I’m writing this from my hospital bed during a few lucid moments before my favorite opiate kicks in again. We’re having technical difficulties with posting from here, but Ben is going to carry the laptop home or someplace with wifi and post from there. That means, though, that comments and e-mails won’t get to me in a timely fashion. Oh well!
Anyway, here are the wonderful FACTS you’ve been waiting for:
Elias Chaffee [plus Ben’s last name]
Born September 25 at 3:54 p.m.
6 pounds, 5 ounces
19.5 inches
healthy, robust, and beautiful with dark baby hair in very attractive finger waves, and when he opens his eyes they are sort of an electric shade of blue. Otherwise he looks like Isaac’s identical twin. I assume the hair and eyes will both change radically in the next few months, but he cuts a striking figure at the moment.
So tiny! I can’t believe that Isaac was ever this tiny, and yet he was even tinier.
He’s wonderful! While only nine days further along the gestation path, and only two ounces heavier than Isaac was, he’s a much more vigorous and mature little creature. His lungs are gorgeous and strong. He has not needed a BIT of incubator time. He has no feeding issues and nursed heartily right out of the gate.
Also, the whole c-section experience yesterday went so much more smoothly than last time. I attribute a lot of this to going into it while NOT in labor, as opposed to following 16 hours of labor, and my body’s general state of calm. Relative calm anyway. The whole thing is such an intense and strange thing to do, I guess it’s impossible (unless you’re some sort of yoga-breathing master or are able to leave your body at will) to actually be CALM while someone is cutting you open and extracting a baby.
Two parts that I especially dreaded repeating were first off the spinal—the needle going WAY into your spine to numb everything from the chest down—and secondly the nausea during the first few hours of recovery, did NOT happen the same way at all this time. The placement of the spinal did hurt, but not in a full-on blood-curdling scream sort of way. More a deep gasp and eyes squeezed tightly shut. Then done—then the weird sheets of cold running down both legs as the numbness took hold.
The room was very bright and cold and bustling. Now and then I would catch a glimpse of too much information in a reflection in the lights overhead, so I pretty much kept my eyes closed the whole time. Ben sat next to my head (we were behind a curtain), holding my hand and maintaining a running monologue about vacations we would take one day soon. His voice went a long way towards steadying me and giving me something else to think about than what all the medical staff were saying. (“Knife.” Etc.)
And then, just like in the case of Isaac, they all could see the little full moon emerging and cries of “it’s a boy!” went round the room. Ben stood up a bit to peep over the curtain and got to see some of the process. But when it comes to blood and gore, Ben is not exactly made of iron. Earlier in the day when I was having the amnio, the doctor asked Ben to hold the ultrasound wand for him, and Ben pretty near fainted…
Anyway, after the long and to-me difficult process of putting everything back together in there layer by layer, it was finally all over. I was wheeled back to the recovery room where we had spent the whole day waiting, while woman after woman had come back from surgery and endured the dry heaves. It was hard to sit through hearing that for hours without being fully aware that soon it would be me. Last time the nausea during the first few hours post-op was really horrible. This time… not much! It really was not so bad, and I hurled not at all!
Better yet, they brought the baby pretty soon, within an hour or so, and he immediately set to nursing like he’d done all this plenty of times before.
He’s a super champ—that’s there is to it.
So—it’s all glory. We have a beautiful new baby and the process has been smooth as silk.
Looks like I’ll be heading home on Friday.