Squeezing out a baby, Part 1

This is part something of something of my end-of-pregnancy-delivery story....it will be long and tedious so don't feel like you have to hang in (I want a record of this birthing adventure - that's a euphemism - for us to read one day when this is a distant memory). Warning, this may eventually get more graphic.


My pregnancy was pretty uneventful, at least as far as the act of being pregnant goes. Before I even knew I was pregnant I had this urge to eat better, that basically equated to adding spinach to every meal.  I've never been a vegetable lover.  I blame a childhood in which not eating your vegetables resulted in solitary confinement, missing birthday parties, and choking down pills larger than my 6 year old esophagus. Vegetable eating was my mom's thing, and I literally thought I was being poisoned as my gag reflex would kick into high gear the moment steamed kale brushed my tongue.  I would spit into napkins, go to the bathroom and flush veggies down the toilet, I would bury my vitamins in the backyard...anything to avoid swallowing.  Once I found out I was pregnant all of the sudden providing a vegetable rich environment for my little fetus was super important. I started making green smoothies (spinach or kale, fresh fruit, greek yogurt).  Somehow, even though Steve wasn't nourishing a placenta, I made it equally important for him to drink a green smoothie as well.

In my first trimester I experienced some nausea, that was sometimes more prevalent in the morning, with the occasional vomit, that usually happened after drinking a green smoothie while walking the dog and just in time to give the kids waiting for the bus some morning entertainment.  The mornings I drank a green smoothie, particularly one with kale because it was extra chunky, and I would get that undeniable feeling of needing to empty my stomach contents, I would try extra hard to hold it in. You know... the back head tilt, continuous swallowing and deep breathing, determined I would not lose the nutrients I just choked down and praying if I did that some kind of absorption happened in the last 10 minutes. Anyways, like I mentioned, pretty uneventful other then some first trimester nausea and sleepiness.

Somewhere along the line I started having this strange pain under my right ribs. I was constantly pushing babies body parts down from up in my right lung and people were always commenting about how "those feet like to tickle your lungs"...well if this was feet then my kid must be a hobbit with gnarly toe-nails (which isn't entirely crazy if you've seen my husbands feet).  As I got farther along the pain got worse, waking me up at night, and I would sleep with rotating bags of frozen vegetables on my right side (sadly, at this point that's as close as some vegetables were getting to my little babe).  It was a strange pain, like my ribs were breaking and my skin was being tased over and over.  The week after Momma Bear passed (I was 37 weeks, I think), we were toying with the idea of having me fly up with everyone to the funeral in Buffalo.  I went for a prenatal visit and requested an ultrasound just to be sure, because I had not had one since I was 15 weeks and I just wanted to make sure I wasn't going to birth triplets with ambiguous genitalia in Buffalo...later that day we found out the baby was breeched (booty down instead of head down).  We were so disheartened watching all our "natural birthing plans" become obsolete.

36 weeks

We turned into baby turning militants. If we couldn't get this kid to turn when she was a little babe not even aware her arms are attached to her body, what would that say about our future abilities as parents? It was suggested that maybe the little girl wanted some extra attention, seeing that we had spent more time at chemotherapy and hospitals than at pregnancy yoga and prenatal massage. I took the week off work and made it my job to flip a baby (http://www.spinningbabies.com).

It's like when you buy a new car and then you see that car everywhere, all the sudden everybody was a baby turning expert.

I spent hours hanging upside down off the couch with music, a flashlight, and Steve saying "come down here baby" near my nether-regions and ice up near my ribs where her head was. I was cracked and twisted by chiropractors, burned sticky tee-pee incense on my little toes (and then spent the rest of the day reassuring people I wasn't getting the baby high), had some cranio therapy thing that cost $50 and took 3 minutes to stretch my neck like gumby, did headstands in the pool during the winter, spent hours in the downward polar bear position, walked around the house on all 4's (try that 9 months pregnant), and other things i wont mention...I was consumed and determined to do things the way we had planned, after all we had been through so much (and that HypnoBirthing class was nonrefundable), surely this would go as planned, we were just trying to do the best thing for our little one.

At each subsequent ultrasound the tech would smile and giggle and say "that baby isn't going anywhere" and then tell me about how her butt was so wedged in my pelvis that we couldn't even confirm I was having a girl (oh, and that she was going to be a 9lb baby).  But I knew better, only 3% of babies are breeched at birth and some even turn during labor, and our little babe was a majority babe not a minority babe.

To Be Continued....