Jen and Betty were up most of the night, nursing and watching Gilmore Girls. It was tough to sleep through. I am now remembering, vividly, what it was like to have a newborn the first two times around. I'm living it.
Now, I have been told that if I watched some, I would like the Gilmore Girls. I don't know. My first impression is that this is what would happen if you put a stack of dollar bills and a thesaurus together and asked them to write a TV show. Rich girls bantering about rich girl things at high velocity.
Anyway, I finally remembered to plug in my mp3 player and got some noise blockage to drown out the constant talking.
Got up super tired with my alarm at 7 AM, intent on doing my proposed morning-routine chores: I started the laundry, went up to do the dishes, and found Jen's mom already doing them. Hey, I can't complain... Got the kids' lunches ready and got them ready to go to school, but they wanted Grandma to walk them to school. Again, no complaints here. I'm glad to let grandma be grandma, but it turns out there's not a whole lot that I can contribute.
So that's why, for the first time in a very very long time, I spent several hours playing video games this morning. Yay me! Current game of choice is Pokemon Colosseum for the Gamecube. The nice thing about being an older, patient, "vintage gamer" is that I can wait for new games to come out, people to get bored of them, I can pick up the well-reviewed ones used, wait a few years, and eventually get around to playing them. Anyway, I had a pretty fun time, but it was a quiet morning.
Helped out with Betty and helped Jen and Betty take a bath. We had some visitors this afternoon who brought us a yummy dinner (thanks!), so Grandma and I ran to the store to make ourselves scarce.
Okay, here's a tangent: It was packed at the grocery store. It is busier at 2 PM at the grocery store than it is at 6 PM. Where do all these people come from? Don't they have jobs? Isn't 6 or 7 PM the obvious busy time to do grocery shopping? I don't know. it's weird. I thought by staying home that I would have more convenient grocery access. Turns out the best time to shop is when we shopped before we had kids -- 10:30 at night, just before the store closes.
I took my nap after groceries, and woke up and put together the supper that Becky had brought.
This evening, our midwife Tracy visited. Home visits! Amazing. Anyway, it was really really good to have a talk with her, to kind of sort through all the things that happened at the birth. Anyway, she gave us two bits of information that eased our minds a lot about things-- one is that larger babies tend to have more instances of... what was it... tachypnea? ...anyway, it's normal, and it almost always solves itself. cool. The other thing was that Betty's birth was a classic case of shoulder dystocia (her shoulders got stuck and wouldn't come out of the birth canal). Tracy told us that she's sort of the resident expert on Shoulder Dystocias, and that 3 of her 6 kids had it. In fact, her first shoulder dystocia was the impetus for her becoming a midwife-- she felt her doctors didn't treat it right, and did some research, asking around, and found midwifery (and Andaluz in particular) had better, more assured answers. Anyway, it was obvious at the birth that Tracy knew what she was doing, and she must have mad tetris skills, because she just turned the baby right, and got her right out of there.
It was super reassuring to have Tracy visit. This birth was painful, but I think it would have been a messy C-section with lots of drama had we gone to a hospital. Instead, it was difficult, painful, but not invasive or (too) traumatic. I highly recommend waterbirth to anyone considering it, and I highly recommend the midwives at Andaluz as knowing exactly what they're doing.
While Tracy was monopolizing our attention, the kids had a fun evening playing, and I put them to bed.
I spent much of the evening catching up on this here blog. It was tough
to get the first few words on the page. Now that I've started, it should
be much easier to sum up the days' events right after they happened.It also seems to take forever to upload pictures over our creaky internet connection, so on days like this when there's no pictures, you'll understand why.
I wrote most of last night's blog while holding Betty or bouncing her in a bouncy seat, letting Jen get some evening rest.
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Okay, now an interesting aside: For all three births, we've had a boombox and music playing as Jen labored and delivered. I kept track of the song that was playing when each kid was born. It kinda becomes "their" song. Here goes:
Betty: The Lowest Pair - Magpies at Sunset:
Sabrina: Dirty Three - I Offered It Up to the Stars and the Night Sky
Edgar: Death Cab for Cutie - Death of an Interior Decorator
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