Well, she did indeed hold out until her due date. Stella Lucille was born 2-1-12 at 12:08 pm. She weighed in at 9lbs 14oz. She was 20 and ¾” long. Yep, she’s a big ol chunky monkey with cheeks that go on for days. And she is perfect.
We spent the last month of the pregnancy playing the “Is this it? How bout now??” game. It wasn’t fun. We had a couple trips to the hospital for monitoring and a bio scan which revealed her big size. After weighing our pros and cons with the doctor and a lengthy discussion, we decided it was in the best interest of all parties for a C section. It was scheduled for Wednesday, February 1st at 11:00 a.m. There was so much anxiety relieved after we scheduled the C section. That morning we went it, checked in and then waited. We got bumped for an emergency C section, so they didn’t come to get us until about 11:45. Once she was in and prepped and I was in my fancy scrubs, they let me go back with her. Approximately 10 minutes later, we heard a scream. At 12:08 p.m. our baby girl was born. They had to cut her cord since she was a C section, but I got to trim it afterwards. They cleaned her off, wrapped her up and handed her to me. I took her over to Lauren to show her. We were both sobbing with joy. Hell, I might be right now just typing all this out. They started stitching Lauren back up while Stella and I went to the nursery for her tests and shot. Her blood sugar was low, so they gave her a bottle. A half an hour later they tested again and it was higher, but still too low. Turns out our little lady was hypoglycemic. It is apparently pretty common with bigger babies. They hooked her up to an IV and kept her in the NICU for 2.5 days. Lauren was not happy about her girl being kept away from her, so she decided to speed up her recovery. Everyone was impressed by how quickly she was down there in a wheel chair and then off her IV and walking the next day. It’s probably the reason she healed as quickly as she did. Getting up and walking does wonders for C section recovery, they say. So for 2.5 days we schlepped down to the NICU every 2 hours to see our girl. Usually it was more often as she had loads of visitors and sometimes we just wanted to hang out with her. Her recovery plan was 24 hours of sugar readings over 50, then slowly wean off the glucose in the IV (taking approximately another 24 hours) then a 24 hour watch to make sure it stayed above 50. (I know 3 days > the 2.5 she was in, I’m getting to that). On Wednesday, once it went above 50, it stayed there, until Thursday very early AM. Then the rest of Thursday was good. It dropped below 50 again very early Friday AM. You see how this can be discouraging? We hadn’t even made it past step one at this point. If it dropped, we started all over. At 5 in the morning on Friday we were getting very discouraged. We were starting to wonder if she was coming home with us. Just as we were leaving from that feeding, she kicked her IV out. The nurse said she would have to restart it and yes, the whole process would basically start from scratch. So when we went to the 9 am feeding (the NICU is closed between 6 and 8, so they fed her at 7) we found out that they couldn’t get the IV back in, but her blood sugar was up and as long as it stayed up for 24 hours, she was all ours. We totally skipped like 2 steps of the process. Sure enough, it stayed up. Saturday morning Lauren took her dad and step-mom down to the NICU to see her and brought her back with them. At 3 days old this little girl was telling us she would be doing things her way. They wanted to do a couple more tests that day, but as long as it stayed up, she’d be officially released from NICU care and discharged on Sunday. With Lauren.
She is now 3 weeks old. We’ve adjusted to life with a baby pretty well. I do feel kind of bad since Lauren has to get up with her all the time. I guess that’s the price for getting 3 months off work. ;-P I, on the other hand, am in the middle of an outage and working 12.5 hour shifts. Not exactly how I would choose to spend the first few weeks of my daughter’s life, but that’s timing, you know? We just happened to get pregnant on the first try and I just happened to get this job, so she just happened to be born during my busiest time of the year. Luckily, I won the boss lottery and they were amazing enough to let me take a week off when she was born. In a couple weeks, I will be back to a normal shift and seeing my girls way more. At least until the Braidwood outage starts.
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