Archive for April, 2011
April Superlatives
Note: This is a retroactive post that I cobbled together in December of 2011 so I could make this page full of monthly recaps for the entire year (our first in our new house!). Yup, I’m just a bit type A. So here’s what we tackled throughout the month of April – high school yearbook style.
Most Outdoorsy: Digging Out The Liriope That Covered Nearly 80% Of The Future Patio Area
Most Domestic: Making Sue The Napkin into Sue The Pillow
Biggest Crybaby: Sharing Clara’s Terrifying Slash Miraculous Birth Story
Most Likely To Result In Cursing: Having An Epic Battle With My Sewing Machine And Squeezing Out A Party Banner
Hoppiest: DIYing An Easter Basket For Clara
Most Illuminating: Finishing Off The Freshly Built Console Table With Some Lamps & Other Accessories
Most Eco: Getting A Rain Barrel On Earth Day
Most Mature: Making New Wood Look Old
Most Likely To Result In Paint In Your Hair: Painting John’s Sister’s Apartment (along with making a photo wall for another relative and another DIY baby book)
Biggest Relief: Finishing The Big Console Table Build
Best Editing: Removing One Of The Most Oddly Placed Lights In The History Of The World
Most Festive: Making Party Invitations & Custom Clara Fabric (Thanks To John’s Scanned Handwriting & The Magic Of Spoonflower)
Most Well Hung: Finally Completing Our Hallway’s Double Sided Frame Gallery
Most Type-A: Hanging Two Mirrors-Turned-Dry-Erase-Boards In The Office For Compulsive List-Making
Least Type-A: Confessing My Goo-Related Secret (ok, and rectifying it with some good old fashioned elbow grease)
Most Likely To Take A Few Installments: Starting Our Console Table Project & Continuing Our Console Table Project & Further Continuing Our Console Table Project
Biggest Metal Heads: Tweaking A Large Set Of Iron Keys (and hanging them with twine as art)
Most Rebellious: Painting A Chair (yeah… it didn’t work)
Biggest Procrastinator: Organizing Our Closet (it only took us four whole months)
Biggest Slob: Sharing A Tour Of Our Not-So-Perfect (aka: Pretty Darn Messy) House
Least Successful: Attempting To Save My Brutally Injured Ceramic Dog
The Madness Begins
Note: For those reading this post during happy hour, feel free to turn it into a drinking game and take a sip every time you read the word liriope. Or maybe just a half-sip. Don’t want things to get crazy.
Woot. We’ve officially started to attack the side patio (previously mentioned here and here) that we want to bang out in time for Clara’s big b-day bash in two short weeks.
That’s right, in the words of Cee Lo we said “forget you” (yes, we prudes sing the PG version) to the insane ten-ish rows of liriope. And John only had to dig about half of it up thanks to two friends of ours who came over to help / steal some for their own homes in the liriope digging party to end all parties (we were happy to repay them with all the free liriope they could grab). Everyone used the shove-the-shovel-under-each-clump-and-step-on-it-to-pop-it-out method, and it worked like a charm. I think with three people the whole thing took a total of around 2.5 to 3 hours. And I got to hang out inside with Clara, except when we were making various patio-digging appearances to boost morale and bring ice water to the crew.
After the dirt settled we were left with a nice bare area that will soon become about two-thirds of our patio (the brick path still needs to be removed before we can begin digging out and leveling the soil for the next phase of the project which involves tamping, gravel, and sand).
So although we have a lot ahead of us, we’re just happy to finally be getting started after lots of talk. And there’s something about looking at a newly bare area that enables you to envision things so much more easily (like, say, a patio) that you couldn’t quite picture as well with all that dastardly liriope around.
We already shared this odd little photoshopped sketch to give you a vague idea of what we’re envisioning…
… and when it comes to the materials, we’re planning to use cobblestone pavers very similar to the ones in our driveway…
… but in order to get the best deal we priced some out at Home Depot, Lowe’s, and a local place called Southside Building Supply. The local guys won out with the best price per square foot by around 40 cents (and happily had just a two day delivery turnaround), but we’ll share more info, photos, and prices of the actual pavers once they arrive and we (hopefully) get ‘em laid (that’s what she said). And you know we like to overshare when it comes to the deets, so here’s the boring stuff that we did first for anyone at home who’d like to play along with us patio-fy with us:
- talked for way too long about possible dimensions and even used a garden hose to map out possible shapes
- schlepped around to those paver places that we mentioned above to find the best deal (more on that when the pavers arrive)
- called Miss Utility to confirm that there’s nothing buried under that area that we could dig into and somehow ruin (Miss Utility might be the local name, but they’re a public service group who contacts gas and water and electrical companies who then come out to mark things that are underground)
- dug out that pesky liriope (but we still have to remove the brick path, dig out more dirt, level things, add gravel, add sand, etc)
- made sure our bank account could support a pretty pricey project (well at least to us – the stone and other supplies like gravel, sand, & tools along with delivery costs may be around 1K, but considering we paid nearly 3K for our last patio, which was smaller, to be put in by the pros just weeks before our backyard wedding, we’re psyched to hopefully save a lot by doing it ourselves this time)
Thankfully we got confirmation that there’s nothing lurking under that side of the house from Miss Utility and we think we’ve even finalized a plan when it comes to cobblestone paver type as well as patio shape. More info/pics/sweating/rambling as we go. In the meantime, have any of you guys laid your own patios complete with digging, leveling, tamping, and lots of gravel and sand? We’re obnoxiously excited about it. Seriously, we need to get a life.
Psst- We announced this week’s contest winners, so click here to see if you’re one of them.
Psssst- Liriope, liriope, liriope. Just kidding.
Sue The Pillow (It’s Official)
Duuuuude. I got back on the proverbial sewing machine horse. What? You haven’t heard that expression. Whatever. The point is: Sue the Napkin is now Sue the Pillow! Or more accurately Sue The Pillows (yup, I made two of them).
Here are my materials:
- Four Sue The Napkins (I originally got ten when we found them on clearance at Crate & Barrel, but I picked up four more so I could make two pillows using four of them and still have ten leftover to use as dinner napkins).
- Oh Brother (my
trustysewing machine, more on him here) - Two old pillows to use as the “inside” of my new Sue pillow covers
- A needle and some brown thread to sew one edge of the pillow shut by hand (that way I can easily seam rip that last portion to free the pillow inside and make a different cover down the line if I’d like).
I’ll spare you every detail, but I basically just stacked two napkins on top of each other with the good printed side touching (and the back of the fabric showing on the top and the bottom of the stack) and used my sewing machine to sew three of the four sides completely shut while it was all inside out like that. I even turned the corner and did about an inch or two on each end of the remaining fourth side while they were still inside out on the machine. Then I removed the napkins and turned them right side in, stuffed a pillow inside my little napkin envelope (which now had the printed side facing out), and stitched the remaining expanse of about 10″ closed by hand with my brown thread (which blends in surprisingly well).
As I’ve mentioned complained about before, I’ve ironically never had an issue with sewing by hand (it’s like painting by hand or demo-ing by hand, both of which I can do – I only have issues when I rely on a maniacal robot sewing machine). But as much as I whine about the ol’ new sewing machine, it did me right for my little pillow party. Am I a professional seamstress? No. Can I sew three straight lines without ending up with a birdsnest-looking-pile-o’-thread? I did this time. Strike up the band! Cue the fireworks!
And on the surprisingly-not-as-annoying-as-I-thought-it-would-be side of things, it only took me about four commercial breaks during Modern Family to whip up both pillows (so maybe about 12 minutes total? I was watching last week’s episode by the way, so don’t ruin this week’s for me).
Then I just stitched them closed during Bethenny Ever After (this took me much longer than it should have because I kept stopping to stare at the screen and guffaw at my imaginary BFF). But all in all, they look a lot less demented much better than I expected. Actually – dare I say it? – like real pillows.
Oh and as pretty as the pillows look when they’re all fluffed and photographed for the blog, more often than not they really look like this. Because Burger makes it a personal goal of his to squish every pillow in the house into an ugly little blob. But he’s cute so we deal with it.
Sometimes he even stops to nuzzle Sue, as if to say “you’re my favorite napkin-turned-pillow too.” It’s always nice to get pillow validation from an eight pound chihuahua.
So that’s the tale of Sue The Pillow(s). Have you guys sewn any napkin pillows lately? Did you die over the whole Gloria hair-rings/earrings thing on Modern Family last week? Me too. Can’t wait to watch this week’s episode tonight.
Let’s Take This Outside
First of all, the outpouring of kindness and support that you guys showed to our family yesterday is both humbling and amazing. Thanks for the helpful words of encouragement and for sharing your stories. But enough with the heavy stuff. How about something light and fluffy? Let’s go on a looooong overdue photo tour of our yard (a la Katie B’s), shall we?
You’ve gotten a few select glimpses of what we’re working with in this post about our carport/driveaway, this post about our “alley”, and this one about the magnolia out front. But there’s plenty more to show (that’s your warning that this post will be photo-heavy – so much so that it took me three weeks just to muster the energy to finally edit down the 100+ pics that I snapped a couple of weekends ago and write this beast of a post).
So let’s start somewhere familiar – the front yard (as sort of pictured in our header).
It’s smaller than our last house’s front yard (i.e. the house is closer to the street) which I see as a good thing because there’s less grass to mow. Sah-weet. Actually, there are enough bush-borders, areas of groundcover, and that big dirt circle under the magnolia that ensure there isn’t too much grass at all. Of course we have some long term plans to transform our house’s curb appeal and pretty much every square foot of yard that we have (just like we did slowly and steadily over 4+ years at our last house) but as for specifics, we’re not quite there yet. But it should be fun to see where we end up in a few years.
Our general plans for the front are mainly to make it feel more open and inviting to the front porch. Like our last house, there are lots of borders of bushes (mostly boxwoods and azaleas) that act as a natural fence around the grassy area seen above. But in our opinion, it just means a lot of visual interruption – especially when it comes to feeling welcomed towards the front door. We’ve also always felt that short squat houses like ranches look best with some open area and lower and more varied plantings than walls of large shrubs (so there aren’t a bunch of things in front of the house to dwarf it even more).
No one really uses our front door now (unless they’re selling something). In fact even FedEx uses the side door in our carport to drop things off. We can’t really blame ‘em because the front pathway is so narrow that it doesn’t really say “walk this way.” I actually had to trim some bushes on move-in day just to fit furniture through (it didn’t help that the bushes were also dusted with snow). Since the path is such a nice natural continuation to the sweet paver stones that they used to create the driveway, we’d love for it to at least look like it’s usable someday – even if everyone still goes to the carport.
So we’re thinking that trimming back / removing / transplanting some of these bushes above in favor of some lower profile landscaping will help open up the entrance on both sides of the path. Which will hopefully make it feel more inviting and show off our full-of-potential front porch (which we also have plans to pimp as we go).
But as much as bush-borders are a theme on our property, it doesn’t compare to the sheer volume of liriope (aka “monkey grass”) that you can find around here. Just check out the sloped area on this side of the front yard. Yup, it’s above that stone wall and below it, about 10+ plants deep:
This particular sea of liriope is actually kinda welcome because it makes for a virtually self-sustaining spot of landscaping, though it would be nice to add a bit more color to it at some point. But we’re not über-focused on that area because we’re so distracted / confounded by the area next to it. Yes, this big wild spot of leaves and tall grasses next to that stone wall and brick path is still our property.
This is the area that separates our house from our neighbors to the left (as you face the house). And I must say that we really appreciate the breathing room. Which reminds me – I should point out that this lot is surprisingly similar in size to our last house (almost an acre), BUT this lot is kinda square whereas our last house was a long skinny rectangle – with about half of it being woods in the back.
(Imagine a nice little whole-yard sketch here- I’ll have to whip one up in a future post).
The “pro” of our new squarer lot is that it puts more space between us and the next door neighbors (instead of just including a seemingly endless dense and thick woods in the back of the house). But the “con” is that instead of having a maintenance-free forest hidden in the back, we get “wild” spaces like this one shown above instead… which is visible from the street, btw. We’re not 100% certain, but we’d love to naturalize this area even more so it looks lush and semi-foresty instead of oddly bare but not quite tended to (tall grasses and wildflowers come to mind along with more large trees and shrubs). No rush though, we’ll figure it out someday…
And even though our lot is much less long and skinny than our last one, we still have plenty of raw un-landscaped area in the back. Actually, we have a ton of it. Sidenote: can you believe that’s the back of our house? Thanks to the addition it’s so different from the front (we think the peak is so charming) but someday we hope to bring some peaks into the front of the house and paint the hardboard siding (and possibly the brick) to make it feel more cohesive. But that might be five years down the line or even further. Gotta think long and hard about big changes like that to make sure we don’t do anything hasty that we’ll regret hate with a passion down the line.
Apparently this expanse used to be more heavily wooded, but somewhere along the line it was cleared and now it just sits as a leaf depository. Total bummer because we loved the private wooded feeling beyond the grassy part of our first house’s backyard.
The old John & Sherry would just thrown down some grass seed to make the entire area look more finished, but we’ve sort of outgrown our “let’s grow grass everywhere” phase (thanks in part to reading the Organic Lawn Care Manual last year). So our current plan is to keep this portion of the backyard “wild” so it’s one less area that we need to maintain/mow/water/weed/otherwise tend to. We plan to slowly plant fast growing evergreens that will create some nice privacy and bring back that wooded feeling that we love. Because there’s already enough landscaped backyard to maintain for our tastes. Behold…
Overall, we think the backyard is super charming. Which is a bit surprising considering how much we didn’t enjoy having pathways-lined-by-bushes everywhere in our last house’s yard. I think the key difference is that these pathways are brick, not pea gravel (which was a weeding NIGHTMARE). Though they obviously could use a quick pass with the leaf blower. But see those round planting beds on either side of the path the branches from left to right in the photo above? Those are goners. Sherry thinks that planting grass there to create more of an unobstructed area for pooch running and kid playing (especially when the offspring is older and excited to play tag or have races or play running bases) it’ll be nice to phase out a few of those small areas that break up that lush green grass. So we’re thinking that the brick paths can stay but the round beds will go.
And even though the low-profile liriope border along the path is an improvement over the big obstructive boxwoods in our last backyard, we’re not crazy about it – especially the fact that it’s 3 or 4 plants deep in many places. It just makes the paths feel narrower and more closed in. And since we’ve always preferred more organic transitions (vs. heavy distinct borders) we’ll probably dig up a lot of the monkey grass eventually (or we’ll post one of those you-dig-it-and-it’s-yours ads on craigslist) and just grow grass right up the edges of the brick paths for a more flush and clean look.
Liriope isn’t the only border going on back here, though. We’ve got more stone borders than you can shake a stick at (which would probably break your stick, btw).
Sherry’s not a fan of them visually (too interruptive for her tastes) and I’m not a fan of having to break out the weed-whacker to trim the grass against them. I could learn to live with them in some places (like where they make a distinct break between the grassy yard and the wild leafy abyss behind). But other places – like this little tree in the middle of the grass – are a bit too disruptive (Sherry wants to transplant that guy into the woodsy back part of the yard anyway to de-clutter the grassy area a bit more anyway).
One thing is for sure- all of those stone borders are a pain in my arse when I’m mowing.
(Yes, I’m using my gas-powered mower and not my push mower for the back, since it only really works well on long, straight yards – which the back sadly isn’t).
Now that we’ve covered the front, side, and back yards – let’s move around the house to one last spot that we recently mentioned in this post (you can see how much older the pics are in this post by clicking over to that one for more lush leaves and stuff). It sits behind our carport, just off our sunroom and gets called everything from “Liriope Heaven” to “Burger’s Bathroom.” Here’s the view of it from the carport:
For Burger, it’s perfect. It’s fenced on all sides, completely visible from the house and has plenty of curious spots to sniff / mark… and even a little zen lawn ornament.
As we’ve mentioned a few times, we’d love to continue our liriope-removal party over here (can you tell I’m trying to psyche myself up by calling it a “party?” – maybe putting it all up on craigslist is the way to go) and then we’ll be DIYing a stone patio (all by ourselves if all goes well) so we’ve got more usable outdoor living space. I’m sure Burger would argue that he’s getting plenty of use out of it now, but he got out-voted at the family meeting. Poor guy. But he loved lounging on our back patio at the old house so methinks he’ll be down with the plan in the end.
Right now our only outdoor entertaining space is this patio off of the sunroom and living room that isn’t even big enough for our grill (fyi, that patio furniture was left by the previous owners and yes, Sherry’s broken ceramic dog still sits sadly by the door).
The sunroom used to be some sort of outdoor space before it was enclosed, actually. You can even still see the original brick staircase that used to lead up to it. Funny, right? Well, funny to you and me – so annoying to the wife. She just doesn’t understand how someone completely enclosed the sunroom and heated and cooled it and added a million outlets and a fan but didn’t take the time to remove those odd stairs. I suggested putting some potted plants on them but she thinks it’ll be too busy and cluttered looking so we’ll have to come up with some other plan. Someday.
All-in-all, we’re smitten with the outdoor spaces that we got with this house. None of them are perfectly “us” yet, but that’s probably why we’re so excited about them – there’s so much possibility and potential. Even if some of it is buried more deeply (under rows and rows of liriope for example).
We’re falling in love with our surroundings more everyday as things start to bloom and green up. Like our new Most Favorite Tree In The Universe – this maple that’s grafted so it has two different colored leaves. Yeah, that’s one tree. Nature rocks my socks.
Maybe we love it so much because it provides this awesome shot of color through the window of our guest room (which we catch a glimpse of every time we walk down the hall away from Clara’s room). This picture does not do it justice.
It’s actually a bummer I didn’t wait longer to take these pictures (three weeks from camera to post is inexcusable) because just yesterday our azaleas started to get some color on them. So rather than delay this post any longer by retaking and resizing all of these images (which might be another three inexcusable weeks), Sherry snapped a few flower shots for me to throw in here at the end. Ooooh…. ahhhh…..
Phew! Now that you’ve seen all of these “before” pictures of the yard – and now that the weather is starting to be consistently nice – we can start tackling some of those outdoor projects. Well, as soon as Sherry’s allergies calm down a bit (our car was so green with pollen last week that it looked painted). But she’s working that Netti Pot like a fiend. You’re welcome for that visual.
Update: Apparently this post was confusing (even to Sherry) so this updated post (complete with a sketch and a video) should help.
Clara’s Birth Story
It’s nearly a year late (I can’t believe I’m going to be the mother of a one year old in three short weeks). And the reason for the delay is simple. Thinking / typing / talking about the day that Clara was born still scares the pants off of me. Even 11+ months later. This little lady made quite the dramatic entrance.
Yup, the day that Clara came into the world was the most amazing life-changing day of my existence, but it was easily also the single most terrifying one. I’ve mentioned some details a few times in comments on other Clara-related posts (many readers wanted to know all about the bean’s birth right away) but I think now that she’s almost a year old I’ve processed that day enough to really share it fully with the interweb. By no means am I over it (don’t really know if I ever will be), but I can talk about it now without crying. So that’s a start, right? A few friends of mine have actually recommend that I write this post as part of the whole healing process (a lot of the posts that we write are actually for our own benefit since this is just an online diary to document our lives for our own selfish purposes, haha). So I thought it made sense. I know that how Clara came into the world will affect future pregnancies and how nervous/anxious/wary/afraid I’ll be if any of the same complications pop up again, so perhaps talking about it after processing it for almost a year might help me come to terms with it a bit more. So here it goes (deep breaths, deep breaths).
I had an amazing low risk fabulous pregnancy. No high blood pressure. No weird pains. Over 100 days of morning sickness (yes I counted) but that’s to be expected. Or at least tolerated in the name of baking a human. Other than that (and once that ended) it was amazeballs as my girl Bethenny Frankel would say. I felt great. I loved feeling my little bean kicking around in there. I basked in the glory of being prego. I told John I could do it ten more times. Life was good.
My tiny 4’11″ mom had two natural (and very fast) child births, so I had high hopes of a normal (if not very quickly progressing) delivery. Maybe without drugs, and maybe with them. I wasn’t going into it with any strong feelings either way, but I had taken some classes on pain management and learned about The Bradley Method so I was actually feeling very bring-it-on by the end. Either way I kept telling myself “in the end the baby will be out and I’ll get to meet her, so no fear is allowed – it’s going to be a happy day – with drugs or without them. No pressure. Just try to go with the flow and relax.” I had orders to “run, don’t walk” to the hospital if I had any signs of labor (my mother had me in four hours and my brother within two) so that had me a little on edge, but the only thing I worried about was having the baby at home or in the car since I feared it would all happen really fast because that runs in the family.
John was working downtown at the time and I was at home without a car (we’re a one car family, so he’d take the car during the day and after he came home we’d run any errands I needed to do). So admittedly the whole being at home without the car thing was kind of scary but I knew about fifty neighbors who volunteered to drive me to the hospital if things got crazy and John couldn’t make it home to get me in time. The funny thing is that he answered his cell phone on the first half-a-ring for the last two weeks of my pregnancy, so I knew he was on high alert and was confident that he’d hightail it home in time (it was only a 15 minute drive).
I never felt a single contraction (not even Braxton Hicks) until the day I went into labor, but I knew I was dilated to a 3.5 at 39 weeks (yes I walked around at a 3.5 without going into labor with my first child, which I hear is really uncommon). Clara must have been holding onto the walls in there. So although I was still about a week “early,” my doc said I was going to have the baby any second. Hence John being on high alert. Oh yeah and my belly looked like this. I was officially ready to pop.
I noticed on the morning of May 14th (it was a Friday) that I was having some pretty intense contractions. My first contractions ever (well that I felt). At first they were oddly irregular so I thought it was just prelabor (didn’t even tell John because I didn’t want him to get all crazy and come running home for a false alarm). But slowly they started to establish a pattern and by the time I started timing them they were just four minutes apart. And they were an 11 on the pain scale. I felt like my insides were ripping apart and my back was killing me. I called John who was out to lunch with all of his coworkers to celebrate his very last day at the office (he was resigning to come on full time as a dad/blogger) and told him to get the eff home. He laughed about how good my timing was because he was just finishing his burrito. I groan-cried in the middle of a contraction and he knew I meant business. So home he came flew.
By the time we got to the hospital my contractions were already two minutes apart. I remember having a hard time even walking from the car to the door because they were just coming nonstop and they were bring-you-to-your-knees painful. I thought I might have a baby right there in the parking lot. They sent me straight into labor and delivery. As we waited for the doctor to arrive and check my progress my water broke in the hospital bed- but instead of being clear it was red. So much blood. Very scary. I didn’t even see most of it (thanks to my giant belly and the sheet over my lower half) but John did along with my OB who happened to be in the room. John’s face went white and the OB snapped into hyperdrive.
Immediately the room filled with frenzied nurses and doctors and they explained that I was having a placental abruption, which happens when the placenta has inexplicably detached from the uterine wall. This is very bad news before the baby is born. And it explains the feels-like-my-body-is-ripping-apart pain I’d been experiencing. It’s an extremely dangerous complication for the baby (since they get their nourishment from the placenta and can go into shock and die) and the mother can hemorrhage (and can also die in cases of extreme bleeding). So it was a pretty dire situation all around (although nobody stopped to explain it, the look on the doctor and nurse’s faces kind of said it all).
Within about a minute they had me in the OR and within three minutes they had sweet baby Clara out thanks to an amazingly fast emergency c-section. They saved her life by acting so fast.
It was a blur. All I remember was them running my gurney into the walls while turning corners in the hallway trying to get me into an ER as fast as possible. They looked panicked. And it scared the heck out of me. I didn’t care about me or my body – just the baby. I remember screaming inside of my head “just cut her out of me, cut and I don’t care if I feel pain or if I get hurt or if I have scars all over, just save her. Do it right here in the hallway if you have to.” Of course my lips weren’t moving. It was one of those out-of-body mind screams that nobody else can hear.
John suddenly wasn’t with me. They just left him behind and ran with me down the hall calling up to get emergency doctors and nurses on hand since the main OR was already in use for a scheduled c-section. I remember people popping out of doorways saying “I’ll help” and joining the frenzied mob and going over all of my stats (blood type, number of weeks prego, etc) while saying things like “baby in distress” and “profuse bleeding.” I couldn’t have created a scarier nightmare scenario in my head if I tried. Lots of people swarmed into the OR in the next thirty seconds. But no John. I could barely breathe at the thought of something going so wrong without him by my side. Once they had me fully prepped for surgery (which happened within less than a minute, they were so amazing) someone must have run off to get him.
I wish I could say it was thanks to me calling out for him but I was in shock so I couldn’t talk or even move. I was frozen. It almost felt like I wasn’t even there and I was watching it all happen to someone else on TV. John says he remembers standing in the hallway as everyone ran off with me. So freaked out and completely alone. Just waiting. That always makes me cry when I think about it. I didn’t know it at the time because of the chaos, but someone had tossed scrubs at him when I was being wheeled out (he would need them since it had to be a sterile environment for the c-section) so he was just standing there in the hallway wearing his scrubs and waiting. And going crazy. Finally someone came out to retrieve him and he was allowed to come hold my hand right as they started to cut. I just stared at him. I was frozen. I didn’t cry. I didn’t talk. I was just in shock at how quickly everything was happening.
Once they opened me up they saw that not only was Clara in distress from the placental abruption, but the umbilical cord had somehow been pinched (which is called “cord prolapse”) so she was without oxygen while fighting to make it through the abruption. I heard them toss out the word “cord prolapse” (they didn’t have time to explain what was going on, so I learned the details later) but in my odd state of panic and shock I thought they were talking about someone else. I was the one with a placental abruption. The scariest page of my birth book at home. The one I didn’t even read because it wouldn’t happen to me because I didn’t have high blood pressure or any of the other risk factors. My baby couldn’t also be dealing with cord prolapse. How could that be? Who could be that unlucky? Then they said “she’s not going to cry ok – don’t wait for her to cry just try to stay calm and breathe slowly.” That was when my heart broke and I started to cry. I guess I was crying for her.
I couldn’t see anything thanks to the screen they threw up before cutting into me, but they were right. She didn’t cry when they yanked her out with all of their might. All I remember was extreme pressure but no pain. Well, no physical pain. Emotional pain = off the charts. They had NICU specialists standing by, and when I heard them say “NICU” out loud that it was the first time I actually thought “what if this doesn’t end the way I thought it always would? What if all those pep talks I gave myself about it being a happy day because “drugs or no drugs I would get to meet my sweet baby girl” weren’t going to be true?
John later admitted that thought had hit him a lot earlier than it had hit me. He said he knew something was very wrong when he saw all the blood before they whisked me away. And when he was standing alone in the hallway after I got wheeled off to the OR he wondered if things were about to end badly. See why that visual of him in the hall makes me cry? It was just so surreal and terrifying. John later confessed that once he was allowed into the OR to hold my hand that he couldn’t really watch as they pulled her out of me, even though he was much taller than the screen they had set up to block my view. Not because he was afraid of the blood or passing out, but because he didn’t want to see our baby “not make it.”
But after about one felt-like-eternity minute they got her to moan. Kind of like a kitty meowing. It was so soft and weak and just heart breaking. I remember thinking “I want her to cry so she’s ok, but I don’t want to hear her if she’s not going to be ok because I’m falling in love already. I can’t hear her moan and then fall silent- she has to start wailing. Right now!” But no dice. I remember thinking that all the silence felt so loud. Like it was almost deafening to listen so desperately for some sign of a cry. Clara got a 4 on her initial Apgar test, which we later heard is usually the lowest score you can get before permanent brain damage if things don’t improve by the five minute Apgar retest. They didn’t announce the time of birth or her weight very loudly or say anything like in the movies, you know like “it’s a girl!” or “happy birthday!” or “what’s her name?” and she didn’t come lay on my chest. I still couldn’t even see her thanks to the screen they had put up to block the surgery. They were all just working on this baby that I couldn’t even see. My baby. And I just stared at John in a silent freeze, tears in my eyes but nothing coming out of my mouth. At some point after closing me up the doctor said “she’s bleeding – she reopened, get over here” and half of the team ran back to work on me. My incision which had been sewn and stapled shut had reopened and I could hear from the doctors tone that it wasn’t an ideal situation. But I still wasn’t scared for me. In any other scenario it would have been intensely alarming, but I had a one track mind: the baby. I want to hear the baby cry.
It felt like five years went by (in reality it was less than five minutes) but slowly the people working on me thinned out and the people working on Clara seemed to start moving more casually and slower. As if it wasn’t such an emergency anymore. I remember thinking “this is either a very good or a very bad sign.” Thankfully, by her five minute Apgar test she pinked up, cried a glorious and spirited cry, and got a 9 (we later learned that the five minute Apgar retest is the most important and revealing one). They said that a 9 was as close to perfect as it gets and that even super healthy children rarely get 10s. And they told us that it was so great that she rebounded so well and was looking fantastic. She was a fighter for sure. They even let John go over and see her (I was still strapped down so I had to wait).
She wasn’t out of the woods yet, but we didn’t know that at the time, so we started to rejoice and John even took some video on the iPhone to bring back over to show to me since I hadn’t even laid eyes on her yet (we were so lucky that the iPhone happened to be in John’s pocket before all hell broke lose, otherwise we wouldn’t have any documentation of Clara’s birth at all). We later learned they were somehow testing her cord blood to see if she was without oxygen for so long that she sustained permanent brain damage. Only when the test came back all-clear (indicating that there were no worries of that) did the nurses and doctors really seem to relax.
Apparently infants who live after a placental abruption have a 40-50% chance of complications, which range from mild to severe (and sometimes mothers who survive end up with a hysterectomy to control the hemorrhaging). Only then did it start to sink in how lucky we really had been. And what a miracle our baby girl really is.
Finally, after what literally felt like days, they wrapped her up and brought her over to me. My arms were strapped down from the surgery, so John held her right near my head and I just stared at her in disbelief. I was still in shock, and bloated with fluids from the IV along with fear and disbelief and unconditional love.
What did I do to deserve such a happy ending? How would I have survived coming home empty handed to a beautiful nursery that I shared with the world while being so confident that I was guarnteed a cute little baby to put in that crib? Basically it was the scariest day of our lives, and I still ask why. Why me (in that annoying “poor me” way) and why me (in the “why-was-I-so-lucky-she-was-spared” way). But the main thing I feel is full. Of relief. Of gratitude. Of love for my little fighter. My little miracle. I’m SO THANKFUL that the doctors and nurses worked so quickly to come to her (and my) rescue. I’ll never know for sure, but if another team had been on duty I don’t know that I would have had the same outcome. They were just so on it. So invested and so amazing. And I can’t even begin to think about what could have happened if I wasn’t in the hospital when I started bleeding.
Other nurses and doctors in the hospital dropped in to see us for days just to tell us how lucky we were (news of our complications were apparently the talk of the hospital). We even had a friend on another floor (coincidentally she was there on the same day that I went into labor for a pre-term labor scare) who had overheard nurses and doctors talking about “that woman who had both a cord prolapse and a placental abruption at the same time but the baby actually survived.” Only later did she find out that it was me they were talking about. I still get chills when I think about that. How lucky we were. How scary it was. And how gorgeous and amazing that little girl in my arms was. And still is.
So that’s the story of the scariest/best day of our lives. Whew. No wonder we’re obsessed with the girl.
As for if those complications are more likely to occur with any subsequent pregnancies, cord prolapse is totally random and can happen to anyone, so it doesn’t become more likely if you’ve experienced it before (but it’s rare, so if you’re prego and reading this story know that my combination of complications were about as likely as winning the lottery). However, placental abruption is more likely to reoccur (around one in four women experience it again) and it can happen as early as around twenty weeks (when the baby isn’t viable yet, which means the baby wouldn’t make it). So it can be devastating and scary. I have strict orders to wait two full years between pregnancies to let everything heal up nice and strong, which puts about three years between Clara and her younger brother or sister, assuming all goes well. I’m fine with the wait since I’m happy to just enjoy Clara for a while and take that time to continue to process the whole birth experience and build up my courage. But I’m sure when I’m pregnant again I’ll be much less happy go lucky about it.
Which is really sad. John keeps begging me to let it be the same joyful and unabashedly exciting time as it was before. But I know myself. And I’ll be on high alert. Searching for any signs or symptoms that something’s wrong. And scared even if there aren’t any signs of trouble (because there weren’t any before I started feeling contractions with Clara- it just all came out of nowhere). I’m scared that I might even be afraid to get a nursery ready. You know, so as not to jinx things. So my plan is to know myself, and accept that I’m going to be scared. But to do my best to enjoy it as much as I can and remind myself that I now know what an abruption feels like (so I should instantly be able to identify it) and that I have more information than I had with Clara (plus the doctors also know about my history now that I’ve had it happen). So I’ll hopefully have just as good of an outcome should it reoccur, as long as it doesn’t happen before the baby is developed enough to be delivered.
But I’m not gonna lie. I’m going to be petrified.
I also might be a “high risk” pregnancy next time without any chance of natural labor (if signs of another abruption occur they’ll rush me to a c-section if the baby is old enough to live outside the womb). I’m ok with that. Anything for a healthy baby. Now not only am I open when it comes to drugs or no drugs, I’m totally down with a c-section too. Slice and dice, baby. Whatever it takes.
