You Got Me Living Like a Desperate Youth Alright, so I think it's official. I'm now writing to an audience of one. Me. It's cool, it was bound to happen given my infrequent posting. Countries have been overthrown and reinstated between my entries. Babies have been gestated and born. So I'll just meander along aimlessly here, kind of talking to myself.

So now I will tell the birth story of Baby E in August. From now on Stealthpunch Junior can be Baby B and the new baby can be Baby E. I don't know why I'm still so interested in privacy since the internet knows everything already anyway, but B and E it'll be.

It was, thankfully, a very straightforward birth. Everyone I know in life again thought I was crazy for wanting to give birth not at a hospital, but at a birth center. I was too chicken to have a homebirth, and also practical really since the closest hospital to our tiny town is half an hour away, plenty of time to bleed out and die under worst-case circumstances. Yes, I know, it doesn't make sense since I'm a crazy hypochondriac in every other aspect of life that I should want to do it outside of a hospital, but for whatever reason I'm totally natural and mostly calm about birth. I believe it's what my body was built to do from an evolutionary standpoint, and doing it the first time showed me that my own particular body is pretty okay at it. So anyway, everybody thought I was crazy and worried about me the whole time.

Timeline: I had the baby Sunday morning at nine. On Friday Gray's parents came to visit, and at night they babysat Baby B while Gray and I went on a date to the awesome Macaroni Grill and then to nearby Borders to check out the latest books. This is the kind of date we like: we stuff ourselves with starches and carbohydrates and then we read. (Really what I think it is is a nostalgic throwback to when we were really poor in Burbank pre-kids and we would go to Barnes & Noble on Saturday night and read books and magazines and not buy anything.) So we go to Borders, we do our reading, I celebrate the fact that we have some cash now by buying a decaf latte (not non-fat, because I am 39 weeks pregnant and eat whatever I like at this point), and then we go home at 12:30am. I go to the bathroom and there in the toilet is -- well, I'll spare the details and just say some minor evidence that things are starting to happen. I go to sleep.

The next day, Saturday, is business as usual. We take Baby B to gym class and everybody there says "You look really pregnant!" and I say back, "Yeah, getting close!" So then we get coffee, more people comment on my largess, and we go home. I sit around. I go to the bathroom and find more evidence. I eat lunch. I start to feel some contractiony stirrings. My in-laws, who were going to leave, now decide to stay.

A quick aside to talk about the mind-body connection. My first birth was 28 hours long. This was due to the fact, I believe, that I could not imagine holding a baby in my arms. I think I totally hung myself up by being emotionally un-ready to have a baby, which was sort of driven home by my midwife and doula at the time saying, "Imagine the first time your baby smiles at you!" in order to get my labor going faster, and it just didn't work. I couldn't imagine it because it seemed totally foreign and unreal. So this time what was hanging me up was the fact that I didn't know what we were going to do with Baby B when I went into labor. Some friends offered to let us drop him off -- if they weren't working. Our neighbor offered to take him in the middle of the night -- if she was in town and not travelling. There was no set plan, and it made me nervous. So I think the fact that my in-laws were here in our house staying with us did the trick. Brain told body "go do it, Baby B is safe," and body did it.

So around 8pm the contractions are getting a little more noticeable, but I can eat dinner, and I can joke around and make conversation. I call my midwife to tell her stuff's happening, and she tells me to get some sleep. Ha! I say, but I manage to sleep until midnight. Then I think maybe my water breaks. I'm not sure. I call the midwife again and she has me do the water breaking test which I never knew about, which is to lay down flat for half an hour, and when you stand up if water gushes out then your water has broken. If not, then it hasn't. And this is important for me because I'm group b strep positive, and the 24-hour clock starts ticking once your water's broken. Baby needs to come out before the 24 hour mark or the risk of infection shoots up. So I lay down for half an hour, Gray puts a chux pad on the floor near the bed, and I stand up. No water comes out, but what does come flying out is a fist-sized liver-looking piece of my insides that bounces off my leg and onto the chux pad and onto the baseboard leaving bloody red Mr. Hankey-sized plops everywhere it goes. I freak out and start dancing around, going "Should we call 9-1-1? Can organs fall out of your vagina?" and Gray doesn't even care how abnormal this seems, he's gotten busy trying to clean the splotches off the baseboard because he's an OCD clean freak. So I punch the midwife's numbers again and tell her that I'm dying, and she goes, "No, no, it's totally normal, it's just your body getting ready." Normal. Next trick I'll do is make part of my intestines come out my nose.

Gray just looked over and said "Are you writing a novel?" The answer seems to be yes, so more soon. Goodnight.


  ¶ 9:57 PM