Sweet Yet Sour

She’s finally here!

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 | The Daily Special | 3 Comments

Our daughter, Anna Leslie, arrived on Saturday night (April 5th) at 9:55 p.m.  She was due April 21st, but we’ll take her, and it’s not like anyone can say they’re really ready for this anyway, due date or not.

First, a word about the name, Anna Leslie.  Mike’s maternal grandmother, Anna Plisko, was much beloved by him and he wanted to honor her.  She died a long time ago, before I ever came into the picture, but from the stories he tells of her, she sounds like a neat lady.  She apparently took care of him a great deal when he was a child. 

Leslie is for my paternal grandfather, Lester Jones, whom I loved very much and miss greatly.  Leslie is a nice way of remembering him without sicking “Lester” on anyone, which is not the most beautiful of names.  I chose the male spelling of Leslie (instead of the female “Lesley”), since I wanted to name her after him.  This is also a nice way to honor many men in my family, since my great-grandfather was a Lester and my father’s middle name is also Lester.  No offense guys named Lester, but Leslie is much better than Lester…

Anna is sleeping quite soundly right now, which I am sure we will pay for tonight, since all newborns seem to arrive with their internal clocks backwards.  She was up a great deal last night, which was expected, but nonetheless tiring.  I also keep checking to make sure she’s breathing; it’s a new mom thing I’m sure, I just hope I can resist driving myself into severe sleep deprivation by checking her constantly.

On Friday, I went to see the midwife and was checked for how close I was to “letting the baby go”.  I was a little close, but there was certainly a ways to go on the dilation front, but Mike went ahead and put the car seat in on Friday night anyway. Smart thinking Mike!

Friday night/Saturday morning, I woke up uncomfortable and decided perhaps I should start timing these things that felt like contractions.  After several hours of debate and getting some errands run, we decided to head to the hospital.  I couldn’t really tell if this was real or false labor, so my expectation was that we would be home in a few hours.  We waited around for a while and made only a little progress once we got to the hospital, and then after a few hours stuff started happening and we were definitely having this baby!  Pretty quickly after that I decided I was not going to be able He-Woman my way through this and voted for the epidural; epidurals are your friends ladies! 

Soon after the epidural started working, things got scary pretty fast.  The midwife and the nurse, without saying anything, began moving very quickly around me; an oxygen mask was put on me and suddenly there were a lot of people in the room.  They were still not telling us what was going on, but they were moving me around, sticking stuff into me, giving me drugs in my i.v. and basically scaring the crap out of Mike and I.  I kept saying “What’s happening?” but they appeared not to hear me through my oxygen mask.  At some point, after several minutes of this, we were finally told that the baby’s heart rate had dropped to practically nothing, but they had gotten it back up.  Scared the crap out of us! 

A little bit later it was time to push, and frankly, this is why they call it labor and I see why now.  Let’s all say another “Whohoo!” for the epidural here, because I think it would be extremely hard to concentrate on figuring out how to push (it doesn’t come naturally) while being in pain.  While I pushed, they vacuumed her little head and after about an hour, out she came. 

There are other more gory details that I will not be posting here; suffice to say, there are other gory details and will continue to be some for several weeks.

Although I will say, being a red head yet again has it’s drawbacks – not that I had a choice, but what a pain, literally.  First, I get more stretchmarks because I am pale, then they tell me there’s no way I’m getting out of an episiotomy because of my skin, then they tell me they won’t take the i.v. out for 24 hours after delivery because red-heads bleed more, and then finally, they tell me that breastfeeding will hurt more because of the pale skin.  Who knew?  When I was a little girl, I had carroty hair and didn’t enjoy all of the names I got called, like “fire-head”, but even now, when my hair is much darker, it continues to be a problem.  Strange… 

The most important thing is that Anna Leslie is here, that she is healthy, and that I have a great husband who is, as I had expected, turning out to be a great dad.  Mike has been super helpful and supportive and he seems to do a lot better than me with very little sleep. And he never once during labor said, “Let the baby go.”  Thank heaven for a little girl and her smart daddy!