I CANNOT believe that my baby girl is already one year old!!
It’s crazy how much our lives have evolved since this girl came along – and I LOVE it <3. In honour of her birthday I thought I’d look back over this day one year ago when she came into the world. I found out I was pregnant the Monday of my Spring finals week. Lets just say the whole “studying” thing or focusing while I took my tests did not happen. Our due date was set for the first Friday of the following Spring Semester… I was really hoping she would come at “full term” {aka 37 weeks – conveniently timed over winter break,} but this kid had other plans. After visits with the midwife and monitoring the baby’s heart rate, they decided it was best not to let me go past 10 days beyond my due date, and so I was induced on a Monday morning at 7am.
The midwife determined that a big part of the reason I hadn’t gone into labor on my own was that baby girl was “sunny side up” meaning that while she was head down, her face was pointed towards my stomach, not the ideal position of pointed towards my back… luckily with some clever maneuvering during labor, they managed to help turn her – once she flipped things started speeding up!
Because i was induced, they had to have a heart monitor on my belly at all times to make sure the Pitocin didn’t stress out baby girl – they found that they could not turn it up very much without increasing her heart rate, so that clued them into the fact that her cord might be twisted in some way. Sure enough, when she came out the cord was around her neck. That was a very scary time for us. There was no crying: the midwife quickly handed her off to the nurses who immediately took her over to get oxygen {instead of giving her to me right away.} At first it didn’t look good – they thought she’d have to go to the NICU, but they let her lay on my first and she started breather better all on her own! We could not have been happier!
Part of having Celiac Disease means you have to be REALLY careful with gluten during pregnancy – Not that I’m not anyways, but it’s more than just feeling sick when you’re pregnant: too much gluten can actually cause a miscarriage {usually this is just when people ignore the gf diet completely, but I was taking NO risks.} Another aspect of it is that we tend to have lower birth weight babies – even at 10 days past due, little peanut was born weighing 6lbs 11oz.
It was so much nicer to finally be at home with our little girl – we weren’t really able to rest at the hospital much, and it was fantastic to be back in our own bed. In some ways this seems like forever ago and in others it seems like just yesterday.
