Meeting Jackson has been more than awesome...he's a great new addition to the family! Let's see about some highlights of his arrival and the joys of motherhood (again)...
1. He came into the world after 20 seconds of pushing...one push and that was it!
2. He's very healthy and weighed 8.7 pounds (one ounce more than Eban)
3. He didn't sleep at all his first night home (maybe two hours)
4. Eban has been great with the new baby and says hello to him at every chance (too cute for words)
5. Seamus has been great taking to the new baby...he licks the side of his head every time I bring his down stairs
6. I'm not taking two Percocet every two hours like I did with Eban so I'm not drugged at all (could be the reason Jackson doesn't sleep as much as Eban did)
7. He had his first date with Morgan O'Brien less than 24 hours after entering the world (see picture below)
Enjoy the photos. And if you want more details on things, go below the following photos for the more in depth stories
The Delivery: We checked into the hospital at 8:30am and didn't get the Pitocin drip until 11:20am. Around that time, Ryan left and got lunch and came back to the room where he smacked his lips with every bite of his sandwich and his snacks - that's the first time I wanted to give him a solid right hook in the choppers. Can you imagine being hungry and listening to your husband say "hmmm" every time he took a savoring bite of any type of food??
Anyway...Around 3pm, my contractions were 2 minutes apart and strong and the anesthesiogist finally came into the room for my epidural. He stuck a blood vessel instead of whatever his was supposed to get, so only half of the epidural worked...the left side of my body was completely numb. After about a half hour of increasingly hard contractions, he came back to try to redo it. As I sat up again and was hunched over so he could get a good spot in between my spine, Ryan began blowing his bad coffee breath on my face and telling me to breathe. I gritted through my teeth to chew some gum and to STOP blowing on my face. He got some gum and blew on my face some more and said is this better. This was the second time I wanted to kill my husband...and boy, did I want to kill him. But I was more scared than angry as it was taking so long to fix the epidural...so he's lucky with this fact.
After 15 minutes my left side was still numb so they came in and gave me a huge syringe of some type of numbing agent into my IV and by 5pm, my whole body was completely numb. They want you to feel some sort of pressure, but I felt nothing.
At this time, my blood pressure had dropped very low again - 88/40 or something like that. So at 5:30pm, they gave me a third shot of ephedrin (sp?) into my IV and I was 7 centimeters dilated. I could feel the top half of my body slightly tremble and that was making me a tad nervous. At 6:20pm, the nurse came in to check on me and said, "ohmy, you're ready to go!" At that point, they paged my doctor and then then the on-call doc came into my room with the med student and our nurse. The med student asked me to push once to see what would happen and then all of the sudden (and I didn't even push that hard), she said he's coming!! And out Jackson came in 20 seconds...it was surreal!
Coming Home:
I was walking within two hours of giving birth (a huge difference than last time). The hospital gave us the all-clear to leave after 24 hours and since we were feeling well, we did. Jackson wasn't ready to sleep all night so he decided to stay up all night. Good thing reinforcements were near (a.k.a. Grammy Swooz), so we asked her to stay up with him from 12:30am for an hour so we could finally get some rest. Last night, he slept every three hours, so we are hoping to get on that schedule for awhile.
Eban has been great! He says "hiya" to the baby and smiles sweetly at him and then continues on playing with whatever suits him for that 5 minutes. We thought he'd be more traumatized, but he's not. Maybe he's too young to be severely traumatized by a new baby coming into his world?
Yesterday, Jackson weighed 7 pounds, 11 ounces at his one day check-up. The docs said he should be back up to his birth weight at two weeks. He got a clean bill of health. While we were there, they commented that Eban's stitches scar looks great. We like that news!
So that's it for now...if there are typos, forgive me, as I'm sitting far away from the computer screen and can't see what I'm typing as I sat on my reading glasses for the umpteenth time and broke them! For those of you that are vision-impaired like me...you know what it's like to break another pair of reading glasses! go figure.
