Dear Samuel,
This time a week ago I had been in labour with you for about three hours, it was around this time that I realised you were really coming and that after two weeks of contractions starting and stopping these were not stopping and had been getting worse. As I packed the last items that I would need for the hospital in my bag I took a last look around the house thinking to myself that this is it and life would never be the same again. I didn't want to go to the hospital so soon in to labour but your father insisted that we go and I have to say that I am glad he did as once we got to the hospital things became intense very quickly.
It was a little over five hours after we got to the hospital that you made your way into the world and as I heard you cry for the first time my heart surged with the love that I feel for you. When they put you in my arms for the first time I knew that this was the way things were meant to be and that you are the little gift that I had been waiting on for so long. The moment I saw you the pain of giving birth to you vanished all I could see was you and all I cared about was that you were here and safe in my arms.
The past week has been one of learning for both of us and while things are not how I thought they would be I know that I am doing the best i can for you. It makes me sad that I can not feed you just my milk and that I need to give you formula as well but its what I have to do to make sure you are healthy and strong and don't end up back in the hospital.
We were in hospital for five days because you developed jauntice and they had to keep an eye on you to make sure that you would be okay. You were taken out of our room and put under lights in the nursery, I hated seeing you with a drip in your tiny little hand and hooked up to monitors when all I wanted was to hold you in my arms and tell you how much I love you. Since they allowed you out of the nursery and back to us I have told you many times a day how much I love you, I only hope that as you grow up you will never for a moment forget that mum and dad love you very much.
We have been home for two days now and things are not easy for either of us at the moment, you still have the jauntice and that is making you a very sleepy little man which is making it hard for you to drink from me and I am feeling sad that I am not feeding you, I hope that soon you will be able to feed just from me and not need the bottle of formula.
Life has changed so much in one week and I don't for a moment regret the changes. Our world currently revolves around you and seeing to your health and happiness. I have spent hours watching you, holding you and talking to you and I think that everytime I look at you I love you even more.
I never knew how much I needed you until you were here in the world with us little man. There is nothing that you could ever do or say that would cause me to love you any less. There is nothing in this world that would make your father and I ever regret having you. We look forward to guiding you in this world and teaching you right from wrong. We look forward to seeing you discover the world around you and helping you to make sense of what you discover but most of all we look forward to sharing our life with you and giving you all the love we can give you. Never doubt for a moment that you are wanted and loved and that we will do what ever we can to support you in this life.
love you always
Mum
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
The birth story of Samuel James
When I went to bed on Tuesday 22nd December 2009 I some how knew that after the next day everything in my world would be different. As I tried to go to sleep I remember thinking to myself that my life would never be the same again and wondering what it would be like. I was 39+5 days pregnant and was well and truely over being pregnant all I wanted was to meet our baby and get started on the rest of our lives. As the night grew later I tried hard to sleep knowing that I could go into labour anyday and that I needed my rest to make sure I had the energy for labour but sleep that night was not easy to find. All night I was up and down going to the bathroom, litrally ever hour I felt that I needed to go but when I got there nothing happened. At the time it never occured to me that the feeling to go to the bathroom was a prelabour sign as I expected my waters to break or to get a show before contractions started.
Wednesday morning rolled in and it was a nice sunny day, I was exhausted and wanted to sleep but had to go to an appointment with the Ob. The Ob for once was running almost on time seeing me at 10.30am rather then 10.15am and as he examined me and I told him how I was feeling. (Lots of pelvic pain and pain in my stomach, back ache and exhausted) The Ob did an internal and found that I was 1 - 2cm dilated and that everything was looking ready to happen, he preformed a stretch and sweep and then told me to go home and rest as the way things were looking he thought that I would be meeting my baby in time for christmas.
On the way home from the Ob we stopped to get doughnuts and as I was sitting in the car I felt the first contraction of the day, I didn't think much of it at the time as contractions had been stopping and starting for two weeks at that point. We got doughnuts and headed home where I went upstairs to try and get some rest. I had been trying to sleep for an hour when I realised that my back ache was getting worse and that it was coming and going in waves. I asked Adam to get me a heatbag, took some panadol and continued trying to get some rest. At 1.30pm I gave up trying to rest, the backaches hurt too much and I started thinking this might actaully be it. I called the hospital and told them how I was feeling and they agreed that I was in early labour.
I got out of bed and into the shower where I stayed for an hour enjoying the warmth on my back eventaully though I had to get out as I needed to sit down. I headed downstairs and jumped on my computer trying to distract myself from contractions by surfing the net. At 2.30pm contractions were regular and I started timing them. They were about eight minutes apart and lasting for around 45 seconds. At that point I was dealing with them quite well just by breathing and using my stress balls. In between contractions I continued to play on my computer and chat to Adam and my mother, as the afternoon went on the contractions became more painful and at 6.00pm they were seven minutes apart and lasting up to a minute. I always planned to labour at home for as long as I could, until contractions were at least five minutes apart but at 6.00pm the pain was getting a lot worse, the house felt too hot to breath and I was almost in tears so I called the hospital and they said to head in when ever I was ready too. I told Adam that I thought he should warn his brother who was driving us that I would need to head to the hospital in an hour or two, ten minutes later his brother turned up and the two of them convinced me that we should head to the hospital now. I called the hospital again and told them we were on our way but i felt like I was failing already as contractions were not even five minutes apart and told the midwife on the phone that, she told me that there was nothing wrong with coming in earlier if I felt i needed too and so we headed of.
We arrived at the hospital a short time later and by 7pm we were settled in to our room with the midwife checking my blood pressure and monitoring how the baby was doing. I feared that contractions would stop on getting to the hospital but found that they quickly intensified, as the midwife set up the oil burner for me and read through my birth plan I breathed through contractions while Adam rubbed my back and reminded me to keep breathing. By the time the midwife finished monitoring bubs the stress balls were not enough to manage the pain and I asked if it was too early to get in the bath, the midwife laughed and said if I wanted the bath then it wasn't too early and went off to run it for me. Before I got in the bath she did an internal and found that at 8.00pm I was 4cm dilated, she commented that things seemed to be moving quickly.
The bath helped a lot but somehow it also seemed to make the contractions come stronger and quicker, it felt like I didn't have more then a minute between contractions before the next one would start and it was all I could do to focus on breathing. Mum and Adam were both beside the bath, my mum holding me up when a contraction would come so that my face wouldn't slip below the water and adam rubbing my back, encouraging me and letting me squeeze his hand. From this point in things are a little fuzzy.
I laboured in the bath and according to Adam at around 9pm the midwife had a quick look and could see that i was just about ready to push so she told me if i felt the urge to push just to go with it. Not long after it was all i could do not to push. Mum and Adam tell me that I was thrashing around in the bath as if I was trying to get away from the pain and groaning, I remember asking for the gas but only after a couple of contractions with the gas I was pushing the mouthpiece away from me yelling at them that it wasn't working (apprently I left it too long too ask and so by the time I did the pain had got to the point where it was too much to manage with the gas) I continued to labour in the bath and I remember feeling my water breaking with one contractions and seeing my show floating in the water. I remember hearing the midwife telling me that the baby was coming and she would be surprised if he wasn't there by midnight.
At around 10.30pm they got me out of the bath as mum and Adam were having trouble keeping my head above the water. At this stage I had already been pushing for over an hour and the midwife thought that changing positions would help so I laboured on all fours resting into a beanbag for a little while before she suggested I try sitting on the toilet, i wasn't there for long before i went back to the beanbag as it seemed more comfortable. I remember hearing Adam telling the midwife that I was struggling and that I was exhausted as I hadn't really slept the night before and that he was worried about me. I had said a few times before then that I couldn't do this and when I said i couldn't do this I hadn't been saying it because of the pain or the exhaustion but because something didn't seem quite right to me but of course nobody listens to a woman in labour when they say they can't do it. At this point it felt like the pain never stopped, like there was never a break between contractions it just kept coming and was all in my back feeling like he was trying to kick my spine out to get out and there was no break in the pain at all.
At 10.30pm midwife changed and the new midwife was encouraging me to push and helping talk me through breathing, Adam was sitting at the head of the beanbag holding my hand and cooling me down with a wet face cloth and mum was there rubbing my back and encouraging me. In between the intense bursts of pain that puncturated the on going pain I rested in to the bean bag and sobbed. The new midwife got me on to my back to see if holding my legs up and pushing that way would help and that position hurt more then any other position, while I was on my back she did an internal to find that the baby was stuck. It was about 11.30pm (The way they explained it to me later was that there is a bend that they have to get around to get out and that because he was coming out sideways he got stuck and couldn't get through)
From then on things happened so fast, I heard them telling me that I couldn't deliver him without some help and asking if I agreed to a vacume birth, I remember crying that I didn't care about my birth plan anymore that I just wanted it over. They called my Ob and instead of telling me to push were trying to get me to stop pushing but I felt like I had no control over it my body was pushing regardless of what I wanted. They bought in the bed and got me up on it and wheeled me back to the room we started in where they strapped the monitor on, after hours of being told to push it didn't make sense to me to suddenly be told not to stop and I just couldn't stop. The Ob took 20 minutes to get in and in that 20 minutes i remember hearing the midwifes talking and remember hearing them say he better get there soon, I remember hearing the alarms going off and Adam and mum telling me not to push that I had to wait for the doctor. Adam was holding my hand and mum was cooling me down with a face cloth and ice water and I was screaming. The doctor came in just before midnight and the room was full of people, the alarms kept going of, i kept screaming and crying and they were all pleading with me not to push and trying to get me to understand the instructions the doctor was giving me about when to push. At last I heard them all tell me to push and so I tried and then they told me to push without the noise and put all the noise I was making into the push. I pushed and pushed and pushed and then there wasn't anymore push left in me, i was out of breath and had nothing left to push and then the Ob was telling me that I had to keep pushing that I couldn't stop that he was almost out and somewhere in me I found something deep inside that let me keep pushing and suddenly I felt his head pop out followed quickly by his body. They quickly took the baby to the resus thing and worked on him for a few moments before I heard the best sound in the world - the sound of my little man screaming his lungs out and I asked if 'he was still a boy' while looking at Adam. (We had been debating for months if the scan really showed that the baby was a boy) and then he was being placed on my chest and i looked down at this tiny little boy and through my tears I said 'Hello little man, welcome to the world, daddy and I are going to love you and look after you and show you the world' then I looked up at Adam and said 'look what we made'
Samuel James came into the world at 12.08am 24th December 2009 and weighed 3.456kg. He made it into his due date by eight minutes proving everyone who was so sure that I was going to go early wrong.
Wednesday morning rolled in and it was a nice sunny day, I was exhausted and wanted to sleep but had to go to an appointment with the Ob. The Ob for once was running almost on time seeing me at 10.30am rather then 10.15am and as he examined me and I told him how I was feeling. (Lots of pelvic pain and pain in my stomach, back ache and exhausted) The Ob did an internal and found that I was 1 - 2cm dilated and that everything was looking ready to happen, he preformed a stretch and sweep and then told me to go home and rest as the way things were looking he thought that I would be meeting my baby in time for christmas.
On the way home from the Ob we stopped to get doughnuts and as I was sitting in the car I felt the first contraction of the day, I didn't think much of it at the time as contractions had been stopping and starting for two weeks at that point. We got doughnuts and headed home where I went upstairs to try and get some rest. I had been trying to sleep for an hour when I realised that my back ache was getting worse and that it was coming and going in waves. I asked Adam to get me a heatbag, took some panadol and continued trying to get some rest. At 1.30pm I gave up trying to rest, the backaches hurt too much and I started thinking this might actaully be it. I called the hospital and told them how I was feeling and they agreed that I was in early labour.
I got out of bed and into the shower where I stayed for an hour enjoying the warmth on my back eventaully though I had to get out as I needed to sit down. I headed downstairs and jumped on my computer trying to distract myself from contractions by surfing the net. At 2.30pm contractions were regular and I started timing them. They were about eight minutes apart and lasting for around 45 seconds. At that point I was dealing with them quite well just by breathing and using my stress balls. In between contractions I continued to play on my computer and chat to Adam and my mother, as the afternoon went on the contractions became more painful and at 6.00pm they were seven minutes apart and lasting up to a minute. I always planned to labour at home for as long as I could, until contractions were at least five minutes apart but at 6.00pm the pain was getting a lot worse, the house felt too hot to breath and I was almost in tears so I called the hospital and they said to head in when ever I was ready too. I told Adam that I thought he should warn his brother who was driving us that I would need to head to the hospital in an hour or two, ten minutes later his brother turned up and the two of them convinced me that we should head to the hospital now. I called the hospital again and told them we were on our way but i felt like I was failing already as contractions were not even five minutes apart and told the midwife on the phone that, she told me that there was nothing wrong with coming in earlier if I felt i needed too and so we headed of.
We arrived at the hospital a short time later and by 7pm we were settled in to our room with the midwife checking my blood pressure and monitoring how the baby was doing. I feared that contractions would stop on getting to the hospital but found that they quickly intensified, as the midwife set up the oil burner for me and read through my birth plan I breathed through contractions while Adam rubbed my back and reminded me to keep breathing. By the time the midwife finished monitoring bubs the stress balls were not enough to manage the pain and I asked if it was too early to get in the bath, the midwife laughed and said if I wanted the bath then it wasn't too early and went off to run it for me. Before I got in the bath she did an internal and found that at 8.00pm I was 4cm dilated, she commented that things seemed to be moving quickly.
The bath helped a lot but somehow it also seemed to make the contractions come stronger and quicker, it felt like I didn't have more then a minute between contractions before the next one would start and it was all I could do to focus on breathing. Mum and Adam were both beside the bath, my mum holding me up when a contraction would come so that my face wouldn't slip below the water and adam rubbing my back, encouraging me and letting me squeeze his hand. From this point in things are a little fuzzy.
I laboured in the bath and according to Adam at around 9pm the midwife had a quick look and could see that i was just about ready to push so she told me if i felt the urge to push just to go with it. Not long after it was all i could do not to push. Mum and Adam tell me that I was thrashing around in the bath as if I was trying to get away from the pain and groaning, I remember asking for the gas but only after a couple of contractions with the gas I was pushing the mouthpiece away from me yelling at them that it wasn't working (apprently I left it too long too ask and so by the time I did the pain had got to the point where it was too much to manage with the gas) I continued to labour in the bath and I remember feeling my water breaking with one contractions and seeing my show floating in the water. I remember hearing the midwife telling me that the baby was coming and she would be surprised if he wasn't there by midnight.
At around 10.30pm they got me out of the bath as mum and Adam were having trouble keeping my head above the water. At this stage I had already been pushing for over an hour and the midwife thought that changing positions would help so I laboured on all fours resting into a beanbag for a little while before she suggested I try sitting on the toilet, i wasn't there for long before i went back to the beanbag as it seemed more comfortable. I remember hearing Adam telling the midwife that I was struggling and that I was exhausted as I hadn't really slept the night before and that he was worried about me. I had said a few times before then that I couldn't do this and when I said i couldn't do this I hadn't been saying it because of the pain or the exhaustion but because something didn't seem quite right to me but of course nobody listens to a woman in labour when they say they can't do it. At this point it felt like the pain never stopped, like there was never a break between contractions it just kept coming and was all in my back feeling like he was trying to kick my spine out to get out and there was no break in the pain at all.
At 10.30pm midwife changed and the new midwife was encouraging me to push and helping talk me through breathing, Adam was sitting at the head of the beanbag holding my hand and cooling me down with a wet face cloth and mum was there rubbing my back and encouraging me. In between the intense bursts of pain that puncturated the on going pain I rested in to the bean bag and sobbed. The new midwife got me on to my back to see if holding my legs up and pushing that way would help and that position hurt more then any other position, while I was on my back she did an internal to find that the baby was stuck. It was about 11.30pm (The way they explained it to me later was that there is a bend that they have to get around to get out and that because he was coming out sideways he got stuck and couldn't get through)
From then on things happened so fast, I heard them telling me that I couldn't deliver him without some help and asking if I agreed to a vacume birth, I remember crying that I didn't care about my birth plan anymore that I just wanted it over. They called my Ob and instead of telling me to push were trying to get me to stop pushing but I felt like I had no control over it my body was pushing regardless of what I wanted. They bought in the bed and got me up on it and wheeled me back to the room we started in where they strapped the monitor on, after hours of being told to push it didn't make sense to me to suddenly be told not to stop and I just couldn't stop. The Ob took 20 minutes to get in and in that 20 minutes i remember hearing the midwifes talking and remember hearing them say he better get there soon, I remember hearing the alarms going off and Adam and mum telling me not to push that I had to wait for the doctor. Adam was holding my hand and mum was cooling me down with a face cloth and ice water and I was screaming. The doctor came in just before midnight and the room was full of people, the alarms kept going of, i kept screaming and crying and they were all pleading with me not to push and trying to get me to understand the instructions the doctor was giving me about when to push. At last I heard them all tell me to push and so I tried and then they told me to push without the noise and put all the noise I was making into the push. I pushed and pushed and pushed and then there wasn't anymore push left in me, i was out of breath and had nothing left to push and then the Ob was telling me that I had to keep pushing that I couldn't stop that he was almost out and somewhere in me I found something deep inside that let me keep pushing and suddenly I felt his head pop out followed quickly by his body. They quickly took the baby to the resus thing and worked on him for a few moments before I heard the best sound in the world - the sound of my little man screaming his lungs out and I asked if 'he was still a boy' while looking at Adam. (We had been debating for months if the scan really showed that the baby was a boy) and then he was being placed on my chest and i looked down at this tiny little boy and through my tears I said 'Hello little man, welcome to the world, daddy and I are going to love you and look after you and show you the world' then I looked up at Adam and said 'look what we made'
Samuel James came into the world at 12.08am 24th December 2009 and weighed 3.456kg. He made it into his due date by eight minutes proving everyone who was so sure that I was going to go early wrong.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
As I type this I stand at the edge of a new point in my life, a point that for a long time I thought that I would never reach, that it would never happen to me. For nine months I have nurtured and carried a child inside my womb, for nine months it often felt like he would never be here and that I would be pregnant for ever but now all of that is about to change. Sometime very soon I am going to be holding my first born child in my arms and my life as I know it now will never ever be the same again. I am excited, I am nervous, I am terrified that I am going to stuff up and screw him up in the process but when it comes down to it I know that I can and will be a good mother. In these last moments of the life where the only person that I have to really consider their needs is myself all I can think about it how much I look forward to holding my baby in my arms and and guiding him as he grows up and explores the world around him, I look forward to watching him discover new things and learn new skills and I look forward to the new challenges that being a mother will bring to my life.
I have now been in labour for three hours and i can say even at this point in time this early in that the contractions are already worse then I ever imagined they would be so early but so far I am coping and I am breathing through them. I know that each contraction has a purpose, that it is a healthy pain and that it means my little boy is on his way and that soon he will be here. I know that if they get bad enough that I can not handle them on my own that I am allowed to ask for pain releif and that if I need pain releif that I have not failed. My goal right now is to have as natural a birth as a can but over riding that the goal is to deleiver our child in the safest way we can for both him and I, if it means that i need help to cope with the pain then I will do what ever it is that I need to do.
Notes: This jouranl entry was made only half an hour before we decided we had to call our ride to the hospital as the pain was getting to be too hard to bare. We arrived at the hospital at 7pm and Samuel was born at 12.08am the following morning.
I have now been in labour for three hours and i can say even at this point in time this early in that the contractions are already worse then I ever imagined they would be so early but so far I am coping and I am breathing through them. I know that each contraction has a purpose, that it is a healthy pain and that it means my little boy is on his way and that soon he will be here. I know that if they get bad enough that I can not handle them on my own that I am allowed to ask for pain releif and that if I need pain releif that I have not failed. My goal right now is to have as natural a birth as a can but over riding that the goal is to deleiver our child in the safest way we can for both him and I, if it means that i need help to cope with the pain then I will do what ever it is that I need to do.
Notes: This jouranl entry was made only half an hour before we decided we had to call our ride to the hospital as the pain was getting to be too hard to bare. We arrived at the hospital at 7pm and Samuel was born at 12.08am the following morning.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Dear Bubbles,
For the past 37 and a bit weeks I have carried you in my womb, you have been a part of me yet already your own little being with its only little beating heart and functioning brain, no matter what the future holds you will always be a part of me and a part of your father too, carrying both our genes but no matter where life will take us I will never forget the time that I carried you in my womb, the time that nothing could be any closer to my heart then you are.
For months I have loved you without ever seeing your face or knowing you as an individual person but very soon the months of waiting to meet you will be over. Its sometimes hard to get my mind around the fact that in only a short time you will be here, that I will hold you in my arms and be able to gaze down into your eyes and look upon the miracle and wonder that is a newborn baby. What an amazing miracle the continuation of the human species is, to think that you form from two tiny cells much smaller then the eye can see and then over what is realisticly only a short span of time those two cells become a fully fuctional little human being. Its an amazing wonderous process that I feel truely blessed to have been able to experience.
As I sit here typing this I can feel you moving around in my womb sometimes a gentle wave other times a sharp kick but each movement a precious sign that you are there and that everything is okay with you. Today I got to see you again, you have grown so much since our last scan 17 weeks ago, to clearly see your heart and other organs, to see your little head and your spine and all the bits that make you a whole human in your own right is amazing. I can not wait until you are here my precious little man, until I can hold you and share this world with you, guiding you and teaching you the things that you need to know.
For the past 37 and a bit weeks I have carried you in my womb, you have been a part of me yet already your own little being with its only little beating heart and functioning brain, no matter what the future holds you will always be a part of me and a part of your father too, carrying both our genes but no matter where life will take us I will never forget the time that I carried you in my womb, the time that nothing could be any closer to my heart then you are.
For months I have loved you without ever seeing your face or knowing you as an individual person but very soon the months of waiting to meet you will be over. Its sometimes hard to get my mind around the fact that in only a short time you will be here, that I will hold you in my arms and be able to gaze down into your eyes and look upon the miracle and wonder that is a newborn baby. What an amazing miracle the continuation of the human species is, to think that you form from two tiny cells much smaller then the eye can see and then over what is realisticly only a short span of time those two cells become a fully fuctional little human being. Its an amazing wonderous process that I feel truely blessed to have been able to experience.
As I sit here typing this I can feel you moving around in my womb sometimes a gentle wave other times a sharp kick but each movement a precious sign that you are there and that everything is okay with you. Today I got to see you again, you have grown so much since our last scan 17 weeks ago, to clearly see your heart and other organs, to see your little head and your spine and all the bits that make you a whole human in your own right is amazing. I can not wait until you are here my precious little man, until I can hold you and share this world with you, guiding you and teaching you the things that you need to know.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
