Two weeks old

Gabriel turned two weeks old yesterday - it already seems like he's been with us for longer than that!! It has been a rather momentous two weeks, I suppose.
We're all doing well, just getting used to the sleep schedule. Of which there isn't really one. I was running just fine on five hours a night (divided, depending on his feeding schedule), but now I'm starting to feel the effects more. It will still be a while before he's even sleeping for five hours straight, so I suppose I just need to get used to it. It's not so bad, since I can try and take naps during the day. The worst is when Gabriel won't go to sleep and we can't figure out why. That usually happens when we're trying to go to bed, around midnight or so. Last night he decided he was going to stay up until 3am, for no particular reason. Usually its more like 2, if he does it. Otherwise he just goes down after I feed him, and we're able to get to sleep. I think it's only been once that he's decided to stay awake after a later feeding - although granted I am all muddled when that happens, from lack of sleep, so I could be forgetting instances.
For a week or so Gabriel seemed to be doing this cluster feeding thing that was really tiring. It seemed like he just wanted to eat constantly, which was really draining for me. When you're breastfeeding, the baby can eat as often as he needs to, so if he thinks he's hungry, he should be fed. It just gets tiring after a while. For the past few days its been a little more normal, but supposedly he'll have another growth spurt at three weeks, so we'll be in for more heavy feeding I suppose. My milk has totally come in, so I'm no longer worried about him getting enough food from me.
We took Gabriel to the doctor last week, when he was nine days old. She weighed him again, and he has passed his birth weight, which is good news. He was just under eight pounds. That puts him in the 25th percentile for his weight, but he is in the 50th percentile for both his length and head circumference, so I suppose he just needs to continue to put on weight. Which I am quite sure he has been doing. He got a clean bill of health from the pediatrician, and won't see her again until he is two months old. The next day we took him back to the hospital for a final series of metabolic tests. We haven't seen any results, but the pediatrician is supposed to call us when she gets them. They took a ton of blood for these, poor little guy.
In other big news, Gabriel's umbilical cord just fell off this afternoon!! It was looking very uncomfortable, so I'm glad it's off now.
We've taken Gabriel out on two walks this week in his stroller, when the sun is out. He doesn't really seem to know what to make of these adventures. I'll have to take a picture of his face the next time we go - it really is hilarious, very pensive. And George seems to have totally mellowed out concerning Gabriel. No more barking when he hears him cry. He really enjoys sniffing Gabriel whenever he gets the chance - I think he's still trying to figure things out a little bit.
Those are the updates I can think of right now. I've included more recent pictures, although not in any particular order (this last picture is of Gabriel with his Grandma Mary, who is staying with us this week). I'll experiment with uploading videos as well - not really sure how that works on blogger, we may have to put them on youtube first. I brought home a stack of books from the library today, all on newborn care and development. We'll see if any of those prove useful to our new life with the little guy.

The birth of Gabriel

Here is the story of Gabriel's birth, complete with pictures, although the pictures may not be in any sort of order.
As I mentioned in a post last week, the doctor had decided to let my body go ahead and go into labor naturally, but it had not done so by last Monday when we were at the doctor's office. Because of the "maturity" of my placenta, the doctor decided to induce on Monday evening. So we checked into the hospital at 6pm on Monday the 4th, and began the cytotec induction at around 6:40. Labor began for real a little while later, but was still a result of the cytotec, so they were keeping an eye on my progress, and thought they might do pitocin (to further augment the labor) if my body didn't do it on its own. But by midnight, they decided that my body had taken over and I was able to progress without anything else (for which I was very grateful). Around that time my contractions were three to four minutes apart, and becoming so that I could no longer talk through the peak of them. My mom was getting some sleep at that point, and I was trying to, so there wasn't much talking going on anyway. The nurse would periodically come in and check, and even though sometimes the contractions would spread out a little bit (to more than four minutes apart), she still decided I was good without pitocin. She checked my progress a few times, and I had progressed to 3 and a half centimeters or so by 4am-ish. (The checking was the most painful thing I had endured up to that point - it was way worse than the contractions I was having then.)
It was around then that my contractions became more unbearably painful. Up until that point I had been doing shallow breaths through them, and that seemed to really help. Time went by fairly quickly. Sometime close to 5am, however, they got so bad that I had to take really deep breaths just to distract myself, and squeeze something really really hard with my hands to get through it. I am not much of a noise-maker, so the nurse said I looked calm, even though my pain level was getting up to an 8 or 9. The worst part was that my contractions started slowing down, with more time in between, but they were lasting for longer, sometimes feeling like there were multiple peaks. This was not what they want to see in labor, it doesn't count as any kind of progress. I endured about an hour and a half of this before the doctor came in. She checked me and said that not only had I not progressed in dilation in more than a couple of hours, but also that the baby had moved out of position. This meant that labor would only slow down further, without him pressing on my cervix to get it to dilate. She broke my water, and said that we would try a few different positions to try to help him get back into position again.
Throughout this whole entire process, Gabriel's heart rate was not consistent. They had seen this in a couple of my non-stress tests (the monitoring they were doing at the hospital in the weeks before the birth) - his heart rate seemed more stable in certain positions; it wasn't bad in others, but was not as good. But at those visits it was not enough to worry them. The night that I was in labor, it was bad enough that the only position that his heart rate did not drop in was on my right side. Anywhere else I turned, or when I got up dropped it, sometimes by half. So that was concerning, but because labor was progressing all night, they weren't too concerned. I was just more uncomfortable.
Around 7am or so, they started helping me change positions in order to get Gabriel to move back into position. Because of the heart rate issue, however, they had to keep me on oxygen, otherwise it would drop. Unfortunately, none of the positions helped, and my contractions were at their absolute worst. I was so exhausted that I was falling asleep in the minutes between them, but then they would come and I would be practically incapacitated. They were so bad that I began throwing up after every few. The worst part about this was that I still wasn't progressing, and Gabriel still wasn't back in position, so I felt like I had to look forward to several more hours of this when I could barely handle it then. The doctor had mentioned that an epidural may be a good idea, not for my pain management, but in order to help the baby move back into place. As much as I did not want to do an epidural, I had to think about the option. When my water broke, there was myconium in it, which meant that we would already have a neonatal doctor and a few more nurses in the room for the actual birth - they would have to do more with Gabriel to make sure he was okay right after birth because he was obviously already in distress. So the side effects that worried me about the epidural were basically already happening. The idea that I might have to endure more hours of that level of pain and exhaustion were more than I could really bear, so I went ahead and got the epidural. That was sometime between 9 or 10 in the morning, so I had been in labor for about twelve hours, five of which had been at the limit of my pain threshold.
Sometime around 7 or 8, so before I got the epidural, Gabriel's heart rate began to drop with each contraction. This is expected right before birth, because the baby is heading down through the birth canal. It is not a good sign when you are barely four centimeters dilated. This was yet another sign that Gabriel was in distress. After getting the epidural, my contractions got a little more regular again, but they were still unable to get Gabriel to move into position at all, and I did not progress past four centimeters in the few hours that I was laboring in different positions (even with the epidural, I was able to change positions with help - I just couldn't get out of bed). So around 1pm, the doctor came in and said that with as many hours as Gabriel had been in distress, we needed to do something different. She said he was still doing okay, but they could not do anything else to progress my labor. They could not give me anything that would make the contractions harder or more regular, such as pitocin, because his heart rate was not stable enough. Leaving my body to continue the way it was was only wearing us both out, and not getting the baby delivered. So she decided to do a cesarean section. I was so exhausted and frustrated that I was not really bothered by the idea. I was worried about what had gone wrong that caused Gabriel to move, when he'd been in that position for a week or more. It happened when my body was no longer on the cytotec, so it was not that, but it really is unclear what actually caused it. The whole heart rate thing was worrying as well. So although I absolutely did not want a C-section before, now it seemed like our best option for delivering a healthy baby.
Because I was already on the epidural, they just changed the medication to make it so that I could have the surgery. They gave Robert some scrubs, and told my mom she would have to wait in the waiting room. They wheeled me to the operating room and were ready within a half an hour. Robert joined us, and they got started. In less than ten minutes I heard Gabriel crying. I started to cry, even though I couldn't even see him yet (I'm tearing up now just thinking about it). They cut his cord and sucked out the amniotic fluid and myconium that had gotten in his nose, mouth, and lungs. Then they took him over to the scale and began the process of weighing and recording everything. Robert had brought the camera, so he took some pictures, and I think one of the nurses took a couple as well. They were already sewing me back together by then.
Gabriel was completely healthy, just screaming bloody murder. The doctor said that the umbilical cord had been in his face, but did not really look kinked or anything, so she did not think it was the cause of distress. They sent my placenta to a pathology lab to see if they could find out if it was the cause. But otherwise, we have no answers as to why things happened the way they did.
My recovery has been really good. I really do have a pretty high pain threshold, so even though I had major abdominal surgery, I don't really feel bad. It still doesn't feel quite real. I was afraid that I'd be disappointed or upset if I had the sort of birth experience that I ended up having, but I am honestly okay with it. It may be that if I hadn't been induced at all, the chain of events that happened would not have happened that way, and I would not have needed the Cesarean. But when the doctor got the pathology report back on my placenta, she said that it showed signs that would have led to an infection in the amniotic fluid in a day or so. That is very bad, and is something that might not have been caught had the doctor sent me home to go into labor on my own. Who knows? That was not the cause of the baby's distress either, but just one more thing that we learned about what was going on. I do not feel guilty for my choices during the birth, or for not having a natural birth as I had wanted. We did the best we could at the time, and Gabriel and I are both healthy and doing well. That's really the most that we can hope for after any birth.

Welcome to the world, Gabriel Joseph West!!

That's right, he's here!! Our beautiful little boy was born on Tuesday, January 5th, at 2:39 in the afternoon. He weighed seven pounds, twelve ounces, and is twenty and a half inches long. He really is the most beautiful baby boy ever!! I have lots of pictures already. I'll post some here. I'm going to try to keep this updated as much as possible, but obviously its taken me almost a week to get this post up, so we'll see how that actually goes.
Gabriel is doing really well, after getting off to a rather rough start. I will do a separate post to tell all about his birth. The short story is that I ended up needing a Cesarean section to deliver, but the only effect he really suffered from that was having more amniotic fluid in his digestive system than usual. He spent the first day or so spitting that up. He passed all of his blood sugar tests, for which we were grateful. However, on Thursday, the day we were supposed to leave the hospital, we were noticing that his lips and mouth were really dry - his lips were even sticking together! None of the nurses really noticed this when they checked him. Robert pointed it out to his pediatrician when she came by for her second visit. She realized that Gabriel must be really dehydrated. She ordered that we put him on formula supplements to get him rehydrated. They also weighed him, and he had already lost ten percent of his birth weight, which is the most they want to see babies lose. I think it usually takes them three or four days to get to that point though, and then they start putting on weight again. Our little Gabriel was simply not getting enough to eat!! I felt like I was feeding a lot, so it was probably my breast milk that wasn't getting enough hydration and nutrients to him, and not his inability to feed. He was so super fussy those first two days in the hospital. He was really gassy, so we thought that was the main problem, but as soon as we started getting formula into him, he began to feel better. We waited for a few extra hours at the hospital, hoping for a wet diaper (which he hadn't had for 24 hours), but eventually they just sent us home, with a promise we would see the pediatrician in the morning.
On Friday morning we got our wet diaper, finally. The pediatrician was relieved, and so were we. Gabriel was obviously feeling better as well! On Saturday we had a visit with the lactation consultant, and we learned that Gabriel had gained back five ounces! He was eating so much, but its obvious that he knew what he wanted. The visit with the consultant showed that as of Saturday, my breast milk still was not providing quite a full meal for Gabriel, although my milk started coming in. She told me what I could do to help it along, and already its helping. We didn't give any formula supplements at all last night, because Gabriel didn't seem to be hungry after breastfeeding. Sometimes he eats so much more than the "typical" amount per feeding, but I think that if he's hungry, he needs to eat! He knows what his body needs better than my books do. I am glad that my own supply is starting to be enough for him though.
Life with Gabriel is lovely. It seems to consist of constantly feeding for me, but I know that there are other things going on as well. He's started sleeping a little more, and he has nice long quiet alert periods that he likes to spend staring at his daddy's face. We still have some frustration with feeding, as he hasn't gotten the hang of latching on down to perfection yet. But for a baby who is less than a week old, I think he's doing wonderfully. We also are still trying to figure out a lot of his crying signals. He still seems to be really gassy, so he almost always needs to be burped. That makes him unhappy, but sometimes its hard to figure out that's what he needs. Otherwise he's a lovely, happy baby.
Okay, this is the longest post ever, but I'll finish up by saying that George has been home with Gabriel for a little more than a day, and he seems to be doing okay. For the most part the only thing that upsets him is when Gabriel cries. Not every time - throughout the night George just kind of comes over and checks on him. But sometimes it really startles him, especially if Gabriel is asleep in the other room. Then when George hears him cry he freaks out and runs into the other room barking and growling. Gabriel doesn't seem to mind (he's already crying, after all), but it's still not great to have the dog running over and barking in his face. George calms down really quick when this happens, but it sort of mystifies us. I'm sure he'll figure it out eventually. Otherwise, he's really cute around Gabriel. He'll usually come over and check him out if he's on somebody's lap, getting close enough to sniff his ear. It's hard to tell what he thinks of the whole thing. He knows that he's no longer allowed on our bed, and this change doesn't seem to bother him too much. We'll keep an eye on how things progress as Gabriel gets bigger.
I'll try to do another post tomorrow, telling Gabriel's birth story. Also, I have to mention that having my mom around has been amazing. She leaves tomorrow. This post is already super long, so I'm stopping now. (Here is a link to the Picasa web album I've created - I'll be updating it as regularly as I can, so check there for pictures!)

This is it!!

So I thought I would do one last update since it looks like I will probably not be updating for a while . . .
We were waiting all week, trying to encourage my body to go into labor, but that wasn't really happening. I've been in early labor for a few days, having contractions and what-not, but nothing regular or even very strong. I kept getting totally frustrated.
We had a doctor's appointment this morning, and she checked me as well as doing an ultrasound. She said that my cervix seems just about the same as two weeks ago, which was seriously disappointing. I expected to be pretty effaced from all the activity that's been going on, but apparently no such luck. However, I am dilated one centimeter! So my body is doing something, I suppose. So while she was checking me, the doctor said, well you'll definitely have this baby sometime this week. Then she did the ultrasound. She said everything looked great, except for my "very mature placenta". That seemed to be pretty serious to her. So after looking at everything, she said, "okay get dressed, I'm going to call the labor wing, and let you know what they say." It looks like they are okay to check me in tonight, so we're going in!
We'll be admitted at 6pm tonight, and they'll start a cytotec induction. That's the same thing she was going to have done three weeks ago when she first brought up induction. It's supposedly the gentlest, most natural way to induce (according to my doctor) - plus it directly works on the cervix, rather than going through an IV. It also does not require monitoring after the initial six hours, which other induction methods do. The doctor is pretty sure that this will put me into real labor, since I'm already in early labor, and we won't have to do any more augmentation. But she is going to do the lowest pitocin level induction if necessary. Either way, we should have a baby tomorrow sometime!
I'm hoping the cytotec does its thing, or that I go into real labor in the next few hours (which is a real possibility). We may have a baby in the very early hours of the morning, if things move along quickly, but it will probably be further along in the morning. So this is super exciting for us!! We will post pictures as soon as we get around to it . . .