I must have blinked and today, somehow, my baby is four years old.
There are so many things I could say about the past four years, about how she made me a mother and activated a version of myself that I had only ever seen in my dreams. It has been the honor of my life to be her mama, and a true joy to see her step into the role of Gideon’s Big Sister. She is funny and silly and active and sweet and also somehow wise beyond her (four) years.
Happy birthday, Sophie. We love you so much.
Almost every single thing about my pregnancy with Gideon was the exact opposite as it was with Sophie, so there was a part of me that wondered if that would be the case for my labor and delivery experience as well, and that turned out to be completely true.
For a few days we thought he might be transverse and I thought “well a scheduled c-section would certainly be the opposite of a long, hard labor and 4 hours of pushing,” but once we had an ultrasound at 36 weeks and saw that he was actually head-down, I started to hope that the “opposite” experience would actually end up just being a quick and relatively easy delivery.
I went to my 39 week appointment on a Friday and my blood pressure was slightly elevated—not enough to need to do anything, but enough that the doctor sent me down to triage at Labor & Delivery so they could monitor me for a few hours. I was completely beside myself, trying not to cry and feeling totally overwhelmed that I hadn’t said a proper goodbye to Sophie before bringing a sibling home to her. After a few hours, the doctor on call said he wasn’t super concerned about my blood pressure but rescheduled my 40 week checkup for the upcoming Monday so they could check again and make a plan from there if it was still high.
My brother had been working from our house for almost a week by this point so that he could be there to watch Sophie when it was time to go to the hospital, so that was one less thing to worry about, but as soon as I got home I booked Ender a stay at the doggie hotel for the following week. We finished packing our hospital bag, I wrote out Sophie’s schedule and cut up some veggies for her snacks, and basically prepared to be admitted for real on the 24th after my appointment.
Luckily my blood pressure hadn’t gone up any more, but because my due date was approaching and it was still higher than it should have been, we decided to schedule an induction for Wednesday the 26th. When I was pregnant with Sophie, the thought of being induced would have totally freaked me out, but I practically jumped for joy to have something on the books and know exactly when we were going to be at the hospital this time.
The night before our appointment, Rob and I put Sophie to bed and tried not to get too emotional about the fact that it was our last time doing her bedtime routine just the three of us. We told her we’d be gone for a few days and be back with her little brother and that Sean would be there to take care of her, and she seemed fine and even excited about it all. We had to be at the hospital at 7:00 AM so I tried to go to bed early, excited to be completing my last night of terrible pregnancy heartburn.
For weeks we had been working on a list of names we liked and we just couldn’t settle on one. We had Sophie’s name settled by the week of her birth, but for some reason we felt like we needed to meet this guy before we named him. We had three potential first names and one middle name and I joked that maybe we would just let one of the nurses decide. I fell asleep wondering what this baby would be like, who he might resemble, and feeling so excited to be meeting him so soon.
The next morning I took a shower and threw up! This baby had me nauseated for 40 full weeks and I had actually joked about possibly being sick up until the day he was born. We made coffees to go and said goodbye to my brother and drove through McDonald’s for a quick breakfast. I was feeling really nervous but calm and pretty confident about everything—my biggest goal for labor was to just be more present this time. With Sophie, I was so exhausted by the time I even got to the hospital that I feel like I barely remember a lot of it. I also wanted to get an epidural much, much earlier this time and not be so scared of that procedure, so it felt good to let the nurses know that when they asked me what my plans were for pain management.
By 8:30 AM we had started the Pitocin! I was already 2 centimeters when they admitted me and having a few contractions here and there, but nothing major. Every 30 minutes the nurse would come in and up the dosage, and after a couple of hours I was definitely starting to feel contractions that were strong enough that I needed to stop what I was doing and breathe through them. I wasn’t super uncomfortable yet, so I didn’t think I needed to get an epidural, but I was extremely mindful of how quickly things could change and didn’t want to end up wishing I had gotten it sooner.
Around 11:30 AM the doctor came in, checked me again, and broke my water. I was still only 2 centimeters but she said that once my water broke things would probably start to progress faster. Another hour or two passed and I was having contractions every 4-5 minutes and they were definitely getting more intense and painful. I was hoping to be more dilated than 2 centimeters when I got my epidural, so the nurse checked me again and said I was at about 4, which seemed good enough to me.
We called for the anesthesiologist and he showed up around 2:00. I was way more aware of my surroundings that during my first labor and delivery, so I definitely felt more than I remember from my first epidural, but just like the first time it really wasn’t anything to be too scared of. Within 20 minutes, I was feeling so much relief and didn’t realize how much pain I had been in. We relaxed for a while.
The nurses and my OB kept reminding me that second babies tend to come much faster, so to be sure to tell them if I felt like I had to go to the bathroom because it could be time to push. My nurse probably thought I was a nut because I kept telling her I had to pee—she put a catheter in but there wasn’t really anything there. I was probably around 6-7 centimeters when they had me lie on my side with the peanut ball between my knees for at least 30 minutes. After another 45 minutes or an hour (around 3:30 PM), I was starting to feel really intense contractions, and I was surprised by how painful they were even after the epidural. I was at 9 centimeters by this point, and I must have stayed there for an hour. The contractions started getting really intense—my whole body would shake and I felt like I didn’t have any control over anything. The nurse kept checking me because I was actively trying not to push, but I was still at 9 centimeters. She told me he was moving down but my cervix wasn’t fully dilated yet. It was intense and painful, but he was doing a lot of the work for me.
Finally the nurse called my doctor and said I had been actively trying not to push and that I was so close to 10 centimeters. She came in at 5:00 PM and while they got set up she told me to do a “practice push” at the next contraction. It was such a relief to be able to finally work with the contractions, and after my first one she said “okay he’s crowning, you’ve got this!” I held my breath and pushed two or three more times, and he was born at 5:04 PM.
He was 8 pounds 3 ounces and 21 inches long, a little heavier than his sister but just as tall. We must have stared at him for an hour or two before we finally settled on his name. He wasn’t a Theo, or a Liam—he was Gideon, and he completed our family in an instant.
Three years ago I stood in the hallway of one of our three California rentals, with my arms pressed against the wall above my head and my hips pressed back, groaning and swaying into the night.
With the crib set up and the car seat installed and her due date approaching and her middle name spelled out two different ways on a piece of paper at the corner of Rob’s desk, our daughter’s arrival felt more and more real with each contraction. We had spent the weekend out and about as much as possible, buying an exercise ball at Target and with me sneaking out in the early morning for peppermint extract for mochas and brewer’s yeast for lactation cookies, but finally on Sunday night I accepted the reality that I was in labor and we summoned my aunt, who showed up an hour later to tell us we were doing great and put pressure on my back and fill up the tub for me.
In the early morning I made tea and heated up a pumpkin muffin, thinking that she would arrive that day. She didn’t, but she was close. I couldn’t tell if she was working with me or against me as we drove to the hospital and got checked in and I was poked and prodded and finally settled into a bed.
Another night passed, this one more difficult than the last.
But then there she was, at 5:30 on a Tuesday morning, in my arms before the sun came up, followed closely by a turkey sandwich and a spicy tuna roll.
Our first moments as a family of three are almost a blur to me, but here and now three years later it’s hard to believe she ever wasn’t there.