Let's just start off by saying, what a great pregnancy! Oh man! Even though pregnancy is basically one of my Least Favorite Things- even *I* had to admit this one was pretty darn smooth. Coincidentally ( as we would so find out) the only thing I had really to complain about was the INTENSE indigestion and heart burn that plagued me from the second trimester all the way until Justice was all the way out of me. ( seriously I had heart burn and contractions all at the same lovely time) Annnnnnyway, I started all that to say, the pregnancy was pretty great and I couldn't have asked for a smoother ride. It was so great, in fact, that the day before my due date I went for a nature walk with a friend, I did a craft cooking project with Ransom and I felt relatively calm ( other than really really really wanting to have a baby!) I even had some contractions before bed, but the soon faded and I slept the night away. And then around 6:30am on my due date-October 27th- I woke up with REAL contractions. They weren't particularly painful, they were just more intense and 'different'. I got up with Brett and the kids and Brett and I discussed whether he should go to work or not. My contractions were still pretty far spread and I was petrified of having a "false alarm". In the end we decided he would just go into work late and see what the morning held. I then went for a walk around our neighborhood....something I had been doing a lot of the last week....it had been rainy and a little cooler that week, but I hadn't cared! I had put on my rain jacket and hit the streets and yet it hadn't seemed to work in inducing labor...till now. This time I walked for about an hour and my contractions went from 7 minutes apart to 5 minutes apart. I decided we could safely go to the hospital without any shame of false labor labels ( I seem to care ridiculously too much about my pregnancy labor street cred in this regard-who knows why!). Lucky for us Brett's brother Josh has been staying with us for several months so we had built in childcare right in the house! So we kissed Ransom and Tabitha, wished Josh good luck and headed to the hospital....
I will now fast forward through the 2 hours of triage and get to the part where they admitted me and we were put in a very nice and large delivery room. It was now around 1pm and I was very much good and ready to have my epidural. My birth plan looked very much like this "get yo self some drugs"...and so I was happily gratified when the anesthesiologist came a little sooner than expected-I'd been told he was down the hall with another patient but it turns out that other patient had last minute thoughts of grandeur ( or she saw the giant needle) and passed on the epidural! Hooray! I got mine sooner!! And while it didn't quiiiite seem to be taking away all the pain away, I felt SO MUCH BETTER and we continued on "laboring" for a few more hours. My doctor showed up, informed me that he was leaving at 4:30 to pick up his daughter for ballet class so I'd need to kindly hurry up the process ( ha!) and so as he talked to Brett about some pastor guy he really likes from New York he broke my water without even so much as a warning. I decided then and there that I didn't care that much about him delivering my child and was secretly fine with the fact that 4:30 ticked passed without the need to push. However, by 5pm I was MORE THAN READY to push out a baby-and in fact, I was pretty sure that epidural wasn't doing a DARN THING. Boo!! Once again the drugs were failing me and I was going to have to push out a baby with all the pain that nature intended. UNFAIR!
Ahhh, such is life-literally. And so with that awful realization and a kindly older doctor who wasn't much on talking but turned out to be an excellent coach, I pushed out the most giant baby in the world. Ok, not really but let's just say I made noises I didn't know were possible.
However-sidenote-remember that women down the hall who had turned down the epidural earlier in the day?! Well, she regretted it. She regretted it big time. She regretted it so loud and with so many curse words we ALL knew how much she regretted it. eek! So, yes, I made some very interesting animal noises that I am thankful were not recorded for posterity-but at least I didn't make sailors blush or anything. So win.
And yes, Justice was not the largest baby in the world, but he was surprisingly large! I hadn't really been measuring particularly big but at 17:06, weighting a hefty 8 pounds 14 ounces, 20 and 3/4 inches long, Justice Tirian came into the world like a lion! Yelling and mad, he was blue which worried me, but he eventually turned to a more normal red color, but he continued to cry a very horse and mad cry for much much longer than Ransom or Tabitha, and I actually started to worry that we'd gotten ourselves a "spirited" child right off the bat! But even though he cried a lot the first two hours or so, he eventually calmed down and we could set about admiring his super long fingers and toes, his full head of black hair and just how much he looked JUST LIKE his brother and his sister ( seriously, the gene pool is like a puddle over here!).
And just as with his brother and sister we found his "birth time" verse in John 17:6 to be very fitting and encouraging:
I will now fast forward through the 2 hours of triage and get to the part where they admitted me and we were put in a very nice and large delivery room. It was now around 1pm and I was very much good and ready to have my epidural. My birth plan looked very much like this "get yo self some drugs"...and so I was happily gratified when the anesthesiologist came a little sooner than expected-I'd been told he was down the hall with another patient but it turns out that other patient had last minute thoughts of grandeur ( or she saw the giant needle) and passed on the epidural! Hooray! I got mine sooner!! And while it didn't quiiiite seem to be taking away all the pain away, I felt SO MUCH BETTER and we continued on "laboring" for a few more hours. My doctor showed up, informed me that he was leaving at 4:30 to pick up his daughter for ballet class so I'd need to kindly hurry up the process ( ha!) and so as he talked to Brett about some pastor guy he really likes from New York he broke my water without even so much as a warning. I decided then and there that I didn't care that much about him delivering my child and was secretly fine with the fact that 4:30 ticked passed without the need to push. However, by 5pm I was MORE THAN READY to push out a baby-and in fact, I was pretty sure that epidural wasn't doing a DARN THING. Boo!! Once again the drugs were failing me and I was going to have to push out a baby with all the pain that nature intended. UNFAIR!
Ahhh, such is life-literally. And so with that awful realization and a kindly older doctor who wasn't much on talking but turned out to be an excellent coach, I pushed out the most giant baby in the world. Ok, not really but let's just say I made noises I didn't know were possible.
However-sidenote-remember that women down the hall who had turned down the epidural earlier in the day?! Well, she regretted it. She regretted it big time. She regretted it so loud and with so many curse words we ALL knew how much she regretted it. eek! So, yes, I made some very interesting animal noises that I am thankful were not recorded for posterity-but at least I didn't make sailors blush or anything. So win.
And yes, Justice was not the largest baby in the world, but he was surprisingly large! I hadn't really been measuring particularly big but at 17:06, weighting a hefty 8 pounds 14 ounces, 20 and 3/4 inches long, Justice Tirian came into the world like a lion! Yelling and mad, he was blue which worried me, but he eventually turned to a more normal red color, but he continued to cry a very horse and mad cry for much much longer than Ransom or Tabitha, and I actually started to worry that we'd gotten ourselves a "spirited" child right off the bat! But even though he cried a lot the first two hours or so, he eventually calmed down and we could set about admiring his super long fingers and toes, his full head of black hair and just how much he looked JUST LIKE his brother and his sister ( seriously, the gene pool is like a puddle over here!).
And just as with his brother and sister we found his "birth time" verse in John 17:6 to be very fitting and encouraging:
" I (Jesus) have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours; you gave them to me and they have obeyed your word."
And while Justice did seem upset right after he was born, he quickly mellowed out into a very sleepy and mellow baby. The morning after he was born his brother and sister came to see him with Spicy and my sister and Josh. Ransom was incredibly sweet and wanted to hold him right away and seemed very proud of his enlarging big brother status. Tabitha used her high pitched voice to say "awwww! he's so sweet!" and then went on to ignore him completely as she played with her "big sister" princess gift. Ahhh 2 year olds!
And so our time the hospital was up, Justice was really so mellow that it wasn't clear right away that there was anything wrong with him. Yes he kept spitting up- a lot. But the nurses assured me he'd probably just swallowed a lot of fluids during birth. And so two days later we took our sweet chubby cheeked baby home!
It was so great to have him home and with us all as a family!
However, on our first night home Justice started spitting up so violently that it practically shot across the room, and some of the spit up had blood in it! Basically the parenting nightmare. All my "calm and collected" this-is-my-third-child-therefore-I-am-chill vibe had left me and we took him to the pediatrician as soon as we possibly could! Sure enough Justice had lost even MORE weight and was now sitting at almost a pound lost in his first week of life. A little too much for comfort. We were sent back to the hospital for an ultra-sound to rule out Pyloric Stenosis. I wasn't allowed to feed Justice until the test was over, and I didn't have a pump yet ( I'd kind of put off buying a new one since my last pump bit the dust)...so of course, this would be the perfect time for my milk supply to come in like a champ! By the time we headed home from the thankfully negative for pyloric stenosis ultrasound I was leaking from EVERYWHERE-but mostly my eyes. I just kept crying and crying as I thought, "But I PRAYED for a healthy baby!!! THIS IS NOT WHAT I WANTED! THIS IS A NIGHTMARE!"
Justice was put on some acid reflux medicine and we were sent home to hopefully watch Justice respond well to the meds-which he did-for a few days...but the next week was horrible, really. Luckily I had help from my parents and then Brett's mom, but Brett was working 12 hour night shifts at work, and I was spending 12 hour night shifts at home. While Justice did throw up a lot during the day, it was a million times worse at night. I would have to change the sheets, my clothes and his clothes multiple times a night. I would have to wash all 20 or so burp clothes that I owned every. single. day. Brett would come home from work in the mornings to find me crying and crying that something was terribly wrong. I had a baby scale and I finally had to just stop putting him on it. He was not gaining weight. He was loosing. My once almost 9 pound chunky baby with neck rolls was now under 8 pounds. Everyone tried to be reassuring with their "its going to be ok!" and their "it probably seems like more than it is" but deep in my heart I knew something was really wrong and I felt very very alone and helpless with my sweet baby boy.
We had another doctors appointment scheduled for that next monday, and I knew it was going to be bad. The problem was I spent my nights researching acid reflux in babies and I knew there wasn't much that could be done for it. I know it sounds dramatic but I felt like I had lost my happy normal life and worst of all I was slowly losing my baby. Justice slept all the time, rarely waking, never crying. Everyone commented about how sweet he was, but I hated it. I felt that it showed just how weak he was and how much his body was working over time to retain calories.
And so that is how the first two weeks of Justice's life passed....
For the end to this story check out my next post
For the end to this story check out my next post
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