So, when I fell off the face of the blogosphere I was just a few months pregnant with our fourth child. I didn't know I was once again incubating a man-child, and had secret visions of sugar plum fairies and pink tutus and names like Adelaide, Olivia, and Sophia dancing through my hormone-riddled brain. I figured my odds of having a girl must be increasing as, technically, it's a about a 50 percent chance of squeaking an X chromosome in there every time.
But oh no. Not in this gene pool. We only make boys.
I tried not to be disappointed. I mean, really, there are people dealing with so much worse. I was carrying a healthy, growing, normal baby boy, and shedding tears because I, once again, was not having a daughter. I know moms of all one gender can surely relate to the angst I was feeling :)
My pregnancy was fairly uneventful. My OBs watch me like a hawk because I have a history of severe pre-eclampsia and HELLP syndrome with my second pregnancy. I've been able to behave myself through my last two pregnancies, although I have noticed how much harder each one gets on my body. This time around, by my third trimester I was waddling around VERY slowly, and wearing all sorts of supportive apparatus. I felt OLD.
At thirty-five weeks on the nose my water broke. I had to go to the hospital and bribe my fellow OB nurses to let me have a little of the nitrazine paper we use to determine if a patient's water has truly broken or not. I didn't want to get checked in to the hospital if it was a false alarm, and if it wasn't I needed to go home and pack (you'd think I would have done that already). The nitrazine was positive and I left, promising to return within an hour or two. They warned me they would come looking for me if I didn't.
I distinctly remember going home and having to go down to the root cellar at our old house that was piled high with boxes and had no light and spiderwebs and scary things all over and dig around trying to find the boxes with newborn and postpartum essentials. I was pretty sure something was going to collapse on me and my nurse friends would finally come looking for me when I didn't show up at the hospital, and find me in hard labor, trapped in my root cellar...but I made it out unscathed.
I wasn't having any contractions at all, so as soon as I got checked in and settled, my OB and I agreed to try a little Pitocin to try to get things going. By noon I was starting to feel contractions. By four thirty I wanted an epidural. By five nineteen we had a beautiful baby boy! He had a rather rough start (as in he didn't want to breathe). My good friend Jen was there as my labor support and was a little horrified that Kevin was remarking on his son's lack of "spontaneous respirations" to the NICU nurse as if he were talking about the weather. I tell you what, you don't get much sympathy when both your parents are nurses. But after some persuasion, the baby did decide that he wanted to live after all and he started breathing and crying and he was finally bundled up and handed to his mama. I kissed him told him I loved him very much, boy parts and all, and then he was whisked off to the NICU for observation.
We named him Phineas David (David after my father) and it was decided that we would call him Finn for short. I had a great deal of angst about the spelling. I wanted to spell it Finneas to avoid confusion regarding his initials and to help those poor people in the general public who still don't know that "Ph" says the same thing as "F". But Kev insisted on the Biblical spelling. I'm glad he did, it looks so much better even as I'm typing it. I've really only started calling him Phineas since he turned two anyway...it sounds MUCH more serious than "Finn" when you yell it.
He was so sweet and tiny and precious. He got to come home with us despite a 24-hour stint in NICU. He was a perfect baby. He ate and slept like a pro and loved to be held. I was happy to oblige as newborns are my favorite kinds of humans.
(That picture makes me want a baby...bad.)
A sweet friend of mine gave me the gift of a newborn photo session in her studio. Here is her blog post with some of the beautiful photos she took of Finn and I. I used them to design his birth announcements which went out....wait for it.....with our Christmas cards in 2012. Yes, he was born in March. Hey, it saved on postage! That's how I roll.
This was one of the most blessed days of my life :) I secretly was wishing for an Olivia, but I can't imagine this season of life without that Finn! Beautiful blog. Beautiful Woman.
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