welcome vivian faith!

We waited all day Thursday for the hospital to call us in for induction, but apparently it was a very busy day there and they never had a room for us. So, Phil took advantage of the beautiful sunny day and went golfing. I hung out at VBS with mom and AnneMarie and Liam. That night, there was still no call so we ended up getting to go to the VBS family night program where we got to see Liam and the other kid perform the songs they had learned that week. I was glad we got to do that because it meant a lot to Liam. He was so proud of himself and had a great time singing and dancing. Afterward he ran to me in the audience and said “Mommy I danced really loud for you!” It made me cry. They served ice cream cones outside the church and we watched the kids run around and play. Liam felt bad for me that I didn’t get to have ice cream (soon no more diet!) and kept offering me licks of his. AnneMarie let Ari and Kaia eat ice cream for the first time (don’t tell their daddy!) and they were really cute getting messy.

That night we stayed up watching tv and hoping the hospital would still call. I started having really strong contractions about 10 minutes apart for hours and I was hoping maybe I would just go into full labor and get to go in anyway. But they slowed down and I figured I should try to get some rest. Phil set his alarm and planned to go into work the next day so we wouldn’t waste another one of his vacation days.

Just before the alarm went off at 6am, the phone rang. I was so excited! They had a room waiting for me! We got ready fast and went in to say goodbye to Liam. “Where you going Mama?” he asked half asleep. “Daddy and I are going to have the baby come out of my tummy and you will stay here with Grandma ok?” I said. “The doctor will help you?”, he asked. “Yep, I love you Kiddo.” I teared up looking at him sleeping there, knowing our lives were about to change so much.

As we drove to the hospital the sky was dark and stormy with thunder and lightning. We arrived around 7:30 and got right into a room where they started monitoring me. My contractions were already pretty strong but still sporadic. Around 9am the doctor came in to check me and determined I was between 3 and 4 centimeters dilated and 60% effaced, not a bad place to start! Since I was already in early labor but contractions were starting and stopping, they decided to go ahead with the pitocin and started me on a low dose around 10:30. For hours I felt great. My contractions picked up but I was so excited to be there. Phil and I just hung out and talked. It was so nice to just be there spending time together. We read books, ate lunch, watched old episodes of Mythbusters. As my labor progressed I did some yoga and bounced on the exercise ball.

At 3:15 the baby gave me a big kick and I felt what I though was my water breaking, but I wasn’t sure (this baby has a tendency to kick my right in the bladder sometimes, ha ha, but this time felt different). Soon after that my contractions really began to get strong so I realized that probably had been my water. I felt like I should be moving around so I asked Phil to walk around the hallways with me. We walked for about half an hour and got back to our room just after 5pm where the doctor checked me again. This time I was 5 centimeters and 90%. They usually say it’s about 1 cm of progress per hour while in active labor so I though to myself, “Ok five more hours of this…I can do this.” I decided I wanted to walk some more to keep up the progress and just as I was about to get up I suddenly felt a little dizzy and needed to lay down.

Throughout the day I had been texting AnneMarie who was with my whole family to keep them updated. At 5:43 I texted “It’s starting to get intense but I’m doing good.” Little did I know how quickly things would happen after that! Within minutes I started to feel really nauseous and having trouble focusing my vision. Contractions were really picking up and I told my nurse that I almost felt like I needed to push but I though that couldn’t be true since I was only 5 cm. She said she would page my doctor. By the next contraction I told her more urgently that I definitely needed to push so she began calling for “any doctor right now!”. It was just at shift change so the doctor that had been with me was just leaving. One more contraction and I was yelling “I can’t not push!” so she hit the emergency call button and instantly there were ten nurses (but still no doctors!) in the room. They told me not to push so they could check my cervix first, but when they looked they saw the baby’s head and knew it was too late. The doctor who had just left to go home ran into the room with her purse over her shoulder and barely got her smock on in time. Just three pushes in five minutes and the baby was out. There were so many people that neither Phil or I could see right away so I asked “what is it?” He got a quick glance and said, “It’s a little boy…no, it’s a girl! It’s a girl! They wrapped her up and put her on my chest and I couldn’t stop kissing her. Phil leaned in to look at her and kissed me. It all happened so fast I felt like I was in a dream. After holding her a little while the pediatricians came in and wanted to see her because her breathing sounded not quite right. They took her to the NICU to check her out and Phil went with her. I lay there and realized, “I just gave birth…without anesthesia!...and it’s a girl!” I sat up in the now quiet room and looked out the window. Rays of sunshine had broken through the dark clouds.

I wanted more than anything to go be with the baby but I didn’t want to rush myself. When Liam was born he went to the NICU as well and I was in such a hurry to go see him that I stood up too soon and passed out and then they wouldn’t let me get up for hours. I knew Phil was with her and she would be fine so I rested and ordered myself some food. Plus, I was thrilled to be done with the low carb diet! Hello macaroni and cheese and chocolate cake!

My own doctor arrived then and came to ask me how I was. She was disappointed to have missed the birth but glad everything went well. She asked what we had named her, “Vivian Faith” I said, for the first time out loud. I choked up a bit. Then Phil came back to check on me. He told me she was doing great and the doctors were just checking everything out to make sure she was fine after all of the scares we had during the pregnancy. They had decided to do a chest x-ray and did see some air pockets around the lungs where they weren’t fully inflating, but they said that was pretty common and would most likely go away in a day or two. Still, they wanted to keep her in the NICU at least overnight to observe her breathing. I was really disappointed but not surprised. I had expected her to be in the NICU and was just relieved they didn’t need to do any procedures on her. Phil said he had been holding her and she was already rooting around looking for milk, so I should go try to feed her. After I finished eating we went down the hall to where she was. I held her and kissed her and brought her to my breast where she latched on right away. She fed so well and it was such an amazing thing to experience after all the trouble with feeding I had last time with Liam.

We stayed with her for a long time before moving to our recovery room on the next floor down. Mom and AnneMarie had said they were coming after Liam and the twins were in bed since it was too late for everyone to visit. They arrived before midnight and we took them up to meet Vivian. Since she wasn’t on any oxygen or anything I was able to continue feeding her every few hours throughout the night. She fed great every time, which was really reassuring. In the early morning light we stared at her and fell in love with her as it sunk in that she was our daughter. I watched Phil hold her and noticed how whenever he spoke she looked right at him with wide open eyes. She was daddy’s girl already. 

On Saturday morning we met with the NICU team to discuss her care plan. They basically said she was doing great and passing all of the tests…which is why they were so confused because based on the issues that had happened in pregnancy and the concerns they saw in the chest x-ray, they would not have expected her to be doing this well. They wanted to keep her a little longer for observation and then discuss the possibility of moving her to the special care nursery, which was closer to our room. I cried. She looked so fine to me that I didn’t understand why we couldn’t just take her home. We went back to our room where I cried some more. We kept making the trip upstairs every 2-3 hours to feed her. It was exhausting but something I looked forward to every time.

Around 3:00 Liam, Mom, Dad, Anne, Tim, Ari, Kaia, Frank came to visit. When Liam walked into our room we were all ready to hug him and tell him how much we missed him. We had read that the best way to introduce your child to their new sibling was to pay attention to them first, then ask them if they wanted to meet the baby. But Liam didn’t run to us like I expected, instead he walked right past us and began searching the room “Where’s the baby?” We picked him up and hugged him and explained that the baby was upstairs and we would go see her soon. Then we gave him a gift “from Vivian” that we had brought. It was just some coloring books and a stuffed monkey and a few other things, “She got me a present?” he said, so pleased. He was really excited.

We left everyone else in the room and held hands with him as we went down the hall to the elevators. We let him push the buttons, which he loved. We had to have him checked out at the NICU desk where they took his temperature and made sure he was healthy enough to enter. He noticed our I.D. bracelets which we explained gave us permission to visit baby Vivian, he insisted that he needed one too so the nurse made him one that said “Big Brother to Vivian”. He was very proud of it. We showed him how to scrub at the hand washing station before we entered, then we walked down the hall to her room. He looked in awe through the window of the incubator where she slept. We sat him down with a big pillow and put her into his arms. I was so proud of him and how interested he was in her. I didn’t know how he would respond but he seemed to be very happy to be a big brother. Later my mom told me how he had been wearing his “Big Brother” shirt all day yesterday as they waited for the news, and then he insisted on sleeping in it and wearing it again today. After a while Phil took him back to our room where he played with the books and things in his gift bag “from Vivian.” The rest of the family took turns coming in to see her as I fed her.

Around 4pm the doctors finally decided to move her down to the special care nursery on our floor. I was glad to have her nearer to us but I cried anyway because I really just wanted to take her home. At least now they would let her come to our room for feedings so I didn’t have to go up and down all the time. Later that night Phil’s Aunt Nancy and Uncle Mike came to visit.

On Sunday morning we met with our family practice doctors and they decided to move her into our room with us. I was so overjoyed to finally not be separated from her. We held her forever. We stayed in our room all day that day as people came to visit. We saw Phil’s cousin Susanna and her husband Kyle, then his Uncle Jim and Aunt Ingrid. Mom came again with Liam and Tim, AnneMarie, Ari and Kaia. This time the girls got to see her so we took some “girl cousin” pictures. Liam was still wearing his “Big Brother” shirt (and starting to smell a little). Mom even bought him a second shirt but he refused to change. After everyone left Phil went to get us some dinner that wasn’t hospital food. The food there wasn’t bad but I was eager to have sushi. It was great! The night was so much better just being able to feed her on demand instead of on a schedule.

Monday morning we were really hoping we would get to go home. We waited forever for different doctors to come talk to us and check different things “one more time.” It got to the point where it seemed like they were inventing new tests to do on her just to see how long they could make us stay there. She passed everything they did with perfect scores but I think they were so amazed at how well she was doing that they were intent on finding something wrong. Eventually they realized what we have know all along, that she is absolutely perfect. After waiting some more we finally signed our discharge papers. We dressed her up in her little outfit and tucked her into her car seat. We held hands and walked out of the hospital. We were finally going home to start our new life as a family of four!