. the supervisor tried to argue with us, saying that if we didn't want hamish to go to the nursery we had to set it up in advance, which our doctor didn't tell us (and, yes, we asked). but we weren't about to just gladly hand our baby over, so we stared at her until she sent a nurse down to bathe the baby in the room with us.

and, the nurse she sent down turned out to be dawn, our friend from church! so she got to be the first person ever to bathe the baby, isn't that cool? i was really hoping it would be her.

after another hour the nurses' supervisor came back and said that it was all well and good for us to keep our baby when they weren't busy, but now they were and they needed hamish to go to the nursery. again with the looking at her like she was nuts, and she went to get her supervisor. while she was gone i asked mark if he felt i was backing him up enough, because so far he'd done all of the talking, and he said he'd appreciate it if i spoke up, so i was the one to talk to the next woman.

i told her that i felt that she and her nurses were perfectly capable, but god had entrusted my baby to me, not the to hospital, and i was perfectly capable, too. see, i don't mind asking for help if i need it. but i don't just hand my children off every chance i get just because. taking care of them is my job, and i'll do it, thanks.

that's just me.

you know, i find this perfectly rational, but other people seem to think that i'm being unreasonable. so i thought of an analogy to help explain how i feel.

occasionally, when i've asked anna to do something, she'll try to do it and discover that she can't. it's something beyond her capabilities. so she'll enlist me, or her father, or aoghdan to help her. for example, if i ask her to clear the table. she may find that she can't carry the dishes and climb over the baby gate into the kitchen at the same time. so aoghdan will climb over the gate, and she'll hand him the dishes, and he'll put them in the sink.

and that's fine by me.

but another time i may ask anna to pick up a toy off of the floor and put it away. she's perfectly capable of doing this, but if she's involved in the tv, she'll reach over, pick up the toy, and hand it to aoghdan saying, "here, put this away." all the while her eyes never leave the television set.

that's not what i asked her to do. and that annoys me.

god entrusted four children into my care. he understands that i will sometimes need help with them. he understands that i sometimes need to enlist the help of doctors, teachers, and my mother-in-law. but if there is something that i am perfectly capable of doing myself, i think he expects me to do it.

i am perfectly capable of watching my own children all day most days. i occasionally need a break, or have other things to do that require me to enlist a babysitter, but for the most part i am capable of doing it. so i do.

i am perfectly capable of teaching my children to read and write and count. there may be a day when they need to learn something that i can't teach, and if/when that time comes, i will enlist someone who can teach them. until then, i will be their teacher.

and while i appreciate the assistance of the doctors and nurses who made it possible for me to safely give birth to my sons, i am perfectly capable of watching after a newborn in my hospital room. i don't need for him to go to the nursery, so he isn't going.

so yeah, i got pretty tired pretty quick of this little game that they were playing. at least once per shift some nurse tried to take my son to the nursery for some reason or another. they managed to get him out three times, and i'm still irritated about it. at least one of the times was because they told us that they didn't have a portable scale so it wasn't possible to weigh hamish in the room. well, mark saw a portable scale sitting outside of someone else's room a couple of hours later.

the other two times were when the pediatrician examined him (she promised us that it was just be an external exam, but that there was a piece of equipment she needed to use that the hospital would not allow her to remove from the nursery under any circumstances) and the circumcision (which we really expected).

they also flushed his bowels when he didn't have a bowel movement soon enough after the delivery. they caught mark half-asleep on that one, and he consented. later he was kind of annoyed about it, because they knew hamish didn't have a blockage. they even said they knew that because he'd had a movement in the womb. but, they did the same thing to me when i was in labour (i consented to it), and it really wasn't so bad, and i felt much better afterwards, so i'm not too worried. i just hope hamish felt the same way about it as i did.

and, they gave him eyedrops and the pku test. we couldn't get out of the pku test. state law. and mark consented to the eyedrops because he was "picking his battles."

still, i think we won more battles than the hospital did, considering how many times they tried to take the baby out of our room. tina said (oh, gosh! i forgot -- mark's sister, tina, went into labour the same day i did! mark ran into her boyfriend in the corridor when he went out for a smoke one time. she was a month early, though, so they stopped her labour.) anyway, she came by, and she told us about how when she had one of her kids at bellaire hospital, they didn't have rooming-in at all. so she just never set her son down. she slept with him on her chest. kind of hard to take a baby to the nursery if his mom never puts him down!

by tuesday morning, mark was so ready to leave. he had to run and get a tire fixed on our car (he got a flat when he went out to get us some sushi from the grocery the night before), and when he got back i was cleaning the room. the nurses came to take my blood pressure (which they do every thirty seconds), and it was high. they told me to go lay down, and i promised that i would as soon as i was done cleaning and packing. i wanted to go home, and my grandmother always taught me to clean a room before you leave it so that you don't leave anything behind.

well, i was packing, and then the baby needed to be nursed, and i hadn't had a chance to lay down when they came back. and my blood pressure was still high. they tried to give me some pain medication, but i assured them that i wasn't in any pain. finally i laid down with the baby for a bit, and eventually they let me go.

i don't understand. my blood pressure is usually a bit low. it was fine the whole time i was in the hospital. suddenly cleaning the room makes it go up? isn't that odd?

well, we finally got out of there around 5. we came home and spent a few minutes alone with the baby before pat showed up with the kids. mark sent anna and aoghdan off to one of the neighbor kid's birthday party, and we just kinda hung out.

seamus was really enthralled with the baby. he's even learned to say "baby." he says it like a question, points at hamish and goes, "baby?" it's so cute.

i love my family!

thank you, god!!!

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