Eyeballs

I think one of the really tough things about parenting is that when you're not privvy to the details of other people's lives, you assume that everything is 100% perfect. Many times we don't talk about our struggles. But I think it's important to address these roadblocks as well - everyone has some cross to bear. Life isn't perfect for anyone.

In October a friend came to visit with her little one. We had a great time seeing them. We took the boys for a walk and chatted and just hung out. Although the boys are about 2.5 months apart, we were due only a month apart. So developmentally the boys are much closer in age. The boys were sitting on a blanket in our living room when I noticed something that I'd been getting suspicious of over the past week or so. "There! Look! Is his eye crossed?!" I pointed to Emmett and my friend looked at him carefully. She is a detail-oriented person, Type A, a social worker. Also honest. Not the kind of person to ignore or sugarcoat things. She looked at him carefully for a minute or two before answering. "I don't see it. I don't think it is. Maybe it just looked that way for a minute," she said. I was glad she was there in the moment to give me her opinion. But I couldn't sweep the feeling under the rug. Couldn't dismiss it. Later when I was uploading pictures from the weekend, I noticed that his eye definitely looked crossed in any pictures where he was looking straight at the camera.

One of the pics from that weekend

I rooted around in my photo files. Just a week earlier his eye might have been a little off in one picture I took (of 100).

A couple of weeks earlier at the pumpkin patch

And a few weeks before that, at his school pictures in September, it looked just fine.

I started compiling pics of Emmett and his eyes into a flickr set, and planned to bring it up at his well baby visit with his pediatrician a three weeks later.

The following week, everyone else started noticing. My Dad asked if his eyes were crossed. Dad is a minister and has seen a lot of people and A LOT of situations. He pretty much knows everything (one time he asked me what a kind of cheese was that we were eating in Chicago and I was all "Holy cow I know something Dad doesn't." So dumb, a type of cheese. haha) I felt a sense of vindication that I wasn't just blowing things out of proportion, but also dismayed that there could be something actually wrong with Emmett.

That week, I saw a notice at his daycare that they would be doing eye exams at his school for the older kids. I asked them to have the person take a look at his eyes. I was given a note in a sealed envelope that night. "Dear Emmett's Mom, I would recommend taking Emmett to a pediatric opthamologist." Ugh. Not words you want to read.The next week at his pediatrician appointment, his doc looked at his eyes and said that while she thought his eye health was good, she was referring us to a doctor at Riley Children's hospital in downtown Indy. The soonest they could get us in was the first week in December. And so we waited.

The first appointment was pretty straightforward. They measured his eyes and agreed with my assessment. They prescribed glasses. The doctor told me that it would most likely correct with the glasses. If not, they'd try patching the good eye to encourage the development of the bad one. If that didn't work, then we'd try surgery.

Emmett turns a lot of heads in his tiny glasses. He is admittedly very cute in them. I'm glad I picked the square frames, as they "turn him into a tiny intellectual" as a friend commented.

In February we took him back to Riley to check on progress and they reported that the eye was less crossed. 18-20 diopters of crossed instead of 30 at the original appointment. But not enough to conclude that the glasses would correct the problem. They recommended patching but wanted to schedule the surgery for early summer. We were more than a little taken aback with what we thought was skipping a step straight to surgery. The error rate the surgeon quoted us was 20%. This was alarming to us, for sure. We scheduled a second opinion at Children's Memorial in Chicago.

Let's just say that the 773 Chicago area code cell phone and Indiana address really confused the administrative staff while making the appointment.

But the appointment was great. We were much better prepared to ask questions at this one, which probably explains most of why we felt better about it. The eye was also slightly better and they did extensive tests on eye health which put his eyesight at completely normal and equally good in each eye. But the doctor recommended the same exact course of treatment as Riley. Same methods, same strategy, same everything. The doctor even recommended Riley as highly as she did Children's. I knew Riley was very well-regarded, but I'm from Indiana. I wanted to know the opinion of the hospital outside of the state, and it's good to know that they are held in high esteem by Children's.

So here we are. Waiting until his next appointment May 11. Looking at him critically each day to see if it's gotten better. Waiting to see if the surgery works. Hoping that it does, to give our little man a chance at a normal life with two normal eyes.

7 months!

Another month has gone by and our tiny Sir is 7 months old!

At seven months, Emmett:

• Has been to TWO Cubs games. Luckily the Cubs won the second one. Emmett slept almost the whole time and I managed to eat chili cheese fries AND a chili cheese dog without any of it falling on E's head (he was in the baby carrier)
  
• He is sitting up largely on his own. He still tumps over a decent amount, but he is doing pretty well overall.
  
• Loves jaunts around town in his stroller
• Has started (kind of) eating solids. I started him on purees and just recently ditched the purees and started the Baby-led weaning methods. He can pick up a piece of cheese, get it to his mouth, and bite off a chunk. The chewing and swallowing could be better but I think he's doing great for only doing the method for a few days.
  
• He is OVER swings. Swings are for babies, Mom.
  
• Loves his activity table, and just recently figured out how to walk himself around it.
  
• Is loving not having to wear his helmet. He is so much more comfortable without it.
  
• Has discovered his feet and spends alot of time trying to get them in his mouth. Unfortunately, his belly gets in the way of this objective.

While taking his 7 month pictures, I got an action shot of Emmett spitting up. This is how we see him much of the time! While gross, this picture TOTALLY cracks me up.

Michigan Vacation 2011

I went to my grandparents' lake house every year as a tiny tot, and visiting that area (and Lark's Lake specifically) is one thing I would really like to make sure Emmett gets to do. I don't know that we'll go every year, but it would be nice to go at least every other year or every couple of years.

This year my parents rented a cottage about 15 minutes away from my grandparents' cottage. I love my grandparents' place but it's super small and definitely does not have room for all the family expansion that has happened recently with the addition of husbands (and a wife for my brother next month, woohoo!!) and Grace and Emmett.

So without further adieu, here is our vacation in pictures. First up, let's get some shots of the cousins together.
Emmett is very against looking at/smiling at the camera when there is anyone else in the shot. Diva baby.

OK, scratch that. Maybe he just won't do it when the other subjects are smiling/looking at the camera as well. "Let's take turns smiling, Gracie. That way they never get a really good one."
Emmett's Great Grandma and Grandpa Kovacs bought him this shirt in Hawaii and Gracie helped me pick out his outfit that day. I do think he totally rocked it.
Those crazy tufts of hair on the sides of his head are totally the reason why he got a haircut later that week.

On Tuesday of that week we headed over to my grandparents' lake to get in some water time. Here, my Mom (aka "Neemaw") is helping Gracie play in the sand.
My sister Katie poses with Emmett on the dock. He is more interested in her glasses than the camera.
Ok, now, this is probably one of the favorite pictures I've ever shot of the little man. Had to order one for my desk.
That night we headed to the Legg's Inn for a polish feast. Katie got pierogis and I got a pork kotlet and we split both of them. We also got some potato pancakes and a polish sampler that were amazing. Oh and the mozzarella sticks that Mike ordered were pretty fantastic too. Here Emmett is with Great-Grandpa Curley. Grandpa Curley makes all kinds of fun sounds that babies love. :)
Posing for a picture with my Dad and Gracie. Of course the other two are smiling so Emmett had to make a weird face.
Emmett wanted a bottle once we sat down so Mike volunteered for the job. Had to grab a shot of them both with their sunglasses on.
The next day Mike and I headed into Petoskey for a date night. We stayed at the Perry Hotel and ate at Chandler's. I would highly recommend both! Loved that the Perry was historic and close to downtown and we had a balcony with an amazing view of the bay. And Chandler's had a great selection of food and wine. Loved walking over there and the downtown area of Petoskey is so cute!

The next day we had brunch and came back to the cottage. My parents had some friends around who were visiting from Midland, Michigan. They headed off to see my grandparents' cottage and I gave Emmett a haircut.
Let's put the #2 guard on and buzz the sides here, son. You hold the mirror so you can see what you look like.

Then we headed into Mackinaw for dinner at Mama Mia's, a Stratton family tradition. Afterward, Katie picked up some fudge for her husband while we took pics of Emmett outside. Sadly, he is too little for ice cream!
Then we headed over to the bridge to get some shots.
After a drive and getting lost a few times, we ended up at the sand dunes over by Sturgeon Bay. Love this shot of Emmett and Mike both looking down the beach at my Dad and Gracie.
My Pops and Emmett!
And Mike pulled a total Dad Move and put Emmett down in the sand. As a Mom who hates messes, I would never have done this and cringed when it happened. But Emmett loved it so much that I was so glad Mike did it. Dads are so much fun aren't they? I'm glad Emmett has a Dad that sometimes doesn't think about messes and just thinks about how great of a time he'll have doing something.
(This doesn't mean you never have to worry about messes, Hubs! You hear me??) Mike buried Emmett's legs in the sand and Emmett was digging through and found his foot. The look of wonder on his face was so ridiculously awesome - he was like "HOLY COW that THING on the end of my LEG was UNDER HERE THE WHOLE TIME!?!?!" He looked up at Mike with this incredulous face I wish I'd gotten on video.

On Friday it was time to go home. But first we headed over to the cottage to get a little more lake time. Milly LOVED it there. Check out a beagle action shot....
Can you just leave me here with Grandma and Grandpa? I swear I won't howl anymore.
There is a tree in front of my Grandparents' cottage that used to grow out over the lake, but actually fell into the lake this winter. The root bulb the resulted was our playhouse in the summer. Here, Gracie and my Dad play on the roots.
Emmett got some more Aunt Katie snuggles and hung out on the shore.
Here is a pic of Gracie with that tree that goes over the water. Love this shot. I am totally submitting this in the photo contest at work!
So that's our vacation in pictures. It was so great. Maybe a tad too short and not enough time at the grandparents' lake but I loved seeing the family. Emmett was very sad to see us all part ways, he misses his fan club.

For more photos from the week click here

State of the Apes

So many updates are all about Emmett, solely because that is my life these days. I love Sir Cheeks, but he is a time-consuming little man. Babies! They cry for a bottle and then barf it all over you! This is my life. Feed the bean, wipe spit-up off of him and me.... lather, rinse, repeat.

Here is my day:
6:00 - Up for the first time, if I'm lucky. Lately Sir has been waking himself up with coughing fits, and then crying for a bottle. Makes sense, what do I want after a coughing fit? Some liquids to ease my sore throat! Today was 5:15AM. I retire to the couch while I feed the bean. If it's after 4 we catch more z's on the couch. Before 4 I try to return him to his crib and crawl back into my own bed.
6:30 - Get myself and Sir ready
8:00 - Out the door. Drop bean at daycare, head to work.
8:45-5:20 - At work
5:15 or 5:25 train
5:30-5:40 - Pick up Sir from daycare, drive home while he screams in the back seat. How a content baby goes from being happy at daycare to wanting a bottle ASAP in the car I have no idea. It's obviously the evil car seat that bites him.
6:00 - Bottle Sir
6:30 - Feed myself
7:00 - Make bottles for daycare, do errands/chores like laundry or picking up the condo that constantly looks like a tornado hit it.
7:30 - Start Sir's bedtime routine. One person bathes and lotions the bean while the other cleans his helmet and preps a bottle. Then we play chicken to figure out who will bottle the little man. Each of us offers and then someone gives in and says "OK, you can do it." Haha.
8:00-8:30 - Sir drops off to sleep
8:30-9:30 - I get ready for bed, do other things I need to around the house, and get to sleep around 10.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

A couple weekends ago, I headed to my friend Tracy's to see her and her week-old twin boys! I was so excited to see them and oh my goodness they were so tiny! Just wee little men! One was about 5 lbs and the other was closer to 6. It blew my mind that at one point, Emmett was that small. My how things change. Sir turns six months old next week and is between 16 and 17 lbs! Carrying him is becoming quite the workout. And he's even bigger now after a growth spurt last weekend. Thank god that the spurt came on a weekend so that we weren't dying - he was up every two hours for a bottle. Geez. But the growing earned him one less week in his helmet! So that is positive :) The hope is that he will be done in two weeks!

Sir's name

One of the nurses in the NICU asked us if we named Emmett after "the vampire in Twilight." She seemed so excited by the prospect that I felt kind of bad saying no. But seriously, the Twilight connection almost made us NOT use the name.

When we started trying to have a little one I bought a copy of The Baby Name Wizard. Swistle runs a baby name website, and loves this book. I read the baby name blog and had to get myself a copy. It's really a fun book - I would highly recommend it for anyone, even anyone not looking for a baby name. The book shows the meaning behind the name, the origin, a small graph of the name's popularity, the categories a name belongs to, and possible brother/sister names for that name. Each category is in the back and has a listing of names. So if you see that the name you like is in the "Antique Charm" section, like many of the ones I like, you can look in the back and see what other names fall into that category. It's super fun to look up all this information on names - one night we pulled it out while we had friends over and read the meaning for each person's name. Fun times!

So, I looked through the baby name book, writing down on a list any names that appealed to me at all. Once I did that, I looked at the categories each were in, and looked through those categories too. Once I did that I had a list of 7-10 girl names and about 5-6 boy names. I ran those by Mike and got some pretty solid vetoes. I suggested Mike do the same and he made up a listing of names. Then I got some vetoes (Herschel? Really?). We settled on a list of 3-4 boy names and about 5-6 girl names. Then we just let the lists marinate for awhile.

In the middle of all of this, my mom gave me a book my Grandma Stratton had filled out about her life. In it, there was a family tree. I noticed that one of the names I really liked, that was on our front runner list, was a family name. Although my Uncle Clyde goes by his middle name, his first name is Emmett. And his father, my great-grandfather, was named Dillard Emmett. To the family he was known as Nandad, but he went by the name Emmett. I knew Emmett was Clyde's given name, but hadn't known about Nandad using the name. I was thrilled to find out the extent of its use as a family name, because I really loved the name. And the family connection was such a great bonus that it overruled the fact that it was used in the Twilight movies.

In the meantime, Mike's favorite on the boy side was Wyatt. So over the pregnancy, our list really boiled down to Emmett and Wyatt on the boy side of things. We had a name picked out for a girl, but I'll keep that a secret in case we want to use that in the future :)

Emmett's middle name was much easier. I feel pretty strongly that middle names should be used to honor someone in the family (at least for us - of course not everyone has to do this!). You hardly ever use a middle name, and it means so much to have a child namesake. Why not use this as a time to show our family how much we love them? We tossed around the idea of using "Michael" but Mike felt that it was a bit narcissistic, and felt pretty strongly about using my Dad's first name, Jeffrey, as a middle name for a boy. One day he was like "Your Dad is a really good man. He loves his family and would do anything for any one of us. I really think we should use his name for a middle name." Once I knew how strongly Mike felt, that pretty much sealed the deal on the boy middle name.

With a girl name picked out and two boy names in competition, I had a strong hunch that the baby would be a boy. I would sit on the couch and point to my belly and say to Mike "You think there is an Emmett in here?" and smile. Mike was always unwilling to commit, and would just smile back and say "Maybe!" One day he admitted to me that he was waiting for a sign regarding what boy name to use. I laughed a little bit but thought we'd wait and see what happened.

Then, in December, the clouds parted and a sign was given. My brother's fiance, Kim, has a sister who was due two months before me. She had her little boy and the e-mail was sent out "We are calling him Wyatt." I did a little victory dance, knowing that the likelihood of using the name Wyatt was far less now. We talked about it a bit - not totally ruling Wyatt out but leaning FAR more towards Emmett.

We never did fully come to a formal decision... Mike just started saying "It's a good name" when I mentioned the name. And then when he was born and the doc asked me his name, I just kind of blurted out "Emmett Jeffrey." Thank goodness it was OK with Mike, because I love that little man's name!

Bananas

I remember touring a daycare about a week after Emmett was discharged from NICU, and thinking that the babies all looked impossibly round and big. Holy cow, giant Godzilla babies. My baby would never be that big!

To be fair.... look at what I was working with. This is Emmett on discharge day, at 5 lbs 10 ounces. He was swimming in his newborn onesie, just a tiny little speck of a man.
Look at those little spindly legs!

And now he is impossibly round and lovely. How time does fly.
The cheeks, they are kissable. He's getting to be such a big boy!

Happier things...

Ok, I have been told that the last entry is super sad. Truth be told, it was a really hard time in our lives. I know I felt helpless, and in this weird limbo of no longer being pregnant but not really fully having our baby. I'm glad I got it out there, but there was alot of that time that was wonderful too. Emmett has been such a joy and is such a little lover, always DTS, or Down to Snuggle, as my brother says. Being in the NICU gave us some time to get acclimated to being parents in a gradual way instead of being thrown to the wolves. But honestly, sometimes I wish we'd been thrown to the wolves a little more, some things would have been easier to experience with the sink or swim method! With all that said, I can't believe our little man is already three months old. He's smiling and cooing and starting to laugh. I love his little giggle, it's infectious. I remember the 3-6 month age being my favorite when I babysat as a teenager, although Mike and I discussed favorite ages last night and we think every age will be our favorite. At three months, Emmett:

• Hates tummy time. He has a foolproof way of getting out of it: spit up and then cry about wallowing in it. Of course we rescue him every time.


• Speaking of spitting up, Emmett spits up ALOT. We have a ton of bibs and he goes through them about as fast as I can wash them.


• Loves to swing. God bless swings. I bought one for upstairs because he loves them so much.


• Loves his bottles and wants them to be prompt. Faster, woman! What is your problem, why do you not have the bottle prepared already!?!? NOW!!!!


• Has a giant belly and big cheeks. The belly is huge right after a bottle. And his cheeks have their own gravitational pull.


• Likes to stare at toys hanging off his playmat and swings. Sometimes he hollers at them. We imagine he is saying "Hey guys! Where ya been all day!?"


• Is starting to get more squirmy but still loves sleeping on my chest. I will miss that when it goes the way of the dinosaur for sure. I love a snuggly baby nap.


• Is still too little to play fetch with Milly. Although that doesn't stop her from depositing toys at his feet while he is on his playmat. Poor Milly doesn't understand what he is all about!


• Loves his baby bjorn-like carrier (We have the Cybex 2.0). He passes out the minute he gets all snuggled into it.

The weather is getting better here in Chicago and we are looking forward to lots more walks in the stroller and showing our little man the city. When we first started trying I thought that having maternity leave in the summer would be better, but it's working out pretty nicely that Sir will be a bit bigger to be toted around all summer! :) This is my second week back at work full-time and it's going pretty well! Last week Mike's mom came up to stay with E and this week my Mom is in town. Next week Mike will be home with Emmett because he accepted a new position with another company and will be starting that on May 2. Then Emmett starts his daycare on April 25th! I am excited to meet his teachers and get him into a routine. I am sure he will love it there. Maybe not as much as doting Grandma attention, but I think it will be great for us as a family.

Birth story

I was drying my hair when I felt a little bit like I'd wet myself. Weird... I thought... I didn't think I had to go. But whatevs... maybe baby kicked my bladder or something. I pottied again, put a pad in just in case I did it again, finished getting ready and headed off to work.

In the car on the way to work I called Mike. "Call your doctor," he told me. So of course I hung up and called my friend Tracy, who has a two year old. "Go home, change into fresh underclothes. Roll around in bed, stand up and if water comes out then your water probably broke." I headed back home to try this out, but once I got home and used the bathroom again I realized what was coming out was tinged pink. I knew at this point that something was happening - what, exactly, was the big question. I called the Doctor's office and left a message - the on-call doctor called me back almost immediately and told me to head to triage at the Women's Hospital. I called Mike, told him I was heading to the hospital (he then convinced me to bring my hospital bag, which was mostly already packed, with a listing of what else I needed on top of the bag, so I quickly tossed the other items in the bag and headed out).

On the way to the hospital I stopped and got a bagel with schmear from Einstein's, and then promptly got stuck in rush-hour traffic on the way to the hospital. I didn't have any contractions at this point, so I wasn't too worried about getting there fast. My dad called when I was in the car on the way down there, and I freaked out that he knew I was headed to the hospital (he'd happened to call Mike when Mike was heading out of the office). "Don't tell anyone!" I exlaimed to him. I was terrified that people would think I was in labor and then we would just find out I peed my pants. That would have been awesome.

At this point, I was 34 weeks and 4 days. After 34 weeks, the risk to the baby of staying inside after your water breaks is greater than the risks of being born a bit early. So when I got to the hospital and they confirmed my water had broken, they brought me up to a labor and delivery room. My doctor stopped by - she happened to be at the hospital - and told me that her colleague was on call and would deliver me. She jokingly said "I wasn't supposed to see you here yet!" when she walked into the room. We discussed starting some pitocin to start labor and I had been dead against the use of pitocin. I asked her to check my dilation to see if I'd started progressing at all first and she balked a bit - they don't like to check too often after your water has broken b.c they don't want to introduce germs to the baby's environment and I was just a bit crampy/didn't have real contractions yet. But she checked and at that point I was 3cm. We agreed to start just a bit of pitocin to get my labor going - the nurse mentioned that pitocin can be dialed up to 40 or so and I was on 2 or 4 most of the time. So I didn't need a whole lot to really get the contractions rolling.

And rolling they did. I didn't want the epidural until I really needed it, and so I did the full blown labor thing until I was about 5cm dilated. The contractions were coming pretty close together and were not pleasant at all.... I demanded that Mike stand by me and that my Dad (who had jumped on a plane only half an hour after talking to me - when I'd told everyone to wait and see if I was even IN labor or not before doing anything... hahah) not talk at all during contractions. I even yelled at him a little bit when he got chatty during a contraction. Hey, I was in labor! I get to yell right?

Around 5cm I finally called Uncle and got the darn epidural already. Dadnd Mike had to step out of the room while the anesthesiologist attending and resident did their thing. I really didn't feel anything at all (they do topical anesthetic before sticking you with the needle) and the nice nurse we had held my hand. I was a bit scared but it ended up being total cake. Relief washed over my midsection and my legs went numb. I went from writhing in pain to being on top of the world. I had to actually look at the monitor to see when I was having a contraction. Since it was around 2:30 and Mike hadn't had lunch yet, I sent him off for a cheeseburger and fries while I was on Cloud Epidural Nine. Thank goodness I did this too, because it was going to turn out to be a long day.

Three cheers for epidurals

Getting in some reading after the epi

The nurses kept fiddling with my pitocin, dialing it up to a 4 or 6 and then back to a 2-3 after the contractions came too fast. I was feeling a short pain in my right side but it was nowhere near as painful as the early contractions. That was the only indication I had that I was having a contraction at the time. I will just say I expected to be in ALOT more pain during labor, epidural or not. By 5 or so I begged the resident to check how far I was dilated. I simply needed to know if I was going to be in for another hour of waiting around or another half day of waiting around before pushing. I was 8cm and fully effaced, so things were definitely in full swing. About an hour later the doc himself swung by, pronounced me 10 cm dilated and gave the nurse instructions to start the pushing. At this point I didn't really feel the urge to push (as the doctor said "You have a really good epidural") but that doctor said we could get things going anyway. My nurse, Autumn, who had been helping out in several rooms, notified someone else to take over her other rooms and prepared to start the pushing process. We loved this labor and delivery nurse - I have a new respect for the nursing profession after this whole experience!!

This chart told me when I was having a contraction

I'm told that usually people are allowed to push for about 3 hours. I pushed for 5. I was not tired and in a great mood to just meet our little one. I didn't want to have a csection after a whole bunch of pushing, so I just kept begging to keep going. We tried pushing in about every position in the book. We could see a bit of change but the whole effort wasn't really going very far. At one point I made a whole lot of progress, and we got to the point where the nurse said she thought I was far enough along to avoid a csection. This made me pretty happy.

At about 5 hours of pushing, the Doc came back in and talked to us. I had been pushing for two full hours longer than he usually lets people, he could tell we were pretty tired out. He indicated that he could use the forceps and get baby out. At this point I was pretty convinced he was right and that baby wouldn't be arriving without some sort of help - I'd been pushing with all my might for 5 hours, Mike was exhausted, I was only OK b.c of all the adrenaline, and our nice L&D nurse had had to go home and she was replaced with one who wasn't very helpful or encouraging. So we looked at each other and knew that it was going to have to happen this way... he was sunny side up, facing up and just not coming out.

The minute we acquiesed to the forceps, the room jumped to life. The doc's resident came in to help position the forceps, the anethesiologist came in to redose my epi, and a team of pediatricians came in to attend to the baby since he was almost 6 weeks early. There were literally 20 people in the room as they positioned my legs up on some platforms and got me all medicated and positioned. I felt really bummed that I hadn't been able to push baby out on my own, but happy that he was going to make his way into the world like NOW. I also needed some more encouragement what with the Doc not being my doc and being very matter-of-fact/quiet and the nurse who wasn't friendly. And Mike was looking pretty exhausted. So I asked him to go get my sister. I needed someone in Hyper Cheerleader on Crack Mode. He and Katie stood at my side as the docs got all done and positioned and we waited for the next contraction.

The next contraction came and I pushed 5 times...and the docs pulled him right out. Katie was perfect, going nuts and hollering encouragement "You're doing it! You're doing it! It's out! He's perfect! He's perfect! Oh my gosh! You did it!" I collapsed, so relieved that Dos had made his way into the world, and so happy to have labor all over with.

The team of pediatricians attended to Dos, now christened Emmett Jeffrey, while my doc and resident finished delivering the rest of the "junk" and sewed me up. The doc wouldn't say how many stiches I had, which clued me into the fact that there were kind of alot. At this point my epidural was so well-supplied that I didn't much care.

They laid him on my chest and we all met each other as a family.

When he came out I immediately started crying.... more crying came when they put him on my chest

I love the look on Mike's face here.... our first moments as a family

We had an hour with him before they whisked the little one off to the NICU to be monitored and watched. Any baby under 35 weeks goes straight to the NICU. We were just 4 days short, delivering him at 34 weeks and 4 days. Now that we are home I am so thankful he had such great NICU staff to watch him and make sure he was 100% healthy. But at the time being away from him was SO HARD.

After I'd been sewed up, my Dad came in and told me he didn't know we were thinking of using his name as a middle name. His lip was trembling and he looked really touched. Katie told him he should just cry it out, and he pulled it together. So cute.

I wish I could say that we all just headed to our postpartum room after that, but right before they took Emmett to the NICU I got a really bad case of the shakes and could not get warm. I shivered for about two hours before finally dropping off to sleep and shaking it. It was pretty much the most awful part about the whole experience; I wanted someone to pitch me out the window it was so awful. My sister tried to feed Emmett a bottle; I was afraid I would drop him b.c I was shaking so bad so I wouldn't hold him while I was shaking. The nurse brought me a turkey sandwich but I was so messed up I couldn't eat it.

About two hours later they wheeled me down to the postpartum room where a nurse helped me clean up and into bed. She was amazing, and was the night nurse most of the time I was there. She was great. Thanks, Nelly!

Only two hours later I woke up with the realizations that a) I was going to need pain medication for awhile and b) that I had a son. I suddenly couldn't wait to see him. I ordered room service breakfast and prepared to go meet him, updating my facebook status to say that he had been born in the middle of the night. And the rest isn't really birth story...