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she's here! she's finally here! the birth itself was normal, but EVERYTHING ELSE leading up to it was chaos, logistics was nuts.

plan A was that i go into the OR with liz, follow baby out to the nursery while susan accompanies liz while cheds waits in the waiting room with val. i stay with liz and baby while val goes for much anticipated overnight with sam and riley.

good plan, no? liz felt contractions and we go in a week earlier, thinking we'll get plan A into motion. except susan is hella sick. ack! we quickly come up with plan B.

plan B: i go into the OR, cheds replaces me, val goes to sue and sarah's for an overnight, which will not be with her beloved girls but her best buddy, isaiah.

we drop val off, text cheds to put her on alert and liz gets her bits poked to determine that those contractions aren't doing anything. at this news, liz jumps out of the bed, we practically flee the hospital and call off the cavalry. got some lunch at a&w before meeting everyone at a park. that was a good dry run.

then we begin planning for if susan gets better in time or not. susan progressively gets better. i think that takes us through plans C-E.

then i get a tickle in my throat. uh oh. i take thursday off, go to walgreen's to pick up vitamin C and zinc tablets, etc, etc and vainly spend the day in bed to shake it off. except i decide to take my temp and it reports 101. WHAT!!! take some advil, fever clears up, we are freaking out with this stupid hamdemic going on, so liz and val go to a hotel for the night. luckily from the dry run, all our bags were already in her car so they were set. val is too excited to settle down so i read her favorite book to her over the phone, which was heartbreaking but i'm happy they're far away from my cooties.

friday, i call my doc, explain the situation to the receptionist, who tells me a nurse will call me back within an hour. when she does, i ask for the sw.ine swab to see if it is indeed that or not, am told that they don't swab for that anymore because it takes 3 days and that they just assume it is if you have a fever. she is, however, alarmed by my "tiny wheeze" symptom, so i get an appointment. explain it all again, lots of talking, lots of hemming and hawing about the course of action since i only had a fever that cleared up, a tiny wheeze and a tiny cough, but otherwise felt fine...iow, totally inconsistent with the sw.ine f.lu. got the rapid in.fluenza a and b swab, which was a tiny qtip on a flexible wire that went up the nose and down the throat. (really?? in this day in age and technology, we rely on torture to get cultures?! AND to add insult to injury, it's 40-70% inaccurate! wtf. AND you would think that if you went to all this trouble to get a culture, you could, OH, test it for sw.ine as well?? fine, whatever.)

since i'm near work, i stop in to pick up my lunch bag, which i worried would get thrown away, and to fax some papers i forgot to do wednesday, while figuring out whether to spend another night at the hotel or not but liz said "eff that" and came home. i head home, intending to sleep all day again, check the results of my swab test...negative! hurray! but wtf, i have a fever again! at this point, i'm thinking that i'm not going to be able to go into the OR let alone the hospital and despair that i'm going to miss the birth of my child and also begin overdrive worrying that liz will get sick, which would be a million levels of bad. she picks val up and goes to school's spaghetti fundraiser dinner with sue and sarah and isaiah while i sleep and hope and pray that the fever goes away. it doesn't, i get more upset. plan F-H involve cheds taking liz to the hospital because it's be too hard for everyone to just dump her at the curb and not go in and i stay home with val. sigh.

saturday, i don't even remember what happened that day but my ear thermometer yet again tells me i have a fever. wtf! i don't even feel hot! i did feel defeated though and despair again that i'm going to miss #2's birth. at some point, liz suggests i take my temp with her basal thermometer and it says 97.7. wtf! i'm never that low. given the wild inaccuracy of everything, we decide...

plan I: cheds picks liz up and takes her to the hospital, i take val to sue and sarah's and head over to the hospital, susan goes into the OR, follows the baby to the nursery, cheds replaces susan in the OR, i stand in the hallway so i can see the baby for a second, run away and pick val up.

except, while susan is prepped to go in, one of the nurses asked why i wasn't going into the OR. i explain my random sickness, to which she seemed to shrug and said it'd probably be fine since they were already exposed to me and if i was sure i didn't want to suit up? i was about to but liz was already getting prepped and after all our plan iterations, i didn't want to mess with it without talking to her so we stayed the course except i would be staying instead of running away after i saw the baby.

susan went in while cheds and i watched from the OR door, which had a big section marked with a wide strip of red tape, which presumably was to keep us back but we inched up until we were standing right at the door, which was awesome because i got to see a lot more than if i had been in there because i'd be behind the drape. i saw the doctor make the cut, smoke rise up, lots of tugging, to the point where i thought they were going to put a foot up and tug of war with each other, until the ob looked straight into my eyes with an excited expression that i couldn't really read...was she being encouraging? hey cheds, did you see her look over at us? why's she nodding?

a tug or two later, out popped vivian gavi! big, pink, cute and crying hella loud. cheds and i cried and hugged and cried some more, then resumed bobbing outside the window to see what was going on.

twist on plan I: a nurse poked her head out and slapped a hospital bracelet on my wrist, which meant i would be taking the baby into the nursery! which was so terrific because i'd missed that with val, who got whisked away because we underplanned for the c-section and i stayed with liz. this is also before we realized that we could request that she hang out with liz before getting whisked so this time, viv got to spend some time with liz while she got stitched up. susan eventually came out and we went to the nursery while cheds hung with liz in recovery.

little viv weighed in at 8lbs 5oz, which i had called exactly! and measured 20.5 inches. i got to see her first bath, she was soaped up on top of a pile of towels and then rinsed off, which was surprising because i imagined her in a tub of water. then she got her blood sugar checked, which was a little low but it steadily crept up to the point that she didn't have to get her heel pricked again. and i saw her hair being washed, which she loved, she was all chill and blissed out, so cute!

cheds picked up val and brought her in for a short visit, then val and i headed home to bed. i made the mistake of letting her sleep in with me so i got no sleep at all. before long, i had to get up and get val to school, then headed over to the hospital to relieve susan and spend the day with my baby. this puffalump is a cutie, has the same reddish brown hair like val and looks a lot like her. here, take
a look. viv, however, has barely opened an eye and has been sleeping a lot. and pooping. =D

even though i said we were at plan I, we were probably up to plan R and now, plan S for me...SLEEP!

posted by winking bunny at 1:41 AM :: ::