Welcoming Everly Pearl

She's here! And she wants everyone to know it. Doctor's offices, grocery stores, restaurants, car dealerships, it doesn't matter where we go, she will let you know that she has arrived and will not be silenced. She is a bit high maintenance and runs on a baseline of mild displeasure, which can turn to pure happiness just as easily as it can turn to fiery rage. Little Everly wants what she wants when she wants it. In other words, she's pretty normal. Her sister quite possibly set us up for some false expectations with her simplicity. That's OK though. I like a challenge, and I respect her for knowing what she wants. No one will mess with this one. She's also so incredibly sweet, and I feel this very fierce protective love for her. It's hard to describe, but I guess that's motherhood in a nutshell.

Her entrance into the world was a rocky one. Starting at 38 weeks I began leaking fluid. A slow, clear leak, just like with Trinity. I figured this was it, so I went in to get it checked and they said it wasn't amniotic fluid. What was it? No one knows. 39 weeks, still leaking. I make them check the fluid around the baby to make sure she's still ok. Everything checks out. 40 weeks, heavier leaking. So I make them test the fluid again. Oh weird, THIS time, it comes back positive as amniotic fluid, and they tell me I should go have this baby. uhhhh ok? At this point it's 5 p.m., and we've both worked all day. I've already been up for 12 hours, and I'm tired. I want her out, but this suddenly seems sudden.

Our last picture together as one

 So we go home and get all of our bags and arrive at the hospital around 6 p.m. We get checked in and they start me on Pitocin right away because at this point no one knows how long my water has been leaking and they just want to get the baby out. I labor through the night, and around 3 a.m., I'm sitting in the bath tub and I can feel the baby make a big, sudden movement.  All the monitors start going off because her heart rate has fallen dangerously low. The midwife and nurse come bustin' in the room and flip me in a million different positions trying to get the heart rate back. They try to act calm but you can tell they are starting to panic a little, so I'm starting to panic a little. After what feels like forever but is probably only about 2 minutes, they get it back. After this, they turn off the Pitocin so as not to stress her out any further. My contractions fade in and out, until they turn it back on around 9 a.m. I've been awake for 27 hours and the baby is nowhere near coming out.

Labor is rough. #DadLife

Even though we tell them it's unnecessary, our families come and spend the night in the waiting room. In the middle of the night, my aunt takes Trinity out to her truck to get some rest, and she curls up on the dog's bed in there. When recounting the night of her sister's birth, Trinity always tells people, "I slept on a dog bed."

Around 2 p.m. a doctor comes in and tells us it's been too long and the baby is still up too high to break my water the rest of the way. They are starting to talk C-Section, and this throws Travis into a bit of a tissy. He's mad at the midwives for bringing in a doctor, and he's mad at the doctor for wanting to cut. Even though his display of anger makes me uncomfortable, he's the perfect advocate for what I want, which is a natural, un-medicated birth, and I'm so thankful he's there.

The doctor gives us an hour to get the baby down far enough so that she can break my water. So we set up what feels like Crossfit exercise stations for my 9-months-pregnant, 7-centimeters-dilated ass to do in order to make the baby move lower. This includes deep squats, lunges, bouncing on an exercise ball, and laying backwards on the bed with my feet dangling off while Travis pulls on them. That last move was especially excruciating and I've now been up for 32 hours. All the hard work paid off, and the baby is a couple stations lower when the doctor comes in to break my water at 3:30.

As soon as my water is completely broken, it's on like Donkey Kong. The contractions are hard and fast and holy shit why does it hurt so bad!? I'm trying to employ all the breathing techniques I learned in prenatal yoga, and be like the women I watched in the hypnobirthing videos, but I am tired, and this hurts more than I remember. I decide I'm just gonna start pushing and get this over with.

Once I start that, I can't stop. It gives me an outlet for all the pain to go. With Trinity, I remember it being intense, but not actual pain. With this baby, I think I left teeth marks on the bed rail. Right when she's almost out, I hear the midwife utter a phrase you do not want to hear when you're giving birth, "well, that's more blood than I should be seeing." I look over at Travis who's standing wide-eyed beside me, and I can tell he's trying not to freak out as I hemorrhage all over everything. He then tells me that I HAVE to get her out NOW. So I push with all my might, to the point that I see stars when I close my eyes, and I feel her head break free. I hear the midwife say, "we have a shoulder." And I assume that means her shoulder has emerged. But it does not mean that. Next thing I know, the nurse jumps up and comes down hard with both hands on my pubic bone. A blood curdling scream comes out of me, both out of intense pain and pure surprise, because if there's one thing you don't expect when giving birth, it's your nurse to punch you in the stomach. It does the trick though. Her shoulder was stuck and the one-two punch dislodged it. They then tell me to reach down and grab my baby. I do as I'm told, and she lets out her first war cry. 24 hours after we arrived at the hospital, and 36 hours after I woke up two mornings ago, she is here. 8 lbs and 5 ounces of strength, beauty, and perfection.

                 

My pain in this picture is at an 11

                         

32 Weeks

"It won't be long now." "You're almost there!" "Trying to walk the baby out?"

These are quotes from random strangers when they see me out in public now. I don't always have the heart to tell them that actually I still have a bit to go, and no I am not trying to induce labor because my baby would be very premature. Instead I just smile and say, "not soon enough!" Because there's still technically two months left. I don't know if two months is physically possible, and given that Trinity came at 36 weeks, I imagine this one will be on the early side too. It's somehow happening so fast and so slow at the same time.

My goal right now is to quit it with the carbs. I've already gained as much weight as I did in the 36 weeks with Trinity, and this baby still needs to double in size before it can safely be born, so I'm basically doomed. Still no stretch marks. Cross your fingers, knock on wood, and pray to the Bio Oil gods that my vain ass can make it through a second time. Don't worry though, I'm pretty sure my belly button is harmed beyond the point of return, so we'll see what kind of drastic measures it will take to get that back in working order. I am stretched to the point that I can feel her body parts at any given time pushing at the top of my stomach. So close, yet so far away.

Just from knowing her in the womb, here are my predictions for her personality:

• She's going to be calmer - more serious - like the type that can sit still and focus on something.
• She'll be an early riser - less of a sleeper than her sister.
• She's going to be more fragile than Trinity, at least physically. 
• She'll be less Travis and more me. 

I'll have to report back on how this pans out. At the moment, all we know is that she looks like Voldemort. 

In probably the most hilarious turn of events this pregnancy, the midwife at my last appointment asked me what birth control I wanted to use after this baby is born. I told her I'd prefer my husband get a vasectomy, because I've altered the way my body should naturally work for way too long. So she kindly gives me a brochure on vasectomies, and then asks what I will actually do if my husband chooses not to take on this responsibility. She was basically saying, well that's a nice dream, now what are you actually going to do since you can't depend on a man for this? So I get home and look at this brochure, and holy shit, it's the most fun birth control brochure I've ever seen. 

First of all, it's in full color, with sports balls all around it, and it's labeled as the OFFICIAL Vasectomy Playbook with a Snip City logo. For any Blazer fans, this is a nice play on Rip City and I applaud it. The inside has paragraphs headlined "1-Hour Fitness," "Deny the Ride," and "Road to Recovery (a 2-day vacation)." More than half of the material focuses on assuring them that their prized package will still perform to full expectation, and they will be just as satisfied. The other half gives them pointers on how awesome recovery is, and also covers that their voice will not get higher. "Get frozen peas, video games, sporting events, or man-movies ready for your arrival home." 

The amount of effort it took to make this seem so great for men really kind of pisses me off, but at the same time I understand the necessity of it. Like, if we don't make this seems super awesome, men will just be like, nah I'm good. Every handout brochure a woman gets about all the horrible medieval practices that could happen to her nether regions are in black and white, and there's just a diagram of what fresh hell lies in store, along with all the ways that it's just going to suck ass. And you basically just have to accept it and be like, yep. Ok. 

For example, the handout for a tubal ligation (what one might consider the female version of a vasectomy) looks like this. 

So from this I just have to assume you cut my fallopian tubes clean off, and somehow seal the ends. Alright sign me up!

In a more unfortunate turn of events, I have to give birth at the hospital again because I have a bi-lobed placenta, which basically means I have two smaller placentas instead of just one big one, and this can cause issues after birth when trying to push it out. I can never just be normal.

In Trinity news, she is going through a new independence phase, where she's decided that she no longer needs me to walk her into her classroom, she can make her own lunch, and also apparently sign herself up for the talent show at school without my knowledge or help. And because she doesn't want me walking into the school with her in the morning, I don't really even know about this talent show. So when she tells me that she signed up to sing a song, and that it's next week, I'm a little caught off guard. She assures me that's she's signed up and she attended a rehearsal, and she's ready to go. So I help her with this song and make sure she knows the lyrics, but when I go in with her on Friday, I see the talent list on the wall and the rehearsal times labeled "required" and none of them have her name on it. This leads me down a path of desperation on a Friday trying to figure out what she has or hasn't done, and if she's in fact signed up. Low and behold, she is not. She signed her name on some practice rehearsal sheet somewhere thinking that made it official, and apparently doesn't understand what the word Required means, so didn't go to any of those rehearsals. I have to agree to volunteer to clean up after the talent show in order to get her squeaked in somewhere after finally getting a hold of the person running this thing. It's a mess that I could have prevented from the beginning if she'd just involved me.

Lesson learned: Never trust a first grader when they assure you they have it handled.

She finished up the soccer season with 1 goal and a lot of assists. I'm so proud of her for playing this year and so happy she had such a good time with the group of girls on the team. Travis and I need to remind ourselves that they are just here to have fun, but we are definitely the aggressive parents. It's even more obnoxious when I'm hugely pregnant shouting CUT HER OFF!! TAKE THE BALL!! from the sidelines. This poor girl. I'm sure she'll be delighted when her sister is born and she no longer gets our full attention.

If nothing else, at least her uniform matches her hairpiece

One More. Party of Four!

Oops, we did it again! Apparently life was getting a little too easy, so we thought we'd shake things up a bit. I wouldn't say it was a conscious decision. I've never understood how people can be so sure that they want to have a baby at this moment and then just go for it. That's not us. It's too big of a life change to just decide, so we left it up the Universe to decide for us. And here we are. 

Let me just say, Toto, we're not 24 anymore. With Trinity, it was easy. I was so happy and felt so good and could pretend like nothing was happening. For a short period of time, I hated chicken and the smell of onions, but otherwise went about my life unscathed. Obviously it got a little rough at the end, with the insane itching that is cholestasis, my aching sciatic, and the premature birth. But BEFORE all that, I was A-OK. This is different. Almost immediately I felt like pure shit. I wasn't put off by certain foods, but I just couldn't stand to think of any food. Not looking in the fridge, not stepping into the kitchen, not preparing anything on the stove. The mere THOUGHT of doing any of that made me gag to the point of losing anything I had left in the tank on a daily basis. The worst part was that I also had to eat constantly to avoid puking, so the trick was to manage it without thinking about it. In addition, it took approximately 1 day for me to look about 6 months pregnant, and my hips are on the verge of needing replacement. When people ask how I feel, I say, "I'm good." But this is what I really mean. 

                

As a result, I have a bowl of mandarin oranges on my nightstand, and a mini fridge in my office full of ready-made snacks. Thank goodness for Travis, who does all this for me so that I can avoid the kitchen. We also went from me preparing dinner nearly every night, to him trying to whip up something that I'm not going to hate the smell of. He's a trooper, but I know he's feeling the struggle. There was a point when I would wake up at 3 a.m. every night, gagging from hunger, and I would open my bag of trusty apple slices and take a crunchy, satisfying bite. The man who could sleep through a tornado, a robbery, and a fire all at the same time is immediately awake and alert and annoyed that I'm crunching apples in bed at 3 a.m. "It's a disease," he says. "I have that disease where I can't stand to hear crunching." He's obviously the one suffering here. 

Does everyone remember when we used to find out the gender of our babies, and then tell our families and friends by calling them up, or texting them and saying, "It's a girl!"? These times are now gone, my friends. Now it's all the rage to torture yourself by NOT finding out, and then let someone random find out your baby's gender before you, and then you have a party to inconvenience everyone by making them attend to find out what you're having. All for a couple of sweet photos of your "clever" reveal that you can now post to social media. I'm guilty of loving these reveals on Facebook, but man, what a pain in the ass. I was not going to partake in this new tradition, because I could not imagine torturing myself by not finding out as soon as I possibly could. But then, our time to find out coincided with the super bowl, and we were going to have a bunch of people over anyway, so we decided to also make it a reveal party for any family and friends who wanted to attend. I always intended on finding out the gender at the appointment, and simply announcing it to everyone at the party. When our "friends" discovered this, they peer pressured me mercilessly into not finding out because apparently that's no fun. So here I am, after the appointment on Thursday, not knowing what's developing inside my body, for the sake of everyone's amusement. Not happy about it. 

What's your vote? 100% of people polled have said #TeamBlue. And I get it, a boy would be nice. One of each is ideal. Plus, I love our boy name and have been dying to use it since Trinity ended up not being a boy. BUT, I'm sorry to say, I'm goin' girl here. My babies have a tendency to be surprises, so I think we'll all be surprised when we learn that more pink is in store. I could be wrong. We shall see.

If you're around on Sunday, come on by before the game for our Tacos or Wieners party, and bring your BB Gun for an old fashioned shoot out reveal. If not, I'll post pictures ;)