Part II: Medical and Domestic Madness Ensues
There are days -and I mean, MOST days, it's primary, not incidental- when I think to myself, "Huh. Some people do this on *purpose*. Imagine that..." Parenting four children is, at best, a diverting circus from sunup until sometime around, well... sunup; at worst, it is hair-pulling, head-splitting, stress-inducing, mind-gouging madness. There are moments when I have to find a quiet place (hard won, but a closet will do in a pinch), curl up in the fetal position, and rock back and forth until the desire to throw things subsides. It is not easy, not so much because there is a third of a dozen of them, but because three of them are small. Small, evil, and rife with endless capacity for engaging their extremely fertile minds and spirits in the sort of adventures that promise to render their mother bald and barmy.
It's mostly Ash and Ainslee, actually. Since the arrival of the interloper, they have learned the art of conspiracy. They both have the stealth, intelligence, and complete and utter lack of regard for consequence to pull it off most of the time. Their stories will follow soon, but for now, this is Blakely's story. Blakely, my tiny fragile baby girl, the most unplanned, but now, the most fiercely guarded.
It is amazing how intensely you can love someone you've only known for ten short weeks. It is a quality about newborns, certainly; most parents find they have a bond, an immediate, inherent desire to protect and comfort their neonates right from the first cry. But Blakely has that quality some children are born with, this... charisma, kind of a charm about her that was God's last gift to her on her way here to earth. I know, that sounds like sheer blathering motherly bias, but in Blake's case, it's true. Ash, Ainslee, and Keegan all adore their baby sister, but not all newborns can command the kind of gentleness and adoration from her 2 and 12 year old brothers that this baby does. We are stopped constantly, by men, women, and children alike, all wanting to see up close this tiny being whom they invariably compare to a doll. I have had four children, and have not been stopped or had any of them publicly, shamelessy petted and groped as often as happens with this little one. She is plain heartbreaking, not just because she is so freaking adorable that she makes your breath stop, but because she was born with Princess Syndrome: She appears fragile, she looks helpless, she has a perfectly round head. These things make people who aren't even related to this child want to protect, comfort, and care for her, whether they were invited to do so or not. I keep four bottles of hand sanitizer with me at all times.
She's a mini-celebrity, and I understand why; however, it really *is* my task to protect and comfort her. And that is a task that is proving almost daunting in its demand, a task that would prevent me from sleeping if the usual demands of infancy didn't already. It is a task that I thought I was prepared for -having experienced rough infancies with my other three- but discovered that it is something you can never inure yourself to, no matter the intensity of your training.
Part II: Post-partum Madness
After they placed my tortilla-wrapped baby girl back in my arms on the evening of her birth, after all the well-wishers had filed back into the room, and then back out again more than two hours later, after The Hellions were introduced to their newest sibling (a meeting that went as well as could be expected; Ainslee gazed at Blakely with serious intensity, and demanded to hold her; Ash looked at Blake as though she were a potentially rabid animal, he was wary and mistrustful, but nonetheless curious), after I'd had the necessary infusions of pizza, coke, and Peanut M&M's, after Steven went home to care for the other kids, when it was just Blakely and me there in that quiet, darkened hospital room, only then did I allow myself to unwrap her, to inspect her fully from head to toe, to reassure myself that she was in fact entirely whole, entirely well, entirely without noticeable defect. I noted her amazingly pink skin, her startlingly silver-blue eyes that gazed at me with apparent indifference, her ten fingers and toes with nails that were transparent and thinner than paper. I noted the whorls of golden blonde hair on the back of her head, contrasted with the straight lines of the white blond fuzz on the top of her head. I noted her Moro reflex, her grasping reflex, her sucking reflex; she latched on like a seasoned pro about an hour after she was born, and I was already trying to nurse her as frequently as possible. I couldn't find any birthmarks of any kind on her at first, until I noticed a couple of fingerprint-sized spots on her ribcage, which looked almost like bruises. She also had this tiny pit near the top of her ear, right where the ear meets the side of the head; I was to find out later that it is an actual birth defect, called a preauricular pit, and has to be removed before a child's fifth birthday, lest it become a source of ongoing infection.
Apart from that, my daughter was, in every fathomable way, the kind of newborn that people show on TV, the ones that you know are *not* in fact newborns, because their heads are not football shaped, and their faces aren't squashed, and they don't show any indication of the trauma of birth. That was my Blakely. As I laid there that evening, barely registering the sounds of the nurses in the hallway, or of screams of labor in process in proximal rooms, or even the TV that I'd forgotten to turn off, I fell face-first in head over heels love with this baby girl, realizing as I did so that I'd not allowed myself to begin the process before she was born. It was a fact that I filed away for future reference, something to be mulled over at a time when I wasn't so busily drenching myself in the afterglow of love at first sight.
I remember trying to make a deal with God that night (as infrequently as we communicate, I'm not surprised he rejected my overtures in the eventuality). I told him that, while it would be great if we could dodge BOTH the ubiquitous jaundice (with which every one of my children was plagued, to an unreasonably dangerous degree), *and* the excruciating reflux (the reason for Ainslee's colic and Ash's weight loss in his third month), that'd be great! But if we had to have one or the other, I requested that it be just the jaundice, because that could be dealt with and gone in a week or so, while the reflux hangs around for upwards of a year, visiting misery on all those within spit-shot.
I also hazarded a meek request -I didn't want to draw attention to the possibility, not even in my own mind, that she could be anything other than the image of perfect health that she currently appeared to be- that she please, just this one, just this once, right out of the starting gate, could this one please, pretty please, be, you know... not sick? I mean, not constantly faced with one scary disease or another, not plagued by the lung and sinus issues that her immunodeficient brothers suffered, or the strange and unusual diagnoses that her sister came home with during her first year, or any of the usual medical crap that saw fit to settle on my progeny, no matter my attempts to intercept it. Maybe, just this one?
It was a difficult request to make, because as I nuzzled and cuddled and nursed her until the wee hours of the next morning, I had the sense that I was asking to be written a bad check. Maybe it was her size; she was amazingly petite for a full-term baby, one that -according to an amniocentesis- was about a week POST-date, but at worst, no less than 38 weeks and three days gestation. Her head in particular was eensy, just under 13 inches around. Maybe it was her cry; not a hearty wail, then or any time since then, but a sort of hoarse plea for comfort that just splintered my soul when I heard it. Maybe it was the fact that she was giving off British Thermal Units in a way that no other newborn I'd ever held had ever done; the nurses, too, kept checking her temperature, which was just barely above normal at 99.6. I'm not sure what it was, but I refused to address it at all that night, or at any point during the rest of our stay in the hospital. She was FINE, dammit. F-I-N-E perfect, thankyouverymuch. Doubts, kiss my ass. Look, she isn't even yellow, and all of the other ones totally were by the time they were three hours old, so there you go! You may even escape the jaundice!
I kept her with me in the room that night, nursing her when I could. When the pediatrician came to see her for the first time the next morning, they noted much the same thing I did: This was an absolutely gorgeous, perfect, completely healthy newborn. Well, there is that tiny ear pit defect, but other than that... perfect. She can go home tomorrow, all things maintaining their status.
As the second day of Blake's life wore on, I got to know her a little better. Prefers to cuddle belly-to-chest, and the closer to Mommy's neck and shoulder, the better. Prefers to nurse on the left, won't have anything to do with the right. Very, very quiet; doesn't make squeaking, humming, or grunting noises, doesn't even snuffle in her sleep like most newborns. She DID, however, very much like her new Soothie pacifier that one or another of the nurses bestowed on her sometime during the night, while Mommy was half-asleep and groggy with post-partum fatigue. She likes to suck, does our Blakely, and that's fine by me, so long as she is content. By the time 6 p.m. rolled around, and Blake approached her 24th hour of life, I realized that she still had not produced her first meconium (that's fetus poo, for the uninitiated; it's generally expelled by the time a new baby is 24 hours old, and gruesome stuff to behold, but perfectly normal). Huh. I mentioned it to the nurse, who-about to leave for the day- kind of shrugged and said that if she hadn't gone by the next morning that I should tell the pediatrician. In other words, shaddupayaface, Mama; don't go tripping over stools that aren't in your way. (HA! I am still sleep-deprived, so that pun just made my ears pop with glee!) She did, however, take Blake's temperature again; 99.6 under the arm, something that would need to be watched, just to be safe.
When the new nurse came on her shift that night, she came into our room around 10 p.m. to weigh the baby and take both of our vitals. I mentioned to her again about the lack of meconium; *this* nurse was downright concerned about that fact, and cursed the previous nurse for not putting it in our chart notes. She then said, "If she hasn't gone by midnight, we'll do something about it." That sounded kind of ominous to me, so I sent up a quick prayer to God -who was very much friend at that point, seeing as how my daughter was over 24 hours old and STILL not even remotely yellow, bu-yah!- that my non-jaundiced baby would poop, like, now.
Then the nurse weighed her: 5 lbs, 12 oz. Both of our jaws kind of dropped. It is normal for a newborn to lose up to ten percent of their body weight in the first day after birth, but eight ounces from an initially 6 lb, 4 oz baby is a bit excessive (more like 12 to 15%, I think? I did the math back then, can't remember now). The nurse suggested that we also mention this to the pediatrician the next morning when they came by.
Keegan came and spent a couple of hours with us that evening; he held his new baby sister for the entirety of his visit, something he'd never done before with either Ash or Ainslee; he couldn't get enough of this one, though, just kept rocking and cooing at and cuddling her. When it was time for him to leave, he was reluctant to relinquish her to me, but I promised him -happily!- that he was welcome to help me to his heart's content with her when we got home. He still jumps to her aid at the slightest squawk, even now, and can't stand to for her to even so much as look uncomfortable or out of sorts. It's fairly adorable.
By midnight that night, Blakely still had not blessed us with the horror that is meconium poo. The nurse came in, armed with -of all things- a rectal thermometer, informing me that probably all that was needed was some good old fashioned rectal stimulation to get things moving. Ah. Right. Okay. So. The nurse took a rectal temperature... nothing. She took another one, this time moving the thermometer around a bit. I couldn't hardly stand to watch this most sophisticated form of nursing, and was about to ask her to stop, when suddenly, there it was! Er, well, kind of. The diabolical deeds of the Cuckoo's Nest graduate resulted in the expulsion of a spot of meconium, equal to about the size of a quarter. She suggested that there might be an obstruction, so she would note it in our chart for the pediatrician to see the next morning.
*sigh* And so it begins, I thought -very unobtrusively, quietly to myself, back in the unlighted corners of my mind. Probably it's nothing. I mean, it's just poop. I'll try nursing her more tomorrow, see if some more colostrum doesn't do the trick.
At 2 that morning, Blake stopped eating. *Refused* to nurse. She also started crying, kind of a lot. By 4 a.m., I was stupid fall-down exhausted, and worried that if I tried to hold and comfort her through her crying jags, I would likely fall asleep and drop her off the side of the bed. So I called the nurse and guiltily allowed my baby girl to be taken to the nursery for a few hours, so I could get just enough shut-eye to be functional. Which I did. And GODS, guilt be damned, but it was the most lovely two hour nap of my entire life.
At 6:30 a.m., they brought her back to me, sound asleep, comfortable in her tortilla wrap, Soothie in her mouth. At 7 a.m., the on-call pediatrician came by for another check-up. In spite of the fact that Blake hadn't yet passed her meconium, in spite of the fact that she'd lost more weight than is usual, she was given a clean bill of health, and given the okay to go home that afternoon, after she'd had her hearing test. The pediatrician all but waved away the slightly elevated temperature and lack of poop; she said that babies often ran warm in the post-partum period, since they can't regulate their own temperature. She also said that if Blake hadn't pooped by the following morning, THEN we'd worry about it. Ah. Okay. If you say so. But that nagging little doubt was clinging to my cerebral membranes, like sticky, neglected spider webs. This was all very different from what I was used to. But... well, okay. I was ready to go home anyway.
Probably none of this seems to make sense, or to matter much; I thought so at the time, too. Mostly. But I paid enough attention that when it finally *did* seem to matter, I was able to produce facts that I otherwise might not have recalled.
Not that it is helping much yet, but... Knowledge is power, right?
It is midnight, and I am cross-eyed with fatigue, and have to go feed my Skinny Minnie again very shortly, so posting this for now... And of course, much, MUCH more to come, poor beleaguered journal... and readers...
It's mostly Ash and Ainslee, actually. Since the arrival of the interloper, they have learned the art of conspiracy. They both have the stealth, intelligence, and complete and utter lack of regard for consequence to pull it off most of the time. Their stories will follow soon, but for now, this is Blakely's story. Blakely, my tiny fragile baby girl, the most unplanned, but now, the most fiercely guarded.
It is amazing how intensely you can love someone you've only known for ten short weeks. It is a quality about newborns, certainly; most parents find they have a bond, an immediate, inherent desire to protect and comfort their neonates right from the first cry. But Blakely has that quality some children are born with, this... charisma, kind of a charm about her that was God's last gift to her on her way here to earth. I know, that sounds like sheer blathering motherly bias, but in Blake's case, it's true. Ash, Ainslee, and Keegan all adore their baby sister, but not all newborns can command the kind of gentleness and adoration from her 2 and 12 year old brothers that this baby does. We are stopped constantly, by men, women, and children alike, all wanting to see up close this tiny being whom they invariably compare to a doll. I have had four children, and have not been stopped or had any of them publicly, shamelessy petted and groped as often as happens with this little one. She is plain heartbreaking, not just because she is so freaking adorable that she makes your breath stop, but because she was born with Princess Syndrome: She appears fragile, she looks helpless, she has a perfectly round head. These things make people who aren't even related to this child want to protect, comfort, and care for her, whether they were invited to do so or not. I keep four bottles of hand sanitizer with me at all times.
She's a mini-celebrity, and I understand why; however, it really *is* my task to protect and comfort her. And that is a task that is proving almost daunting in its demand, a task that would prevent me from sleeping if the usual demands of infancy didn't already. It is a task that I thought I was prepared for -having experienced rough infancies with my other three- but discovered that it is something you can never inure yourself to, no matter the intensity of your training.
Part II: Post-partum Madness
After they placed my tortilla-wrapped baby girl back in my arms on the evening of her birth, after all the well-wishers had filed back into the room, and then back out again more than two hours later, after The Hellions were introduced to their newest sibling (a meeting that went as well as could be expected; Ainslee gazed at Blakely with serious intensity, and demanded to hold her; Ash looked at Blake as though she were a potentially rabid animal, he was wary and mistrustful, but nonetheless curious), after I'd had the necessary infusions of pizza, coke, and Peanut M&M's, after Steven went home to care for the other kids, when it was just Blakely and me there in that quiet, darkened hospital room, only then did I allow myself to unwrap her, to inspect her fully from head to toe, to reassure myself that she was in fact entirely whole, entirely well, entirely without noticeable defect. I noted her amazingly pink skin, her startlingly silver-blue eyes that gazed at me with apparent indifference, her ten fingers and toes with nails that were transparent and thinner than paper. I noted the whorls of golden blonde hair on the back of her head, contrasted with the straight lines of the white blond fuzz on the top of her head. I noted her Moro reflex, her grasping reflex, her sucking reflex; she latched on like a seasoned pro about an hour after she was born, and I was already trying to nurse her as frequently as possible. I couldn't find any birthmarks of any kind on her at first, until I noticed a couple of fingerprint-sized spots on her ribcage, which looked almost like bruises. She also had this tiny pit near the top of her ear, right where the ear meets the side of the head; I was to find out later that it is an actual birth defect, called a preauricular pit, and has to be removed before a child's fifth birthday, lest it become a source of ongoing infection.
Apart from that, my daughter was, in every fathomable way, the kind of newborn that people show on TV, the ones that you know are *not* in fact newborns, because their heads are not football shaped, and their faces aren't squashed, and they don't show any indication of the trauma of birth. That was my Blakely. As I laid there that evening, barely registering the sounds of the nurses in the hallway, or of screams of labor in process in proximal rooms, or even the TV that I'd forgotten to turn off, I fell face-first in head over heels love with this baby girl, realizing as I did so that I'd not allowed myself to begin the process before she was born. It was a fact that I filed away for future reference, something to be mulled over at a time when I wasn't so busily drenching myself in the afterglow of love at first sight.
I remember trying to make a deal with God that night (as infrequently as we communicate, I'm not surprised he rejected my overtures in the eventuality). I told him that, while it would be great if we could dodge BOTH the ubiquitous jaundice (with which every one of my children was plagued, to an unreasonably dangerous degree), *and* the excruciating reflux (the reason for Ainslee's colic and Ash's weight loss in his third month), that'd be great! But if we had to have one or the other, I requested that it be just the jaundice, because that could be dealt with and gone in a week or so, while the reflux hangs around for upwards of a year, visiting misery on all those within spit-shot.
I also hazarded a meek request -I didn't want to draw attention to the possibility, not even in my own mind, that she could be anything other than the image of perfect health that she currently appeared to be- that she please, just this one, just this once, right out of the starting gate, could this one please, pretty please, be, you know... not sick? I mean, not constantly faced with one scary disease or another, not plagued by the lung and sinus issues that her immunodeficient brothers suffered, or the strange and unusual diagnoses that her sister came home with during her first year, or any of the usual medical crap that saw fit to settle on my progeny, no matter my attempts to intercept it. Maybe, just this one?
It was a difficult request to make, because as I nuzzled and cuddled and nursed her until the wee hours of the next morning, I had the sense that I was asking to be written a bad check. Maybe it was her size; she was amazingly petite for a full-term baby, one that -according to an amniocentesis- was about a week POST-date, but at worst, no less than 38 weeks and three days gestation. Her head in particular was eensy, just under 13 inches around. Maybe it was her cry; not a hearty wail, then or any time since then, but a sort of hoarse plea for comfort that just splintered my soul when I heard it. Maybe it was the fact that she was giving off British Thermal Units in a way that no other newborn I'd ever held had ever done; the nurses, too, kept checking her temperature, which was just barely above normal at 99.6. I'm not sure what it was, but I refused to address it at all that night, or at any point during the rest of our stay in the hospital. She was FINE, dammit. F-I-N-E perfect, thankyouverymuch. Doubts, kiss my ass. Look, she isn't even yellow, and all of the other ones totally were by the time they were three hours old, so there you go! You may even escape the jaundice!
I kept her with me in the room that night, nursing her when I could. When the pediatrician came to see her for the first time the next morning, they noted much the same thing I did: This was an absolutely gorgeous, perfect, completely healthy newborn. Well, there is that tiny ear pit defect, but other than that... perfect. She can go home tomorrow, all things maintaining their status.
As the second day of Blake's life wore on, I got to know her a little better. Prefers to cuddle belly-to-chest, and the closer to Mommy's neck and shoulder, the better. Prefers to nurse on the left, won't have anything to do with the right. Very, very quiet; doesn't make squeaking, humming, or grunting noises, doesn't even snuffle in her sleep like most newborns. She DID, however, very much like her new Soothie pacifier that one or another of the nurses bestowed on her sometime during the night, while Mommy was half-asleep and groggy with post-partum fatigue. She likes to suck, does our Blakely, and that's fine by me, so long as she is content. By the time 6 p.m. rolled around, and Blake approached her 24th hour of life, I realized that she still had not produced her first meconium (that's fetus poo, for the uninitiated; it's generally expelled by the time a new baby is 24 hours old, and gruesome stuff to behold, but perfectly normal). Huh. I mentioned it to the nurse, who-about to leave for the day- kind of shrugged and said that if she hadn't gone by the next morning that I should tell the pediatrician. In other words, shaddupayaface, Mama; don't go tripping over stools that aren't in your way. (HA! I am still sleep-deprived, so that pun just made my ears pop with glee!) She did, however, take Blake's temperature again; 99.6 under the arm, something that would need to be watched, just to be safe.
When the new nurse came on her shift that night, she came into our room around 10 p.m. to weigh the baby and take both of our vitals. I mentioned to her again about the lack of meconium; *this* nurse was downright concerned about that fact, and cursed the previous nurse for not putting it in our chart notes. She then said, "If she hasn't gone by midnight, we'll do something about it." That sounded kind of ominous to me, so I sent up a quick prayer to God -who was very much friend at that point, seeing as how my daughter was over 24 hours old and STILL not even remotely yellow, bu-yah!- that my non-jaundiced baby would poop, like, now.
Then the nurse weighed her: 5 lbs, 12 oz. Both of our jaws kind of dropped. It is normal for a newborn to lose up to ten percent of their body weight in the first day after birth, but eight ounces from an initially 6 lb, 4 oz baby is a bit excessive (more like 12 to 15%, I think? I did the math back then, can't remember now). The nurse suggested that we also mention this to the pediatrician the next morning when they came by.
Keegan came and spent a couple of hours with us that evening; he held his new baby sister for the entirety of his visit, something he'd never done before with either Ash or Ainslee; he couldn't get enough of this one, though, just kept rocking and cooing at and cuddling her. When it was time for him to leave, he was reluctant to relinquish her to me, but I promised him -happily!- that he was welcome to help me to his heart's content with her when we got home. He still jumps to her aid at the slightest squawk, even now, and can't stand to for her to even so much as look uncomfortable or out of sorts. It's fairly adorable.
By midnight that night, Blakely still had not blessed us with the horror that is meconium poo. The nurse came in, armed with -of all things- a rectal thermometer, informing me that probably all that was needed was some good old fashioned rectal stimulation to get things moving. Ah. Right. Okay. So. The nurse took a rectal temperature... nothing. She took another one, this time moving the thermometer around a bit. I couldn't hardly stand to watch this most sophisticated form of nursing, and was about to ask her to stop, when suddenly, there it was! Er, well, kind of. The diabolical deeds of the Cuckoo's Nest graduate resulted in the expulsion of a spot of meconium, equal to about the size of a quarter. She suggested that there might be an obstruction, so she would note it in our chart for the pediatrician to see the next morning.
*sigh* And so it begins, I thought -very unobtrusively, quietly to myself, back in the unlighted corners of my mind. Probably it's nothing. I mean, it's just poop. I'll try nursing her more tomorrow, see if some more colostrum doesn't do the trick.
At 2 that morning, Blake stopped eating. *Refused* to nurse. She also started crying, kind of a lot. By 4 a.m., I was stupid fall-down exhausted, and worried that if I tried to hold and comfort her through her crying jags, I would likely fall asleep and drop her off the side of the bed. So I called the nurse and guiltily allowed my baby girl to be taken to the nursery for a few hours, so I could get just enough shut-eye to be functional. Which I did. And GODS, guilt be damned, but it was the most lovely two hour nap of my entire life.
At 6:30 a.m., they brought her back to me, sound asleep, comfortable in her tortilla wrap, Soothie in her mouth. At 7 a.m., the on-call pediatrician came by for another check-up. In spite of the fact that Blake hadn't yet passed her meconium, in spite of the fact that she'd lost more weight than is usual, she was given a clean bill of health, and given the okay to go home that afternoon, after she'd had her hearing test. The pediatrician all but waved away the slightly elevated temperature and lack of poop; she said that babies often ran warm in the post-partum period, since they can't regulate their own temperature. She also said that if Blake hadn't pooped by the following morning, THEN we'd worry about it. Ah. Okay. If you say so. But that nagging little doubt was clinging to my cerebral membranes, like sticky, neglected spider webs. This was all very different from what I was used to. But... well, okay. I was ready to go home anyway.
Probably none of this seems to make sense, or to matter much; I thought so at the time, too. Mostly. But I paid enough attention that when it finally *did* seem to matter, I was able to produce facts that I otherwise might not have recalled.
Not that it is helping much yet, but... Knowledge is power, right?
It is midnight, and I am cross-eyed with fatigue, and have to go feed my Skinny Minnie again very shortly, so posting this for now... And of course, much, MUCH more to come, poor beleaguered journal... and readers...