davejenbarnes

We did it! No drugs!

Here’s the birth story if you’re interested. My first contraction started at 11:30 a.m. and hit me like an 18 wheeler. The next few contractions were 20-10 minutes apart. Within 3 hours, the contractions were still stronger than belief and about 7 minutes apart. I went through the emotional signposts very quickly and finally demanded that David come home from work at 4:00 when school was out. In the meantime, I called the midwives and they said to head in as soon as my husband was able to drive me. We got to the Birthing Center at 5:25 and were admitted to Exam Room One when the owner of the Birthing Center walked in and immediately moved me to The Windsor delivery room where the midwife performed the internal exam and claimed that I was at 9 cm! Holy cow! Within the next 2 contractions, the bag of waters broke and I was able to push whenever I felt like it, which was about 5 minutes later. After pushing for 20 minutes, Lowell Xavier Barnes was born, weighing in at 7 pounds, 7 ounces (one ounce lighter than James!) and 20 inches long at 6:04 p.m.

We arrived home at 1 a.m. and we would have been home much sooner if the postpartum nurse-midwife had already been trained in the discharge paperwork process. Dave and I had a restless night but are in great spirits and we’re both in utter disbelief at how normal I feel. I have even already danced a jig, taken a shower, and been walking around since 7 p.m. yesterday. I’ll be posting more pictures over time. But here is an example of how great I felt giving birth naturally:

More to come soon…

No news is good news, right?

Well, I have some news and that is that Lowell is in the OP position.

I’ve finished the 18 months old collage over in the photos section. There were only a few pictures from the same day so i added most of the Valentine’s Day pictures and made sure to take some from when Grandma was here while David was at TMEA.

James has some kind of bug or reaction. He got sick last night in his bed and I didn’t discover it until 5 a.m. when I walked by his door and sensed a very foul odor seeping out from under his door. I don’t know when he got sick because I had earplugs in but I remember thinking he was calling for us around 4 a.m. while I was laying awake praying to be asleep. We’ve pretty much narrowed it down to either the fresh pineapple he devoured or the Johnny Carino’s we had for dinner. The dinner was what was all over his bed and the pineapples are coming out the other end in the most disgusting manner, which, of course, is causing another monumental diaper rash that we now get to try to get under control… The thing about his diaper rashes is that you want to put him in paper sposies because you can just throw them away but they multiply the rash tenfold whereas the cloth diapers stop the rash in its tracks but you have to be careful with cremes and then comes the washing (ick) and there’s always detergent burn to worry about as well. The best thing I guess would be to let him run around butt-naked outside in the sunshine (which I have done before in the back yard last summer).

So, yeah, it’s not a great start to his 19th month and I have a feeling that it’s only going to go downhill for him as he has to adjust to sharing his momma with another needy human which has yet to be born, by the way.

clockwise from bottom left: Ana, Cara (looking away) Eric, Justin, Dave (striking some kind of pose) and Ray. Ray and Ana’s son is the dark head at the bottom of the picture. Misty, Eric’s wife, took the picture and I’m blogging it from her Flickr stream.