Happy Birthday Blake!

Welcome to the world Blake Christopher Harvey! He made his debut on Sunday February 26, 2012 at 6.57PM weighing in at 7lb 2oz and 19” long. While we were pretty sure he’d be arriving earlier than his due date, we were quite surprised when he waited one day past being deemed “full term”. My water broke at 9AM right as I was about to get out of bed, but since Blake’s head was so far down into the birth canal the amniotic fluid didn’t exactly all come out at once. After I convinced Chris that my water had broken (he wasn’t convinced since there was no pool of water) we showered up, ate some breakfast, finished packing our bags, and headed to the hospital.

After getting checked in around 10:30AM, the guess is that I was 2cm dilated (it was really hard to tell since Blake’s head was basically right there). Then I was moved to my official labor/delivery room to wait until things got going. My contractions started getting stronger and closer together after a couple hours and I had “the one” contraction that convinced me it was time to get the epidural. I wasn’t sure what real labor contractions would feel like but when people tell you if you can’t sleep through it then it’s the real thing, they’re right. It took everything in me to not let my blood pressure spike through the roof (which it was already elevated enough to worry my doctor).

Once I got the epidural, around 4:30PM, things started to get much more tolerable. It worked completely on my right side, but not exactly on the left. I have no basis for comparison but I’m sure it helped. I was still able to feel the contractions which helped for the pushing phase. After an hour, I had another pelvic exam to check on the progress and to our surprise I had gone from 4cm to 10cm dilated and was ready to go. One hour of pushing and an episiotomy later (Blake’s heart rate was getting super low and labor needed to be sped up for the safety of his arrival), our little boy entered the world with the scariest cone head I’ve seen. We had no idea 10 hours earlier that we’d be spending our Sunday exactly like that, but we couldn’t be happier to finally meet this handsome little man.

On the way home from the hospital.

He has the cutest little lips, nose, eyes, hands, feet… ok I could go on and on. He is a strong little guy too, after feeling his arm strength and little legs kicking, I understand why he was always poking so far out of my belly. All the doctors and nurses that checked him out said everything was perfect with him so that was really encouraging. That is something we’ve worried ourselves about this whole time, was just hoping that he’d be healthy. Unfortunately, before we left the hospital, a doctor from our pediatrician’s practice checked him out and let us know that he was starting to show signs of jaundice.

Of course this is fairly common so we didn’t worry too much about it, just took the normal advice of trying to make sure he ate as much as possible so he’d be able to pee and poop out all the bilirubin in a timely manner. Since we decided to breastfeed, this is easier said than done since mature milk doesn’t come in until day 3 or 4 and colostrum is such a small quantity of food for babies. Long story short, his bilirubin levels continued to increase each day and we did all that we could to try and get his levels back down. To get the levels down you have to increase food intake so it can be excreted in pee/poop. UV is also helpful in breaking down the bili in the blood so we did a few sessions by the window.

Unfortunately, after everything we tried, it wasn’t enough and we ended up in the hospital on Friday afternoon for photo-therapy. For this treatment, he lies under bili lamps and on a bili blanket constantly except for diaper changes and feedings and these special UV lamps are very efficient at breaking down the bilirubin in the blood. Our guess at why his levels got so high is from all the bruising he had on his head during delivery.

Being a parent is already more exhausting than we ever expected. Not only do you get less than 4 hours of sleep each day but then you’re forced to make so many decisions about another little person’s life. I know we’ll get through this and we’ll be on to the next challenge shortly but this little boy has grown on us faster than we realized possible.