Oh where to start, I always hated more formal-type writing while I was in school so I'm not quite sure why I agreed to write a journal! Mainly I think it was to force myself to do it. I didn't do this during my first pregnancy and I am ashamed to say I haven't even kept a baby book for my now 18-month-old son. I did write down milestones on scraps of paper and stored them in a box, and I have copies of all the email updates I sent to family throughout my pregnancy so I guess some day I can recreate a journal of sorts for him.
I guess I'll start by introducing myself. I am Michelle, known as Miche to many and here on the StorkNet Bulletin boards. That's pronounced Meesh, not Mish. After meeting a bunch of people I knew from online in person I realized that lots of people pronounce Miche wrong, and the wrong pronunciation just grates on my ears! I guess the nickname started because my mother is French and she always called me Michouchette, a French term of endearment which roughly translates to my little cabbage. That over the years got shortened to Michou and Michou was shortened to just Miche. At any rate it's much better than any of the nicknames my brother had for me growing up!
I am 27 years old, still fairly young, but old enough that I have to stop and think about my age when someone asks! I will be 28 on September 2 of this year, and my husband will be 28 on August 22 so this baby has the potential to be born on either of our birthdays since s/he is due August 23. But I'm getting ahead of myself now! I'm the baby of 4 children. My sisters are 8 and 9 years older than me and my brother is 3 years older. Growing up I just loved children and always wanted a baby brother or sister, but now I look back and realize that there were some good things about being the youngest. I imagine it will be difficult to keep Tommy's smaller toys (when he gets smaller ones) away from the baby. This was something I never needed to deal with as a kid. Tom, my husband, is the second oldest of five, four boys and then a girl. They are all about 3-4 years apart.
I have lived in lots of different places in my life. I was born in New Jersey, but my family moved to Midland, Michigan when I was just four months old. I got to go on the plane with my parents, house hunting while my siblings all stayed behind. Not that I remember, but growing up I thought it was pretty cool! Just before my eleventh birthday we moved from this company town in the Midwest to Tiburon, California, an affluent town just north of San Francisco. My parents chose Tiburon because my dad's commute into the city wouldn't be too bad, but we definitely didn't fit in with most in the town! I showed up to my first day of sixth grade thinking I was so cool. It was 1984 and I was wearing a Hang Ten outfit, aqua polo shirt and short shorts with a vest over that had white, aqua and pink stripes. All this was topped off with a pair of pink topsiders. I was so excited to be the new kid in school! In Michigan everyone flocked to the new kid's desk at recess and competed to be that kid's first friend, but I guess middle school was different than elementary school. I was a complete outcast! No one realized I was new because so many kids were new since this was the first year the school had sixth graders in middle school! Up until then it had just been seventh and eight graders so two-thirds of the school was new! And on top of that I learned quickly that the fashion trends in Michigan were about two years behind California! Everyone, girls and boys, were wearing jam shorts down to their knees and big baggy t-shirts! And almost all the girls had very short hair so I couldn't tell many apart from boys! I fit in just great!
I'm not sure why I went off on that tangent, but I guess anyone reading this journal should get used to that because I tend to do that quite a lot! Well things got better three years later when I moved on to high school. Almost everyone I went to school with moved on to private high schools and I went to the public high. Since it was father north and a better mix of people I was no longer the odd ball. See in middle school I was pretty much the only kid that didn't have a live-in au pair (nanny), maid and gardener. I was once asked what my parents did. I told them that my father was a VP of finance for a large leasing corporation. I was then asked what my mom did, I replied that she stays home and takes care of the house and us. My classmate then said "Why? Don't you have a maid?" I had friends who had three story homes with elevators; even my high school had a parking lot filled with BMWs and Mercedes! I knew kids that got brand new Miatas for their sixteenth birthdays! And I drove a 1977 Peugeot Diesel with a paint job that had been burnt in the sun. It was so loud that I announced my arrival from a mile away! The car had character though, and in some ways I miss it! Well after a while in middle school my classmates thought it was pretty cool that my mom was so involved in my life. I always knew I wanted to stay at home with my kids just like my mom did!
Well in high school I continued to be a good student, played sports in all seasons, water polo, basketball and softball. I was a soloist in the symphonic band where I played flute and occasionally piccolo, and I was active in student government and clubs. I was far from the most popular kid in school, but I seemed to be well liked by most. I even was a homecoming princess, but I didn't win queen. I look back on it as being a good time!
I chose to major in Biochemistry in college, and I chose a fairly small school in Los Angeles. Far enough away from home where I couldn't go home for weekends, but a quick plane flight away in case there was an emergency! I debated going closer to home, but I knew that I had to grow up at some point and picked the farther away school so that I would be forced to be out in the world on my own. By my junior year school had become a bit too small for me. With only 4000 students pretty much everyone knew everyone else's business and I had some business that I really didn't want everyone to know! I continued to be active in extracurricular activities in college along with playing Division I softball. We weren't a fabulous team, but my senior year we got to go to Hawaii for 8 days for a tournament so that was pretty neat!
In December of my senior year I realized that I didn't know what I would be doing the next year so I decided to apply to grad school. I had been tutoring since my sophomore year of high school and all through college, and I also TAed the freshman majors' chemistry lab and I knew I loved to teach. I figured I'd go for a PhD with the idea of becoming a professor at a University geared toward teaching like where I went to school. I took the computerized GRE that weekend, did well on it, and applied to four different programs that would still accept applications. Three of the programs were in Boston and one in New Mexico. My parents had moved to Santa Fe between my sophomore and junior years of college so they wanted me to apply near them. My one sister convinced me to apply to schools in Boston since she lived near there. She left for college when I was just nine and then we moved to California and she only visited occasionally so it wasn't until I was in college that she stopped thinking of me as a kid! I was really excited to be thinking of living near her and getting to know her better!
I got into all four programs and decided to go to Brandeis just outside of Boston. It was the largest and highest ranked of the programs and I also got an NIH grant through them so they offered me the best stipend! School was ok, but it didn't thrill me. I enjoyed my classes and classmates, and I found the research fascinating, but I realized that I wasn't cut out to just do one thing all day, every day! I was in that lab running experiments for at least twelve hours a day! For the first time in my life I wasn't spread incredibly thin doing fifty different activities, I was just doing science day seven days a week and all day and night long! I knew this wasn't what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was also struggling with depression again, something I had issues with since puberty. I ended up taking a leave of absence and had hoped to return after a semester or possibly a year.
I ended up moving to Mississippi where I knew a friend and the cost of living was really cheap! Well one thing led to another and this friend and I became engaged! After eight months Tom got a job offer from a start-up in Silicon Valley so we decided to move to California. After a few months of temping I got a job as a legal assistant at a major law firm specializing in high tech. I reviewed patent applications for technical content and did technical searches for medical device patents, pharmaceutical patents and the occasional computer or software related patent. It was a pretty good job and offered a lot of overtime so I was able to make some extra money to help get us out of debt. Obviously I didn't go back to grad school when my leave was up. Life just seemed to have taken me on a different path. I did, however, continue with tutoring and still tutor a few hours a week in my home.
Tom and I were married July 4, 1998. We didn't pick that date on purpose, it just happened to be the day that the church was available! We had a pretty small traditional Catholic Church wedding with a reception at an Irish pub and restaurant. Since it was such a slow restaurant going day they shut down and let us have the place the entire night! We had an eight-hour reception and had a blast! Breaking with tradition we were actually the last to leave! The next day we drove down highway one and stayed at a little hotel right on the water north of San Luis Obispo. Then drove down to LA saw the sights since Tom had never been there. The bulk of our honeymoon was spent on the Queen Mary in Long Beach. Tom loves old ocean liners so it was really neat! Unfortunately we were both sick the entire honeymoon so we didn't see much except the inside of our suite, for some that wouldn't be a bad honeymoon, but the whole sick part made it really miserable! We had to be home the next weekend because the 10-11 year old softball team I coached had their big all star tournament that weekend.
Three months later I found out I was pregnant! It was quite a surprise. I thought I had gotten my period because I had some bleeding, but the next day it stopped. I had been suspecting that I was pregnant so I decided to take a test. It was positive, but a very very faint positive that took a full ten minutes to develop. I assumed it was probably a false positive. Later that night I momentarily blacked out. I had an intestinal flu and Tom assumed I was dehydrated so he rushed me to the emergency room. It was there that we found out that indeed I was pregnant, just 12 days past conception! The next day the morning sickness hit, hard! I had bad morning sickness through my second trimester and lost over 20 pounds. Fortunately I'm overweight to start so my doctor was not that worried. I also got very sick during my second trimester with a sinus infection and upper respiratory infection and I had migraines quite often so when my third trimester started it was a great relief! I finally felt good! I also didn't show much until the very end of my pregnancy either so I wasn't too huge in my seventh month. I ended up gaining all the weight back and then putting on an additional fifteen pounds all in the last few weeks. It was mostly water though because at my five-week post-partum check I was down thirty-three pounds, seventeen from my pre-pregnancy weight. Basically I just needed to get pregnant to lose weight! My body is that backwards!
Toward the end of the pregnancy I got pretty miserable though. I had a rare condition, a separated pubic bone. It started hurting bad during my eighth month and was most likely due to having a heavy and very low carrying baby. I had stayed in decent shape through the pregnancy and was even coaching softball again, this time a 13-15 year old team. My co-coach got a little freaked out when he looked over at me and saw my belly moving! I was quite proud that even toward the end of the pregnancy I was hitting infield and outfield, warming up pitchers and coaching the bases! I miss coaching, but it would be a bit harder with a baby outside of me than it was having one inside!
The pubic bone condition turned out to be more important that I thought. We knew the baby was larger than average and one and a half weeks before my due date the doctor estimated he was 8.5 lbs. That wasn't unusually large, but he thought the ultrasound wasn't that accurate and guessed he was larger. He convinced me to induce before my due date. Basically he scared me and told me that delivering a very large baby vaginally would cause my pubic symphysis to separate further and that might lay me up for a year or more! That thought petrified me so I agreed. I have since learned that damage to the pubic symphysis is never a permanent condition, and after Tommy was born the pain completely went away. I hope the condition does not return this pregnancy. There isn't too much information out there on it, but this time I won't let my care provider scare me like that! The doctor assured me the induction would go smoothly and he guessed my pushing stage would go quickly. Big strong girls like me have an easy time pushing he said!
Boy was the doctor wrong! I was 3 cm when the induction began. Within forty-five minutes my water had broken and the contractions started overlapping. The baby was posterior and stuck at -1 station. When my water broke I went to 4 cm and stayed there for another 12 hours. Every few hours the doc would come in, tell me I wasn't in "real" labor yet because I was tolerating it so well, then he would check me and say, something completely discouraging like "still 4 cm, we have a long way to go". Finally around 10:30 PM he said that in his experience with thousands of laboring women he didn't believe that I would progress any further. I was completely exhausted and my husband who didn't want to be there in the first place was starting to lose it seeing me in so much pain. The doctor suggested that before the baby or I go into trauma it would be best for me to get a c-section. How could I argue that?
I started crying immediately. I felt like such a failure! We decided that my mom would be in the operating room with me and that Tom would wait outside with my best friend and go with the baby to the nursery. Tom doesn't do well with hospitals and doctors and I felt really good knowing he would be with the baby. The c-section was pretty horrible. Before Tommy was even born I started shaking uncontrollably! Then suddenly they said it was a boy! We had purposely kept it a surprise. I heard a cry and it didn't sound very loud so I asked if it was a good cry. The doctor said, "Yes, he has a good cry." Tom and my friend Lisa were outside and peeked in the window when they heard the cry. Tom heard the doctor's reply and just said to Lisa, "He! Did he say HE!"? When they looked in they saw him being carried over and cleaned off, then they saw all the blood around me and turned quickly! When they wheeled Tommy out Lisa said Tom cried!
My experience wasn't as nice. The doctor gave me a quick peek of the baby over the screen. He was completely purple so that worried me a little (turns out his apgars were 8 and 9, just lost points on color). They didn't offer him to me, just whisked him by me one more time before they took him down to the nursery. He took one look at me and made the most pitiful face and let out a loud "Waaah!" My mom later teased me and said he must have thought, "This is my mother! Help me!" I was too out of it to really think of protesting and didn't ask to hold him or ask that he stay in the room with me, and they sure weren't going to volunteer that! After sewing me up they brought me to recovery and my friend and mother stayed with me. I wasn't handling the anesthesia well and just remember being in a ton of pain! The nurse pushed on my stomach and I kept feeling blood rushing out and pain searing into my abdomen. I couldn't believe she was pushing that hard where I had just been cut open! I was still shaking hard for over two hours after. I wish I had been told about that was normal during a c-section! My back went into spasms and the entire time I was also extremely nauseous. I kept declaring that I was going to throw up and my mom would bring me a bedpan and then I would just spit a little, but be unable to vomit. I felt that vomiting would have made me feel better, but I'm not sure. They gave me a morphine IV where I could push a button and get more morphine every five minutes. I could push it as many times as I wanted, but it would only release medicine every five minutes. I think I must have hit that button every minute! Finally after about 2 -3 hours Tom walked in with Tommy. There was something nice about my husband being the one who handed me my baby, but it still didn't make the wait worth it!
I tried to nurse him and he wanted nothing to do with it. To make a long story short he had a very poor suck reflex and could not draw my nipple back far enough so he would panic and push at me. And on top of that I have large breasts and inverted nipples, which made it more difficult for him. I cup fed him in the hospital and had to lie to the nursery nurses to keep them from giving him a bottle. He was getting my milk, but they wanted to know if he was actually nursing and wouldn't leave me alone until I said yes! It wasn't until he was six weeks old that he nursed properly, and he hasn't stopped since! He's still nursing a ton, and still has a poor latch so he will push my nipple against his top teeth. This is starting to become a really painful issue now that I'm experiencing nipple soreness with this pregnancy, but I know that taking care of him without nursing will be so much harder and take more effort than this perfect mommy pacifier, so I'm just dealing with the pain for now!
This pregnancy was another surprise, but again a very welcome one. I had quite a scare and dealt with a threatened miscarriage for several weeks, but I'm afraid this is getting pretty long so I will start in on the specifics of this pregnancy in my next entry. I'm trying to do everything I can to make this birth a completely different experience. For starters I'm looking for a midwife and I'm definitely going for a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean). I'm educating myself much more than I did last time about the actual birth. I did great learning about pregnancy and about nursing, and I think it was all I learned here at StorkNet about nursing that got me through the tough start, but I pretty much ignored the whole labor and delivery part, which is not a mistake I will make again!
