Okay, I will admit this was a long time coming. I meant to do another post last night, but baby things kept us busy. But anywho here we are now. For those of you who have yet to hear the story, I will warn you...there isn't much to tell, but, as is usual for me, I'm going to make it take significantly longer than it needs to.
In some ways things started Tuesday night. Mary Jane was having more contractions than usual, and both of us began to wonder if we would show up to our c-section appointment in labor.
And sure enough we showed up the next morning and found she was having a suspiciously large number of contractions. The nurses getting Mary Jane checked in looked at the monitor and asked whether we wanted to try and have this baby the good ole fashioned way. Our answer? Ummmm maybe?
The decision didn't stay in our hands for long. They quickly did a check and found she wasn't dilated at all. So with enough time for a quick picture it was off to the operating room.
The doctors took Mary Jane in first to give her her epidural. This left Jason all gowned up and chomping at the bit waiting to get in. A feeling he remembered all too well from two and a half years ago, when Parker and Emma Jane were ripped untimely from their mother's womb. Fortunately while Hannah Kate was about to be ripped from her mother's womb it was not in an untimely fashion. And while Jason was once again impatiently waiting outside the door to the OR room his expression was less :( and more:
Twenty long minutes later, Jason was brought into the OR where found a bunch of doctors, nurses, PA's and what not, huddling around his wife's body holding sharp instruments and getting ready to cut open his wife. While this had clearly been the plan for months now, there was still something surreal about this fact, and the fact that he was going to just ignore this and have a seat next to her face as though this were a normal part of life.
From there things happened rather quickly, or at least they seemed to to the person who was not strapped to a table, numbed from the stomach down, and being sliced into by friendly-yet faceless medical professionals. For all the people strapped to a table, arms splayed to their side, it can be assumed things were happening at a significantly slower rate. Basically, Jason and Mary Jane were living in two different time lines.
However you count the seconds the time eventually came when Hannah Kate arrived. Faithful readers have already seen the very first picture of her (and some of them even complained about it...ahem...Liz....cough, cough) so here is a second, less goopey, yet still authentically "just born" picture of her.
Okay, maybe only slightly less goopy. She still looks like a dusky zombie baby, in search of brains in this picture, but hey...this is what modern tech has given us, the ability to share everything...even the things people really don't want shared. You think this is bad, just wait till you see the pictures of the placenta. There are no pictures of the placenta
Give me some credit here
Crimeny.
On a side note, Parker and Emma Jane have become big fans of seeing pictures, and when they came in asked to see some. When Parker saw the above picture she informed me someone needed to "clean the paint off Hannah Kate."
Drama:
We wouldn't be us if we didn't include some drama into the whole experience, but I will go ahead and tell you now the drama was all much ado about nothing. Some of you have asked about my initial text, the one that just said "She is here, details to follow" and still others have seen some cell-phone pictures that appear to include wires and what not. Due to this I have been hit with a number of question regarding health and wellness of baby. She is fine. So what's the story there? Well, you asked, but as I have already said, it's much ado about nothing.
When Hannah Kate was born she was retracting a bit when breathing, which, for those of you medically ignorant people out there who, along with me, require a bit of translation, just means that she was having a little more trouble breathing than they would like. She was doing the breathing just fine, but her sides would go in a bit much and her nostrils would flare, and her sats were a weeee (and I mean a tiny) bit lower than they would like. Turns out this happens a lot for bigger babies after c-sections. They don't get the benefit of having all the liquid squeezed out of them durning the birthing process. It usually takes them a little longer to get it all up and be happy campers. To be on the safe side they like to bring such babies down to the NICU for observation for a couple of hours. And that is exactly what happened to Hannah Kate. Jason following her out of the OR in an isolate, while Mary Jane was wheeled away in a separate direction was an annoyingly familiar scenario, but there was never any real worries or danger.
Perhaps the scariest moment came when Jason realized they would be wheeling that isolate right by the waiting room where Nana, Granny, and Paw Paw were all waiting. He actually stopped the doctors and said, um...can we go a different direction here, because if we walk by the waiting room with this isolate you're going to have three more patients in this hospital. They laughed for a moment, but he said, "no really, this family has a long, distinguished, rich history of visits to the NICU and I don't think they can handle the sight of one more." Jason was astonished to find they in fact really did not have another route, and so he ran into the waiting room and told them how completely okay everything was...he's pretty sure they only pretended to believe him, but it was nice of them to pretend. Thankfully their hearts pretended too, and all collectively decided not to arrest.
Once in the NICU Jason got to help clean "the paint" off Hannah Kate, eventually Nana came back, and they all just generally hung out. Things were so low key that one of the nurses took the time to snap this picture of Jason making silly faces at Hannah Kate. He felt she should learn about silly faces first thing, especially as she seemed so adept at making them. As you can see, the nurse in the background was thrilled with this behavior as well.
All told Hannah Kate was only down there for an hour-hour and a half. And it wasn't long until she was back in the room with Mary Jane looking like this:
Which is pretty much how she looks now, only she's a whole bunch more orangey, which is still not a big deal and something we'll talk about in a later post. For now it is time to wrap things up.
But wait you say, what about Parker and Emma Jane? Have they met Hannah Kate? Do they like her? Have they thrown any spectacular temper tantrums? Are they being cute as buttons? What about more pictures of Hannah Kate? What about visitors? What about that orangeyness?
All this can be saved for future posts, and can be considered reasons to come back soon. (very soon, as someone has already begun loading pictures to the computer and is likely to begin working on another post while mommy and baby nap)
Blessings,
Thank you for your prayers,
Jason, Mary Jane, Parker, Emma Jane, Hannah Kate Broge
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