In the Beginning...

• life

[copied in from the old livejournal and backdated]

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

…there was me, my husband (justjoshin which I usually shorten to JJ or J), 5 cats (Sanguine, Graymalkin, Darkness, Ghost and Itti Bitti Kitti), a dog (Fenrir) and some number of fish (was 2 algae eaters and 3 goldfish but they’ve been breeding). For anyone who cares I’m 24 (was 23 when Tiny was born) and JJ is 26 turning 27 this year.

Then there was “the accident”.

We use natural family planning coz I hate drugs. I was also at the time working on a massive uni project pulling 20hr shifts, and got myself a fever. I didn’t notice and when I took my temperature it was high, so we avoided sex. Three days later we got happy and guess what, my body temperature had gone up for real so we had perfect conditions for conception. It took remarkably quickly.

The pregnancy went along extremely smoothly and easily compared to what I’ve heard and read (aside from the three false alarms we had which led me to believe that Tiny would be born on a Thursday), I just liked complaining for the sake of complaining about how inconvenient it was coz I couldn’t train and suddenly everyone started handling me like fine china that would break if breathed on :) If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with the uni project (which I managed to get deferred to 2nd semester this year) and reorganising our wedding (which we moved 6 months forward to have before Tiny was born … so I was 6 months pregnant on our wedding day :) I might have started this off as a pregnancy journal. Obviously that didn’t happen.

Birth according to the hospital took 6.5 hours. The pushing phase took 38 minutes which explains why it hurt so bloody much. I’d read enough birth horror stories as well as joyous birth experiences. I think I missed out on the whole happy peaceful birth thing. The day before Tiny was born we were out skating. Or rather JJ and his friend were out skating, I was taking photos. We had Rar (the dog) with us. I noticed Rar limping a couple of times but he didn’t seem terribly interested in letting us check his paws for injuries so we figured whatever it was wasn’t that bad. After dropping the dog home we went back to the friend’s to play PS2 games. We got home about 1am or something like that, and the dog was limping severely. We checked his paws and realised that three of his four paws had torn pads, poor puppy, and resolved to take him to the vet tomorrow.

I joked that I would go into labour tomorrow because we had to take the dog to the vet. As I would be 9 days early we doubted that would happen.

Well guess what my waters broke at 4am. We took our time getting as ready as we could (though we still managed to forget a few things) and when we left we included a side trip to see my aunty who lived down the road and asked her to check in on the dog when she had a moment, leaving her the spare keys. We trekked to the hospital and after an internal exam got told I was 2cm dilated and paper thin. We had the option of going home and coming back again or just staying at the hospital (it was Woodside in East Freo by the way). As much as going home and soaking in a hot bath appealed to me we decided to stay coz a) I doubted if that happened that we’d make it back to the hospital and Josh wasn’t keen on the whole homebirth idea especially if he had to do an emergency birth assistance) and b) the car trip had been extremely uncomfortable.

The next time they checked (I don’t know how long, I spent most of it alternately walking around and curled up in bed coz both methods alternately eased the contraction pains) I was 4cm dilated, they decided I was “labouring nicely” and we got moved from the waiting ward to one of the labour wards.

I refused epidural and pethidine shots on the grounds that I have an aversion to spinal taps and I don’t like needles. The TENS machine did nothing except annoy me and I ended up taking the nitrous oxide even though it gave me the most horrendous headspins and made me extremely angry at no one for no reason. The midwives kept asking if I felt like pushing and eventually I said yes (when I finally recognised what they were talking about when I felt it strongly for the first time) and they seemed quite shocked that I had gone from 4 to 10cm in an hour.

The pushing is not something I ever want to repeat again, though if Josh accidentally knocks me up again it’s mostly comforting to know that I can do it. I ditched the nitrous oxide too coz it was distracting.

I touched the top of his head when he was almost out, I managed to see his head emerge (Josh had a better view of the whole process than I did), and when it was finally close to the end I watched his body glide out in half a push. Took a few million it felt like to get his big head out. He only cried enough to prove he was good at breathing, then went quiet and looked around. The midwives wrapped him up in a blanket and put him in my arms. He had an awesome conehead from his trip down the birth canal and he smelled something like mouldy cheese. We stared at each other in awe and fascination. I loved him from that moment. JJ looked like he was going to cry. Tiny had a bit of a drink and passed out.

A beautiful little baby boy.

Tiny is now 2 months old. Had the brilliant idea to start a journal documenting our parenting misadventures and so I don’t completely bore my friends to death constantly bragging about my baby ;) So. Here it is.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License