She even slept all the way home, and when we got home I was able to put her into her bed and she continued to sleep. The problem was that I was so overly tired (tears of exhaustion in my eyes tired) that I couldn't sleep. I just laid there, pleading with myself to knock me out because I couldn't stand being awake anymore. Instead, after about fifteen minutes of laying there, Katie woke up and I stopped trying to sleep because it obviously wasn't going to happen.
Around midnight that night, Katie found a good position in my arms and went to sleep on her own. Through the night I got about three hours of sleep. I thought she did really well in sleeping, though Bill told me in the morning that Katie had woken up and did her groaning act for a while (for some reason, in sleep and when awake Katie makes the grumpiest of groaning noises. It doesn't lead to crying, so maybe she just likes hearing her own noises?) so he watched and shushed her while I continued sleeping. Three hours, even though they were broken, never felt so good. I was wide awake most of the morning. Starting to get really sleepy again now though...however I just laid down for twenty minutes and once again couldn't find any sleep.
I can't believe I was in labor and gave birth only 17 days ago. It literally feels like that event, along with the entirety of the pregnancy, could have been years ago. It feels so very far away! I can't wrap my mind around the idea that it was just over two weeks ago. I looked at a few of the pictures from that day today, and even seeing it makes it feel like forever ago.
Here's some of the pictures. They're dark because the room had no lights on - Bill had to use flash to see anything.
While I was on the ball (Midwife Tammy is in the backround:)
This was pretty far into labor, when my back was really bad
and I needed someone to push on my back and have a heating pad:
(I was not a happy camper in any of these pictures!)
The only other pictures I have are after I got angry with the hospital gown and decided to forgo it completely. lol, I'm sure I was a lot of fun during the 10 1/2 hours I was in active labor...
The farther away it feels, the more I can't believe that I actually did it. Even with the memory of just how bad the pain was fading, it's still amazes me that I had enough strength to get through it instead of just telling everyone off and getting some heavy meds! I have no idea what part of me was in charge during labor, because I fully expected that the weak parts of me would take over and crumble my resolve. Instead, there was a part of me that I had no idea was in there that was driving my labor - one that said absolutely no to any IV drugs, no epidurals and that I was going to keep going whether it killed me or not (because towards the end there, I wasn't so sure! lol) And when I detected a note of concern in Tammy's voice a few different times in labor, that part of me was able to ramp up the strength of pushing and encouraged my body to give me faster, harder contractions even when they were already killing me. Even with 9 months of research and being so afraid of not getting my natural birth beforehand, I don't think I ever felt so strongly about these things until I was completely out of it mentally (most of me mentally actually felt like it was shut off or asleep) and some new part of me took over and dictated what was and wasn't going to happen. Looking back, it's pretty neat that I had such strength in me (even though when Tammy kept saying I was strong enough to get through this, I really just wanted to kick her!) and that I found a new part in me that seemed so foreign from my usual personality but managed to get me through in the way that I had hoped and wanted. Whatever it was that caused such strength, made me happy afterwards, and proud of what I had been able to accomplish, especially when the day before I had cried so hard from disappointment because I didn't think I'd get my birth and even have a chance to do what I was hoping to do.
With all that said, I can't imagine going through this again, let alone multiple times more!
And Katie is waking up now, so that's it for today.
"With all that said, I can't imagine going through this again, let alone multiple times more!"
ReplyDeleteAnd yet....... when Katie turns a year old you will remember so very little of the pain or fear and you will miss her "baby-ness" and start dreaming of doing it all over again with the next one. And believe me, even though right now you can't even imagine that you would want to do it again with the 9 months of pregnancy, morning sickness, aches and pains of pregnancy, labor, after birth pains and bleeding, sleepless nights with a new nursling and the non-stop holding, rocking and nursing, you will hit the one year mark and do ANYTHING and I mean ANYTHING to experience it all over again !
That will embark you on a quest to conceive Baby Keller number 2 and the cycle contines on and on until you fill up the house with Keller babies over the life of your fertility of the next 20 years !
That is how you end up like me with 6 children; however, if I had started at your age and kept going from 23 on.......I would probably have at least 8 or 9 right now. So you don't know what the future holds for you, I never saw myself having 6 kids after I had Zachary either, I thought at the time that 2 would be more than enough. But let that baby bug bite you and you keep wanting more and more !