A Year…

It’s amazing to think where we were this time last year. We’d been in the hospital for fourteen hours because we’d been scheduled for an induction. My water had broken. We were trying to get the epidural. My Mum and husband had gone down to get food from the hospital cafeteria, and we were hoping things would move right along.

I had an epidural top up around 1 p.m. so that we could start pushing and get the munchkin out but by 3:30 p.m. it was apparent he wasn’t leaving so easily. I was exhausted. He’d crowned but wasn’t going any further. Much as we didn’t want to we opted after two more pushes and no headway to go for a C-Section. That half hour of prep was the most agonizing I’ve felt. The epidural was wearing off. My body kept telling me we needed to PUSH PUSH PUSH and everyone was telling me NO NO NO.

They had to move me off one bed into the other. I was cursing up a storm it was so painful, and then I was freezing cold at the same time because they were numbing my lower body even more so that they could perform the section. I remember Dr. B. (the nice man with the epidural) singing along to the radio they had going in the O.R. to keep me distracted while we were waiting for my husband to be cleared to come in, and the nurses talking about trying to get him out for 4:26 so that he could be born at 4:26 on 4/26 2006. They managed 4:29 p.m.

It’s the weirdest thing to feel the pressure but not really be connected to it. It felt as though there were twelve people squashing my stomach area but there was no pain, and then the lightest feeling. He was huge and purple and very angry. The cord was around his shoulders.
I got to kiss him before they whisked him and my husband into the other room so they could clean him up and weigh and measure him, and at the same time put me back together.

My Mum got to take this. The first picture of him ever taken. He was about fifteen minutes old at this time, and still angry as you can see.

By contrast this is him more recently playing with some blocks a friend sent him for his birthday.
He’s about a foot taller and 17lbs heavier now, and a lot more mobile. It’s so strange to think that I spent the first portion of last year wondering when he was going to be out and begging and pleading that he would be born a few weeks early but healthy just so I would stop being uncomfortable, and this whole year seems to be such a blur, and it’s hard to believe that he’s a year old already but at the same time it seems to have taken forever.

We survived the first year though! We actually made it! Yay!! Do we get a prize?