History of the J Man

Julie: 

Looks like it’s time to officially change the name of this blog.  I’m thinking something like “History of the J Man and Little E”…

Jonah’s little brother was born early Monday morning, May 10, 2010 at 2:42 a.m.   I started feeling contractions around 10 p.m., after celebrating Mother’s Day with the family in Morton Grove then getting a crabby Jonah to bed once we got home.  Chris and I went to bed hoping to sleep through much of the beginning stages of labor.  Chris snored away without any trouble while I slept on and off for a bit, trying to relax through contractions and not wake up enough to even time them. 

Around 12:15 a.m., I woke Chris and asked him to get the phone so we could call our doula to ask her to come.  I thought contractions were about 8 minutes apart at that point.  I had plans to wait a little longer before calling the midwife but ended up calling her too around 12:45 a.m. or so.  The midwife got to our house around 1:40 a.m. and her assistant arrived a few minutes later.  At that point I had gotten up to soak in the bathtub while Chris started to set up the house for our homebirth.  There wasn’t a ton to set up but he had to put plastic down on the bed and on the floor and pull out some other things like towels for the delivery.

The midwife came and took my blood pressure while I sat in the tub and then left to get set up herself.  By the time she was ready I was also ready to get out of the tub.  It was sort of tricky getting out of the tub and walking back the length of the house to our bedroom but I made it. I crawled into bed, and Hillary checked me.  She said I was 9.5 centimeters and fully effaced so I could start to push any time I was ready.  That was much better news than when I got to triage with Jonah at the hospital and was barely at 5 centimeters.

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Chris:

From my position at the head of the bed, I didn’t have such a great view of what was going on, though I held Julie’s hand and massaged her head during the more intense periods.  As the contractions started to come more forcefully, I could tell Julie was in a lot of pain, but fortunately they didn’t seem to last very long (at least to me; I’m sure to Julie they felt interminably long). 

At some point I did happen to look down and see his head poking through down there, and I heard the midwife say, “He’s in the call” or something like that.  I wasn’t sure what she said, as another wave of pain coursed through Julie’s body.  It was only a few more pushes and the baby was out!  Julie had only pushed for about 15 minutes, which is a far cry from the two hours from when Jonah was born.  In fact, from the time I woke up (12:18 a.m.) to when he was born (2:52 a.m.), only about 2.5 hours had gone by.  When Jonah was born, it had been a 30 hour odyssey.  From when Julie had started to feel the first contractions to time of the birth, it had been just under five hours, or about the length of a Red Sox/Yankees playoff game.

Once the baby was born, Julie got him on her chest and after a couple of fitful false starts, he latched on and started chowing down.  He didn’t cry out right at first, but once Hillary moved him over to the bed to run through the standard battery of tests, he was really able to test out his lungs, and they were in fine working order.  We debated over whether he looked like Jonah and after consulting Jonah’s baby book, decided that he didn’t really look anything like his older brother. 

I also found out that what the midwife had said was that our new baby had been born “in the caul,” which simply means he was born without the amniotic sac having been broken:

To be “born in the caul” simply means a child is born with the amniotic sac or membrane still intact around the body. When a baby is born in the caul, the sac balloons out at birth, covering the baby’s face and body as it emerges from the mother. The baby is in no danger of drowning, as it is still being fed nutrients and oxygen through the umbilical cord, and will not take its first breath until the face emerges from the fluid contained in the caul. The caul is harmless and is easily removed by the doctor or midwife. (From Wikipedia)

According to the article, only about 1 birth in 1,000 result in a baby born in the caul, and most of those are premature births.  It explained why Julie’s water had never broken.  Apparently being born this way is quite auspicious, according to our midwife.  She told us how European cultures believed the caul, or baby membrane, was said to have powers to save people from drowning, and how they were richly prized by sailors. 

The baby’s vitals all checked out and as the midwives were starting to pack up, my cell phone rang: Our doula had arrived!  Of course, she had missed the birth, which was too bad, but in some ways, it was great that labor was so smooth (relatively speaking) that we were able to manage things on our own.  She was coming in from Bolingbrook and had taken her time because she didn’t want to get there too early, but never in my wildest imaginations did I think the whole affair would take under five hours.  I remember distinctly hoping that we would be done by noon the following day as I rolled out bed just after midnight.  As it turned out, we were all tucked into bed as the sun was coming up. 

Around 6:45 a.m. or so, Jonah wandered out of his room, and much to his surprise, he had a baby brother!  I still can’t believe that he slept through the whole thing, and Bianca also didn’t make a peep.  I don’t know if her instincts told her what was going on and to lay low, or she was just tired, but neither Jonah nor Bianca disturbed us at all.  We were all set to call Julie’s parents to take them back to Evanston and get them out of the way, but it was never necessary.

Before she left, our doula was nice enough to make us some pancakes which we thankfully ate together.  Jonah was very excited to hold his new brother and had fun touching his fingers, toes and hair.  It was nice to see him ask permission to touch the baby; hopefully his respectfulness will last!

It’s about 5 p.m. now and it’s still hard to believe what we’ve all experienced.  Our home now has four people in it (five, if we count the dog!).  It’s going to take some adjustments and definitely won’t be easy, but I think we’re all ready for the adventure.  We’d better be, because it’s coming at us whether we want it to or not.

Finally, we did decide on a name, only an hour ago or so: Elliott Cameron Diehl. 

As the due date for this little one comes closer, I’m happy to report that Chris and I have made a major decision regarding his delivery.  Three years ago, we decided to have Jonah at Illinois Masonic Medical Center down the street from home partially due to the fact that they have 2 Alternative Birthing Center (ABC) rooms.  ABC rooms are meant to be treated almost like a hotel room where moms can go to deliver babies in a hospital but free of the hospital room setting and free of interventions (unless they have complications).  If you’ve read the details about my delivery there though, you know that we didn’t get to use those rooms.  They weren’t available when we got there then they weren’t staffed for the next morning so we delivered in the standard hospital setting. 

All along, it was our goal to have a natural childbirth.  Due to a number of factors and interventions, however, that didn’t happen.  I ended up with an IV, amnio flush, fetal monitor and epidural.  All-in-all it turned out fine.  Jonah was born healthy but it was a long, uncomfortable 30-hour process followed by a couple nights at the hospital.  Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m not a good sleeper.   I like my bed and my pillows and I like things dark and quiet or I don’t sleep.  The hospital is not exactly my ideal venue for a good night’s rest.

So this time around, after doing our research and looking into options we’ve decided that we are going to deliver this baby at home.  We’ve hired the same doula that helped us with Jonah and a homebirth midwife.  Both ladies and one assistant will come to our home when the time is right and help us welcome this new baby into the world within the comforts of our own home.  We’ll get to relax here before, during and after the whole process then sleep afterwards in our own beds.  We’re hoping it keeps all of us more relaxed and happy which will, hopefully, lead to a shorter labor and a nicer experience for everyone.  It will also let us avoid the uncomfortable stay in the hospital and any extra time away from our first baby, “Big Boy Jonah.”  I love the idea that he’ll be able to come home and be with us as soon as we’re ready for him.  No dealing with visiting hours, no hospital beds, no hospital food, no nurses coming in and out of the room at all times and no one telling us when we’re allowed to leave or see Jonah.

My decisions to do this were helped along by 3 other women I know who’ve already had their babies at home.  Two of which are in the medical profession themselves.  That, and recently seeing a friend of mine in the hospital in a coma after his heart stopped really made me feel that hospitals are for sick people.  I’m not sick, I’m just going to have a baby, my body is built to do this and in fact has already done it once.   

Chris has done a great job helping me with research, doing his own reading and asking questions that I haven’t thought of.  He’s gone with me to info sessions and midwife consultations.  He’s been great at helping me with relaxation techniques, massage and being overall supportive and on the same page as me this whole time.  He doesn’t want to have to sleep on one of those hospital cots again either! 

I’m excited and looking forward to it.   Not too soon though! I still have at least 6 weeks to go and we need that time to get the house in order.  We still have to set up the crib and pull out Jonah’s old baby clothes, blankets and gear.  We’ll get to that part one of these weekends…

So as you’ll recall, we’ve just arrived at the hospital and the ABC is unavailable… 

Julie: When we got to the room and they got my monitor hooked up, we took a few showers to try and get comfortable and relax.  We did a few laps around the ward too, but the contractions weren’t getting any closer or more steady.  My water hadn’t broken.  So I opted to let them break my water to see if that would get things going.  But once they did, that there was meconium in the discharge so then they had to hook me up to the amnio infusion to try to flush the meconium from the womb so the baby wouldn’t ingest it.  Picture sitting on a hose.  So that was going on, the baby monitor was hooked on and I couldn’t really move at all anymore.  At that point they wanted to start a little pitocin so, although I wanted to do this naturally and avoid drugs, nothing was happening and I couldn’t walk around so I agreed.   

That’s when the contractions started and I was so tired at that point that I sort of zoned out between each contraction.  At the rate I was going, I wasn’t going to have any energy to do anything else, much less push.  So at 11 a.m. on Saturday, after about 14 hours of managing the pain myself, I asked for the epidural.  I was hooked up to a million tubes and hoses already and I was drained so I said, “Why not?”  I think I finally got it around noon.  At that point, Chris and I both got to sleep for 3-4 hours and I dilated another 4 cm during that nap.  I think the epidural really helped to relax me and let my body open up.  The baby was positioned a little funny though, so I still had a lot of back pain laying there, even with the epidural.  The anesthesiologist and midwife kept arguing whether giving me more pain meds would help my back or not.  He said it wouldn’t, she said it would.  I think she was right, but it didn’t get rid of it totally.  And I hated lying there so still on my back but, the IV and hose were still in me and I couldn’t move my legs, so I was stuck.

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I want to get this down before I’m 50 years old have no memories left except those of the the Cubs winning the Series back in ‘08.

The Day That Would Become the J Man’s Birthday actually started on The Day Before the Day That Would Become the J Man’s Birthday. I know, because both Julie and I had both come home from a full day’s work that fateful Friday, June 8, 2007. We were sitting around thinking about ordering in, when Julie began to feel some twinges in her general stomach area. This was around 6:30 p.m.

At first, she wondered if it was just indigestion, but it quickly became apparent that the gig was up — the kid was knocking.

For those of you who don’t have kids, you may think that having a baby is similar to what you see in the movies, with people rushing around and a frenzied ambulance ride, but our birth class’s recommendation for when labor pains started was to take a nap. So we tried a few of the methods we had learned in said birth class and things were going OK, but since we had signed up for a doula, we decided to give her a ring. Carrie (the doula) lived (and may still live) in Bolingbrook, Illinois, which you can see is not close. I figured a) it could take a couple of hours for her to arrive and b) I wasn’t sure if I knew precisely what I was doing. Needless to say, we made the call. Continue Reading »