Rocks In My Dryer

The Corrie Story, Part 3

This is part three in a three-part series that has probably gotten wa-a-a-y too long already.  But if you're still reading, you can see part one of our daughter's birth story here, and part two here.

Two years ago today, my baby daughter cried the moment she entered the world, just as I prayed she would.  I was flooded with relief.  I hardly got to see her as the NICU team whisked her across the hall to evaluate her.  As we had planned ahead of time, Hubs left my room immediately and stayed right by her side, running back every couple of minutes with brief status reports: "She looks fine!" or "She's on oxygen, but she's breathing great!"  Before they took her to the NICU, they brought her to my bed and let me hold her for a few seconds.  She was tiny, but she was clearly very strong and very healthy.  She was taken to the NICU, and I didn't get to see her again for several hours, while they checked her status more fully and started her IV antibiotics (since my water had been broken so long).  She was a remarkable 5 lbs 13 oz at only 34 weeks gestation (and yes, my due date was correct).  We rejoiced!

I could write pages about our experience in the NICU.  If you've ever been in one, you understand. 

The first time I went in, hours after Corrie's birth, my husband was pushing me in a wheelchair.  He had been in there once already, right after her birth, and he walked me through the rigid security and hand-washing protocol.  He did his best to prepare me for that room, but there was no way he could.

Our NICU was a large room, full of the tiniest little humans I'd ever seen.  What first struck me was the sound of it.  There was a constant, dull whoosh of ventilators and other machines, as well as an unending chorus of beeps from hundreds of monitors.  But for a room full of babies, there was remarkably little crying.  Most of them simply weren't strong enough. 

Our daughter had been placed in the area reserved for the sickest babies, as all "newcomers" were, until they could be fully evaluated.  It was profoundly sobering to see her in such an environment.  The nurse had coached us that a preemie's gentle system tolerated a firm touch better than a "tickly" one; so with my hand solidly on her tiny head I wept, suddenly overcome with guilt that my body pushed her out too soon.

Our Corrie proved to a spunky little thing, blowing the lid off every expectation.  Within a day of her arrival in the NICU, she was moved to the level for the healthiest babies.  She nursed--ever so slowly, but surely--when she was only 18 hours old, and she never required a feeding tube.  Except for the first few minutes after birth, she breathed room air the entire time.  She was so feisty that she pulled out five IV tubes in four days, until they finally had to insert one into the top of her head.  It was heartbreaking and funny at the same time, as I whispered to her it was the first of many princess caps she would wear.  She squirmed and cried and kicked in her isolette, cheered on (I imagined) by the photograph of her big brothers taped to the inside of her little bed. 

The hardest part was leaving her at the hospital each night.  I knew how well she was cared for, but, irrationally every instinct in my body wanted to hide her under my coat and sneak her home with us.  Every night I sang a blessing over her:  "May the Lord bless you and keep you, May He be gracious unto you..."

She was doing SO well.  We overwhelmingly grateful for this, but this was mixed with a bittersweet guilt as we got to know the other families.  We met parents who had been heroically existing in the strange NICU no-man's-land for weeks, even months.  I saw mothers sitting day after day beside their babies' incubators, unable to touch them.  Twice during our stay, the other parents and I were quickly shuffled out of the room when a baby "coded".  And I will never, as long as I live, forget the look on the face of the mother who described to me how her baby's organs were gradually shutting down.  She spoke as matter-of-factly as if she were describing what she had for lunch that day--her eyes were dull with shock, exhaustion and grief.  How I prayed for her, for all of them. 

After five brief days (not the two or three weeks for which we had been prepared), Corrie was ready to go home.  I couldn't bring myself to make eye contact with the other mothers as I left, inwardly rejoicing and weeping in the same moment.  But how we celebrated on our way home!  Her brothers would finally be able to meet her.  One of my favorite family photographs (above right, taken by my mother) showed our boys sitting in the front yard, eagerly waiting for Hubs and me to bring her home.  What a day!

And what days we've had since!.  It is hard for me to believe that the tiny and fragile little baby she was is the same feisty two year old that I see today.  She is a saucy little bundle of spunk, with her blonde pigtails and dimples.  She dances with abandon to my Abba CD, and she pulls the dog's hair at every opportunity.  She faithfully carries a Winnie the Pooh spoon around in her sparkly purple purse, and she sings "Ginkle Ginkle Ta-Ta-Ta" (Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star) at the top of her lungs. She runs happily to the door when she sees her brothers get off the school bus, and she has been known to raid my make-up drawer on more than one occasion.  She is a girly and stubborn and delightful ray of sunshine in our house, an unexpected blessing none of us could have known how much we needed.

Happy birthday, my sweet girl--we're so glad you happened. 

In The Category Of "Sentences You Never Want To Hear Your Children Say":

Joseph to Stephen, as they're coming in the backdoor:  "Okay, so let's not throw eggs at each other anymore..."

Works For Me: Car Cleaning

Does the floor of anyone else's car look an explosion at a french fry factory?  Mine is scary.

So here's my little WFMW tip for the day:  I keep a stash of empty grocery sacks in my car, so that when I'm in the car waiting for a child at the dentist, or karate, or soccer, etc., I can use the time to quickly gather up the trash and dump it in the nearest trash bin.  I also keep a bottle of fabric freshener (this stuff is my favorite) in the car, so I can hose down gently spray my otherwise rancid aromatic vehicle.

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: 

At the request of many of you, next week (November 15) we will be having a "themed" Works-For-Me Wednesday...the Christmas Edition!  Please be thinking ahead about some Christmas-related tips you can share.  Time savers?  Gift ideas?  Recipes?  Anything that makes the holidays easier would be great.

Want to share your helpful tip with Bloggityville?  Leave a link below.  First-timers, please read through the guidelines here before posting.

*REMEMBER:  Please keep your parenthetical description SHORT--no more than three words!  If not, it could mess up the way Mr. Linky displays it below and make it hard for us all to read.  Thanks!

The Corrie Story, Part 2

This is part two in a three-part series that will probably be interesting to my immediate family only.  But if you're still reading, you can see part one here.

My doctor told me that the odds were good I would go into labor in the next 24-48 hours, since my water had broken, but I was having no contractions at the moment.  My husband, remember, was camping with our boys in the remote woods of Arkansas, out of cell phone range.  We could have tracked down a forest ranger to find him, but it would've taken hours and would've frightened Hubs and (even worse) the boys.  We made the difficult choice to wait until early the next morning, when my Dad would drive to find them.

I was so worried that Hubs would be alarmed when he heard the news, and that his fear would rub off on the boys.  I prayed the most specific prayer I've ever prayed when I begged God that somehow, in the middle of the night, with no advance warning, Hubs would somehow know that I was in labor and would feel peace.  I called his cell phone and left a message, knowing he wouldn't get it until he was on the road the next day.

And strangely, at midnight, in a remote tent far away, my husband's phone beeped to tell him he had a message.  He had no service and no way to retrieve it, and there was no logical explanation for why the "beep" occurred.  But as he lay there in the tent, he would tell me later, he had a strange thought:  "I bet Shannon is in labor.  Either way, there is nothing I can do about it at this moment.  Her mom is there with her, so I know she'll be fine."  He felt peaceful and calm, just as I prayed he would, and he strangely felt no sense of surprise when my Dad showed up at 6 am that morning to deliver the news of my hospitalization.

It was a little detail that was big to us, one affirmation of many that God's sovereign hand was guiding this strange journey we were on.

As it turned out, I did not start having contractions.  I had thought, until then, that once your water broke you had to deliver within 24 hours, to prevent infection.  It turns out, this is only true when your water breaks at full term.  When your water breaks as early as mine did, they keep you in the hospital and do everything they can to put off labor.  This allows the baby time to grow, and allows them time to pump the momma full of antibiotics to stave off infection.

It was a delicate line we were walking:  take the baby out now and avoid infection, or let the baby grow but risk an infection (a dangerous thing in a preemie).  We felt confident in our doctor's advice that we wait.

For ten days I stayed in the hospital while my husband, family and friends managed life at home.  It was hard for the boys.  Hubs brought them to see me as much as possible, but it was a poor substitution for having a mother at home.  Stephen's kindergarten teacher would later tell me that he spent an entire day hiding under his desk, he was so distraught.  Hubs managed beautifully, though, nearly wearing himself out.  My doctor would let Hubs take me on wheelchair strolls around the hospital, and we invariably ended up going down the hall to the NICU.  The walls were lined with photos of babies who had once been very sick and tiny but were now thriving, healthy children.  We hoped, and we prayed.

We were visited by nurses and a neonatolgist who prepared us for a few likelihoods:  Corrie probably wouldn't cry at birth, she would likely be on oxygen right away and would almost certainly need a feeding tube, we could expect to have her in the NICU for at least 2 weeks.  We shouldn't fear these things, because the odds were overwhelmingly in our favor--things might get complicated, but at 34 weeks, she would be fine.

I fixated strangely on the notion of not hearing her cry at birth.  It was a sound I longed for.  I remembered the rush of joy during my sons' births, when I heard their little lungs fill with air and announce their arrival in the world.  I tried not to hope, yet still I prayed, "Lord, could she cry?  Just once?"

When I reached 34 weeks, on November 9th, we felt Corrie had grown enough that the risk of infection outweighed the risk of prematurity, and my doctor began the induction process.  Labor moved slowly for about eight hours, as induced preemie births often will.  But at about 3 pm, the overwhelming urge to push had me shouting for nurses.  They rushed in and realized Corrie's arrival was imminent.  It had sneaked up on us, and no one was ready.  The doctor hadn't made it, and the NICU team hadn't set up in the room.  In a flurry of activity, there was shouting in my room and in the hallway:  "Get the doctor!"  "Don't push!"  "Page the NICU!"  I couldn't hear myself think above the din of noise.  People were running, and Hubs looked terribly afraid.

And then somehow, miraculously, in all the noise, I heard a sound that reminded me of a tiny baby kitten.  It was soft and weak, but it was unmistakable:  Corrie was here. 

And she was crying.

To be continued Thursday...

The Corrie Story, Part 1

My daughter's birthday is approaching later this week, and it has dawned on me that I've never written her birth story.  For us, it was very dramatic, though I know it's mild compared to what other families have been through.  Still, I don't want to forget one minute of it.  So if you'll indulge me, here's Corrie's birth story, in three parts (it's a long story, y'all).  Here's part one:

Around March of 2003, I was telling Hubs about some friends of ours who had a surprise pregnancy.  He looked at me nervously.  "That wouldn't happen to us, would it?" he asked.  My response (and yes, this is actually what I said):  "No, Honey.  When you hear of people 'accidentally' getting pregnant, what that actually means is that they messed up on their birth control.  We're very careful--we're just not the sort of people that happens to."

And somewhere up in Heaven, God must've thrown His mighty head back and laughed.  Because one month later, while the room spun around me and my jaw hung open, I was looking in amazement at two little pink lines on a plastic stick.

I gave myself 24 hours to try to adjust to the idea before even telling Hubs.  He took the surprising news well, but we were both reeling.  This had not been apart of Our Plan For Our Family.  We were very content as the parents of three little boys.  It was kind of our schtik, you know?  Boys will be boys.  Three is a charm.  We were done.  We stumbled through the next few days, numb and confused and even, if I were to be brutally honest, disappointed. 

Until I began bleeding.

I had endured two miscarriages before.  I knew the signs.  And I had every single one of them.  Before I had even had a chance to grow accustomed to the idea of being pregnant, it appeared this little life inside me was slipping away.  My doctor agreed that this was likely what was happening, but we would wait a few days and see.  We waited.

And we waited. 

And in my heart, a deep seed of desire took root as I pleaded with God to save this little life that I didn't even know I wanted so desperately.

Remarkably, though the bleeding continued for a time, I did not miscarry.  On the contrary, the morning sickness hit me like a truck as this little baby evidently took hold.  Relief and joy and nervousness and nausea washed over me every single day.

My pregnancy continued normally for a time.  My boys began to be excited about their new little sibling (whom they named "Godzilla", for some reason, a nickname which, mercifully, did not stick).  Here I am at about 20 weeks on vacation on the Alabama Gulf Coast.  Just after this trip, we had an ultrasound, and we took Adam and Stephen with us.  For the second time in five months, my jaw dropped to the floor when the tech announced that we were having a girl.

A girl?  What am I supposed to do with a girl?  I'm a mom of boys.  We do t-ball and Hot Wheels and patched-up jeans and buzz cuts.  A GIRL?

Despite the shock, I was thrilled beyond words.  I remember going back out to the car after the ultrasound and sitting there quietly, shaking my head in disbelief and laughter.  A girl?  God was blessing me with a daughter?  A surprise daughter?  I couldn't contain myself.

A few more normal weeks passed, except for my diagnosis of gestational diabetes.  Still, this wasn't a huge hurdle; I was able to manage it with my diet.  The fall of 2004 passed uneventfully as we eagerly planned for our new little daughter, due December 23rd--a Christmas baby!  I prepared a room so pink that it actually glowed out into the hallway.

In late October, Hubs took the boys camping.  I looked forward to a weekend alone in which I'd finish up the nursery before the holiday rush hit.  They would be out of cell phone range, but that was no concern--I was only 32.5 weeks and was having no complications.  At the last minute, my mother decided to come for a visit and help me.  I'm so glad she did.

Saturday, October 30th, Mom and I had been busy shopping and working in the nursery.  I was tired and took a nap in the afternoon.  I awakened around 3:30 pm to feel a strange leak of fluid.  Great, I thought, bladder problems.  Just what I need.  I cleaned up and we went to dinner.  Afterwards, we watched a movie, but the strange leak continued.  I told my mom about it, and she suggested we go the hospital to make sure it wasn't amniotic fluid.  I shrugged it off.

By 11 pm, when the leaking continued, my mom insisted we visit the hospital (thank you, Lord, that she was there--would I have gone in had I been alone?)  I drove us to the hospital, laughing the whole way at the thought that these nurses were going to tell me--a fourth-time mother--that I was wetting my pants.  How delightful.  We watched Saturday Night Live in the hospital room while we waited for the test results.  They came in around midnight.

My water had broken.  At 32.5 weeks. 

The room was spinning around me as the nurse said something about "remaining at the hospital" and "bedrest" and "infection" and "NICU", but I couldn't take it all in.  The nurse left and I reached out my hand to my mom, who came to my bed and sat with me.  We prayed aloud. Please, God, please place Your hands on this little baby and keep her safe...

To be continued tomorrow...

Works For Me: Saving Candy

In the category of Excruciatingly Cheap Mom Tricks That Will Probably Have My Kids In Therapy Someday, here's my little suggestion for all that Halloween candy that is probably overtaking your house right now. 

Go through it, pick out some good ones that don't have Halloween-ish decorations on them, put them in a big ziploc bag and freeze and...VOILA!  Stocking stuffers in only two short months!  Ho, ho, ho!

Yes, I'm that cheap.  I do it every year, and (as far as I know) the kids haven't figured it out.  Works for me!

Feel free to share your WFMW link below.  Please read through the guidelines if you have any questions.