Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Welcome Little Squirrel, birth story and official announcement

*Warning: this post contains a full birth story, so it does get a little graphic*
On May 30, 2014 my husband, big brother Moose and I welcomed little Squirrel into the world weighing 8 pounds 15.5oz and 19.5 inches of absolute perfection.

Pregnancy was "easy" in the sense that nothing major went wrong and since I had been through it before, I knew what to expect.
In my eyes, however, it was far from easy.
We found out that we were expecting a new little peanut in September of 2013, only 2 short months after my breast feeding journey with Moose ended. I was lucky to only have some slight nausea at night for the first 3 weeks after we saw those 2 pink lines. Unfortunately, at the 8 week mark the dreaded morning sickness set in and to be able to properly care for Moose I ended up on prescription nausea medication for the next 10 weeks.

At 18 weeks we found out that our new little bundle was going to be another boy.
We were all ecstatic!
Despite lingering nausea that lasted until about half way though the third trimester, everything checked out perfect. Squirrel was right on track to arrive on his June 5th due date.
May 24th we ended up in Labor and delivery due to contractions that were getting closer together. We were sent home about 4 hours later with no progress made. I spent a solid week before and a week after in false labor.

I woke up the morning of May 29th having intense, yet inconsistent contractions. I timed them through out the day, but thought nothing of it due to the previous two weeks of false labor. Around 11pm that night I decided to head to bed just in case he decided to show up the next day.
Sleep was hard to come by since I was woken up with each contraction. And at 2am I woke up feeling wetness and the urge to pee. Unfortunately, what I thought was my water breaking turned out to be a lot of blood, followed by a clot type thing about the size of a golf ball and even more blood. It looked like a slaughterhouse in my bathroom.
Moose woke up right as my husband went to get him, we grabbed all of our stuff, dropped him off down the road with his grandparents and sped to the hospital.
I think the funniest thing through it all was how calm and serene I was through it all. Once we were on our way to the hospital I felt completely relaxed and at ease.
We arrived at the hospital, checked in, and were taken directly to a labor and delivery room where I was told to immediately strip down and put on a gown to be checked and hooked up to monitors. I was at a nice 8cm with contractions 2 minutes apart. We decided to bypass medication for as long as I was handling labor well. Everything was pretty relaxing until the doctor came in and offered to break my water.
If you have never given birth before, or had an epidural and didn't experience contractions with a broken water, that is when things got real.
After a bit, I was to 9.5cm and the attending nurse decided that it would be a good idea to do some practice pushes while she helped get rid of the last little lip of cervix. Unfortunately, after ever push, I got such intense pain to my right hip, it felt like someone was trying to break it. After several tries to keep breathing through the pain, I gave in and asked for an intrathecal so that I could focus on getting Squirrel out and not on the pain that came after each pushing session.
Once the intrathecal took full effect, we decided to have me sit up and labor down to help make things easier. It worked a little too well and Squirrel was crowning before I was able to finish my first practice push. The doctor came in, and in 6 short pushes and a cord removed from his neck, Squirrel was born.

He was such a chubby little guy and absolutely perfect in every way.
I was surprised how different he looked from his brother and despite being almost bald, he looked more like me than Moose had.


 One of his first pictures, just after being cleaned up

Meeting big brother Moose

Chubby little love bug

1 month old

2 months old

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