I know, I know, I haven’t written anything for a long time,
and for that I apologize. It’s been hard
to motivate myself to write another post because It takes a lot of time, and I
know that my mom, and my wife will probably be the only 2 people who ever read
it. I think the only person following
this blog is, well, me. But, I promised
a lot of people to post our birth story.
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| Skyler Marie Phillips was born on February 23, 2014 at 10:19 (Or something) a.m. She weighed 8 lbs 13 oz. and was 21 Inches long. |
I suppose
most of you want to hear the whole story of how everything went down. So, here it goes. *Deep Breath*
On Feb. 22nd my wife woke up feeling crampy. Of course this caused me to become giddy as a
school girl, hoping that it would get worse, and that we would get things
going. Why was I in such a hurry, oh,
well, probably because Shelby was already 1 week overdue. At 41 weeks mommy was as uncomfortable as a
whale in a kiddy pool. She wasn’t
sleeping, and was just all around really miserable. So, when the pressure waves (Word for
Contractions in Hypnobabies) started on Saturday, I was elated. Not only because I was anxious to get Skyler
here, but, because I had felt like a failure the night before. You see, we tried to induce labor
naturally. In the only way that a male
could possibly contribute to this task, doing the thing that got us here in the
first place. Having nothing happen that
night made me feel like I had failed my wife.
But, luckily, obviously that’s why my wife went into labor the next day.
(Or so I hereby claim that’s the reason).
We went about our day normally, running errands, etc. Well, that night we were going to Michaels to
get some yarn so my wife could knit while she was in the hospital. (Yeah, you’d
think I was married to a 90 year old woman). Well, in the parking lot, all of a
sudden, my wife grabs my arm and says, “Wow, I’m peeing my pants, woooowwww….”
And we thought to ourselves, let the games begin.
My wife has wanted to do a natural birth her entire life,
which is convenient because my entire family makes a camp full of hippies look
like business men in suits, when it comes to birth. So, we started the intense journey of doing
this natural birth. Shelby’s Pressure waves started at around 6:30 pm Saturday
night, and lasted ALL FREAKIN’ NIGHT! These
things weren’t just like every 10 minutes apart. Once her water broke, she started having them
like every 4 minutes apart, then 3 minutes, etc… Let me just say, my wife is a fricken’ birth
monster (2nd Cousin to the cookie monster) She went into labor mode and I didn’t know
who this woman was anymore. It was
totally different than I was expecting, she was like tromping around our
apartment all night, walking back and forth from our family room to bedroom and
back again. She did labor in the bathtub
for a while, and that was okay, but basically, there’s nothing you can do
kids. I don’t care what classes you’ve
taken, videos you’ve watched, people you’ve talked to, whatever, you will labor
however you NEED to labor. There is
absolutely NO right way to do this. You
do what you gotta do. And she did. I’ve never been so proud of anyone in my
entire life. I’ve also never felt more
helpless in my entire life. There is
nothing I could do other than pour warm water over her in the bathtub; or walk
back and forth with her in our apartment.
I couldn’t take the pain away, and that was hard for me. But I did my best in the capacity that I was
assigned, and it was exhausting, but somewhat fulfilling, because every
pressure wave meant Skyler was a little closer.
My sister Megan who is a Doula, helped a lot during this time. She made it a lot easier for me, if you’re
thinking of using a Doula, I highly recommend using my sister. If you want her website address, just let me
know in the comments.
TO THE HOSPITAL
At around 4:00 a.m. Sunday morning, after a long night of
laboring, we figured we MUST be at like 9 of course, right? Well, we got there, and Shelby was a 2. Yeah, a 2.
I wanted to scream. All that damn
work for a 2? Luckily, since her water
had broken, the hospital didn’t make us go home, but admitted us. We labored for about 4 more hours, and she
moved to a 5 1/2. I’m not gonna lie,
when our midwife told us she was a 5 ½, I started crying. I don’t know why, I guess it was partly
exhaustion, and relief that this was actually happening this night. And I was also just so dang proud of my wife
for doing this. Then, my wife went into warp drive, and her womb opened up like
the black hole at the end of Avengers, you know, the one where all the aliens
come through to attack New York? But I
digress. She went from a 7 to a 9 in
like 30 minutes. What was alarming
though is that her body started bearing down at 7 1/2. And it was hard. I haven’t heard that much intense pushing
since my last trip to Tucanos meat bar.
The midwife was able to kind of mold Shelby’s cervix around Skyler’s
head to speed things up. We didn’t love
this (Cause we’re hippies) but, a lot of that went out the window when we were
in the moment.
We had some bad news at this point however, and it added
some stress to the situation that I really hated. We wanted to do Delayed Cord clamping, and
immediate skin to skin; but, because Skyler was 41 weeks, she had taken a crap
in the womb, and had most likely eaten it.
Kids are gross. So, they would
have to clamp and cut the cord quickly to then take her to a little table to “pump”
the Mekonium (poop) out of her lungs.
This was horrible news, but we were hoping she wouldn’t have any signs
of Mek which would make it so we didn’t have to do that.
We were finally at the point where Shelby could start
pushing. This was insane. I kept looking at the secret passageway that
my daughter had to fit through, and I was convinced there was no way she was
going to fit through it. However, my stud
muffin of a wife pushed for about 30 minutes, maybe, I don’t know, and
amazingly Sky’s head came through, along with her arm, haha, she always keeps
her hands at her face, even in the womb.
And she basically came shooting out, along with a lot of green liquid,
which meant Mek was present. They took her
to the table to start working on her, and of course, I’m like quietly crapping
my pants in anticipation for her to make some kind of noise, after a couple
minutes, they did indeed pump some mek she had aspirated, and I was able to
take her to her waiting mommy. Well, the
second I turned around from the table, I see my wife, hemorrhaging on the
bed. At this point baby was fine, but I
had a new set of worries, where I was sure I was going to be raising this child
on my own.
When it really got bad was when the midwife was yanking on
the umbilical cord, and it snapped off.
I wanted to head butt her, but she is a she. Then she said “Can someone go get the doctor”
in the kind of voice where you know she’s trying to stay calm but inside she’s
taking a massive panic dumb That’s right
when I turned to her and said, “Is my wife going to die”
Luckily Shelby was able to push the placenta out, and we got
all of it out luckily. We were able to
stop the bleeding, and get her all sewn up.
She tore internally, but she’s doing much better now two weeks later.
After all this, even though the birth didn’t really turn out
the way we had planned, it wasn’t as glamorous and calm as some of the
hypnobaby videos we had seen, and we even had to have some interventions that
we never would have wanted before, we had a healthy, perfect little human being
in our possession, and it was glorious.
Since this is so freaken long, I’ll post another blog soon
on the weeks after the birth, I’ll leave it at this for the birth story portion
of our adventure.
Please comment if you actually read this, I’d like to know
that I’m not writing these blogs in vain.
It helps motivate me to blog more often if more people are actually
reading what I write.
Thanks, and stay tuned for the next blog soon!
You guys, our baby is unreal. She is the only thing, I can think of, that can poop on everything around her, and still remain adorable.
As you can see in her pictures, she is a little chunker. She is so squishy and adorable, and healthy. I give thanks daily that my baby girl is healthy. God bless those who have to deal with health challenges with their babies, I don't know if I could handle that. She also so smart, and seems to be ahead of the game in her development. She was pretty much crawling around at 6 months, and could roll around earlier than that. Now, at 7 months, she can crawl wherever she wants so that she can then bonk her head on whatever it is she wants to climb up on to stand up. Yeah, she's already standing up by herself with the help of whatever is in front of her. She has already had two bottom teeth since she was like 5 months old, and she's currently getting her top teeth now, which sucks. Teething babies are not as much fun. She's 17 lbs at this point. She talks all the time, I have a feeling she'll be an early talker, but you never really know, to be honest. You can see her little brain developing literally everyday. She is doing new things all the time, things that you think to yourself, holy crap, is she supposed to already be doing that? It's pretty awesome, and kind of sad too to see certain stages you have grown to love so much pass you by, and become a thing of the past. I can totally understand the term "baby hungry" now. I see why people are willing to put up with the trauma of having another one of these things again within a year or two. But, for now, I'm pretty content. :)
