Tallulah Blair, Part One: The Beginning
Wednesday, January 23rd: It's my last day at work before maternity leave. Tallulah is not due until Friday, but I have been 3 cm dilated for almost a week now and having consistent mild contractions today. She'll probably come late & make Mama and Daddy wait a little longer, which is fine. I just need to be home for about two days before she gets here & have myself a little staycation. Take a little time to finish up her nursery, clean the house, and bounce on my yoga ball to coax her out. Binge on some Netflix. Get my mind right for the massive change that's about to rock our little world. Enjoy those last solitary moments that I'll get for a long, long time. I probably could wait until my due date to leave work, but instinct tells me to do otherwise.
Wednesday night: I go home in a great mood that my three months of leave has begun. Tofu is draining and drying out, waiting to be fried up and put into a stir fry, which is one of our weekly regulars. I keep my phone on the kitchen counter as I chop broccoli & zucchini so I can time my contractions on my pregnancy app. They're lasting for about 30 seconds and meandering between 5 & 10 minutes apart, but they aren't painful at all. This must be false labor. Ben's not home from work yet and I'm starting to grow a little anxious. What if this is the real deal and baby girl is on her way?
I put Maggie on her leash and decide to go for a walk (or a waddle, rather). Walking helps initiate labor, after all. We don't even make it to the end of our driveway before Maggie catches a whiff of three deer across the road in the woods. She takes off running & yanks her leash out of my hands, and chases the deer up the little mountain across the dirt road, with her leash trailing behind her. Eventually she loses track of the deer, and I can see her standing still, sniffing something on the ground. Maggie is still young & loves to play....and when we try to wrangle her up when she gets loose, it's the perfect game for her to run away even further and show us just how far & fast she can run. But here I am, bigly pregnant, and not really feeling up to her game. Ben's almost an hour late at this point. He'll be here any minute, I tell myself, and he can deal with Maggie. I can just stand nearby and watch where she goes, to make sure she doesn't get out of eyesight; and just maybe she won't run away any further. I wait, and wait, and worry, expecting to hear his truck trudging down the road any moment now, but the minutes pass, and I continue to gently contract. Ben has already texted me to let me know he's going to be late tonight, but I have not looked at my phone, so I'm unaware. After what seemed like forever, Maggie decides to be a good girl and walk back to me. Yay, crisis averted! Ben finally gets home and we eat our delicious tofu stirfry over Ramen, and fall asleep in the living room. I wake him up and make him come to bed, which I typically don't do. I tell him I need him beside me in case anything happens throughout the night.
We go to bed, but I don't sleep. The contractions keep coming, but they're not getting stronger. I don't bother timing them, under the assumption that when labor begins, I'll know. I get up at 2:00am to go to the bathroom and pee; honestly, I should have just made a pallet in the bathroom to sleep on, considering I was there every 30 minutes. I see that I've lost my mucous plug, again. Sigh. This happened a week ago and was obviously no indication of imminent labor, to my disappointment. I stand up from the toilet and hear a loud splat on the floor. Deer in the headlights. I ask myself, I literally just peed so there's no way that's pee, right? Pregnancy is weird, I tell myself. I'm not in pain, so it couldn't have been my water breaking. Total denial. I hear the words of my midwife repeating in my head. "You'll know when it's time. Don't bother coming to the hospital until you're contracting so bad that you can't even speak". Well then, it's not time. I'll go back to sleep until it is.
I walk to my bed and feel a large trickle running down my leg. Okay... so maybe that is my water breaking? I don't bother waking Ben up to tell him; I don't want to jinx it.
Thursday, January 24th: Morning rolls around, and I wake up feeling really..... gross. Something isn't right, but still the contractions aren't very strong, though they are getting closer in frequency. The game plan is that Ben will go to work for an hour or two while I stay at home and get the hospital bag ready to go. I'll call the midwife when the office opens to find out what to do. And what's the midwife say? "Get here, now!". Ben grabs us some Chic-fil-a breakfast before rushing home. I'm pacing the floor when he gets home. We pack the truck, crate Maggie, and walk out the door, unsure whether we would return with Tallulah when we walked through the door next. I still wasn't quite convinced, though with every step, I squished with the warm liquid that had raised our baby for the last nine months. So much for those two days of peace & quiet awaiting her due date!
We arrive at the midwives' office around 10am to find out if this was it. Immediately, I am hooked to a fetal monitor to check on the baby & my contractions. The machine is supposed to pick up on contractions so they can be timed, but the nurse isn't finding any contractions, which is making us even more nervous. We can hear Tallulah's heartbeat racing loudly on the monitor. Ben asks the nurse, "Can the volume on this thing be adjusted?", and she turns it down, which helps a little, but we still sit in silence, anxiously awaiting some news. After about an hour of being monitored, we're taken back to another room, where I'll be tested for premature rupture of my water. As I'm lying on the examination table, I feel a really big squish, and am immediately embarrassed that I'm probably just constantly pissing myself in true preggo fashion, and will inevitably have a walk of shame as I leave the office and head home, not in labor, and covered in my own waste. I'm almost in tears at this realization. My favorite midwife Delrose comes in, cheery as always, which puts me mildly at ease. I ashamedly tell her about the puddle I'm lying in, and she lets out a concerned "Oh". She swabs me and confirms it - amniotic fluid. I can't hold back the tears any longer. The time has come. The midwife tells me, "Now, go deliver that baby! Push hard! You have a big reputation to uphold as one of our patients. Go make us proud." So, to the hospital we go, pumped up and ready to deliver this baby.
We're escorted to our birthing room around 11am, where we will bring our daughter into the world. The midwife on call, Sandra, comes into the room after I'm changed into my hospital gown. She mentions one of those words I'd hoped to never hear: "induction". I feel gutted. For nine months, I've stalked all the pregnancy & parenting online forums, and talked to all the moms who've been here before me. Most will say that they wouldn't wish an induction on their worse enemy, and now I can agree. I ask Sandra if I can wait a few hours on the induction to see if my body would naturally progress, and she isn't having it. I'm on a strict timeline to deliver this baby without a c-section, due to increased risk of infection with my water already being broken. She asks if I want the epidural now or later, and I opt to labor with the Pitocin for a while before getting the epidural. Ben & I walk the halls with our friend "Slim" (this is what the nurse called the IV pole) as the Pitocin gets into my system. All is good in our little world, at least for about two hours; family is on their way to the hospital and we are enjoying ourselves parading in the hospital halls. Then out of nowhere my body starts to do its job. Immediately, I am in immense pain. I tell Ben I need to get back to the hospital room, that it's getting serious. I moan & groan through the waves, leaned up against the window, which is nice and cold to my forehead. Ben tries to joke about the bad drivers on Prince Avenue he could see from the window, but his humor was lost on me. The midwife comes to check on me, and I tell her it's time for the epidural. She says it will be about 45 minutes, which was the longest 45 minutes of my life. During that time, Ben lets me know our family has arrived and they're in the waiting room. I tell him I can't have company right now. I can't let them see me in this pain. I need to work through this alone. Just until I can get some pain relief.
Finally, the anesthesiologist comes into the room. By that time, my contractions are so strong that I can't hold still. "Ball yourself up like an angry cat", the nurse tells me. What is an angry cat? I'm allergic to cats & am more of a dog person anyway, so I don't know. So I hunch my back over as far as I can. Ben sits in front of me, pale and scared after catching a glimpse of the needle - thankfully, I did not. The anesthesiologist is poking around in my spine with the giant needle in the short breaks inbetween contractions. I can feel him shaking his head in disappointment as he's saying "Nope, that's not good". I can only focus on the contractions so I have zero ability to absorb the fact that he's failing at giving me the epidural; although I did wonder if I would have to deliver without it. I see the fear on Ben's face. After it was all over, he told me blood was flying across the room each time the anesthesiologist stuck the needle in me. After another 30 minutes, success. I am so incredibly relieved to the point that I'm laughing at how numb I am. The contractions have faded away (at least, according to my newly medicated nervous system). So, we call in the troops. We allow family in and for a while, I labor painlessly & enjoy our company. I drink some chicken broth (since I wasn't allowed solids - wish I'd known that beforehand because I would have scarfed down Ben's uneaten Chic-fil-a in a heartbeat when he'd offered it on the way to the hospital... he was too nervous to eat) which results in some gnarly heartburn later in the evening. My sisters-in-law suggested I try propping my legs up on a peanut ball, which I knew nothing about, but it ended up helping me progress nicely with no effort on my behalf. My legs are practically deadweight, so Laura & Ben had to pick them up to set me up on the ball. Laura, Ben & Sarah took turns giving me pressure on my hips and feeding me water, and coaching me on. At this point, I had to pee so bad (despite having a catheter) that I wouldn't let anyone refer to my contractions as 'waves' or anything water-related anymore. I'd been guzzling water constantly and the catheter wasn't getting rid of it quick enough.
Around 8pm or so, shit starts to get real. I'm feeling the contractions again, and they are non-stop. The playful banter in the room evolves to what I perceived as somber silence, as I worked my way through the contractions, up and down the waves. Our family members are beginning to make bets on when she'll arrive. The midwife's guess? By midnight. My guess? After midnight. Everyone else? Way before midnight. This baby's coming. The midwife checks me and I'm 7cm dilated. Wow, major progress. She says she'll be back in an hour or so to re-check me; she thinks I'll be ready to push by then. And boy, was I ever. From 8 to 9, I felt the most painful tugging on my rear end. It felt like I was going to poop my entire intestines out. I joked, "Are ya'll sure this baby isn't going to come out my butthole?". I truly tried to keep my sense of humor the best I could, but I was starting to break. I begged my family to go get the midwife around 8:45; I couldn't take it any longer. I needed to push.
Sometime between 8:45 & 9, my room gets transformed into a sterile delivery area. The midwife is putting on her gloves and mask, and my feet are put into stirrups. Suddenly, it's like I'm on the table of Dexter Morgan's kill room. I'm 9cm dilated. Holy f%@#, this is it! My sisters-in-law are talking quietly among themselves, discussing that they needed to leave for the waiting room. Our plan was that only our moms & Ben would see Tallulah's birth, but his sisters had been so awesome during my labor that I wanted them to stay and continue helping while I pushed, if they wanted to. So, my stellar delivery team assembles. Laura and my mother hold my legs. Ben tells me he loves me over & over, as he holds my hand and an emesis bag at my head, catching the vomit that I can't hold back (I'd been warning everyone that puke was coming for a while, to be fair). There's a mirror at the end of the bed, which I've requested to view her birth, but I wasn't even able to open my eyes. At some point baby's hearbeat began to drop. I heard whispers in the room, "is she okay?", but I blissfully ignored them. We were gonna be okay. (Her heart rate was dropping because her umbilical cord was wrapped around her ankle, which we learned a few minutes later).
The next 15 minutes are a beautiful, exciting blur. Everyone is cheering me on as I push. "That's it! Good work!". I push once, and then again. The midwife says, "Dad, are you catching the baby? Get down here and scrub up!". I receive one final kiss on the forehead from him and he goes to the end of the bed, where our baby will soon emerge into the world, right into the arms of her daddy. My mom-in-law takes his place and holds my hand. "I need you to give me a good, strong push, Meagan!", the midwife yells, as I'm screaming & writhing in pain. Epidural, my ass, I think to myself, as I pushed with all my strength. I feel her move closer... I feel the ring of fire. The room erupts with cheers. "There she is!!". I hear Ben say, "I see her, she's coming, Meagan! You're doing so good!". Then from the midwife, "That's it, just one more little push!", and I obeyed. After four pushes at 9:19, in an instant, our world was completely rocked, as we heard the most precious little cries of our daughter. The emotion.... they tell you about the emotion, but you never really understand until you feel it. The love. The pride. It's everything; life itself. Now I held our entire world right in my arms, as she looked up at me, and all I could see was her daddy in her eyes. Those same gorgeous blue eyes that caught my attention some 11 years ago, those same blue eyes that looked into mine as he said "I do" two years ago, now examined this fresh, new world, as she laid on my warm chest, quietly crying and taking in her surroundings. I thought I knew love when I met her daddy all those years ago, but nothing could ever compare to the love I'd developed for her in an instant. She is the perfect next chapter in our love story.
............. to be continued <3
Wednesday night: I go home in a great mood that my three months of leave has begun. Tofu is draining and drying out, waiting to be fried up and put into a stir fry, which is one of our weekly regulars. I keep my phone on the kitchen counter as I chop broccoli & zucchini so I can time my contractions on my pregnancy app. They're lasting for about 30 seconds and meandering between 5 & 10 minutes apart, but they aren't painful at all. This must be false labor. Ben's not home from work yet and I'm starting to grow a little anxious. What if this is the real deal and baby girl is on her way?
I put Maggie on her leash and decide to go for a walk (or a waddle, rather). Walking helps initiate labor, after all. We don't even make it to the end of our driveway before Maggie catches a whiff of three deer across the road in the woods. She takes off running & yanks her leash out of my hands, and chases the deer up the little mountain across the dirt road, with her leash trailing behind her. Eventually she loses track of the deer, and I can see her standing still, sniffing something on the ground. Maggie is still young & loves to play....and when we try to wrangle her up when she gets loose, it's the perfect game for her to run away even further and show us just how far & fast she can run. But here I am, bigly pregnant, and not really feeling up to her game. Ben's almost an hour late at this point. He'll be here any minute, I tell myself, and he can deal with Maggie. I can just stand nearby and watch where she goes, to make sure she doesn't get out of eyesight; and just maybe she won't run away any further. I wait, and wait, and worry, expecting to hear his truck trudging down the road any moment now, but the minutes pass, and I continue to gently contract. Ben has already texted me to let me know he's going to be late tonight, but I have not looked at my phone, so I'm unaware. After what seemed like forever, Maggie decides to be a good girl and walk back to me. Yay, crisis averted! Ben finally gets home and we eat our delicious tofu stirfry over Ramen, and fall asleep in the living room. I wake him up and make him come to bed, which I typically don't do. I tell him I need him beside me in case anything happens throughout the night.
We go to bed, but I don't sleep. The contractions keep coming, but they're not getting stronger. I don't bother timing them, under the assumption that when labor begins, I'll know. I get up at 2:00am to go to the bathroom and pee; honestly, I should have just made a pallet in the bathroom to sleep on, considering I was there every 30 minutes. I see that I've lost my mucous plug, again. Sigh. This happened a week ago and was obviously no indication of imminent labor, to my disappointment. I stand up from the toilet and hear a loud splat on the floor. Deer in the headlights. I ask myself, I literally just peed so there's no way that's pee, right? Pregnancy is weird, I tell myself. I'm not in pain, so it couldn't have been my water breaking. Total denial. I hear the words of my midwife repeating in my head. "You'll know when it's time. Don't bother coming to the hospital until you're contracting so bad that you can't even speak". Well then, it's not time. I'll go back to sleep until it is.
I walk to my bed and feel a large trickle running down my leg. Okay... so maybe that is my water breaking? I don't bother waking Ben up to tell him; I don't want to jinx it.
Thursday, January 24th: Morning rolls around, and I wake up feeling really..... gross. Something isn't right, but still the contractions aren't very strong, though they are getting closer in frequency. The game plan is that Ben will go to work for an hour or two while I stay at home and get the hospital bag ready to go. I'll call the midwife when the office opens to find out what to do. And what's the midwife say? "Get here, now!". Ben grabs us some Chic-fil-a breakfast before rushing home. I'm pacing the floor when he gets home. We pack the truck, crate Maggie, and walk out the door, unsure whether we would return with Tallulah when we walked through the door next. I still wasn't quite convinced, though with every step, I squished with the warm liquid that had raised our baby for the last nine months. So much for those two days of peace & quiet awaiting her due date!
We arrive at the midwives' office around 10am to find out if this was it. Immediately, I am hooked to a fetal monitor to check on the baby & my contractions. The machine is supposed to pick up on contractions so they can be timed, but the nurse isn't finding any contractions, which is making us even more nervous. We can hear Tallulah's heartbeat racing loudly on the monitor. Ben asks the nurse, "Can the volume on this thing be adjusted?", and she turns it down, which helps a little, but we still sit in silence, anxiously awaiting some news. After about an hour of being monitored, we're taken back to another room, where I'll be tested for premature rupture of my water. As I'm lying on the examination table, I feel a really big squish, and am immediately embarrassed that I'm probably just constantly pissing myself in true preggo fashion, and will inevitably have a walk of shame as I leave the office and head home, not in labor, and covered in my own waste. I'm almost in tears at this realization. My favorite midwife Delrose comes in, cheery as always, which puts me mildly at ease. I ashamedly tell her about the puddle I'm lying in, and she lets out a concerned "Oh". She swabs me and confirms it - amniotic fluid. I can't hold back the tears any longer. The time has come. The midwife tells me, "Now, go deliver that baby! Push hard! You have a big reputation to uphold as one of our patients. Go make us proud." So, to the hospital we go, pumped up and ready to deliver this baby.
We're escorted to our birthing room around 11am, where we will bring our daughter into the world. The midwife on call, Sandra, comes into the room after I'm changed into my hospital gown. She mentions one of those words I'd hoped to never hear: "induction". I feel gutted. For nine months, I've stalked all the pregnancy & parenting online forums, and talked to all the moms who've been here before me. Most will say that they wouldn't wish an induction on their worse enemy, and now I can agree. I ask Sandra if I can wait a few hours on the induction to see if my body would naturally progress, and she isn't having it. I'm on a strict timeline to deliver this baby without a c-section, due to increased risk of infection with my water already being broken. She asks if I want the epidural now or later, and I opt to labor with the Pitocin for a while before getting the epidural. Ben & I walk the halls with our friend "Slim" (this is what the nurse called the IV pole) as the Pitocin gets into my system. All is good in our little world, at least for about two hours; family is on their way to the hospital and we are enjoying ourselves parading in the hospital halls. Then out of nowhere my body starts to do its job. Immediately, I am in immense pain. I tell Ben I need to get back to the hospital room, that it's getting serious. I moan & groan through the waves, leaned up against the window, which is nice and cold to my forehead. Ben tries to joke about the bad drivers on Prince Avenue he could see from the window, but his humor was lost on me. The midwife comes to check on me, and I tell her it's time for the epidural. She says it will be about 45 minutes, which was the longest 45 minutes of my life. During that time, Ben lets me know our family has arrived and they're in the waiting room. I tell him I can't have company right now. I can't let them see me in this pain. I need to work through this alone. Just until I can get some pain relief.
Finally, the anesthesiologist comes into the room. By that time, my contractions are so strong that I can't hold still. "Ball yourself up like an angry cat", the nurse tells me. What is an angry cat? I'm allergic to cats & am more of a dog person anyway, so I don't know. So I hunch my back over as far as I can. Ben sits in front of me, pale and scared after catching a glimpse of the needle - thankfully, I did not. The anesthesiologist is poking around in my spine with the giant needle in the short breaks inbetween contractions. I can feel him shaking his head in disappointment as he's saying "Nope, that's not good". I can only focus on the contractions so I have zero ability to absorb the fact that he's failing at giving me the epidural; although I did wonder if I would have to deliver without it. I see the fear on Ben's face. After it was all over, he told me blood was flying across the room each time the anesthesiologist stuck the needle in me. After another 30 minutes, success. I am so incredibly relieved to the point that I'm laughing at how numb I am. The contractions have faded away (at least, according to my newly medicated nervous system). So, we call in the troops. We allow family in and for a while, I labor painlessly & enjoy our company. I drink some chicken broth (since I wasn't allowed solids - wish I'd known that beforehand because I would have scarfed down Ben's uneaten Chic-fil-a in a heartbeat when he'd offered it on the way to the hospital... he was too nervous to eat) which results in some gnarly heartburn later in the evening. My sisters-in-law suggested I try propping my legs up on a peanut ball, which I knew nothing about, but it ended up helping me progress nicely with no effort on my behalf. My legs are practically deadweight, so Laura & Ben had to pick them up to set me up on the ball. Laura, Ben & Sarah took turns giving me pressure on my hips and feeding me water, and coaching me on. At this point, I had to pee so bad (despite having a catheter) that I wouldn't let anyone refer to my contractions as 'waves' or anything water-related anymore. I'd been guzzling water constantly and the catheter wasn't getting rid of it quick enough.
Around 8pm or so, shit starts to get real. I'm feeling the contractions again, and they are non-stop. The playful banter in the room evolves to what I perceived as somber silence, as I worked my way through the contractions, up and down the waves. Our family members are beginning to make bets on when she'll arrive. The midwife's guess? By midnight. My guess? After midnight. Everyone else? Way before midnight. This baby's coming. The midwife checks me and I'm 7cm dilated. Wow, major progress. She says she'll be back in an hour or so to re-check me; she thinks I'll be ready to push by then. And boy, was I ever. From 8 to 9, I felt the most painful tugging on my rear end. It felt like I was going to poop my entire intestines out. I joked, "Are ya'll sure this baby isn't going to come out my butthole?". I truly tried to keep my sense of humor the best I could, but I was starting to break. I begged my family to go get the midwife around 8:45; I couldn't take it any longer. I needed to push.
Sometime between 8:45 & 9, my room gets transformed into a sterile delivery area. The midwife is putting on her gloves and mask, and my feet are put into stirrups. Suddenly, it's like I'm on the table of Dexter Morgan's kill room. I'm 9cm dilated. Holy f%@#, this is it! My sisters-in-law are talking quietly among themselves, discussing that they needed to leave for the waiting room. Our plan was that only our moms & Ben would see Tallulah's birth, but his sisters had been so awesome during my labor that I wanted them to stay and continue helping while I pushed, if they wanted to. So, my stellar delivery team assembles. Laura and my mother hold my legs. Ben tells me he loves me over & over, as he holds my hand and an emesis bag at my head, catching the vomit that I can't hold back (I'd been warning everyone that puke was coming for a while, to be fair). There's a mirror at the end of the bed, which I've requested to view her birth, but I wasn't even able to open my eyes. At some point baby's hearbeat began to drop. I heard whispers in the room, "is she okay?", but I blissfully ignored them. We were gonna be okay. (Her heart rate was dropping because her umbilical cord was wrapped around her ankle, which we learned a few minutes later).
The next 15 minutes are a beautiful, exciting blur. Everyone is cheering me on as I push. "That's it! Good work!". I push once, and then again. The midwife says, "Dad, are you catching the baby? Get down here and scrub up!". I receive one final kiss on the forehead from him and he goes to the end of the bed, where our baby will soon emerge into the world, right into the arms of her daddy. My mom-in-law takes his place and holds my hand. "I need you to give me a good, strong push, Meagan!", the midwife yells, as I'm screaming & writhing in pain. Epidural, my ass, I think to myself, as I pushed with all my strength. I feel her move closer... I feel the ring of fire. The room erupts with cheers. "There she is!!". I hear Ben say, "I see her, she's coming, Meagan! You're doing so good!". Then from the midwife, "That's it, just one more little push!", and I obeyed. After four pushes at 9:19, in an instant, our world was completely rocked, as we heard the most precious little cries of our daughter. The emotion.... they tell you about the emotion, but you never really understand until you feel it. The love. The pride. It's everything; life itself. Now I held our entire world right in my arms, as she looked up at me, and all I could see was her daddy in her eyes. Those same gorgeous blue eyes that caught my attention some 11 years ago, those same blue eyes that looked into mine as he said "I do" two years ago, now examined this fresh, new world, as she laid on my warm chest, quietly crying and taking in her surroundings. I thought I knew love when I met her daddy all those years ago, but nothing could ever compare to the love I'd developed for her in an instant. She is the perfect next chapter in our love story.
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| Tallulah Blair 7 pounds & 6 ounces 20 inches long 9:19pm, January 24th, 2019 |
............. to be continued <3
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