Author: althea

April 27: Heather just did a nice post on her website (lernerclan.net) about Evie’s birth story.  Reading it spurred me to write down Sylvie’s birth story.  I’ve been meaning to write it down for a couple months, and I better do it soon or I’ll forget some of the fun details!  I’m writing this for Sylvia to have in the future, but in the meantime, if you like this sort of thing, here’s our story.

Sylvia’s due date was calculated as February 8.  Andrew was born five days before his due day, so I was all ready for the little one to be born for about a week before.  It was a snowy, snowy week.  In fact, a couple days before I went into labor, we had a truly tremendous snowstorm.  Glad we weren’t trying to get to the hospital through that!  By February 10, the roads were snow free (but our street was covered in a very thick layer of ice).  Since we couldn’t get outside and since I was at a bit of a loss as to what to do with my humungous self, Bryan and I decided to go walk around Target and West Towne Mall to see if that would get my systems in labor mode.  While LuAnn watched Andrew, Bryan and I enjoyed one last pre-baby outing together.  We went to Target where I was delighted to find a couple final sets of the birth announcements that I’d been looking for for weeks.  Then we headed over to the mall and walked up and down.  At one point, I stopped by The Children’s Place and picked up a pair of teeny white fleece pants.  There were displays of Valentine’s Day clothes, but I didn’t bother looking at them since I figured I could still be pregnant when Valentines Day came around.
When we got home around 4pm, I sat down to address baby announcements and make some thank you cards.  It was about that time that I started having contractions.  Bryan joked that my body had just been waiting for me to have everything in order before kicking in labor.  Once all baby announcements were acquired, it was go time:)

I sat on the sofa and exerted some creative energy while I started experiencing contractions that pretty quickly became regular and about 5 minutes apart.  LuAnn made pasta fagioli for supper.  I really enjoyed it but ate rather sparingly, figuring that if labor progressed that night I might not want to have a full tummy of food!  During early contractions, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.  They lasted about 20 seconds.  From 5-6 pm, contractions got stronger where I couldn’t listen to others talk during contractions.  Between contractions, however, I felt perfectly fine.  Andrew came over to talk to me after dinner, and it was pretty weird to try talking to a two-year-old while in labor!

After dinner, Bryan and I headed back to our bedroom while LuAnn put Andrew down to bed.  I was interested in hypnobirthing, so Bryan helped to make a calm, quiet environment for laboring.  We put on some soft classical music, turned off most of the lights, and propped me up on pillows.  Andrew came in to say goodnight.  Contractions were increasingly intense and were coming every 3-5 minutes.  After a while, we moved over to the tub where I labored for a while.  It was in the tub where I had some contractions that I thought I could have named as they do with hurricaines.

April 26: Sylvia spends a lot of the time she’s in her car seat…screaming.  I feel like I need a different word for that because screaming is such a violent, negative word and she does it so much that I want to re-name it something more positive.  So today as I again drove across town accompanied by her gasping, gurgling on saliva, full-throtle screaming, I decided that I will refer to such behavior as “singing.”  And as long as she was singing, I might as well sing too.
Usually I spend the first 5-10 minutes of a drive trying to soothe her by singing, shushing, stroking her face, trying to get her to take the pacifier, and then I give up and sit in resigned silence for the remainder of the drive.  But this time I put on a new kids CD I got at the library called Ralph’s World and sang Happy Lemonade about 10 times in a row.

The lyrics are as follows:

So Sylvia and I “sang” a duet on our drive across town: me belting out “happy lemons for happy days, happy people with smiling faces..” and Sylvia “singing” wahhhh wwaaaahhhhh…gasp, gasp…silent scream…very audible scream…gurgle-cough from saliva that collected in the back of the throat during the last extended scream.  cough cough cough.  ANGRY cry from the coughing.  wahhhh waaahhhhh  waaaaaahhhhhhh. And meanwhile I’m at “la la la la la la la la…”

I may be scarring the poor girl by singing about happiness being a glass of lemondae while she’s in the throws of deepest carseat misery, but at least I’ll be heading toward a nice Willy Wanka-esque insanity:)

PS.  Joe did a nice post about Syliva’s carseat crying back in March.