Introducing Ethan Cyrus Shealy!

Our little man is finally here!  He made his entrance into our world on Thursday, April 12 and we were so excited to finally meet him!  Here is his story:

When I went to the doctor for my 39 week appointment, I had not made any more progress.  I was still at 1-2 cm. and the baby was still so high up that the doctor ordered another ultrasound to check his position.  We went ahead and scheduled an induction for Thursday, April 12 (two days after my due date) since my doctor was going to be on call that day and night.  Her plan was for me to come in for a checkup on Wednesday the 11th after which she would admit me to the hospital and get me started on some Cervadil overnight and then start Pitocin on Thursday morning.

I was kind of worried about being induced at only 1 cm.  I did not want to have to endure a really long labor with a higher possibility of a C-section at the end.  So I did a lot of praying and a lot of walking and squatting and bouncing on the exercise ball and anything else I could think of.  Something must have worked, because when I went in for my appointment on the 11th I was 4.5 cm. dilated.  The doctor sent me home to get a good night's sleep in my own bed and told me to be at the hospital by 6 am the next morning to get started on some Pitocin.

When I came in, the baby was still really high so the doctor did not want to break my water for fear of problems with the cord.  So she started me on Pitocin and came back to check on me around noon.  I got my epidural right away and slept for a couple of hours.  At noon, I was at 6 cm. but the baby still had not moved down at all so she still could not break my water.  I was starting to get worried.  What if I got all the way to 10 centimeters and he was still really high?  I had only had to push about 20 minutes with Gemma and I was not excited about the thought of pushing for hours. 

Around 4:30, I was starting to think I was going to be laboring through the night.  I started feeling nauseous and lightheaded (possibly because all I had eaten all day was popsicles) and was just getting more and more scared of what was looking to be a longer labor than I had expected.  The nurse decided to go ahead and check me again and I was 9 cm.  I asked her to help me roll to my other side and as she flipped me the pressure broke my water.  Baby was lower but still fairly high, so she had me do a few practice pushes to see if it would even move him.  It seemed to be working, so she called the doctor. 

The doctor showed up and I started pushing.  On my 3rd round of pushing, the doctor suddenly told me to stop.  I was like, Did she really just tell me to stop?  The baby was out and he had the cord wrapped three times around his neck.  I started to panic, but the doctor took care of it immediately.  She hooked her fingers under the cord, clamped it, and went ahead and cut it.  Then they rushed him over to the warmer to make sure everything was okay.

After they made sure he was all right, they handed me my sweet baby boy.  He was 7 lbs., 7 oz. and 20.5 inches long, and perfect.  :)  And even though I had given birth once already, the second time was just as amazing.  We already love our little man SO much!

And now without further ado, here he is.  Ethan Cyrus Shealy, born April 12, 2012 at 5:04 pm:

An Early Morning Mall Adventure

I am about to go crazy waiting for this baby to decide to come out (he is showing no signs of being so inclined and I am scheduled to be induced next Thursday) so I decided to drag Gemma to Target early this morning to try to find some teeny tiny shorts for her.  The ones she was wearing yesterday (size 12 month) kept literally falling all the way off.  I looked at about a hundred pairs of shorts in Target and left the store with one pair in a size 6 month.  I held up the 9 month pair and they looked ginormous and I will actually be surprised if the 6 month is even small enough for her tiny hiney.  And yes, she will be turning 2 next month and is still wearing 6 month sized pants.

But I decided I had to blog about the rest of our mall adventure (although I'm not sure anyone even reads this blog anymore but oh well) because it just ended up being pretty amusing. 

After looking at every pair of baby and toddler shorts in Target I decided I really wanted a spicy chicken biscuit from Chick Fil A.  (Apparently they do not have spicy chicken biscuits at the Chick Fil A at the mall for some reason, only regular chicken biscuits.  Which I thought was really weird but whatever.)  So we walked out toward the food court.

As we're strolling toward the food court, some old lady randomly walks up to me and says something along the lines of:  "You're not neglecting her when you're taking care of your baby."  In my head I'm like, "Huh?  What the heck are you even talking about?"  So she proceeds to elaborate that someone she knows had two kids really close together and the mom felt like she would be neglecting the older one by taking care of the baby but it was fine because the older one can't even remember not having the younger one around.  At which point I'm like, great story, that's ten minutes of my life I did just spend neglecting my daughter while listening to you ramble.  Thanks.  I am sure she meant well, but it was an interruption I didn't need while being hugely pregnant and wrangling a 2-year-old through the mall.  I also love how since I'm pregnant every woman I see thinks they can (and should) just walk up to me and tell me a) all the gory details of their labor stories and b) their vast knowledge of parenting advice.  I'm not complaining about this - I just think it's odd that so many women interpret a large baby belly as an opportunity to share really personal (and unwanted) information with a perfect stranger. 

Moving on...just outside the food court is a platform with a bunch of those cars that you can ride for a quarter (or in this economy, a handful of quarters).  Gemma immediately makes a beeline to look at the cars (screaming "Car! Car!" the whole way) and she climbs on the ice cream truck.  I dig around in my purse and find one quarter and put it in.  Nothing happens and I don't have any more quarters so I try the coin return which of course doesn't work.  So then the ice cream truck starts screaming loudly in this weird high-pitched voice with a Spanish accent: "YOU HAVE TO PUT MORE QUARTERS IN!" It starts yelling this at me like every 10 seconds and scaring the daylights out of Gemma when it does.  I keep trying to get my quarter back just to make the thing shut up but it just keeps yelling at me so I walk over to Chick Fil A and give the girl all the dimes I can find in my wallet in exchange for two more quarters hoping that's enough to shut the ice cream truck up.  (There of course is no sign anywhere indicating how much it actually costs to ride the thing.)  I haul Gemma back across the food court and stick the two quarters in and apparently 3 is the magic number of quarters because the thing starts lurching around.  And Gemma HATES it.  She actually turns pasty white and starts shaking.  I try to get her to sit down and grab the steering wheel and enjoy it but she's terrified and finally starts crying at which point I rescue her from the scary Hispanic-child-of-the-corn-ice-cream-truck and save the day.  In the end, it cost 75 cents to ride the thing for about 10 seconds and Gemma hated every one of those 10 seconds so it was an extreme fail all the way around.  But I had a good laugh about it later.  And hey, it was 10 seconds where I was too distracted to think about how ready I am for this baby to come out!