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Daphne

Finn, not feeling so supermom

Soldiering on

August 31, 2012

Day 5 postpartum.

I’m in the twilight zone – my days and nights have fused into one giant ball of sleeplessness.

I’ve forgotten how exhausting it is to take care of a newborn. I keep hearing infant-crying noises in my head, and it turns out that 90% of them are real, which at this point is possibly worse than hearing imaginary crying sounds.

The postnatal blues is not helping either. It’s not nearly as bad as the first 2 kids and I was mentally prepared for it but it’s still tough to deal with sometimes.

Days like these, I get through each day by reminding myself to be thankful. And not just a perfunctory “ok, let’s be thankful” but to spend time focusing on all the things I’ve got to be grateful for.

1. Finn is healthy and growing well. Every time he cries, it’s a reminder that God gave him to us and he’s everything that we could have asked for.

2. Truett and Kirsten are amazing older siblings. They kiss him and pat him and cuddle him whenever he’s awake. It’s a real joy to watch.

3. The return of Superdad. He’s always been super but with the new baby, he seems to have leveled up his powers. He takes the 2 bigger kids off my hands, helps out with Finn, does the chores and spends whatever time he has left doing actual work. Then at the end of every day, he gives me a hug and tells me that everything is going to be ok.

4. My mom and my mom-in-law have been a tremendous help, taking care of the cooking, cleaning, and being around to watch the kids.

5. The benefit of experience. Knowing that the madness is temporary and things will get better in a couple of weeks.

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Finn

We’re home!

August 29, 2012

We’re back home from the hospital, thanks for all the well-wishes and lovely emails!

Baby Finn is doing really well and the two bigger kids are having a lot of fun examining him like he’s a strange new specimen. It’s a little surreal now that we’ve got 3 kids and the reality of it is finally sinking in.

Exciting times ahead.

So the birth story. It’s pretty much the same story as millions of other births but I’ll tell it anyway.

On Sunday night, I started getting a little crampish right around dinner time. I wasn’t sure if it was another false alarm and since the contractions were still intermittent, I left it alone and went to watch the National Day Rally, waiting for a more definitive sign. It must have been a very powerful speech by our Prime Minister because by the time it ended, the contractions were down to 6 minutes apart and increasingly painful. A sign that it was time to head for the hospital.

Remember how I was planning for a medication-free birth? I had a whole list of pain management techniques that I’d been practicing, like hissing, deep breathing, yoga poses, exercise ball bounces and slow stretches.

Most of them required some mobility but because I had a previous c-section, the risk of uterine rupture meant that I had to be hooked up to a CTG monitor and put on a drip, ready for an emergency c-section if the baby started showing signs of distress. Which meant that I was confined to the bed throughout the entire labor process and all I could do was hiss and breathe. Ok, FYI, those are the 2 most useless techniques, trust me.

At 11pm, the pain was about a level 8 and after 2 hours of hissing, I was rolling around on the gurney, about to unleash every profanity in the English language, as well as some in Hokkien. In between contractions, the nurse looked at me kindly and asked if I wanted epidural.

“Not yet, I’m going to hold out for a little longer,” was my reply.

“It’s a Sunday night, so if you decide not to, we won’t get the anesthetist and you’ll have to go all the way without it.”

“Ok, just give me 5 minutes to think.”

*BAM, the next wave of contractions*

“NURSE!! GIVE ME THE EPIDURAL NOW!!!!”

“We’ll call the anesthetist, but it will take about 30 minutes for him to arrive. You just hang in there.”

30 MINUTES?? For a woman who is in labor, 30 minutes is a LONG TIME. That’s 10 rounds of contractions at 3 minutes apart. That’s how zombies get started, y’all. Ever wonder how patient zero happens? It’s probably a nurse who gets her face bitten off by a woman in labor told to wait 30 minutes for her epidural.

Thankfully he managed to arrive in 20 and after I got my epidural, it was all good. I could even relax and watch a movie while waiting for the labor to progress.

I was a little bummed that I couldn’t go medication-free but my gynae looked at me with all his years of wisdom and said, “It’s not the way to prove your worth as a mom. You get to do that after your child is born.” That made me feel so much better.

Finally, at 3.25am, baby Finn was born, looking all wrinkly and squishy. But he was ours and he was perfect.

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