The history of our family motto: “We don’t give up!”

Now that Audrey is here, I’ve decided to address this blog to her.  Everyone is welcome to read and comment– in fact, I hope you will so that this is as rich a record of her life as possible!  I just want her to know how special she is to me, and I think that the best way to do that is to write everything from now on for her directly.  Think of it as a public electronic baby book!  Here goes…

You were born at 11:51 a.m. on Friday, August 27, 2010… and I’m writing this on Tuesday, December 7.  Good that you weren’t as tardy in arriving as I am with updating this blog!  Honestly, this is the first chance I’ve had to even *think* about blogging since your arrival.  Who knew newborns could be so much work?!  (To all of my friends who had kids before me and suffered through my ranting about how being organized is the key to surviving anything… I’M SORRY.  You must have all been snickering under your breath when I said I was going to have a baby… )

I’ll catch you up on the last three months bit by bit in the coming weeks, but suffice it to say that they were mostly filled with figuring out how to feed, change, burp, bathe, carry, and entertain you.  I’ll post some videos and photos of the funnier moments (breast feeding on the Florida Turnpike anyone?). For now I just want to share two important victories with you, victories that gave us our new family motto: “We don’t give up!”

The first had to do with your heart.  You were born with a heart defect (a “small to moderate” hole between your two ventricles) that was a lot more serious than just a little valve murmur.  I remember sitting in the hospital bed the day after you were born, after I got the news, and holding you, this little creature, in my arms and just crying and crying at the thought that you might not make it.  Ok, partially I was hyped up on hormones– nobody was telling me you were in imminent danger.  But I was absolutely astonished at the power of my feelings of protectiveness and fear for this tiny baby who had just make her arrival in the world.  I was sure that if anything happened to you I would just die myself, and you were only 24 hours old!  Just thinking about it now makes my chest tight and my eyes well up.  When they discharged us from the hospital (two days after my C-section!) they told me to watch you for signs of not thriving (not gaining weight well, lethargic, etc.) and for signs of heart failure (blue lips, not breathing), since both were possible with your kind of defect.  Oh my GOD!!!

I didn’t tell very many people about all of this at the time, mainly because I wanted to focus on the positive and there was nothing I could do about the defect except wait.  And if having cancer taught me one thing, it’s not to panic until there’s something to panic about!  So you and I got on with the business of learning about each other, and I tried not to panic as your first pediatric cardiology follow-up appointment neared.  And you know what?  By that time, just five weeks after your birth, they found that the hole was almost closed.  Mind you, when they originally diagnosed you they were talking about following you into your teen years, were saying that the defect might (or might not) cause you trouble, that you might (or might not) require heart surgery someday.  And here we were not even two months later and the doctor said it was so small now that he felt comfortable releasing us to your pediatrician for further monitoring since it would certainly disappear completely soon.  Our first major victory!

The second major victory just happened today, and it was a big enough one that it made me want to stay up late to write this post: today was your first day without formula.  After fourteen grueling weeks of battling a low milk supply, you got nothing but 100% pure breast milk from yours truly today and you are now sleeping peacefully at 11 p.m. You cannot BELIEVE what a huge deal this is for me!

I had prepared for your birth by attending childbirth and breastfeeding classes.  I hired a doula.  I practiced birthing positions on a birth ball.  I checked daily to see if drops of colostrum were present, just waiting to feed you when you finally arrived.  I wanted to have the full birth and motherhood experience and I prepared as much as possible to make it happen.

But things started to go wrong very quickly around 41 weeks.  Despite weekly pelvic exams, my OB missed that you were frank breech.  When she did an ultrasound at 41 weeks to check amniotic fluid levels, the ultrasound tech and I were shocked to find your head up by my diaphragm!  You had very little fluid and were estimated to be around 11 pounds, so I had to have a C-section the very next day.  No labor, no doula, no birth ball… and no nursing in the OR.  I have an adorable (and heartbreaking) video of you just minutes after birth, snuggled up against my cheek trying to nurse on my jawbone… just before you were wheeled away to the nursery and given a bottle!   Things went from bad to worse when the lactation consultant and I somehow missed each other and she left for the night– and the hospital didn’t have anyone on staff for the rest of the weekend.  The nurses tried to help, but they weren’t trained to help with breastfeeding and I got conflicting (and downright wrong) advice all weekend.  You dropped a ton of weight and I could tell that I wasn’t producing anything– no colostrum, nada– and I panicked and started giving you formula at the nurses’ suggestion.

I eventually hired a lactation consultant and we confirmed that my milk had not come in, so she devised a system for us to feed you with a little tube lined up with my nipple through which you would get formula, but nurse normally to make sure you didn’t forget how.  It was impossibly hard to do and incredibly frustrating, sometimes requiring me to latch you on as many as 20 times before we got it right.  I was in pain, you were crying with hunger,  and your formula intake was climbing, finally hitting 24 ounces a day just a few weeks after you were born.  I was despondent, sure that yet another dream of motherhood, breastfeeding, had vanished.

But somehow I never gave up hope completely, and I started reading online, talking to lactation consultants at the other hospital in town, and figuring out a way to build my milk supply slowly.  And I’m happy to report that after 47 days (yes, almost 7 weeks!) of slowly reducing your formula and letting my breasts make up the difference, today you only got breast milk directly from me.  No formula, no pumped milk.  In order to stay the course, I gave all of our formula and bottles to our neighbor Ryleigh for safe keeping last night– a good decision it turned out, since I was totally jonesing to give you a little formula to get you to stop crying and go to sleep several times since then.  We had a tough night last night and some tough times today, but I know we’re going to make it.

I’ve been saying for several weeks now that our new family motto is “We don’t give up!” but I really feel deep down tonight, maybe for the first time, that it really suits us.  I didn’t give up on having you, and now sometimes I cry when I look at you and think, if I had ever wavered in my commitment to have a baby, you wouldn’t be here now.  You are the perfect baby for me and I look forward to our life together.  We have it all to look forward to and, no matter what happens, just remember that we don’t give up.  Ever.

Love,
Mommy