Eggceptional Blues

I wrote this post back in February and not sure why I didn’t post it but here it is now. Ill have another update shortly as my little man is almost 8 months old now!!! Gahhhh! Where does the time go?

I’ve been writing this post for over a month in my head but have been unsure if its really something I want to put out there. There have been many posts lately from moms struggling with post partum hormones and fussy babies and I SO get it. But I think I’ve been given a huge gift in all of this.

My college degree is in child development and I’ve been working in the field of family services for the past 5+ years. I was ready for infancy. I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. I was actually pretty sure I’d end up with post partum depression so I did placenta encapsulation hoping to combat it. And I don’t know if that’s what’s making things so great, but in my opinion those pills are gold. My “happy pills.”

It hasn’t been easy, that’s not it. Weeks 2-7 were pretty damn hard with almost constant crying. Around week 5 I completely cut out dairy and gluten and things got better but it wasn’t until almost 8 weeks that the painful shrieking cries went away. Week 7 included only 30 minutes of sleep at a time. Seriously no more than 30 minutes of sleep for an entire week. I think my husband took him and I got an 1.5 hour nap real quick. But even then I feel like we coped really well.

Since 8 weeks we’ve been up consistently 2-3 times a night for feedings. Occasionally he’ll give us 5 hours on the first block of sleep which rocks. But even on the bad nights… I wake up insanely happy. Every day I think about how unbelievably lucky we are and my face constantly hurts from smiling all the time. It’s ridiculous.

I don’t know wether to attest the beautiful birth we had, or the “happy pills” or just plain luck but I wanted to shed some light on the fact that apparently the first few months aren’t always terrible. I’m sad they’ve gone so quickly but every day is more fun than the last.

My little man is 12 weeks old today. I can’t believe how fast its going. I know everyone says that but it sucks how true it is. The hub went back to work yesterday and we miss him a lot. Its been so great all being home together. Things are changing now and I’m trying to figure out how its going to work.

I went to my boss a couple weeks ago and expressed how nervous I was about coming back to work and not wanting to leave Archie. I have the best boss on the planet and she tried to meet every worry I had with a solution. I don’t want him to be with anyone but family…. She said I could come back 2 days a week (my mom offered 1 day and the hub is home Fridays) and work 4-6 hours from home. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal, ya? I also have several large events in April that worry me, she offered to hire someone to help make it happen. She’s way way way too good to me. I should be thrilled with this work plan but I’m not.

There is the issue that Arch doesn’t like bottles. I’ve been pumping and have a small stash going but every time we offer a bottle he drinks less than an ounce and then starts screaming at it. We’re following all the recommendations, the hub gives it to him, I stand at the edge of the room so he can’t smell me, and we’ve tried various bottles/nipples. No dice. I sort of love that he prefers me over the bottle. I love being needed by him because I know it wont last forever. My instincts are to always be there. Sometimes he’s not even hungry he’s just fussy and wants to pacify on my boob and while part of my wants some freedom to get stuff done, the other part of me likes doing this for him.

I don’t want to leave him. Not because I don’t trust my mom and husband, I know they’re amazing with him but its ME. I can’t really wrap my head around leaving 2 days a week. The inner conflict I’m dealing with is too much. I love my job, I work at an incredible place with incredible people and most people would kill for a job like mine. I’m afraid to give it up, another job like this may never pop up again. Not to mention I have a lot of pride in my career and all I’ve achieved growing my program to what it is today. Can I leave that all behind?! Well, I’m pretty ready to… I’m afraid my heart just isn’t in it anymore. My heart is home with Arch. That’s where I want to be. I expected to struggle with going back to work but I didn’t expect to feel like this. Like I’m perfectly happy having my life revolve around my son and having my identity be “mom”. In a lot of ways its my life long dream, in other ways its like the death of my individuality. Can I still be me without a job, just being a SAHM??

The hub started a new business while he was on leave, selling phone access.ories on the internet. I’ve been doing all the packing and shipping for the past week and it at least gives be a chance to contribute to the family financially. It would be my work from home option. It seems like a good plan, right?! So why can’t I bring myself to call my boss and tell her I’ve changed my mind and I’m not coming back?

Ugh.

Arch gave us an amazing Christmas present last night… Sleep! We’ve been waking twice a night for the last couple weeks which has been great but last night it was only once! We were at my big family Christmas party last night with 30ish people. It was chaotic and we were there until 9:30pm, and he’s usually asleep by then. But he also had some great naps yesterday. I wrapped him to me while opening presents etc. and he slept almost 3 hours in the Moby!! I wrapped him twice at the party and he slept for about an hour each time. Then we got home and he went down around 10:30 and slept until 4:30, booya! Then woke just before 8.

So today I was feeling confident and tried a “real” nap. At his usual time in the morning he started the fussy tired thing so I swaddled him and tried to put him down for a nap. He slept 30 minutes and was awake. I went in and rocked him back to sleep and we got another 20 minutes and then he was over it. He hasn’t napped since and its almost 2pm. Yesterday he had a 3 hour nap by now! So I’ll put him in the Moby shortly and go with the tried and true nap. What are the rest of you doing for naps? Is it normal that his nap lengths are so all over the place? I’m wondering when he’ll be able to nap on his own (not strapped to me)… It would be a real gift to my back, but I also want to start developing good routines. Just not sure if its still too early for that.

We just started looking into vaccines and trying to decide where we stand on them. We’ve held off thus far wanting to learn more before doing anything. Did you guys know there’s formaldehyde and aluminum in a lot of them? Freaking weird! It seems like they don’t see much side effects or harm from them, but I struggle with the idea of putting that stuff in his body. Even if its spread apart and one at a time. But at the same time I want to make sure he’s protected. What have you done and what made you choose that? Please no cruel judgments about other’s choices, I’m just curious why other moms chose what they did and why. Especially if you prescribe to AP style which I’m finding I lean towards.

And Merry Christmas from my little love!!

His THREE Christmas outfits, luckily we had plenty of parties to attend! 🙂

My uterus that is, and for the first time that news at an ultrasound was good news! Ha!

So Archie is over 2 months old now and we’re cruising along pretty nicely. Weeks 3-6 were rough with what was almost colic but once I cut out dairy and gluten the crying went significantly down. He started to feel much better but then around 7 weeks he decided to sleep no more than an hour at at time. We were getting 30 minute naps all night and it was brutal. Not a terrible amount of crying or fussing, just not sleeping. I didn’t know i could survive on such little sleep! Then right around 8 weeks there was a magical night where he slept 5 hours, out of no where! Then he did a couple 2 hour chunks after that. Then the next night our first routine started. All of a sudden, he was ready for a routine and showed us how it was going to be. He sleeps till about 1 or 2 depending on when he goes down (anytime between 8-10… Still working on that piece), then wakes again around 5:30 then wakes for the day around 7:30. Two feedings in the night is SO not bad, I feel like a million bucks! I just hope this lasts! Around the same time he started taking more consistent naps during the day. By 9 or 10am he’s ready for a nap, and the longer he sleeps the happier he is. I’ve found the the best way to get him to sleep for longer than 30 minutes is to use my Moby wrap and wear him. I can usually get an hour up to 2 hours in that. If I put him down on the swing or anything he wakes in 20-30 minutes. At some point we’ll work on naps but for now I’m so grateful to be sleeping as much as I am.

Breastfeeding is going fairly well with just a couple bumps in the road. I’ve started pumping once a day or once every other day despite my hatred for doing so. After reading several posts of others lately on regrets for not pumping more early on, I decided to take the advice and begin building a stash. Even if he doesn’t take a bottle well now, he likely will someday and I’ll want to have that for him. I always have a hard time remembering to drink enough water so i worry about supply sometimes even though it doesn’t seem to be a concern right now at all. I’m leaking all the time! When feeding my only frustration is he likes to delatch and relatch over and over again. Sometimes he’s fussing while doing it but more often than not he’s perfectly happy eating like that. But each time he let’s go I have to kind of help him get back on. Its pretty frustrating for me, I don’t understand why he keeps letting go. If I don’t help him get the nipple back in his mouth right away after he let’s go, he rubs his face in my boob and begins whining and getting upset until I help him. I tru burping and putting him back on, or switching, or massaging the boob while he’s on but nothing seems to make any difference. Anyone else ever experience this?

After the holidays I’m going to revamp this blog, give it a new look and feel! Hope everyone has a very merry Christmas, holding your loved ones tight!

I can’t believe how quickly its going by now. He’s already 7 weeks old! Next thing I know he’ll be walking and talking and sometimes I just can’t no stand the thought of how fast it’ll all go. While I do look forward to getting over the crying stage, I love how small and sweet he is. I wish I could just live in these moments a little longer. Time is going to go by too fast.

But time just keeps flying by. Soon I’ll have to go back to work which I’m completely dreading. How did those of you who did it cope with leaving them? Did you cry your faces off because I’m pretty sure I’ll sob every day I have to leave. The hub and I have discussed me staying home since my salary is pretty pitiful to begin with, I just can’t seem to feel right about that either. So much of my identity and self worth is wrapped up in my career and I’m afraid of not working. I guess that’s the blessing and the curse of being the modern woman.

I absolutely love the idea of being a stay at home mom and having babies galore. Unfortunately I have no idea how difficult or even if we’ll be able to have another. I’m still dealing with some PP stuff (apparently there is STILL stuff up my hoo ha as of my most recent OB appt) and am not approved for sex until I get an ultrasound to see what’s going on up there. At my last appointment the doc pulled out a glob of what looked to be part of the amniotic sac. Fun, right. Hopefully that was the last of it but if there are particles still left I’ll have to have a D&C. I know it can’t be nearly as traumatic as what so many of my friends have gone through after losing their little babes, but I don’t know much about the actual procedure. Will I be put out? Will there be a lot of pain? What does it mean for future fertility? My doc said that not doing it is far riskier for future fertility but I don’t understand why the body doesn’t just work this stuff out and push it out on its own eventually. I have no intention of risking my future fertility of course but man that sucks.

I’m actually really looking forward to having sex again. For as long as i can remember sex has been about TTC. We maybe had sex a handful of times while I was pregnant and my husband did it out of obligation, he was very creeped out by the belly and it was not enjoyable for either of us. I want to feel sexy and have sex for pleasure and not purpose. How quickly did you have sex after your babies were born? Did it hurt? When I went to the OB and she put the (um I have no word for it) duck face expander thing in, it actually hurt! Its never hurt before, my vagina was just super tender. I would imagine that means sex won’t be too pleasurable right now

Alright, so I started another blog for family and friends where we post pictures and little updates about Arch. All of the Hub’s family lives far away so this helps them feel connected… it also helps keep me from over posting on FB about him. I want to respect my fellow infertiles still in the trenches, they’re FBing really shouldn’t have to revolve around dodging baby posts. I know how much i hated it before Arch came.

So! If you’re interested I’ve already posted some birth pictures on there. The website is molly and andy dot com. I’ve edited or taken out all of the fun ones showing him coming out my vag since its the internet but you can still see some fun ones. There’s really only one picture of me laboring on my exercise ball, all the rest are at the end when I was in the tub just pushing him out and some from after of course.

So that’s the end of my birth talk. I want to get on to talking about parenting stuff but like many who have babies in our community… I’m not totally sure if it’s appropriate to do that here or to begin a new blog. What do you guys think, is it better to leave this blog and my struggle with infertility in one place, separate from parenting after infertility? Or is it better that I just change up my whole blog to gear more towards the parenting aspect? The reality is I want more children, GD do I ever. I know there will come a day when I’m back to needing this space to talk about TTC and all that again… so I’m not sure how to navigate it. What are your thoughts and what have you seen done?

Sorry for the 6 week delay in my post. Arch keeps me plenty busy!! On to my post part um story so that I can start talking about parenting!

So I had my beautiful birth in the tub and then returned to my bed and delivered the placenta, then proceeded to bleed like crazy. I guess my placenta had come apart and there were pieces left inside making it so my body wouldn’t start clotting. Very quickly my midwife was elbow deep in my hooha scraping the leftover pieces out. I have a gnarly picture of what came out. She’s asked doctors and other midwives (and I’ve asked my OB at my follow up PP appt) and nobody has seen anything like it. My placenta had extra lobes growing into my amniotic sac. Crazy shit. Since I was still bleeding I guess the next step was to get me to go pee. Something about the uterus not being able to contract and clot if the bladder is full. I felt like I had to pee so they helped me to the toilet. As we were walking to the bathroom things became fuzzy. When they sat me on the toilet I remember telling my midwife that everything sounded cloudy. Not sure why it sounded cloudy and didn’t look cloudy but that was the experience I was having. I couldn’t pee and next thing I knew I was on the bathroom floor and felt like I had just had the most incredible nap. After being up all night laboring I needed a nap, but it wasn’t a nap. I passed out! Whoops! When I woke up I was on the bathroom floor and my midwife was sticking things up my butt (yes you read that right) and then sticking a cathader up my pee hole. I was feeling pretty woozy and my midwives were saying the classic “stay with me” and scaring the crap out of my mom and hub. Once they got the pee out and jabbed at my abdomen to get the last gushes of blood out, it was a waiting game. The drugs they stuck up my butt made me cramp so freaking bad like I was in labor again but it was to help my uterus contract back and clot. I had to hang out on the ground of my newly remodeled bathroom (getting blood everywhere, gah) for an hour or more until they felt my vitals were coming back to stable. Had some honey and they brought Arch in to cuddle with me. Things calmed down after that, only problem was the fever I was running. When it hadn’t dropped by 9pm she consulted with a nurse friend of hers who works in L&D and she recommended I go to the hospital in case it was an infection. Blah. My midwife agreed but also thought it was possibly a reaction to the butt drugs. So we debated a while but i really didn’t want to go. We decided to try Tylenol to drop the fever and a couple more IV bags. Sure enough it dropped and we were able to stay home!! Yay! 10 days bed rest, 10 days of laying around… Skin to skin… Thanking the powers that be for this incredible life that we made. The struggle has to have only made it sweeter. He’s my everything.

Here’s a picture of me “wearing” my babe this week while seeing my brother play at an open mic night. Then another of his big smiles which started a little over a week ago. Holy crap they bare amazing.

I’m thinking I’ll post some pictures from the birth next so stay tuned!

I’ll start with the birth story and leave all the postpartum drama for another post, because they are two completely separate experiences in my mind.

Starting around 38 weeks my midwives recommended I take vitamin c daily to help prevent my water from breaking prematurely and then putting evening primrose oil up my vajay to soften the cervix. The evening primrose oil is pretty nasty considering you want it up therea while to do its job but ya gotta pee every 5 minutes. So I’d do my best to pee and put it in right before bed and get as much time with it as possible. However most nights I’d wake up needing to pee but also slightly feeling like I was already doing so because the oil was oozing out of me. Yum! Sunday I didn’t feel real well. I had spent all day Saturday in the hospital with family as my aunt (who I’m very close with) has a brain anurism and… I won’t go all into this because it sucks and is sad and I’m writing a happy post about Archie… So I thought Sunday was likely just exhaustion from the day before. Apparently though my body was readying itself!!

I went to bed around 11 feeling kinda feverish and just crummy and woke up at 12:30 feeling like I had stuff oozing out of me. Got up to pee and realized I had forgotten the oil that night since I was so tired! Maybe this is the new late pregnancy symptom where, um, you uncontrollably pee yourself… but it just kept going. Sort of in little spurts and I had zero control over it. Suspicious!!! I woke up the Hub and we googled it and then I was pretty sure my water had broken but wasn’t feeling any contractions. I called my mom to put her on alert and did the same for my midwife and then tried to go back to bed. Sometimes it takes a while but within 45 minutes I was having some pretty distinct contractions… sweet! Unfortunately timing them was frustrating. They ranged from 2.5-5 minutes apart with no real pattern but were slowly getting stronger over time. My mom came over around 2:30 and the midwives around 3 while the hub set up the tub.

The hours if 3-9am kind of flew by. I was listening to my hypnobirthing affirmations and breathing through the contractions pretty well. I took a couple hot showers which unfortunately started my spiral downward into dehydration. I started puking which sucked because there’s no way to control your pee while you puke, ha! I did that once in the shower and a couple other times right after a particularly tough contraction. I labored mostly on my exercise ball and found a comfortable position leaning back while breathing through and I felt pretty confident. So at some point I remember being 4cm and feeling pretty good about that and then a couple hours later and things definitely picking up in intensity I was only 5cm and totally bummed.

My midwife said that although I was 5cm (this was probably around 10:45am) that I was dilated much more on one side than the other. They didn’t want me in the tub for fear it would slow things down so she asked me to get on the bed and lay on the side that still needed to dilate. Holy hell…. that’s when I lost the control I had been holding onto. The hub was amazing and there with me through the whole thing encouraging and helping me focus on my breathing. Once on the bed on my side I didn’t have the pressure of the ball I was sitting on and the contractions felt so much stronger and I couldn’t simply breath through it and visualize anymore. I started kind of heaving and crying and really freaking out… all along thinking I’m only 5cm. I was begging to get into the tub and everyone was trying to convince me this would help things to go faster. I guess the position placed baby’s head right on the undilated part of the cervix forcing it to open up. My midwife asked that I do 5-6 contractions in this position and then I could get in the tub. I believe it was only 3 contractions later and I urgently needed to PUSH. It was insane. Luckily they took me seriously and rushed me to the tub and sure enough I was 10cm!! In like 20 minutes from 5cm! Hell yes! Once in the tub I did 2 contractions on all fours and the water felt so incredible but I wasn’t convinced something that felt so big was going to be able to come out that hole but they said it was time to start trying to push him out so I flipped around and and began.

Now the hypnobirthing teaches “breathing down” and I actually really wanted to do that. I could feel how that would work and kept trying to do that but I guess archie’s heart rate was dropping and they were concerned enough to tell me I needed to get him out. “Bear down and push him out” is what they told me so sure enough, in 3 contractions he slid into this world peacefully through the water. It was incredible… nothing else about it. I could feel his head come out with one contraction and then his body with the next and it was the most amazing thing I’ve ever experienced.

When he came out he was pretty damn purple but he cried immediately and we were able to hold him and love on him right there for quite a while. He was and is absolutely, positively perfect. We could tell immediately that he had my family nose and my husbands funny looking spoon toes.

All too quickly though we needed to get out of the tub and back to the bed to deliver the placenta and this is when things turned south. I’ll write a whole other post about this part but I hemmhoraged and passed out and things got scary but I’m all good now and enjoying my strict bed rest to spend lots of time snuggling my little man.

Arch was born at 11:43am and I’d say I only really had hard labor for less than an hour. Its funny how relative time becomes during labor… all in all I guess mine was 10ish hours but it really didn’t feel terribly long. I was just in the zone to have my baby.

I’m so grateful for a relatively painless labor (until the end…) and incredible midwives who definitely knew what they were doing. I am proud of how I managed contractions and even more proud that I was able to give Archie this type of entrance into the world. I’m even more grateful that I didn’t end up in the hospital and that he never had to leave the comfort of our home and was never in the arms of anyone who wasn’t giving him all the love in the world. 🙂 🙂

I’m torn on whether to post pictures of everything… or maybe just sensor them. What do you guys want to see? The whole gory story, tastefully sensored pictures or maybe just a password protected page so you only have to look if you want to? My mom was in charge of capturing everything and she did a pretty good job.

I think that’s all for his birth, stay tuned for the post partum story. Thanks for all your love, we are so happy and consumed by love. I really can’t believe we made it here… he is all my dreams come true. Here’s a picture of my little munchkin just a few minutes ago.

P.s. I remember reading on someone’s blog about a great postpartum wrap but can’t remember who or what it was called. Any recommendations? My stomach is pure jelly and would love to get something to hold it all back together. Thanks!