Day 5: Babies (31 days)

Day 5: Babies

   I don't know much about either of my parent's birth.  My paternal grandmother died before I was born and it somehow never came up with my dad that I can recall.  He too is gone now but his younger brother by about 18 months might have some details.  They (the older of four kids) were both born in the late 1920's so perhaps at home.  All I know about my mom's is that she was born in a hospital and was the biggest of my maternal grandmother's babies.  My mom was born in Belgium in April of 1945 and so somewhere there is a great picture of her at three weeks or so held by her older brother at a V-E celebration.

  I was also suppose to be born in April but for whatever reason labor did not start and even stranger my mother's doctor let her go a full month (never happen now) past.  So late on the 17th of May my mom was having irregular contractions at a prenatal appointment and licm ving a good distance away her doctor admitted her figuring she would be in good labor by the morning ~ luckily for me a nurse decided to put my mom on the monitor that night just to check how the baby (me) was doing with these early contractions (terribly) and even luckier a partner in the practice where my mom was going happened to be in the hospital ~ I was born by emergency c-section and was quite ill for awhile and was first in the hospital where I was born for a couple of weeks and then transferred to Boston Children's for another couple of weeks. So expected mid-April ~ came home mid-June.
Charlie's was on a Sunday morning and by report relatively low-stress and lovely.

I started this blog when Lisbeth was 9 months and have yet to write out her birth story (a goal for the month perhaps); the quick version is ~ a week overdue; 24-36 hours of prodromal earlier labor, appointment on Monday morning finds that I've dilated to 4 cm but there is essentially no fluid surrounding the baby so we augment my labor with Pitocin, a narcotic that makes me paranoid, an epidural that does not fully wear off for a day and a half but finally at 9:44 pm a sweet baby girl :).

Links to the other two:
Liam's
Caitlin's

Baby Elisabeth

Meeting Liam

Sisters together

Following Dara's lead for these 31 days