Delaney Abigail Readling, 2/19/11

Finally!!!!





8 Pounds, 3 Ounces


 

Not Sure How I feel About Baths

Daddy!

Mommy!

Uncle Shawn, Aunt Sarah and Daddy

First Diaper. I did it all by myself

Tooooooooooooo Cute

Live from the delivery room...

It seems as though everyone should have picked Feb. 19 in the baby pool. We've been here at Martin Memorial since 5 a.m. when Melissa couldn't take it anymore and decided she needed to have someone confirm that she was, indeed, suffering through the beginnings of labor. After an entire night of contractions and kneeling in front of the toilet and everything else labor includes, she just needed confirmation.

Her contractions were 3 to 6 minutes apart and they told her go "out to walk for an hour". That's hospital-speak for there's nothing we can do, and you may as well go home, but we're not going to tell you to go home. So, she put on her clothes to go walk and her water immediately broke. If anyone ever asks what it sounds like when your water breaks, it goes something like this: Oh Shit.

She was admitted and we got the whole labor experience, complete with contractions strong enough to bring tears to her eyes, fingernail marks in my arm and even a short bath. Nothing worked. And Melissa was a very unhappy camper.

Then the doctor showed up at 9:30, decided she was 4 cm and allowed her to have the epidural. That, too, brought tears to her eyes, even though they were very different kinds of tears. Joy filled the room!

I got to leave for 30 minutes while they set up the epidural, so I walked downtown and got some iced tea. When I got back to the room, Melissa was a totally different person. I mean, she was NICE!! She was smiley. Talkative. Personable. I think we should ALL get epidurals at least once a week. I'm thinking peace in the Middle East kind of stuff. And, judging by what I'v seen this morning, that's well within reach.

It's now 12:36 p.m. and she is 9/10 of the way there. Snoring through contractions and now eating Lemon Ice while half of Central Florida rushes to be at her side. Lots of family headed this way.

It's gonna be an interesting afternoon. You'll thank me for not posting any pictures with this blog.

Keep you posted...

The Final Countdown

What Week 39.5 looks like

This is what Melissa's feet look like. I put this here so she
could refer back to confirm that she does, indeed, have
feet. She hasn't seen them in months.

All right, this is going to be quick and painless, much like Melissa hopes labor is going to be sometime in the next week. Here are a couple pictures of Melissa, Week 39.5. The due date is Saturday. Today's day is Tuesday. That means only a couple more nights (at the most) of irregular sleep, overall discomfort and general amounts of unrest. Kinda like Egypt last week, now that I think about it.
 Oh, that's right, it doesn't mean that all. It just means that all of that is about to be cranked up. Times five! At least we have our practice.
Here are a couple pictures. Perhaps the final pictures of Melissa with baby, as opposed to baby with Melissa.
For the record, Valentine's Day is past and her worst nightmare of having a Valentine's Day baby is past. So, foot rubs are now allowed and she even went out for spicy wings tonight, all with the hopes of getting things started. Too bad she failed on the spicy wings part and ordered Gold Rush sauce, which isn't spicy at all. Even to a -1 week old.

What you should look like when you eat spicy wings.





The Catch-up Baby Blog

Gratuitous Gabrielle Reece photo. This has nothing to do with the blog.

This is the catch-all blog entry, designed to catch me up from all the recent events and put me on the trail to a happier, more-on-time baby blogging future. I hope. Yeah, but probably not.

So….here we go.

First of all, go to bebepool.com/mikeyj10 and fill out your entry to the baby pool. It's free because I'm lazy.

Besides lazy, I’m also kind of mad a myself because I sat in my office for about 45 minutes while my boss talked to me about all these “important” things and I didn’t realize that I was really just being held against my will. Politely.

Because, while Margot was going on and on about some thing or another that really wasn’t nearly as pressing as it seemed at the time, people were streaming along on the other side of the wall and setting up the surprise baby shower in the conference room.

One of the baby
shower beers. Yum!

Then it was time for the “meeting”, which actually turned out to be a quite fun little food fest (with red velvet cupcakes) and lots of presents. Like Melissa at her shower, I got many cool baby things. Onesies, diapers, bags, etc. Unlike Melissa at her shower, I got one really cool thing. Beer, jerky, onion rings…all imported from Columbus, Ohio because Teresa made her husband buy stuff a guy would like and he knew a place up there that was filled with that stuff. He was right!

Thank you to all the Habitat people! I’m sure Baby Readling will look great in all of her new clothes.

The next day was Melissa’s other shower, a pizza-themed lady bug fest, put together by Tori and Barb. Oh! And cooked by Marty.

I had some pizza and some of the salad and got to set up the champagne fountain (which I also got to take down, after making sure it was empty). I don’t really know how this one went because I stole Marty and went to the boat show. 

When we got back, there was clothes line with a bunch of onesies all the shower people had decorated. Apparently, Baby Readling is a surfer girl hippie Dolphins fan who does what she wants and tilts upside down when her father falls asleep. At least that’s what you get if you put all the messages on the shirts together. And, yes, I left out the Red Sox fan part because that’s a dirty joke by someone I no longer like.

And, you may have seen us writing down names at the baby shower(s). That's because everyone who gave a gift is officially committed to one day of baby sitting. Thanks for that!! I have your name...

Finally, we had another ultrasound and Baby Readling is, according to the tech, “trending to the plus side.” Ha! That’s putting it lightly.

They said she weighed 6 pounds, 12 ounces with a month to go. Most babies gain 2 pounds in the final

month, but ours (at the 76^th percentile already) will most likely gain more. That puts her right around 9 pounds when she’s born, if not 9.25.

Thoughts like that immediately bring the question to mind: What is the automatic cut-off for when a C-Section becomes mandatory?

"9 pounds????? Yikes?"

Labor and (breathe) birthing (think of the beach) classes begin (stretch)

This will apparently cure anything that ails ya

Just to give you an idea of how far behind I am, we went to labor and birthing classes LAST TUESDAY and I’m just now getting around to writing about them today. And then only because the internet is down at work, and I can’t really do anything until it’s back.

So, labor and birthing classes are 2.5 hours on a Tuesday night, followed by 2.5 hours on the next three Tuesday nights, bringing us to a total of 10 hours of sitting in a room, listening to a variety of people talk about all the joy we’re going to experience, showing us videos (mostly animated when it came to the actual birth, thank God!) and then telling us how all the pain, sweat and crazy positions we just saw can be alleviated by breathing properly. Please save your laughter until the end. I almost did.

The woman running the class showed us a couple videos of real women, giving real birth. There was much sweat and several contorted faces. Some of them were on their stomach. Some were on their back. None looked happy to be there. And these were the ones they chose to put on camera. I can’t begin to imagine what the other 97 percent look like.

Definitely the face of someone thinking of a beach
and things to interrogate her child about...

The whole idea behind this first class and these videos was to hammer home the point that proper breathing and relaxation will go a long way towards making the birthing process much easier. Which makes all the sense in the world. The less stress, the more movement. The more in control you are, the smoother things will run. Relax and things just fall out of you, I guess.

The final exercise of the night was our class leader putting on some kind of “relaxing” music. Enya. Or Ocean Sounds, Volume 17. Or something like that. Then, as we sat in our pretty little cushioned seats, in the dimly lit, air conditioned room, she told us to pretend we were at a beach. Make believe the baby is in the water. What would you ask your baby? (Can you swim? was not an option). Talk to your baby. Now tense the muscles in your feet. Relax. Tense the muscles in your calves. Relax. That continued all the way up to our faces, one muscle group at a time.

My only question – and I only have one – is: When Melissa is in the delivery room, heading into her fifth hour of labor, sweat matting her hair down into a slick ripple of stringy fur and this 8-pound baby trying to squeeze out of a 10 cm opening, is she really going to want to picture herself at Bathtub Beach, thinking of questions to ask her baby?

If only we'd not crossed God...

Okay, second question: And does breathing become a rhythmic exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide, or a struggle against all that is happening in (and part way out of) your body?

We also talked about mucus plugs (I’ll spare you. You’re welcome) and some other crazy stuff that God probably didn’t intend to happen to human beings but, since we homogenize milk and train cats to pee in the toilet, he has allowed to occur anyway.

Anyway, tomorrow night is breast feeding class. Which is weird, because I thought I was pretty good at that already. Hopefully there will be films!

Showered With Reality



Peace!



You often hear people talk about how things are “getting real”. This typically occurs far too long into a situation that is completely irreversible at the point at which they utter those words.

So, I won’t say that Sunday’s baby shower in Orlando (Clermont, actually, but you wouldn’t have known the difference) make things “real”, but it certainly helped drive home the fact that we are woefully unprepared to bring a pooping, splattering mess into the world. How sad does that sound?

Okay, not woefully. But unprepared nonetheless.

This thought was compounded by the fact that not only did we have to Vaseline most of the gifts just to get them into the bed of the truck. And the cab. And under the seats. And anywhere else we could find that would fit onesies, binkys and the DIAPER GENIE!! Woo hoo!!

As if the first compoundment wasn’t enough, it was doubly compounded when we got home and started stacking it neatly (with the help of Barb and Marty) in what will be the nursery, if only because we have failed miserably at buying a house to this point. Granted, the stuff is still in boxes and the room won’t exactly qualify as the next wing for the Taj Mahal, but the baby shower haul took up about ¼ of the room. And that’s without the cool crib not being constructed yet.

What happens when a Babies R Us explodes. Or...what we call the nursery

It’s amazing how much stuff a thing that can’t even hold its own head up and whose main goal in life is to dirty as many diapers and throw up as many different colors as she can in the course of one day, actually needs.  

For one thing, her nickname is going to be Tina Turner because of the large amount of clothes she now owns, even though she is minus-7 weeks old. I saw Tina Turner in concert on back-to-back nights in 1993 and witnessed a total of 427 costume changes. Baby R will be able to come darned close to that if she is to wear all the clothes she has right now.

That said, the more clothes, the better. Until we get a real house with a washer and a dryer, I plan on piling those dirty little clothes up and washing them all at once. It takes a lot of I Love Mommy onesies to make a whole load of laundry, by the way.

There are also strollers, Jump and Jives, play saucers, diapers, diaper traveling things, bags, socks (which are actually called booties, who knew?) and little cute baby shoes.

In all truthiness, we are sooooo blessed and grateful to have friends and family that would go shopping (during the holiday shopping season, many of them) and provide us with enough gifts to almost not fit in my truck. That is amazing.

I just hope that everyone who has added to the pile in the nursery (and those of you who still might...) knows they are also on the hook for one day's worth of baby sitting while I play golf. Or fish.

So, it’s getting real around the Readling house right now. And I have a feeling it’s going to get more real this weekend when I have to move everything into storage and clear room in the baby’s room for the actual baby.

Can someone please move this piece of placenta? I can't see the camera!

Bee-stung Pouty Lips That Would Make Hollywood Jealous




She's already got the pout figured out

 Just when you thought we hit a lull in the baby blog, here comes all this exciting news!

            Like, for starters, I think we’re going to have to name sweet Baby Readling something along the lines of Angelina Jolie Lisa Rinna Readling. After the latest ultrasound that seems to be the only fair way to go.

People pay good money to look like Angelina...

      All I know is we were sitting there, minding our own business. I was sitting on the little chair they make father-to-be sit on, trying to remain upright. The Reparations Chair I like to call it, as it seems like punishment I have to endure for the crime of making my wife go through 9 months of hormones, weight gain, discomfort, hormones, warped feet and hormones. To be honest, we both have to deal with the hormones, so the Reparations Chair is really unjustified.

       Anyway, I’m teetering on the brink of falling on the cold floor and she’s all stretched out with the squooshy gel all over her belly. That’s when the experienced and very professional ultrasound tech lets loose with this… “Well, everything looks very good and, oh my, LOOK at those lips. They’re so big. I don’t think I’ve ever seen lips like that on a baby before.”

            So, we both crane our necks a little closer to the big screen monitor and there they are, clear as day, a pre-natal Collagen ad.

...But sometimes they come out looking like Lisa

 Once we calmed down from the shock of our daughter, the future Dizzy Gillespie, the tech broke out with some even more fun information.

            Baby’s weight at 30 weeks: 4 pounds, 3 ounces.

            Melissa’s jaw almost hit the ground and her eyes started spinning as you could see the calculations going through her mind. 4 pounds, 3 ounces with around 8-10 weeks to go. Most of the baby’s weight comes in the final few weeks. 4 pounds, 3 ounces times 2 = 8 pounds, 6 ounces. 8 pounds, 6 ounces squeezing out of a 2.3-pound wide hole. Think of the pain. The pain! What happened to my 6-pound baby? The pain! Can we get it out early? What if she’s late? 4 pounds, 3 ounces times 3 = 12 pounds, 9 ounces = Oh. My. God. 

Then she just laid back and started laughing maniacally. But it was one of those uncomfortable laughs like you don’t know what else to do, but people are watching, so I have to do something, I guess I’ll laugh.

I guess that’s all you can really do when faced with the prospect of everything going smoothly on the day of the birth…until those lips get hung up on something important on the way out.

Lindsay says "Smooches"!