A letter to my daughter

Dear Evelyn,
You have been home for a week now and there are some things you should know. Things I will inevitably forget by the time you start asking about yourself as a baby. First, you are an excellent baby. Only 11 days old, sure, but so far you are absolutely perfect. You only cry or fuss when you are hungry or wearing a dirty diaper. You are sleeping 3 or 4 hours at a a time at night. You eat all the time, which is good for a growing girl like you.

A few things that surprised me this week are both changing table related. You have peed on everyone who has changed your diaper. It's pretty hilarious, actually. Last night you peed on grandma twice, in one changing. I thought little boys were the culprits in peeing with their diapers off, but I guess this particular gift is equal opportunity. The other surprising thing is how many diapers you are using! We've had to up our cloth diaper delivery for next week because you are a diaper dirtying machine. We've gone through 55 diapers since Wednesday morning. That's like 15 a day, or over 100 a week! We have to go get a bigger diaper pail today! It is truly amazing. I know all new moms are amazed by the number of diapers they go through, but I have to believe this is an extra high number. It has to be. It's insane.

How are we going through so many diapers? Well...you hate to be wet. So you cry every single time you pee, and we change you. Also, you have a special gift for pooping in a freshly changed diaper. Yes, you are quite gifted and we love every second of you.

The rest of the time you just sleep, look adorable, or stare at lights. What a great baby.

I can't wait to see what each new week brings. You are a gift.

Love,
Your mom, who hasn't showered in two days.


And just for fun, here are some pictures for Evie's first lunch excursion with two grandmothers. We had fish and chips.

How Baby E was born

I think I posted earlier that little Baby E was born via an emergency c-section. Here's the whole store.

Monday night around 9pm I started to feel a little funny. Really soon, by like 9:10, I was in extraordinary pain. Just abdominal pain. Not contraction-like pain, I thought. I called my midwife and she told me to get to the hospital immediately. They were going to admit me to the labor and delivery triage area to assess the situation, but they ran out of beds! So instead I was sent to the labor and delivery floor observation room. They put me on lots of monitors and realized the baby was fine. Normal heart rate. Normal blood oxygen levels. No contractions. No dialation. I was definitely not in labor. But I was in amazing pain. I couldn't move much at all, I couldn't walk. But the nurses couldn't figure out what was going on. The ob-gyn on call came in and didn't know what was going on. Was it just a gastrointestinal issue? Was it the appendix?

Then, a few minutes before they were going to send me to another area of the hospital for an abdominal ultrasound, the baby's heart rate started to decelerate. It went back up, then back down, and then stayed down. Before I knew it I was being rushed into an operating room for a crash c-section. From the time I entered the O.R. to the time E was born, it was 6 minutes. I was put under general anesthesia so I had no idea what happened; I just woke up with a baby!

Turns out I had a ruptured blood vessel on the outside of my uterus and I had been bleeding internally. They didn't realize this until they opened me up to get the baby out and, woah, look at all the blood. Pretty scary. E was born by the time Jon had scrubbed in and been allowed into the O.R.

After I woke up, doctors kept coming to my room and saying, "In 15 years of medicine I've never seen this before" and things like that. Not very reassuring. So no one has any idea why this vessel ruptured. No one has any idea if it would happen again if I got pregnant again. The general consensus seems to be that it was such a weird, fluke thing that another pregnancy is probably OK. But it will certainly give me pause when Jon and I get to that point.

But everything turned out OK. The baby is perfect. I am recovering and will be for quite a few weeks.

Now that we are home, things are starting to get into a rhythm. Feeding, sleeping, pooping. We are doing well, though, and I couldn't be happier.

Hospital baby pics

Who has the most perfect baby?

It's me!

We have a baby!

We have a baby!

After a somewhat traumatic experience to get her here, including an emergency c-section following some internal bleeding and near-death experience, little baby Evelyn Mary Lew was born at 1:00am September 2. She weighed 5 lbs, 15 oz and was 19 inches long. She has incredible monkey toes and looong fingers. She's also a big fan of sucking on anything nearby. She is a doll. Seriously gorgeous. Lots of brown hair on her head (and shoulders and back...) and deep gray-blue eyes. It will be fun to see what she looks like as she grows a little. Right now the top half of her face looks like Jon and the bottom half looks like me.

I'm still in the hospital so the connection is slow and I can't post many pictures. This one will have to suffice for now. I'll post more later, once I'm home and settled.

Babies!!

Fix it or Replace it?

We are reaching a turning point in every car owner's life: When should you keep fixing a car you own vs. getting a new (used) one?

The situation:

Jon has a fine car. It has 91,000+ miles on it and is almost 8 years old. Earlier this year we had to replace the entire cooling system to the tune of...$2000 or so, if I remember right. He just replaced the windshiled. At 40,000 miles he replaced the clutch. But alas, now the care seems to be having troubles again. And, hooray hooray, it appears to be the oh-so-cheap transmission! So...do we keep sinking money into a car pushing 100k miles? A car that was the first model year the PT Cruiser existed? One that has started costing a lot of money to fix one thing after another? Or do we trade it in for whatever we can get and find a nice used car instead?

It's always one thing after another.

If we do get a new car, it will be used. We'd ideally like a wagon-style body. The shape and size of the PT Cruiser has been nice, I just hate driving it because the windshield is too low and cuts off my line of vision. Since my car is a two door, this new car would likely become the "baby" car, as in the car either of us drive when we have the baby.

Jon dropped his car off at the mechanic this morning and they will try to get a look at it today. We'll know more once we get a price estimate on the repairs. But...after the mechanic drove it around the block with Jon to get a feel for what was the issue, the car no longer went into reverse. It went into reverse yesterday. It's not looking so good...

Biting the bullet

Alright, people. I have hated my hair for the past nine months. A rogue stylist making me look like Joan Jett circa 1984 back in February has led to a long string of disappointing haircuts and an attempt to grow out some sort of style for myself. I have cried at my desk at least two times because I hated my hair so much. (OK, OK, so it's probably more about the horomones than the haircut, but still.) It's just shapeless and styleless and blah. Now I'm having a baby in a couple of weeks and I've got more important things to worry about than how much my hair drives me crazy. The madness must end.

So I'm biting the bullet. I'm going to a real salon with a real reputation and a real price to match. I'm going tomorrow. I'm going in with hope, but tempered expectations. The salon is across from Jon's tattoo shop and he says they are always busy and everyone comes out looking happy. I certainly hope so. I need a hip, fun, easy, awesome style!!

If all goes well, I'll post some pictures.

Full term

I am full term. That means if I go into labor, the hospital will just let it happen and there likely will be no detrimental effect to my child. So...let's get this show on the road! It is CRUEL that pregnancy lasts somewhere between 37 and 42 weeks. (Which is TEN months, by the way...not nine!) That is a big gap! Five weeks of "it might happen any time now" is a long time to sit around waiting. Even though first-time mothers usually deliver later rather than earlier, it is still in my mind that it *could* happen any time. My mom had me three weeks early and I was her first baby. But then my brother was late, after putting my mom on bed rest for a while. Really, it's just a crap shoot. Waiting and waiting, growing and growing. I keep reminding myself that up until 40 weeks, it is better for my child to stay inside the womb where she can keep learning how to do all the stuff she'll need to know once she's born. Better for her.

Patience has never been my greatest gift.

My to-do list is not getting any shorter:

* Unbox, assemble, and install all the car seats, car seat paraphernalia and stroller. (This is really for Jon.)
* Unpack all the lovely gifts we got at the baby shower.
* Put all the stuff I've purchased in the last three weeks into the baby's room in some sort of organized fashion.
* Stop dreaming of the too-cute preppy looks currently selling at the Baby Gap. (Seriously, plaid corduroy jumpers? Most adorable ever.)
* Buy a few button-front shirts so I can breastfeed outside the house. I have no button-front shirts because button-front shirts tend not to be my friend.
* Stop piling last night's clothes in the bassinet. It is not a laundry hamper. There will soon be a sleeping child in there.
* Stop worrying about labor. It's happening and it will be fine.
* Put all the small furniture items back in the baby's room now that the carpets have been professionally cleaned. (They still look pretty bad, but soooo much better than before.)
* Pack the hospital bag.
* Sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep.

That last "to do" is particularly important because I have been fighting off a cold or something for the past few days. I've got that scratchy throat, fog head, hot eyes feeling you get before you get sick. Which is totally NOT what I need right now. I've been pounding the OJ and trying to rest as much as I can. Sadly, rest is not very restful. I'm usually pretty good about fighting things off at the very first sign of ickiness, before it becomes a full-blown cold or flu, but my body is so tired, so run down, so focused on growing this baby and nothing else, that I'm afraid my tried and true methods of prevention will fail me. We'll see what the next few days have in store.