Lauren Elizabeth - Feb 20, 2008

Wow. I thought I would be good and update my blog with news from Italy and track the course of the past 9-10 months of pregnancy through my blog. Instead, I neglected to update anything for 10 months at least - the last pictures of me on here were pre-pregnancy. Now, there's just going to be pictures of a really cute kid (or rather, of me, without being pregnant).

I thought that buying a house and Billy embarking on his legal career would be the biggest life changes that we would have for the imminent future. Then, law school graduation happened, followed by a missed period and then 39 weeks later, we welcomed Lauren Elizabeth to the family at 1:39 pm on Feb 20, 2008.

Being pregnant was super-easy. Really. I know that very few women have such an easy time of it - none of my friends really escaped morning sickness or were miserable in the last month. For me, it was simply a matter of waking up each day, trying to eat healthy food, and just doing (or not doing) whatever Dr. Pohl said I should or shouldn't do. If you live in Atlanta, and need a good OB-GYN for any reason (he specializes in infertility as well), Dr. Joseph Pohl is worth the drive to Lawrenceville. The folks at Gwinnett Medical Center took really good care of me, Billy and Lauren too, even though we did have a bit of an NICU scare with her the first hour she was born. In week 39, I was still not dilating a single bit, and Dr. Pohl said that it was possible I could go 2 weeks past my due date. I'd already had 3 weeks or so of just wanting to be finished with being pregnant (an 8 pound baby gets cumbersome and unwieldy rather quickly in month 9). So, we elected to induce a few days early.

Many people that I had talked to swore up and down that elective induction was a terrible thing to do because the drugs made labor extremely painful and gave the laboring women a miserable experience. When we were talking about the procedure with Dr. Pohl, he calmed us both by saying that he preferred to keep things as close to nature as possible and for us to be prepared to wait 24 hours for the initial drugs to even begin to dilate me, much less start true labor. He said that many doctors get impatient when women haven't dilated enough after a short amount of time and push things too fast, which results in C-sections or extreme pain. I can speak from experience that taking it slowly per Dr. Pohl's philosophy was actually quite good. There were a few hours of intense pain in the middle of the night before I was dilated enough to have an epidural and Stadol only worked for one round. But, once the epidural was in and labor began, things went pretty smoothly.

I remember Dr. Pohl coming in just after lunchtime (I came down with a fever around 11 or noon, so we had to wait for the antibiotics to run through my system and for my fever to go away before we could start pushing). He was looking for he paper waders, but evidentally the nurse who stocked the room had gotten the wrong ones. His first words: "What the hell?!" Billy and I nearly died at the bed, because normally Dr. Pohl is extremely mild-mannered and tranquil, so seeing him slightly peeved was hilarious. My nurse Lynne (God bless her, she was fantastic) responded with, "Dr. Pohl! You can't say that!" Once they covered the floor and bed with tons of paper (and the tool table was laid out (I don't even remember all the instruments that were there, but there was a long row of silver), we got down to the business of pushing. My contractions were about 5 minutes apart, so between each series of pushes, we'd all sit back (Dr. Pohl included) and basically chill until the next contraction started. Billy says the pushign took about 45 minutes - as soon as Lauren's head was out, Dr. Pohl evidentally reached right on in and physically pulled her out by her head so that I didn't even have to push her shoulders through. My only moment of panic was when he made the comment, "I hope we don't have to cut through to the sphincter - I'm going to try to save it." Good news is, the episiotomy was actually much milder than he and I were afraid it would be and everything seems to be healing up nicely.

Once we got home with Lauren, I had several days of absolute terror and panic. I recall being in tears on the way home even. I vacillated between trying to come to grips with the fact that my stomach no longer held the faceless entity that I had been carrying and feeling for 39 weeks. I felt terrible because I didn't feel like I had a bond with her at all (they had taken her from me for the first 24 hours because of my fever during labor) and I felt completely unprepared to be a mom. When I would think about having to spend the next 7-8 weeks at home alone with her, I would get sick to my stomach (mainly because I thought I would be so dreadfully lonely with no interactions with people) -and then I would feel guilty that I had those kinds of feelings. Billy, on the other hand, took to her right away and had been filling in the role of dad splendidly, which further compounded my guilt that I didn't feel especially maternal.

Thankfully, I think the hormonal rollercoaster ride is coming to an end. The past couple of days have been wonderful - granted, Lauren is a super pleasant baby - she only cries if she needs a diaper change or is hungry (which is roughly every 3 hours on the dot). She usually only eats about 3 oz of milk during that period and then goes right back to sleep. We've had to make some feeding adjustments (I have basically given up on direct breastfeeding in favor of pumping so that I know exactly how much she is eating and how much I need to prepare for when she goes to day care), and we had to change to a different bottle so that she wouldn't get gas so badly. Now that those changes are in place, we just sit and wait for her to wake up. In the meantime, we stand over her crib or bassinet and watch her face contort and smile, laugh at her sneezes, smile at her tremendous yawns, and marvel over the fact that somehow we were blessed with such a cute and wonderful baby. What in the world did we do to warrant her? And then I have a mild panic attack during which I hope and pray that maybe, just maybe, I can be a mom worthy of her.