Ain't it Grand?

After about a week for Elizabeth and I to adjust to our new lives with Elfie (it's growing on me) her other Grandparents flew into town from St. Louis. For my dad, this is not only the first grandchild but the first girl! Smitten barely begins to cover it; he just melted.

While all faces are new to Evelyn, this one was new to us too. Evelyn's Grandmother, Becky, is my soon-to-be-step-mom (henceforth stbsm) accompanied my dad for the visit. Her resume includes 3 grandchildren of her own so she has lots of experience in the art of grandma-ing.

Becky is a huge Civil war buff so she fit right in here in history rich Virginia. We went on a few adventures but mostly lounged around at home getting Evie cuddles. Dad and Becky also helped us make several freezer meals so we'll be good on dinners for a while.

The visit culminated in a "Grandparents Dinner" Sue and Harry came down to visit and have dinner with Elizabeth, Becky, Dad, and I. It was a very enjoyable evening. Fortunately for us Evelyn isn't quite old enough to be completely spoiled rotten yet.

Week 1

This is a bit behind but as any parent can imagine, we've been a bit busy.

Well, much to my surprise, we survived the first week of parenthood. If I am being more accurate we loved every minute of it. During the "every 3 hour through the night" schedule we set up a leap frog system that allowed each of us 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep. This has kept us (mostly) sane over the first week.

Lets rewind a bit....

After Elfie (new nickname for Evelyn. Not sure if we like it yet) was born she and Elizabeth stayed in the hospital. A few things about the hospital. First, the nursing staff was uh-ma-zing! They were very polite and friendly and at least acted like they had they cared for us as much as we did. They were very knowledgeable and spent quite a bit of time answering our questions and demonstrating any and everything we could imagine. Second, Evelyn only left the room 2 or 3 times during our stay. She slept mere feet from her mother from the moment she was born. Third, I felt it was kind of a trial run for us as parents where we were ultimately responsible for her care but had "adult supervision" as needed. It assuaged many of my initial fears of new parenthood.

As stated in our last post, Evie had her first blow-out at about 3 AM. Fortunately, this was more than 6 hours after her birth which meant she could get a bath from the nurse. Friday morning Grandma (Susan) came to visit. I picked her up that morning and brought her to the hospital. As you can imagine it was love at first sight.

 

Later that evening, Grandpa (Harry) and Grandma came back for a brief visit. I'm told Harry has a chiropractor which is good because he was wrapped around that finger.

We were hopeful that Saturday would see the Elfs' discharges, but that was not to be. The Pediatric Hospitalist's exam showed higher than acceptable levels of jaundice. This lead to an additional day in the hospital. Elizabeth and I spent a quiet day watching movies and visiting with Sue and Harry.

Sunday came and everyone was cleared to go home! After introductions were made to the dogs we were ready to start this whole "parenthood" thing.

Evelyn got her first in home visitor Monday when her Uncle Alan stopped by.

Evie also had her first pediatrician's visit during the first week, which gave us a good chance to get the feel of the office we picked, and at this point (at the time of writing, three visits later) we are happy with our choice! Their nurse practitioners are all trained to help with breast feeding, which didn't work out for us (Elizabeth is pumping and we supplement with formula as needed), but it's nice to know for the future. Everything else about Evie looked good! Her jaundice went away and she is back to gaining weight instead of losing it! Overall, we would say it was a successful first week of parenthood. 

Welcome to the World Evelyn Leia!

Oy, it's been a really, really, REALLY long time since we've written any updates for this blog! However, we figure that it's a better way to keep all of our family and friends up to date with Evelyn Leia than on Facebook. Or at least a way to give more details :-)

So Evelyn Leia is a week old already! I figure that  means it's time for me to actually sit down and write her birth story- but don't worry I won't go into too much detail. So Wednesday May 11th we went to bed as usual, but around 1:15 am I woke up, feeling slightly weird and it turns out that labor had begun! I started timing my contractions so that we knew when to call the doctor. I thought my water had broken around 1:30 am, called the doctor around 2:30 am. While on the phone with the doctor my water actually DID break. Boy, am I glad that didn't happen at work (which was one of my biggest fears). So we got up, I took a shower, Scott started packing stuff up that we were saving for last minute (computer, DVDs, etc) and off we went to the hospital. We were officially admitted around 3:30 I think- but to be honest that part is a little hazy. When admitted I was having contractions every 2-4 minutes but while I was still about 50% effaced with no dilation.

I had been planning on trying to labor without the epidural, but after my doctor came and checked me-- and it hurt-- I decided I was going to get that epidural. After that labor wasn't so bad since I couldn't feel the contractions, but the contractions also were not progressing me at all so they gave me medicine to try to make the contractions more productive. However, the problem proved to be that the medicine caused stronger contractions- which made Evelyn's heart rate drop. Not to the point of panic, but enough that Evelyn and I had to be consistently monitored.Every 30-60 minutes the nurses came in and had me move positions to try to get Evelyn to move into the correct position to progress labor. At around 2pm the doctor came by and I hadn't progressed at all, so they took me off the medicine to increase contractions and instead decided to see if my body would progress on it's own. However, it didn't. Instead I started getting a shooting pain through my left hip that would not go away-- and the epidural did NOTHING for the pain.

Finally, the doctor came back around 6pm and told us that we were going to have to go for a c-section because Evelyn decided to come down, as the nurse said, "cattywampus". She was sort of diagonal/sideways, and the contractions instead of pushing her down, were pushing her into my hip. They prepped me for my c-section- and Scott did a great job keeping me calm because even though I was ok with the c-section part of me was freaking out.  Finally, we were back in the OR, I was numb from the chest down, and Evelyn was brought into our world!

Evelyn immediately demonstrated that she has a good set of lungs and that she has no problem with her plumbing as she peed all over the table as they tried to clean her up. While in the hospital Evelyn also demonstrated she has a great capacity for pooping when she had her first poopy diaper explosion that first night. She remains a good pooper. Scott and I have (mostly) figured out a schedule that doesn't leave us both exhausted and cranky, so overall, we'd have to say, we've got this.