Immunizations!

On Tuesday Jess had her first set of shots. [ ] One in each thigh! The poor thing!! However, it does seem that I was more upset by the procedure than she was. It was heartbreaking, she gave the nurses a giant toothless smile before they descended on her with needles. My poor trusting sweetheart! Must keep reminding myself that it's in her best interest and it only hurt for a second. Her eyes welled up with tears and she screamed but as soon as I got her to the breast she was calm again. (Although, when I stood up with her to leave I'm pretty sure that everything she'd just eaten came back up down the front of my shirt.)

Grandma and Grandpa Smith came with us. (Since I don't have my license yet I still need a qualified driver in the car with me and they were happy for an excuse to come see the baby!) It looks like the only reaction she had was feeling overly sleepy the rest of the day and a bit of a queasy tummy the next. Between one of her many naps we went to Ikea to buy her some furniture for all of her precious baby clothes that currently think laying on the bed is a form of storage. She slept through most of the store and woke up near the end to create a poop storm! She was happy enough sitting in it but actually cried more when I went to change her than she did when she got her injections that morning! (You never know what a baby's going to complain about.) She settled and happily played with Grandma while Grandpa and I tried to figure out how to get a flat-packed wardrobe and dresser set in the back of their car. Eventually it all went in. We've still to build it though. Mark has promised help tonight. I'll post some pictures when we get it all up. :)

She's 2 months and 4 days old and smiling all the time now. Her hair is still growing (there was a couple weeks there where it was falling out faster than it was growing but we seem to be back on track now) and her eye colour changes daily. It all depends on what light you see them in. Today they look blue, yesterday they seemed green and the day before they were flecked with brown. So who knows!! :D

Check up - check in.

Jessica will be 7 weeks old tomorrow!!

Last Monday I went in for my 6 week postnatal check up with Dr. Nalini, everything was good and she was happy with everything. (Jessica had stayed in the car with Mark since we didn't want to expose her to a germ ridden doctor's office unless we absolutely had to.) She asked about Jessica and I said I'd been sent an appointment card for next Tuesday. Nalini shook her head and asked if we could bring her in tomorrow instead. Apparently Nalini would be off next Tuesday and wanted to see Jessica herself instead of a random doctor who would be covering for her.

As a matter of course.. it snowed the next morning! Not enough to trap us in but amusing since it hadn't actually snowed since my parents left. Jessica was perfect. Nalini was very impressed and said that she looked older than 6 weeks, was so alert and attentive! The raised swelling on her chest has completely gone away and like I said eariler.. she's perfect!

Currently she's sleeping peacefully in the Peanut Shell baby sling (no not the ones in the recall!) my parents sent me from America. I wasn't sure if it was going to work and when I first tried to put her in it she started fussing, but now she seems to love it, which is excellent! I was even able to make myself some toast without putting her down. :) Being able to type with both hands while holding her is just an unexpected perk!!

Jessie had her second big outing this weekend. We went to the mall and to Babies R Us. She took everything in her stride!! We were even able to go to Pizza Hut for dinner afterwards. (Luckily we were the only people in the restaurant because she did start to get a bit fussy and we were able to take turns walking with her. It was completely understandable though. If I smelled pizza and wasn't allowed any, I'd be fussy too.)

5 Weeks Old!

My amazing baby is 5 weeks today and getting so big and so beautiful! The health visitor came yesterday morning to do her 6 week check (she's going to be on vacation for the next 2 weeks so she wanted to get it done before she left). Jessica now weighs 9lbs 12oz and is 21 inches long. That up from her birth weight of 8lbs (which fell to 7lbs 5oz after she came home) and 19 inches. Her muscle tone is great and she's starting to lift her head like a pro! She's growing so well and we're still exclusively breast feeding. I feel so blessed that it actually works for us. I hear and read so many stories of women who have incredible problems with breast feeding. Either baby won't latch correctly or they have supply issues... other than some soreness (to be expected!) and getting the hang of things, it's gone brilliantly for us!

She's starting to outgrow her newborn clothes (which is fine by us since those are the ones she had the fewest of!) It's amazing to watch her start to develop a little personality. Her eyes follow you and she's so much more alert now.

I made life difficult for myself the other day though. I went to make some coffee and accidentally grabbed the normal coffee rather than the decaffeinated. I had no idea why my normally calm baby refused to nap at all and was crying her head off if I tried to put her down at all. After 24 hours of very little sleep for either of us, I finally realized what I had done... oops. I won't be making that mistake again!

She's been sleeping on my chest making little baby snoring noises as I write but it looks like she's waking up, so I'd better go! If I don't get a chance to update sooner then you'll definitely be hearing from me around April 6th when she goes to the doctor for her 6 week medical checkup.

One Month Today!

It's amazing how fast time has flown by. When I was pregnant a month seemed to last a year, every day a week, but now that she's here the days blur together and it seems like only yesterday that we brought her home. It barely feels like my parents were here at all. I guess the pain induced haze that I lived in for a week or so helped blur my conception of reality a bit.

I just uploaded a few more pictures of her to the Picasa Album album and only then did I realize how much she's really grown! (I don't notice it as much since we're attached pretty much 24 hours a day.)But it's easily apparent to others. After Mark's first full day back at work he came home and asked me if she was bigger. She's growing by leaps and bounds!

I'll have to cut this post short as Jessica is demanding my attention and her Daddy even more so.

18 Days Later

I haven't posted anything for a while but I'm sure you'll forgive me. :) Jessica is simply amazing. She's an absolutely wonderful baby (but would you expect me to say anything else?) She's sitting in her swing at the moment alternating between asleep and awake and squeaking. The new mother in me says "go pick her up and hold her!" despite her being perfectly content where she is, while my more rational side says I should use this time to DO SOMETHING! I seem to have compromised and am writing a post about her. :) Not really the most productive use of my time but it doesn't require me to switch my focus away from the beautiful baby.

My parents came to visit on the 22nd and stayed for 8 days. It was wonderful. I really wish they could have stayed longer. Now that they're gone it almost feels like they were never here. I don't think Mark, Jess, and I would have had any clean clothes or dishes if they hadn't come. I miss them already!

POOPSPOLISION!!!

...back to typing with one hand... Gotta love diapers! She was in her swing but the poop decided to come out sideways from her diaper. Luckily she was in a blanket so I don't have to figure out how to wash the swing. Sadly, my british washing machine isn't capable of adjusting for load size, so I had to run around finding enough of the same colour to wash so the super powerful staining baby poo didn't have time to set. She of course decided that it was an ideal time to be hungry, so I had to carry her around while finding clothes. [Stairs are SUCH a hassle when you have a baby. So scared we're just going to tumble down them everytime I get near them.]

I've started an album of Jessica pictures at Jessica MacKenzie - Picasa

More to say but baby demands my attention. I'll try to post again before another month passes.

Construction Complete

Hello baby-fans. I (Mark) will be guest posting for Rebecca as she's currently still stuck at the hospital tonight. I'm hoping to get her home tomorrow.

In case the info-wave somehow hasn't reached you yet, our beautiful daughter Jessica Mackenzie Smith was born at 6:06pm on the 18th of February 2010, weighing 8.0 lbs exactly.
But that's the end of the story, so let me tell you how we got there :)

6:39 am (18/2/10): Rebecca decides she needs to drag herself from bed once again to visit the bathroom. 90% of the way there, her water breaks. Having heard lots of talk in the antenatal classes about how you have lots of time at home before you're supposed to come in, she's not unduly concerned and has a shower and her first (pain-free) contractions.

7:00 am: I'm woken by my alarm for work and Rebecca tells me she thinks we're having a baby today. Having been fed the same propaganda at the antenatal classes, I'm not too worried either, so get in the shower.

7:30 am: Her contractions are getting a bit shorter and the hospital tells her to have some breakfast and come in since it sounded like there might be some Meconium in the fliud.

8:00am: Her contractions have quickly gone down to first 5 and then just 2 minutes apart and really hurt. Since we've been loading up the car with everything she'll need, we've not had any breakfast but decide we'd better get going.

8:17am: The 30 minute drive to the hospital is completed in record time and we head upstairs, where they put us in a birthing suite. We're joined by midwife Adele and student midwife Gillian, who were both really nice. Having a student midwife also had the dual benefit of causing lots of things to be explained and there always being someone around, even when the main midwives are switching out for breaks etc. Rebecca is set up with "gas & air", which takes the edge off the contractions a bit, but is mostly a distraction (according to Rebecca).

8:40 pm: A small doctor tells Rebecca that she'll have to have a cannula in her hand, something she has dreaded ever since having to get one when getting her tonsils out when she was younger. The doctor puts a tourniquet on her wrist, but then waits on a contraction and gets distracted talking to a midwife - Rebecca's hand hurts a lot from the cut-off circulation in her rapidly purpling hand (it wouldn't be a genuine baby blog post without a made-up word!). The doctor finally turns back (what seemed like a long time later), only to fail to get it inserted! Rebecca is rewarded with a painful hole in the back of her hand and the doctor switches to the other hand, this time with more success. They also put the blood pressure monitoring cuff on the hand with the cannula, so when it inflates every 10 minutes the change in pressure causes her hand to hurt afresh. Rebecca is at least relieved to learn that her consultant, Dr. Ellison, is the main doctor on duty and will be checking in every so often.

9:30am: The cervix is dilated to 6cm already, could it really be this easy?

9:30am -> 12:30pm: No, it could not.
Many painful contractions and baby has decided to rotate the wrong way, so she is facing up towards Rebecca's belly instead of her back (an angle of about 2 o'clock if you were looking at the belly in cross-section from Rebecca's head). At least she's not breech.
A midwife firmly points out to Rebecca that crying "OOOOOOWWWWWWWWW!!!!" really loudly and insistently is just a waste of her energy, which she'll need for pushing later. Plus, she'll be scaring the other patients. Rebecca is nonplussed.
The identify of this nurse is a mystery due to the midwives doing the usual trick of sharing the same small pool of names, having two different Gillians during various breaks and a 3rd midwife later claiming she was the one that said it when they were joking about it later in the day (Rebecca remains unconvinced).

12:30 pm: Cervix is now at 8cm, but they're still running Oxytocin in order to get things moving faster due to the worry of Meconium in the amniotic fluid.

1:30 pm: Rebecca decides she would like to go for the epidural offered to her. The main things putting her off before were that she would have to have a pressure cuff on her arm, a (very painful) cannula in her hand and be wired up to a machine to monitor the baby's heartbeat and basically be stuck in the bed due to all the wires, tubes and drips. Since she now has all this anyway (due to baby being at risk), she sees no point in avoiding it any more.

2:15 pm: Rebecca likes "the nice drugs lady" and says she's welcome back in the room any time :) Rebecca is now able to hold a conversation with the midwives, previously she only said about two words at a time. We discuss with them how much our car sucks and Adele said she had the same problem when she test drove the same model.

3:00 pm: The epidural has mostly worked, but there's a region on her left where it hasn't taken, so still hurts a lot. Unfortunately, to even it out she'd have to lie on that side, but that's opposite to way she needs to lean to try to get baby to rotate.

3:40 pm: The cervix is fully dilated at 10cm, but they still want to wait about an hour so that baby can come down more before beginning pushing.

4:00 pm: Jack Bauer is framed as a terrorist for the 15th time and is on the run from his own governm. . . oh wait, that's a different story ;)

4:40pm: It's time to start pushing. The one good thing about the pain from the area where the epidural isn't working is that it helps her know when to push. I can tell that this is Not Fun™.

5:10 pm: A parade of various doctors and other people examine baby's heartbeat trace, which is slowing down some after the pushes, causing concern.

5:30 pm: Baby still hasn't turned and the periodic deceleration of baby's heartbeat makes Dr. Ellison decide that it's time to help baby along. I'm taken away to change into scrubs while they prepare the operating theater. I change into a blue outfit and take a seat by the operating room door, waiting to be called in. What I perceive to be about a couple of hours go past as I wait, worrying that I've been forgotten and will have missed everything.

5:50 pm: Rebecca is wheeled into the operating room doors past me and about 5 minutes/another hour later I finally get to come in. I'm told if they have to switch to a c-section then I'll have to leave and they'll need to give Rebecca general anesthetic as the epidural and (stronger) nitrous she's currently on wouldn't be enough.

6:00 pm: Things run together a bit here due to the high emotion and, although I'm sure it's not true, my faulty memory of the forceps Dr Ellison was manipulating inside Rebecca had the handles looking about the same size as those of giant garden sheers. I was also concerned by the apparent roughness to the baby as she was turned. There are about a dozen people packed into the room, and I have a little space by Rebecca's left shoulder to holder her hand. I do my best to reassure her. Holding her hand, time seems to go both really fast and slow at the same time. Now that the baby's turned, the head comes out in a single push, then her body in another.

6:06 pm: Jessica is born. She looks a bit purple but cries for a second as she's taken to the resuscitation area in the corer to be checked over. The group of 3 or 4 people around her block my view. Time ticks by very slowly as we listen for any kind of sound from Jessica to indicate she's ok. I'm later told that she was having trouble with her breathing at this point and that they were checking her throat for meconium.

6:? pm: I'm called over to the corner to see Jessica, while Dr. Ellison continues to work on Rebecca. We look at each other as I reluctantly let go of her hand.
I see my daughter properly for the first time. She looks a bit worse-for-wear, with bruises on her head from the forceps and heart monitor (and is in good need of a bath too), but she's absolutely perfect. Gillian (the student midwife one) swaddles her up and gives her to me to hold. I carry her over to Rebecca to let her see. She's relieved and happy all at once. I put baby on top of her so they can get some skin-to-skin contact, but they don't let her start breast feeding for some reason.

6:30 pm: They finally finish Rebecca's stitches (it turned out they had to do something called an episiotomy). They have me put baby into a clear plastic crib thing so they can wheel Rebecca and her to Recovery. When I put Jessica down she cries. Seeing tears in her little eyes for the first time, I have to try hard to blink away a few myself. I stroke her face and make shushing noises and she seems to settle down.

6:35am: Recovery is a large, dark ward with lots of beds but we're the only ones there. We cuddle our little girl and try to get our heads around the fact that she's really real and that this is our baby.

7/8? pm: Rebecca's anesthesia wears off and she starts to discover just how much an Episiotomy sucks. Lots and lots of pain. When we talk to the midwife (who's been coming and going in our ward) we discover that there had only been pain relief prescribed for the next day for some reason, they had forgotten about the night. The "nice old lady midwife" took care of it and got her a prescription for something to help (Voltron? Sounds suspiciously like a transformer to me, maybe it was something else. . .)

8:00 pm: I learn that there's no working pay phones in the hospital, so we can't use the Planet Talk free-phone number to call the people in America (it doesn't work from mobile phones). I call my family members to share our news. My parents kindly agree to call people for us as well, but Rebecca was only able to grab a few numbers when we first left for the hospital.

8:00 pm -> 2:00 am (19/2/10): I stay with Rebecca and Jessica in Recovery. Rebecca has the fun of a catheter and can't have anything to eat until she's produced a certain amount. Every time the midwife comes by we ask if Rebecca can get something to eat, since she's not been allowed anything but water all day (I at least had the odd nibble here and there). Sadly, she just keeps hanging up another bag of Hartmann's Solution and says "maybe when this bag is done". Much cuddling of baby takes place.
Baby manages to properly breast feed for the first time at 11:15 pm.

2:00 am: Finally, Rebecca is allowed some food. We get "tea and toast" (which was actually coffee and some slices of buttered toast). I'm sure Rebecca would say it was very British :) Strangely, despite being a maternity ward, they didn't normally have decaff, so the midwife had to break into the staff supply for Rebecca. I had 'regular' to reduce the chance of crashing on the way home.

2:45 am: Rebecca is transferred to the actual maternity ward, which I'm not even allowed in the corridor of at that hour. Happy that she's going to go to sleep, I head home.

3:15 am: I get home, crop and resize some pictures and post to facebook to let people know what's happening (you probably joined our story about here dear reader). I decide other stuff can wait until the morning.

3:30 am: I fall asleep as a dad for the first time.

9 days overdue

I had my last appointment with the consultant on Monday. We had to wait an hour to get in but everything looks fine. She did a membrane sweep in hopes that it would encourage labour to start, however it's now been 2 days and I still have no signs of an impending baby.

They did schedule an induction though. First Dr. Ellison suggested the Monday the 22nd, but that's the day my parents arrive so I was kinda hoping for something before that. I mentioned this but the midwife had already gone away to phone the hospital. Luckily, when she got back she told us that the ward was full on the 22nd so she'd gone ahead and scheduled it for the 20th instead of waiting longer. (Yay!) So, I go in on Friday the 19th at 1:30pm to be admitted and given a dose of prostin. Then we wait to see if that encourages labour to begin. Mark will be allowed to stay with me until 9pm, at which point they'll send him home and I have to stay by myself. The next morning they'll dose me with more drugs, break my waters and generally start the induction in full. I'm still hoping that baby decides to come on her own before then! We've got 2 and half more days... come on baby girl!!!

As much as I'd rather not have medical intervention to get things started it's really nice to know that by Sunday there WILL be a baby and the waiting will be over.

So yeah: that's me, completely egg shaped and full of baby. I braided my hair in hopes that she'd get the hint and come out, but it was completely ignored.