Zac's birth story

Alright sweet Zacaroo…here’s how you made your entrance into this crazy world! This is long, but I just wrote how I remembered and let it be. So, I’m all over the board with my writing. Sit back, grab your beverage of choice and see how this little bunch of awesomeness came in to this world…

Your due date was March 2nd. My last day of work before I started maternity leave was February 24th. My last post on here said something like I walked out the door at work on that Friday and maybe the heavens opened up and angels sang…or something like that. I was free for the next 3 months or so. I had one week until your due date and planned on getting lots of stuff done the following week before you arrived. It was an eventful weekend. Aunt Jill and the kids came down to spend the weekend with us. Our plan was for Aunt Jill and I to cook lots of stuff so we could freeze it and get ready for your arrival. We cooked on Saturday and then woke up early Sunday and started cooking again. Sauce for lasagna, chicken pot pies, chicken soup. Yum. Sunday morning started out very normal. The kids played and we were planning on going to Target to get some bathing suits for Alex and Sydney so everyone could go swimming at the Y.



We decided to get McDonald's for breakfast (yes, this is an important note). All I wanted was hash browns…and a lot of them. I think I told your Dad to bring me home 6 of them. I chuckle as I write this at how absurd this sounds. At the time it sounded totally normal to me – believe me. I somehow packed on 50 or so pounds by this point, so this was reasonable. He came home and informed me they had to fire up more barrels of oil to cook hash browns because he ordered 12. Fast forward…so I may or may not have eaten 5 or 6 of them, but only those who were there will ever know :) We were getting ready to go to Target and I noticed I had some bleeding. No biggie, I’m a few days away from having a baby. I pretty much thought nothing of it and chalked it up to labor is getting near. So we went to Target did some shopping and when we got home I was still having bleeding. Aunt Jill said I should probably call the doctor just to see what they say. I called my doctor and she said that I should come in and be checked just to be safe since I really wasn’t having labor pains. Ok, I’ll come in for the kajillionith time and probably be sent home, but I listen to my docs and trust them. On the way out the door, I gave Tyler a quick kiss and said we’ll be back soon buddy. He was watching TV and barely batted an eye that we left. I think we got in the car and I asked your Dad to grab our bag just in case. And grab the camera. My bag was half packed and I was planning on packing it fully the next day. As we were driving to the hospital I started to get more nervous. What IF something is wrong? I started to feel pains in my belly and was telling your Dad that maybe its labor pains (nope, just hash brown pains).

My last belly pic taken on February 24th.





At about 1pm or so we got to the hospital, checked in and went to triage. They hooked me up to the monitors, checked me out and said everything looked great and they were going to discharge me in a few minutes. About 5 minutes later a nurse came rushing in and told me that your heart rate had dropped and I just bought myself some extra time of being monitored. Cue slight nervousness. It was about 20 minutes later that Dad and I were sitting around talking and all of a sudden nurses ran in the room, threw oxygen on me and started an IV in my arm. Oye! What the heck is happening! Ok, now I’m shaking nervous and have no clue what’s going on. They told us that when you were good, you were great. And when your heart rate dropped it was really bad. I was all hooked up now, the nurses left the room and we had no idea what was about to happen. A nurse then walked in and said “Congratulations, you’re not leaving without a baby!” What?! But I don’t have everything ready, I have half a bag packed and I didn’t say goodbye to Tyler?? Cue crying. Crying because I just left my only baby at home and the next time I see him he won’t be my only baby anymore. They told me babies heart rates drop all the time and we don’t even know it, but since they’ve witnessed it on the monitors, they can’t send me home. If they would have sent me home I would’ve been sick worrying if you were OK or not. My birth plan is always simple. Listen to my doctors, have a healthy baby and get an epidural. Remember, I was going to pre-order it this time after what happened with how long I waited for an epidural with Tyler. Sorry to say they are still not taking epidural pre-orders :)

At about 3 or so, they moved us into the birthing suite and got us settled. The plan was to induce me with the lowest amount of Pitocin possible. I was barely dilated and my cervix wasn’t even soft, but they couldn’t give me the pill to soften my cervix because if your heart rate dropped at any point their plan was to immediately go to a C-Section. So, the plan was to slowly induce me and in about 24-36 hours I was told we’d be having a baby. Tyler’s birth was 17 hours. I couldn’t believe this was going to take longer than that! The doctor had me sign all of the paperwork for a C-section, explained everything to me about C-sections and said she’s doing that because she won’t have time to explain and do all of this stuff if a C-section is needed. If your heart rate keeps going crazy then they will just come and take me to the operating room. Yikes!

So at 4pm, I was given a bag of antibiotics since I was positive for Group B Strep. I needed to get that for 4 hours and then they could start the Pitocin. At 8pm, they started Pitocin. I pretty much felt nothing yet, but the monitors said I was having contractions. At this point your Grammy got to our house and Aunt Jill had already done one run to the hospital with some things for us (couldn’t have had better timing having them at our house already). No frantic phone calls or figuring out what to do with Tyler.

Your Dad and I watched the Oscar’s, I sipped chicken soup and we chatted with the nurses about everyone’s dresses and Angelina Jolie’s leg sticking out of her dress. The nurse also chuckled at how low of a dose of Pitocin I was on and said it wasn’t going to do much so just get some rest. Around 11pm, Grammy and Jill made another run to the hospital with more food and with some things we forgot. I got checked and I hadn’t made much progress at all. I was 1 cm and my cervix was not soft. So, I wasn’t having this baby anytime soon. Grammy and Jill left and said they’ll be back in the morning. Dad and I then turned off the lights and went to sleep. Correction…dad went to sleep.

Here's a little eye candy for you Zac, this leg was the talk of the town the night you were born!



Soon after Grammy and Aunt Jill left, I started to feel some contractions. Around midnight I had to wake Dad up and have him help me through them. They were starting to get more and more intense and my absolutely awesome nurse Jen (who had 8 kids herself) said to just let her know when I wanted some pain meds. She said they couldn’t give me an epidural until I was 3-4 cm dilated, but they have another drug they can put in my IV. I’ve heard about this drug and it makes you feel kind of drunk. I didn’t want to feel drunk unless it was from Blue Moon so I said I’d wait until I could get the epidural. The contractions started to get intense and I kept thinking that I’m in this for the long haul (remember 24-36 hrs. people!). So, in my head I had to tell myself to buck up and make it through these because it’s only going to get worse. Around 1:30 or so Jen could tell that I was in A LOT of pain. She asked if I wanted to be checked again and I told her at 3 am they could check me. I didn’t want to be disappointed that I hadn’t really progressed and be told I couldn’t get the epidural. So Dad and Jen helped me through contractions. I was having CRAZY, RIDICULOUS, RIP MY HAIR OUT contractions. A little after 2am, I had enough. I told Jen to get someone to check me and give me whatever drug they want. Or knock me off the bed to make me feel better. Jen told me she guaranteed I was at 3 cm by just watching me go through contractions and I was making a good choice. She had me sign all the epidural forms and was confident it was time to get one. The resident came in to check me and I was at 6 cm! And then the resident said “oops…” and I felt the gush. My water broke. Please get me the epidural…NOW! And just when I thought my contractions couldn’t get any worse. They did. And I knew this kid was on his way out.

It only took the anesthesiologist a few minutes to get to me, but in that small time frame things got crazy. I kept asking Jen if I was going to have time for the epidural. Her response was “You’re going to be fine”. Not the answer I was looking for. I sat up on the bed, and the anesthesiologist started giving me the epidural. Like I said, I knew this kid was on his way out, for REAL. They reminded me not to move and not to push (yeah that was easy for them to say). He got the needle in and I laid back down and immediately told them I had to push, like NOW. I asked Jen again if I was going to do this without pain meds and I’ll never forget this moment. She looked me right in my eyes and said “Yes, it’s too late to push the meds through, but you’re going to be fine” Jen totally ROCKED though with keeping my head in the game! And your Dad once again was an all-star coach! They checked me again and I was 9.5 cm. The resident was geared up and ready to deliver the baby. My doctor was running in to the room at this point since she expected the whole thing to take a lot longer. People were rushing around trying to get everything into place. Everything progressed so quickly it was crazy. They told me I could start pushing on my next contraction. So, I pushed 3 times (yep, that’s it!) and our little Zachary Scott was born at 2:47am on Monday, February 27th. Yikes! I won’t lie, soon after he was born my response, out loud, to all of this craziness was “Holy Shit!!” (yeah, I’m classy like that.) We did it. Our first accomplishment as team. I went from wanting to pre-order an epidural to delivering without any pain meds. I never expected to have a baby without meds, but that just goes to show you how much birth plans work when having a baby! They have their own plan.

You were here weighing 7lbs. 2 oz and 21 inches long. Born at Abington Memorial Hospital delivered by the awesome Dr. Allison Keen. A perfect, healthy baby. They immediately gave you to me to hold and they never took you away (until about an hour later when I needed a turkey hoagie). Since Tyler went to the NICU, this was a totally different experience for us. They didn’t even do measurements immediately. You got weighed about an hour or so after you were born (when the hoagie got delivered) and they didn’t measure you until we got to our regular room hours later. It was awesome. The man who wheeled me down to the room informed me about how and when I need to get pregnant again to have a girl. I think he said it has to be one year from now. Can you imagine the look on my face while he was saying this? Yeah, ok, I’m right on that. We got settled in our room and then the fun started. Oh yeah, that wasn’t even the fun part…

Around 6 am, I got up to go to the bathroom. I had A LOT of bleeding. Now, being this isn’t the first time I’ve done this I didn’t really panic too much. An aid happened to be in the room and I just mentioned it to her. She took one look and immediately called for backup. To make a long story short, I was having a hemorrhage. For 3 hours I bled and they couldn’t stop it. Slowly and slowly the nurses started piling up in my room and I think I had about 7 in there including the head nurse. Residents were trying to get it to stop, they took Zac out of the room, brought in the hemorrhage cart (which Dave kindly suggested they call the happy cart instead), were asking me my blood type in case they needed to do a transfusion and they worked on getting it to stop, but they couldn’t. They did ultrasounds, removed blood clots and then ended up giving me a combo of 3 medicines to finally make it stop. I thought childbirth hurt. This was even worse. It finally stopped and it took me a while to fully recoup from all of that. I actually felt great after the birth, it was the hemorrhage that was hard to recover from. After a few trips to the doctor, a trip to the ER after we got home and lots of iron pills later I felt like myself again within a few days.

The hospital experience I had with Zac was absolutely amazing! Everything about it was wonderful. I kind of felt like I was on vacation. We got discharged from the hospital on Leap Day, February 29th. It was a rainy day and maybe around 45-50 degrees (it was a mild winter). We got home on that rainy leap day and started to dive in to being a family of four. Grammy was there to help us out for another night and made us meals and cleaned and did everything she could to help us transition to this new life. It didn’t take long to adjust to having you around because unlike when you bring home your first child, life doesn’t stop this time. It keeps moving, the toddler keeps moving and we just blended you right in to everyday life. I look back now and can’t imagine what it was like with just 3 of us and sweet Zac you have been lighting up all our lives ever since! ♥

The bean is 6 months old!

Half a year - sheesh! We’ve got a growing, starting to move boy on our hands! Zac is growing up so much these days. He’s so aware of things and wants to get his hands on everything in sight! He rolls over both ways now and sits up pretty well by himself. He can stand by himself for a few seconds while holding on to something and when you put your arms out he reaches for you. Now that he can sit up, he’s able to play with Tyler, which I would say is one of his favorite things to do. And if I could guess I might just say Tyler is his favorite person at the moment. He lights up when he sees him and squeals and laughs at his big brother. With movement comes getting stuck in the crib rails a lot and he had to be freed last night because his entire leg was through the rails. Bumper time for sure. He’s starting to drop things and then look to see where they went and I think he’s starting to play the “I’ll drop something and you pick it up game”. Fun, fun. He also loves paper and magazines and will shred them up like crazy!

We had his 6 month checkup yesterday and everything was great. He’s weighing in at 15lbs 10oz (16%) and 26.25in. (36%) and his head is 17.25 (63%) (he was 26.75in. at the dermatologist last week, so maybe we’ll just go with 26.5 in.). He eats a lot of food, but I’m not sure where he puts it. He drinks about 4-5, 6-8 oz. bottles a day and eats cereal and fruit for lunch and then he eats a veggie and fruit for dinner. He eats stage 2 foods now and we try something new every day. He loves to eat the little cheese curls and we’ve given him things like pieces of baked potato and he seemed to enjoy that too. The other day he tried yogurt and it was a huge hit! He was sleeping through the night like a champ, but decided about 3 weeks ago to start waking up and crying until we gave him a bottle. The doctor confirmed yesterday what I’ve been thinking and we just need to start a little sleep boot camp so this doesn’t become a habit (he’s big enough where he doesn’t need a bottle in the middle of the night). Boot camp began last night. We’ll see how this goes.

It’s getting fun for sure and Zac continues to have such a calm demeanor and is SO pleasant. He’s smiley, giggly and cuddly. He sometimes gives a little "I'm scared of you face" if he’s doesn’t know someone, but it doesn’t take him long to warm up. When he’s on his belly it looks like he wants to move and he tries to get his legs going, but hasn’t gotten too far yet. I know they say with your 2nd child you’re smart enough to know that things get crazy once they move, but we’re ready for it and at the same time I can’t believe my little baby is getting to be not so little anymore.

Camping and beachin it...

We had a camp out in our backyard this past weekend. We roasted marshmallows, made smores, played hide and seek in the dark, watched a movie in the tent and ate popcorn until way past Tyler's normal bedtime. Zac and I slept in the house since he's decided that he now likes a bottle around 4 or 5 am these days and Dave and Tyler slept in the tent.

Tyler had so much fun. He kept telling us over and over how much fun he was having and after I left he and Dave laid down to watch a movie and fall asleep, he asked Dave "Can I put my arm around you?" and he tucked his little arm around Dave's neck and they watched a movie together. Dave said he almost cried when Tyler did that. Tyler slept the whole night and woke up at 6:30 and according to Dave sat up and dove right in to the popcorn bowl for more ha ha. Tyler was so proud of himself for camping with Dad!

On Sunday we decided to go to the beach for the day. We set out for Sea Isle, but ended up going to Cape May (where Tyler peed in the middle of a park in the city because "he had to GO!) so we could meet up with Amy, Ryan and Nash. Tyler is really starting to like the ocean and will even stand by himself and jump small waves. He likes to go out far with Dave and smash waves as he calls it and by the end of the day his eyes look like he was stung by something because he has so much salt water that hits his face. Guess we need to work on closing the eyes. He has grown by leaps and bounds considering last summer he wanted nothing to do with the water. What a difference a year makes. At the end of the day we were going to take a rare family picture and then Dave stepped on a big fish hook and it went through his toe. No family picture, but we did have one throbbing toe.



































And he still climbs like a nut....

Lots o' stuff!

There's been lots of moments lately that I want to bottle up because they've been awesome! We seem to have hit a nice groove around here with handling the kids and having some fun. It helps that both boys are just plain awesome, really they are. Things seem easier now a days and I'll soak this up because before we know it they'll probably be fighting over toys and wrestling in the yard making me nervous. We can go out, enjoy the nice end of summer weather and our boys are always up for a little adventure!

We went for a little hike to see a big Indian statue that sits in the woods near our house. There's an easy route and then a more treacherous route (as a man coming down from it described to us). Dave looked at me and said "Not too treacherous for us." So the man looked at us like we were bad parents and off we went up the hill. Treacherous somewhat, but nothing our little hiker couldn't handle. Tyler pretty much walked up the whole thing himself. The kid is good, he's pretty athletic for a two year old and not afraid of much. Dave and Zac followed right along. We took the easier route down to be safe, but got to see the big statue. We followed that with throwing rocks in the water, watching some dogs swim, a nice walk along the trails, add in a stop to check out some heavy machinery and that is what we call a great day around here!











We also had our first wagon ride with 2 passengers! I only got one picture, but we made it around the entire block like this. Other than a few toys being thrown from the wagon, there was no jumping out or craziness that happened other than a small stint of chasing a mouse down the street. Just some brothers having fun in the wagon. I consider this an accomplishment.



We went to check out a new park the other day. I think Dave enjoyed it more than Tyler and was pretending he was on American Ninja Warrior jumping around all the playground stuff. Then he had me trying out some of the stuff and we turned in to the parents who look ridiculous because we're swinging ourselves around on all the cool things at the playground. Oh well. We also got in a little baseball time. Tyler practiced running the bases, Dave was showing him how to pitch and Zac slept and was the gate keeper. I miss playing softball and can't wait until Tyler and I can play catch!















And some cuteness...





Oh to be a baby. If you're tired while eating dinner you just fall asleep in between bites of food.



I picked the kids up at school today and while leaving the parking lot this was happening in the back seat. I had to stop and capture it :)



Remember Fort Total Awesomeness? Well, our neighbors did some tree trimming and it's kind of gone. But, we now have Fort Boogie on the other side of the yard (named by Tyler) :)



Tyler had his first dentist appointment last week. Dave took him so there aren't any pictures. Unlike me, he's not much of a documenter. I would have had 50 pictures within a 10 minute span of him being there. He did pretty good and sat nicely except for when the cleaning brush came out. Dave had to hold him down so the hygienist could clean his teeth. Better Dave than me. He got a good report and Tyler knows that he has to keep brushing so he doesn't get an "cabities" :)