Baby girl is here!

On Wednesday morning at my weekly obgyn appointment I asked for a membrane  sweep. I remembered being offered one around this time when I was pregnant with Matthew and it seemed to help. He was born 4 days later. But this went much quicker! 

All week I had been having painful inconsistent contractions. I even went to labor and delivery on Sunday after the contractions lasted for a full minute every 5 minutes for over an hour, but once I was resting in the bed they petered out. The nurse told me Braxton Hicks can be just as painful as real contractions. 

So... in the end I waited too long to go in! I had contractions all day long on Thursday, but they weren't totally consistent. 25 minutes apart for a couple hours, then an hour pause, then 20 minutes apart, then another break. By dinner time they were about 10 minutes apart. I really started to wonder if this could be it. 

Then all of a sudden they went from 10 minutes to 3 minutes apart and they were so painful! I called Mom to pick up Matthew. During breaks between contractions I slowly made my way out to the car. We left our house just before 9. By the time we got to the hospital (just 5 minutes away), the contractions were 2 minutes apart and lasting at least a minute. So basically every other minute I was in excruciating pain. Trevor had to push me in a wheelchair up to labor and delivery and sign all the paperwork for me. 

They hurried me back, I threw on a hospital gown, and they checked me to discover I was dialated to an 8 or a 9. By this point I was screaming a lot and begging them to get me back for an epidural. They pushed my bed out of triage and straight to a delivery room, where I needed to transfer to another bed. That's when I got the urge to push. They told me to wait until they got my IV in, and could I please relax my arm? But I couldn't resist pushing and relaxing any part of me was practically impossible. I will admit to lots of screaming and begging for an epidural (too late!). So much fear that I couldn't handle an unmedicated birth. That was not my plan. 

But the poor nurse managed to get the IV in.  Thank goodness the doctor appeared right away. Now it was okay to push. My first attempt involved a lot of screaming and flailing. The doctor told me I needed to stop all of that and concentrate all my energy on pushing. Get angry at that pain and push hard, and all the pain would end. I did my best, scared to death that I wouldn't be able to do it and forgetting to breathe half the time, which made things difficult. But a good 3 or 4 pushes later, they were handing me my beautiful baby and it was over. It was amazing how quickly that overwhelming pain dissipated. 

I think I was a little in shock? It all happened so fast it really took me a few hours to process that she was really here and the hardest part (of pregnancy, anyway) was really over. We left home just before 9 and she was born at 9:36.

The funniest part is when I apologized to the nurses for screaming like a maniac, one of them told me I was the most composed person she has seen during an unmedicated labor. I'm sure she was just being nice because there was absolutely nothing composed about how I behaved. 🤣 I don't think I have ever screamed so much in my life.

At any rate baby girl is here and it is already so fun to see that her little personality is so different from her brother's. Matthew is coming by to meet her with my parents later today. I hope that goes well!

Waiting on baby girl

 

Last time I stood under this beautiful tree sculpture, my water broke and I was admitted to give birth to Matthew.

No luck today. Today I made my fourth visit to Labor and Delivery with this pregnancy. The first was at 32 weeks and they had to give me drugs to stop contractions during an early labor scare. Twice they recommended I come in because I might be leaking amniotic fluid. Today I went in because I had contractions lasting a minute every 5 minutes for an hour and a half. This is after two days of painful inconsistent contractions that I hoped might be early labor. 

But the contractions slowed down once I was laying in the hospital bed. Dang it! A weekend birth early in the day would have been convenient to be sure. And today is the 4th anniversary of my Grandma's passing... It would have been nice to have something happy happen today.  I guess I will just keep waiting. 

Blessings of Zoom Church

 A tale of two stakes... In my mom's stake up north, they had great success with Zoom during the Pandemic. They noticed people returning to church (at least virtually) who hadn't been in a long time, and they've felt prompted that to this day they should offer a Zoom option.

In my stake, they feel that Zoom is actually a stumbling block that was keeping people from returning in person, and they ended it forever last July.

I believe that our church leaders are inspired and the two stakes have different needs. That makes sense to me. But as a mother of a young toddler who keeps getting sick, boy am I glad that I can hop on my mom's Zoom church when we can't go in person! We didn't catch covid until last fall and we had to miss a few weeks of church then. Zoom was such a blessing. Zoom would be great when I first have my baby--the first 6 weeks I don't go anywhere.

Today we were gearing up to go to stake conference when Matthew threw up pretty spectacularly. I was feeling very bummed that we were going to miss it when I remembered my mom's stake has stake conference today too, complete with a Zoom link!

I don't know what the long term answer is but it would be nice if there was some sort of Zoom meeting always available for people that are home sick. But I guess the pandemic also taught me what to do when you can't go to a church meeting--you can still hold a very lovely meeting right at home.

Tired of Politics

When we first started trying to get pregnant again last year, I was hopeful we could do a Halloween pregnancy announcement. I looked at ideas and came up with what I thought was really cute--a Dr. Seuss themed reveal! Based on "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish". I would wear a red fish hat, Trevor would wear a blue one, Matthew would be in a fish costume with a number 1 on his chest, and then I'd put a tiny fish in a fishbowl on my stomach with a number 2 on the top. At the time I thought this was completely adorable.

Then at whatever point last year, Dr. Seuss was accused of racism and for a little while people were pulling him from their shelves. I realized my cute little pregnancy announcement could be taken as a sort of political statement, as some people were publicly taking sides on the Dr. Seuss issue as a political statement. But I just wanted to share a cute little idea based off a children's book! I wasn't pregnant by Halloween so it was a moot point anyway.

Trevor and I set a goal to take Matthew to Disneyland before he turned 3 and we'd have to pay for his ticket. We finally booked our trip a couple weeks ago, and then all the drama around Disney has erupted about the law in Florida. I am not happy about the direction Disney is going. There is content they are slipping into their toddler content that I do not agree with--I don't let Matthew watch it unsupervised because things pop up that I don't expect. I'm disappointed that they've made alcohol available in every park and that now they cater more to the single adults that like to visit Disney more so than to families, just because singles have greater disposable income.

But I haven't cancelled our Disneyland trip just yet. I got so excited I looked up best places to take pictures in Disneyland and saved a few to my phone. We paid for a year of Disney+ back in December and I intend to use it for the full year.

I want to still be a happy little Disney lover just because I love their movies and I've been a long time fan without people assuming it is a political statement.

Why can't we keep the politics out of kids' shows?

Word of the Year: Reclaim

 First, let me say that 22 has been my lucky number since I was a little kid. Why? I have no idea but because of that I have reason to believe 2022 will be an awesome year. :) Back in my BYU days I used to tell people turning 22 that that was a particularly good year of life and I got a lot of strange looks.

Trevor just pointed out to me that his birthday is on the 22nd, so there you go. Proof it is a good number.

I thought long and hard about what my word of the year should be. I really struggled with it this time around. Finally, though, I decided it should be reclaim.

The last two years have been tough for me as I'm sure they have been for everyone. I became a mother two months before we settled into the pandemic. Adapting to motherhood was wonderful and scary and challenging, and doing it during the pandemic was so isolating. At first I was still working 20 hours a week, but often times needing to sacrifice my sleep or meals to fit it all in since child care options were extremely limited. 

I knew that working as a marriage/parenting researcher wouldn't mean I would have all the answers to parenting... but I didn't realize how much it would frighten me to know that I wasn't living up to the perfect textbook answers of how parenting "should" go. For whatever reason people tend to be quite judgmental of parents, and I often found myself taking that judgement particularly hard.

Then of course lately society has become so divided, along political lines and along pandemic lines. I found myself in a strange place where I am politically conservative but also a believer in masks and vaccines, and deeply dedicated to protecting my at-risk family members from contracting covid. People would sometimes judge me and my politics incorrectly based on my mask. Suddenly I found myself taking a lot of heat from people that I usually agreed with on things because to me covid was a real illness. Sometimes people would argue to me that the odds of dying of covid are small, but having family members who have been struck with rare conditions or deaths before this wasn't much comfort to me. One of my uncles passed away from covid on Matthew's first birthday last year. Other have said that covid is just a flu and not a big deal, but Matthew and I caught it in September (likely from church, unfortunately) and it wasn't just a flu for us.

In the end, to me, covid is a health condition, not a political issue. It hit the world at the same time but like any health issue it impacted everyone differently, and everyone needed to make their own choices about what precautions to take and how to move ahead. It makes sense to me that different people came to different conclusions, but there was no room for that in the public discourse. It seemed that no matter what I did in the pandemic, I was judged for it--called out for not being cautious enough or called out as a stupid sheep for trying to take precautions.

So basically the last two years have been a lot of adapting, a lot of sacrifice, and a lot of feeling judged even when I'm doing my best. In all of this, I feel like I've gotten a bit lost. I've forgotten to take care of my own needs instead of focusing on my family's needs. I've forgotten that my opinions and feelings matter too, even if they are different than someone else's. I've even forgotten some of my strengths and talents and things that make me a worthwhile person. 

I don't like that. This year, I want to refocus on reclaiming myself, being stronger against opposition and judgement, and taking better care of my own needs and wishes. This is going to be a year of Shelece.