Cooper's Diagnosis

This week in our session with Teacher Judy, Cooper said six new words in 30 minutes! We love Teacher Judy. While blowing bubbles she got him to say blow, bubble, and pop. Why he never says those for me I don't know... And then she got him to say Ruby for the very first time! It was so exciting! Which he pronounces Rubah or sometimes Wubah. And she got him to say Cooper, or Toopah. And she got him to say Mama. Teacher Judy was so excited about that one that she gave him a hug and Cooper immediately ran away. Apparently Cooper's love for Teacher Judy does not extend to hugs.

Josh and I love hearing him say Wubah. We make him say it all day long and then giggle about it at night in bed. Wubah.

So at the end of our session Teacher Judy told me that Cooper has apraxia. Apraxia is a condition where the brain's signals to the mouth muscles involving speech are missing or incorrect. This means that the child has no problem understanding speech but when it comes to speaking themselves, they don't know how to move their mouth muscles to make the sounds. Children with apraxia have to learn how to make each sound, and then the thousands of combinations of sounds and practice them thousands of times before they become muscle memory and something they can say independently. It involves extensive and frequent speech therapy for years sometimes. But the good news is once they figure out how to talk, they'll be all caught up on their speech. It just takes a lot of work to get to that point.

It's a daunting task and right now it feels a little overwhelming. And I'm a little sad that speech can't just come naturally to him like it does to everyone else. But I'm glad Cooper has a diagnosis so we know what help to get him. I'm glad there is help available for him. I'm glad I get to stay at home with him so we can practice our speech together. I'm glad Cooper has so many people who support him. I'm glad my husband is just as committed to helping Cooper as I am. There are many things to be grateful for.

Luckily Cooper has a few words already that help him communicate. Once they practice a word enough to have it become a muscle memory they will always have that word and Cooper already has a few words, of course "no" being one of them. And luckily he can make all his consonant and vowel sounds, he just needs to practice them and learn how to combine them into words. So he has a few things working for him already and the rest we will help him figure out.

One thing I know for sure about Cooper is that he is smart. He can count to ten, he knows the first half of the alphabet, he knows his letters, shapes, numbers, and colors. After watching a Barney episode about China, I said hi to Cooper one morning and he answered, "nee how." He is a smart boy and if he gets the help he needs, he can overcome this. And he will have the added blessing of parents who listen to every single thing he says for the rest of his life because we're going to be so delighted by every word. "Wubah" has already brought a lot of happiness to our hearts.

So now we know what to do and what lies ahead for us. Good luck buddy. Mama is always cheering for you.

Another Week

Another week, another blog post. Maybe I should amend my writing goal, there's no way we do enough in one week to warrant a blog post! Let's dig down deep here....

I drove by the preschool this week that Cooper would potentially go to. Actually I drove by it several times, as I drove in one continuous loop around the building for ten minutes. There's just no way. It's too far from my house. It's too big. There are too many window treatments that make it hard to see. I just can't do it. Cooper will just have to be a mute.

This week my mute said up and made monkey sounds. Progress. He's discovered a passionate love for Curious George and he imitates whatever George says. Now if only George was a human instead of a monkey. 

Ruby is officially the cutest baby that has ever been born. She is just gorgeous! I really think she should do baby modeling. She's so dainty, she looks like a little porcelain doll! I want to get her pictures taken again even though we just took newborn photos. I'm kind of obsessed with her. She still wakes up once a night but I still think she's too small to go all night without eating. It is funny though because Cooper was sleeping through the night at six weeks old! Now I realize that was just pure luck. Maybe solid foods will help her stay full a little longer? I doubt it...

Ruby has been doing the 45 minute nap thing, I looked back on my blog and Cooper was doing that too at the same age. She sleeps for 45 minutes and then wakes up and if I get her up she's cranky and tired until her next nap. Most of the time she will go back to sleep if I let her cry for a few minutes, but man I hate letting her cry. And Cooper and I are usually playing in the living room while Ruby is crying away and I wonder if Cooper thinks I'm a terrible mother. But he actually doesn't seem to mind having fun while sister cries. I'm not sure what to make of that.

Cooper is getting a little less enthused with Ruby the older she gets. Sometimes Ruby will flail her arm and accidentally touch one of his trains and he is not pleased. I put her in his old exersaucer this week and he told her, "no!" Then when I eventually got her out he tried to get in it and wound up stuck in the seat head first with his head stuck in a leg hole. Cooper needs to work on his sharing.

This week we went out to dinner with the kids and both of them sat there nicely and quietly the entire meal! I am not even kidding! The check came and we looked at each other like woah, that was amazing. I thought that was blog worthy. We haven't gone out to eat in like six months and maybe that's the key, only take your kids out to eat once every six months.

This week was Josh's last week of classes! He still has to take his boards in July before he graduates but he is done with three years of night classes!! It is so exciting for everyone in our family. But I'm probably the most excited, let's be honest.

Also I'm in love with my yard during the summer. That's all.

Preschool Problems

So my little Cooper had his first speech therapy this week with Teacher Judy. Then later that same night we got him to say "poo-poo." So I hope that's a good sign. Poo poo is an excellent word because the p sound is a very important sound. Basically he could be talking in swear words and we would be happy.

The developmental specialists in Seattle are booked several months out so it looks like that will take quite a while to get him evaluated. In the meantime we are going to be seeing Teacher Judy once a week and next week Cooper is getting evaluated to start receiving speech services through the school district as well.

As soon as I posted about Cooper's doctor appointment last week, a sweet angel from my ward who works with the early intervention program called me and talked to me about getting Cooper set up to do speech services through them. It was amazing because our pediatrician said nothing about it and I was aware that there was a program but had no idea how to get him into it. I am incredibly grateful to her right now. So next week someone comes to our house to evaluate Cooper so he can start speech therapy. It will be so wonderful to have him doing more speech therapy than just our weekly session with Teacher Judy. HOWEVER, this program only runs until he's two, when he turns three, they send the kids to a preschool where he would get extra help with speech.

Preschool.

This fall.

FOUR days a week!

My sweet precious baby boy would be ripped from my arms FOUR days a week!

I called my mom in tears and she asked me how long the days were. And I told her that didn't matter! They could be 30 minutes long and it would still be FOUR days a week!

Now I don't know all the details, we still have to apply and get accepted and maybe I wouldn't have to send him all four days. But I'm already in a state of panic. I wasn't going to send him to preschool at all this year, he has a late August birthday so technically I could send him early or wait a year, and I was going to wait! And then next year maybe find a co op preschool that was two days a week but I could volunteer as a mother helper so I could be there with him every day. And then by the time kindergarten rolled around Cooper would say, "Mom I want to be homeschooled!" And I'd say ok! And then we'd be with each other all day every day all the way through high school and Cooper would take me as his date to senior prom and then maybe he could just live with us for the rest of his life and save on rent! That was my life plan. Every time Cooper poses in a picture with me I think oh, this is just how our prom pictures are going to look! But all of my grand plans started coming off the rails when I heard- FOUR days a week...

I'm not ready. There's no way I'll be ready by September. I just barely let him go to nursery at church. And then when I finally let him go I sat and watched him through the window the whole time. Then the next week they put papers up in the window! Coincidence? Probably not! Now I have to jump up and down to see him!

I wonder if the preschool has better windows.

I wonder if they let people into preschool who still sleep in a crib and still have fat rolls and still giggle when their mommies pretend to eat their feet. It should be illegal! It should be considered kidnapping to even suggest it!

There's even a bus that can come get them! When she told me that, my knees buckled. I'd sooner throw myself in front of the bus before I let my little baby ride on a bus without me!

That darn August birthday! It was the undoing of my life plan! If only I would have known I would never have done anything underneath a Christmas tree!

Aaaahhhhhhhhh!

But Cooper would probably benefit from the extra socialization with other children and he would probably (definitely) benefit from the extra, daily speech therapy, and he would probably benefit from some time away from his mommy who knows what every point and grunt means.

But if everyone could just pray that Cooper starts talking before September so he can stay home with his mommy, that'd be great.

See? Wouldn't we look so good at prom together?

Weekly Update

I'm so glad I made this goal of writing on my blog once a week! HA! I'm already failing at it. It's funny how little I feel like I actually do but yet I never have any spare time. I complained to Josh about a weekly obligation we have and Josh replied, "simplify your life." And I was like umm how much more simple can it get?! Some days I don't even leave the house! It's a strange phenomenon. Anyway, this week-

This week we took Cooper in to the doctor to get him a referral to start speech therapy again. We decided waiting until he's 3 is just too long and if we can get in early it would be nice. Plus Cooper seems to have made a developmental leap where he is being pretty receptive to learning things, he learned how to count to five on his fingers this week, so now would be a good time to go back to "Teacher Judy." And as further proof that I've forgotten how to speak to adults I told the doctor that the speech therapist we had seen before was "Teacher Judy" and then I was like wait, I guess that's not her actual name.

The appointment was... disappointing. I expected her to just write us the referral and say good luck. Instead she expressed concerns about Cooper being on the autism spectrum and wrote us a referral to see the speech therapist and also a developmental specialist in Seattle. Then she started telling me that Cooper would be able to go to regular classes in school and I was like why don't we see if there's anything going on first before you make Cooper's education plan.

So I'm frustrated and disappointed and want to punch the doctor in the face a little bit, and also want to cry when I see every other toddler in the world doing something like analyzing their genetic code under a microscope. I hate childhood development. I just do. But Cooper is my little buddy. So I'll swallow all the sour stuff and slap a smile on my face while I help him do whatever it is he needs.

My mommy gut, certified by Oprah, doesn't think there is anything else going on besides speech problems. Maybe I'm just seeing what I want to see. But then again I love to overreact and diagnose my children with everything imaginable so one would think I would have caught this already.

So that's Cooper's news. The longer he goes without talking, the dumber everyone is starting to think he is. Hahaha. I have this fantasy where I'm telling a teenaged Cooper stories about his childhood and I tell him you just wouldn't talk for so long, we were taking you to speech therapists and special doctors in Seattle! And then we laugh together about what a stubborn stinker he was. That's my hope.

Now for our neglected child- Ruby is still kicking it, baby style. I don't think she'll be ready to sleep train at 4 months. I guess I don't really know but she seems way too small to me to sleep all night without eating. She seems too little to think about starting solids in a month too. Did I really start feeding Cooper solids at 4 months old?! I thought he was so big at 4 months old. Anyway, Ruby is an angel, she seems to understand I have a toddler boy and she does a lot of sitting happily in her bouncy seat. I just love her.

I am trying to get outdoors more. Every summer after a pregnancy I get super antsy to get out and go because I feel like I sat inside for nine months. I've made a goal of two trail runs a week. I love getting out on the trails but spring in Aberdeen can be really rainy so I tend to lean towards going to the gym but I've made a goal to go rain or shine during those small, pre-planned times when Josh can take the kids. My grandpa inspired me to spend more time exercising outside rather than inside. I smile to myself when I think of the fittest person I ever knew, and the quiet, connected way he went about it. Papa never went to the gym, he never ran with an iPod or tracked his distance with the Nike running app, he never wore trendy spandex, and he never ran organized races. I remember when Papa was teaching me how to run sprint ladders to increase my endurance and I asked him for precise times for sprinting, jogging etc... But Papa never ran these sprint ladders on a treadmill, he ran them outside, and kept track of distance by counting each time his left foot hit the ground. He was the true outdoorsmen that Papa. So this weekend we're taking the kids hiking up at Lake Quinualt. It's supposed to be a sunny Saturday so depending on my children's disposition, it could be a really amazing day. It's hard to hike with young kids, did you know that? Probably because it's no fun to sit in a hiking backpack all day when you're two.

So that's about it for this week. Loving on my kids, worried that Cooper has special needs, and trying to enjoy more outdoor time.

Utah Trip

This week we went to Utah for my grandpa's funeral. We drove because last minute plane tickets for three people are super expensive. It's a 14 hour drive and on the way there we drove straight through because 14 hours in theory doesn't sound that bad.

It was rough. Ruby actually did really well on the way there. But Cooper was not pleased to sit in the car that long. I don't blame him, I wasn't pleased either and I'm not two. He took an hour nap, the first time he's fallen asleep in the car for probably a year and a half but never fell asleep at night so he ended up going to bed at 10 pm that night. By far his latest bedtime ever.

The whole drive I kept thinking of ways to get out of having to drive back home. Maybe I could fly back home with the kids and Josh could drive, or we could sell our car when we got there and all fly back home. Spoiler alert: we ended up driving home.

When we got there we had a couple days before the funeral so we tried to see some of our family and friends. We took Cooper bowling and to Jungle Jim's and I ate at Cafe Rio three times. Cooper loves the arcade at Jungle Jim's but he would start throwing the balls from the game into a different game or underneath a game or at your face. Eventually we had to cut him off of skeeball because those things are heavy.

We got to meet my only brother's only child, Jax. He's ten days younger than Ruby. And I want to smooch him all over. When Ruby and Jax were in the same room I'd ask Cooper where baby sister was, he'd look at both babies and then either hold up his hands to say I don't know or he'd point at Jax. So confused.

Then we had our "party for Papa" which is how I described the funeral to Cooper. His funeral was beautiful for a beautiful person. His notes to my grandma were displayed, it was amazing to see visually just how much time he spent enjoying nature. Really every opportunity he got. His bike and skiis and gps and tennis rackets and hiking shoes and straw hats and fannypack were all displayed and were all just totally worn out. He used them so much! And his crazy smart, unintelligible math notebook was out. He used to work math equations for fun that were several pages long. And his casket was natural pine topped with some sagebrush. It was perfect for my little mountain goat.

I've been having a really hard time with losing my grandpa. We were so close. He wasn't religious at all but towards the end he kept talking about heaven and how beautiful it was so that gives me hope. I hope so dearly that heaven is real and beautiful and that someone up there gives my Papa a bike and a tennis racket.

My beautiful children are healing my heart every time I look at them. They are so sweet and amazing and it's so nice to see them starting their own lives. Ruby is three months old now and she is just a joy. She is so happy. I love her smiles and baby laughs. The past (maybe 3?) weeks she has started to sit happily by herself. Well not sit, but lay or sit assisted with some sort of baby device. She still wakes up twice a night which wouldn't be so bad but I only have Cooper to compare her to and Cooper was an Olympic sleeper. Cooper was sleeping 10-12 hours at 3 months old! That kid loves his sleep.

Cooper is still so sweet with Ruby. He loves to hug and kiss her. And also he loves to take the binkie out of her mouth and hold it above his head out of reach and laugh his head off. Haha, I shouldn't find that funny but I do. He's getting so big. He's four months away from turning three and he is just barely starting the whole defiant-toddler thing. He was pretty sweet while he was two and not terrible at all. Now he has tantrums more often, usually about wearing clothes. He either wants to be naked or wear pajamas all day. Another thing I find inappropriately funny. He's also had two really big meltdowns, the hyperventilating, choking, long, loud kind of tantrums. They were both about trains he wanted to take home. Cooper. Loves. Trains. I can't believe it's taken him this long to do some of these toddler things. Three will obviously be harder than two. But I'm still enjoying his toddlerhood. His fits don't last that long and he's so much fun to play with!

Back to the trip- on the way home we decided to stay the night and split the drive up. It was the best idea ever. On the way there I didn't want to because Ruby still wakes up a couple times a night and I knew she'd wake Cooper up and I wasn't going to leave Cooper alone in his own hotel room. But then someone pointed out a wonderful thing- conjoining hotel rooms! So we got conjoining rooms and Cooper got his own room (and his own iPad for this trip, he's not spoiled or anything...) and it worked out beautifully, except for the minute that Cooper escaped out of the front door and ran down the hallway when I had my back turned.

This is a really weird picture but my heart was so full of happiness towards that blessed Comfort Inn that I had to take a picture.

It's so much easier to stay home with the kids and not go anywhere but as I was remembering my grandpa I remembered fondly all the vacations he took us on. Our simple vacations to Park City every summer were the highlight of my year. Maybe when my kids get a little older it will be easier to travel with them? I would really like them to have some of those fun memories like I did. Maybe once we don't have seven or eight poopy diapers a day to stop and change we will travel a bit more!

A Comeback

I haven't been writing much on my blog in a couple years, partly because I've been writing some posts for becominglovely.com and partly because of some unfortunate responses to my writing that made me feel extremely self conscious about my words. But as I was looking back at previous posts the other day to see if Cooper had had as much trouble napping as Ruby has been having (the answer was yes) I realized that my blog is just for me anyway, and it was nice to read about what life was like at that particular point in time because I had already completely forgotten. So I am going to attempt to blog a little more regularly so that when I'm older and hopefully drinking a Diet Coke in some peaceful sunshine somewhere I can remember what my crazy/exhausting/funny days were like as a mother with young children.

As I was selecting a quote from this months chosen conference talk for our ward newsletter I came across this quote about the way we interact with social media-
"We portray an incomplete life- sometimes in a self aggrandizing or fake way. We share this life and then consume the almost exclusively fake lives of our social media friends. How could it not make you feel worse to spend so much time pretending to be happier than you are and the rest of the time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?"
-Elder Quentin L. Cook "Choose Wisely" (If you're curious about the rest of the talk.)

It brought an immediate smile to my face. Just a few days ago I had mentioned to Josh what a hard time I was having trying to take care of a newborn while also giving Cooper the attention that he deserves. I cried as I told him I felt like all Cooper did was watch tv while I tried to get Ruby to sleep and I felt horribly guilty. Josh tried to comfort me by saying that all moms with multiple children and a newborn felt that way and I scoffed and said no, it's definitely just me. It then turned into a conversation about when we view others through social media we see only what that person has carefully crafted and selected for us to see. In effect we have all become our own public relations specialist and no wonder our reality appears inferior when put under comparison. This quote made me feel that it was acceptable, and maybe even preferential for me to be authentic on social media. More importantly it encouraged me to stop feeling judged about presenting my reality exactly as it is which is why I had been ignoring my blog for so long.

Anyway after that long winded introduction, let's talk about poop!

Not really, all is currently good on the poop front. Our household produces it in mass quantities.

We are currently trying to power through the final stretch of newborn-ness. Ruby is 9 weeks old and we have almost made it to the glorious 12. Things have already gotten so much better. She sleeps a 7 or 8 hour stretch at night. She smiles and laughs at you now, which I know motherhood is all about selfless sacrifice, but it sure is nice after a month of screaming to be greeted with a smile! Cooper has gotten over his initial three weeks of hating baby sister and hating mommy and hating everyone and has gone back to his cute, wild self and is now obsessed with baby sister. Seriously, he loves her and my heart explodes whenever I see him interact with her. The other day I was doing dishes and they were on the living room rug and Cooper kept going over to Ruby's bouncy seat and smiling at her and playing with her while no one else was watching and I almost died from sweetness overload.  I'm sure there will be lots of fights down the road when she gets big enough to mess with his toys but for now I am really enjoying their relationship.

This is Cooper going in for a kiss.

Cooper has become more independent the last 9 weeks. Something I thought wouldn't happen for years. He has now gone to nursery by himself for a whole month. I know everyone else's kids did that like a year ago but Cooper is my sensitive, timid boy and I didn't want to push him before he was ready. But now he goes to nursery, he gave up his bottle, and he plays by himself at the park! Part of me, the crazy part, is a little sad that he is growing up and wants him to need me for forever.

Cooper is still struggling with speech. The only words he says consistently are no and uh oh. This kid says no all day long and he usually makes it into a little jobberish song, "no ma no ma no ma no." I constantly have dreams that I find a special phone or some sort of device that lets me talk to Cooper and we have sweet little conversations where he tells me he's sorry it's so hard for him to talk. My poor sweet bud. His speech therapist said we can take him back in at 3 years old if he still hasn't added words (he can make all the sounds but he doesn't put them into words) so I'm sure we'll be back in speech therapy in August. One thing about his speech struggle is that Josh and I are glued to everything he says. When he throws a huge fit about something and screams, "NO!" Josh and I just sit there and smile at each other because we're so happy he's using a word. If he ever does decide to speak and I'm not enrolling him in mime school, I will listen in rapt adoration to every mundane thing he says. It always makes me sad when well-meaning people try to console me about his speech by telling me I'm "lucky" because their child never stops talking. I LOVE listening to children. And my greatest wish right now is to learn what's going through my buddy's head at any given moment. Hopefully one day Cooper will talk to me in real life and not just on a dream phone.

So right now I'm working on how to run errands by myself with the kids as Cooper is not used to walking beside me and holding hands and it turns out it is hard to chase him down the road while lugging a 30 pound car seat (ahem yesterday at the park.) I don't think Cooper would sit in a double stroller so I don't dare buy one just to have him refuse to sit in it (What's that? You know how to make your kids do something they don't want to do? I sure don't.) And I don't really understand the whole sit and stand stroller concept. Is there a mechanism that confines the stander? Or is that for children who aren't flight risks? For now, we spend a little more time inside than we used to. I'm glad it's winter we've been inside missing, instead of the summertime like when Cooper was born in August.

And I'm trying to figure out how to get Ruby down for a nap without struggling with her for hours first. You'd think having a newborn before would have made me somewhat less clueless about newborns this time around. I remember being constantly stressed out about Cooper's naps, I just relaxed about them not too long ago and now I'm stressed about Ruby's instead! Naps are life changing. They can make your day extremely wonderful or extremely horrible. One day the quality of my day won't depend on whether or not someone else has napped and it's going to be an odd sensation.*

*I seem to not comprehend that I'm not always going to be in the young children life stage. One day it was my turn to host our monthly mom's night out, we get together without our kids, eat food and discuss an article. My friend brought grapes and was asking me for something to put them in while I was distracted and talking to someone else. Without thinking I went and got the cutting board and a sharp knife and handed them to her to start cutting the grapes in half. She just stared at me and then I realized oh, I guess we're all adults here and don't need our grapes cut in half. It never occurred to me that not everyone halved all their grapes for a toddler.

And I'm trying to get back in shape after nine months of my baby forcing me to eat tater tots every night as a midnight snack. She made me do it guys. So that's super fun. :) :) :) Actually the exercise IS super fun for me, I am currently up to running 2.5 miles in just three weeks. But the dieting is totally horrible.

And I'm trying to figure out how to not have to give Cooper a bath in the baby bathtub every time I give Ruby one... (If I say no, he just strips his clothes off by himself and gets in anyway.)

So those are all my small, adorable conundrums at the moment in my new role as a mom with childREN. I still can't believe I have two kids! They are so exhausting and so cute and I love them to pieces.

Ruby on her two month birthday.

Cooper is obsessed with the concept of Easter baskets. Whenever Ruby cries he brings her her Easter basket because he thinks it will cheer her up. Sweet big brother.

Ruby's Birth

The False Alarm:
You know how some people are so excited about their birthdays that they start announcing their upcoming birthday weeks in advance? I guess that's Miss Ruby. She was so excited for her birthday that she wanted to start getting us excited and making sure that we were prepared for her birthday a couple weeks ahead of time. Just to keep us on our toes.

At 37 weeks I spent all weekend in excruciating back pain, then on Sunday in addition to the back pain I started having painful, regular contractions. It felt like labor but we weren't expecting Ruby to come early so I waited to see if it would stop. Josh brought me dinner in bed and when I didn't want to eat he told me I had to call the doctor. (It's really sad that me refusing food is Josh's number one warning sign.) So we went to the hospital expecting them to tell me it was just a false alarm but instead they hooked me up to a non stress test and found my contractions were coming every three minutes and rushed out to call the doctor to come perform the birth. (At which point I looked at Josh and burst into tears because my mom wasn't coming for two weeks, we didn't even have our camera, and Cooper was currently bouncing a birthing ball around the room.) We were not ready.

However shortly after that the doctor called to tell me that I actually had a severe kidney infection that was causing me to go into labor and once it started to get treated my labor would stop. So I wasn't giving birth that moment which was such a big relief that I didn't even care why! I did have to stay in the hospital for at least 3 days though while they treated my kidney infection so we decided Josh would take Cooper home, put him to sleep (it was almost 9 pm at this point) and have our neighbor who's about a mile away come sit at our house for about a half hour while Josh brought me my things and went to pick up his cell phone he left at work over the weekend.

Then came the second drama of the night! In between Josh coming back home from the hospital after he brought me my things and my sweet neighbor leaving to go back to her home there was a giant landslide that blocked the entire road in between our house and hers. So she had to drive back up the river about 8 miles, east 20 miles to the next town over, and get on the freeway back to Aberdeen to come home. I felt/still feel HORRIBLE soul-crushing guilt over this. It took her an hour and a half for a ten minute drive at like 9:30 at night all for my stupid overnight bag! My poor poor neighbor who was just being sweet and kind!

So that's when the flooding began. I was at the hospital still having my contractions monitored and my progress checked and Josh was literally stuck at home with no way out to get to the hospital if I had given birth! So that was stressful! But thankfully everything worked out fine, my kidney infection was treated (Um can we talk about kidneys for a second? Holy crap! I can't decide which was more painful that or my unmedicated back labor with Cooper. They were definitely close. I literally spent the first 24 hours in the hospital either crying or vomiting from the pain. Apparently kidneys are not to be underestimated.) and my labor was stopped, and the flooding stopped as well and the roads were cleared so Josh and Cooper were able to visit me the rest of the time I was in the hospital. So that was Miss Ruby's dramatic false alarm.

The Birth:
Now for the actual birth. Ruby was a scheduled c section for January 20th at 5 a.m. We picked up my mom from the airport the day before so we left her asleep with Cooper at home and went to the hospital to have our baby. We got all prepped for surgery which was a much more casual and leisurely thing this time around since it wasn't an emergency and a lot of the things that didn't bother me at all with Cooper because I was distracted with labor like the iv and the catheter were much more uncomfortable and unpleasant this time. The whole time I kept thinking about how one time my grandpa hooked his catheter to his belt and went to the store when he was supposed to be home on bed rest. People like that should probably be the ones having babies, not wimpy me!

Eventually it was time for the surgery and they rolled me back to the operating room and then made me walk into the room and hop up on the operating table myself which I thought was a little weird. It's an odd disconcerting feeling to go willingly sit on the table that they're going to cut you open on. Josh had to wait outside while I got my spinal shot so I left my little smurf in his blue paper clothes watching me through the window while I went to go through what would be one of the worst experiences of my life. It took around an hour from the time they started my spinal block to the time they eventually put me under general anesthesia for my surgery. The anesthesiologist went in three separate times during which I just sat there frozen trying to be a good patient while I cried big black mascara tears all over my legs and said out loud it's going to be ok it's going to be ok to myself over and over again. The only thing that got me through it was I could see Josh's little blue head staring at me through the faraway window. He wouldn't take his eyes off me and I knew that he knew something was wrong even though no one had told him anything yet. He told me later he knew because he could hear me crying out in pain each time they tried to place the needle.

Not to get into the details too much, after a lot of attempts, multiple adjustments, lots of pain tests, and the beginning of my incision, it was determined the anethestetic was not going to work. My doctor said they were going to have to put me under general anesthesia. I think they had to hurry because he had made the start of the cut and hurry they did. In the course of about 30 seconds they told me I was going under, kicked Josh out, put a mask on me, and someone was pushing on my throat so hard I felt like I was being choked to death and that was the last thing I remember...

I really don't remember anything for about six hours after surgery. I don't remember seeing Ruby or Josh or anyone telling me about Ruby was but somehow even with my anxious personality I remember feeling very assured that Ruby was fine and it was ok for me to rest. So I slept most of the day, I even slept through most of Cooper and Ruby's first meeting. I opened my eyes long enough to take about five pictures and that was it.

Ruby Josephine Beach however came out of the surgery without a hitch! She had no problems and was healthy as could be! She was born at 8:30 a.m. weighing exactly 7 pounds and 19.5 inches long. I am so grateful that she's here and healthy and perfect!

The Recovery:
The next day things took another turn when I woke up with a spinal headache. I'd never heard of one before but apparently it's a side effect of having a spinal block where your spinal fluid keeps leaking and gives you a debilitating headache whenever you're upright. But the really bad news is that the only way to treat it is to go back in and do a procedure that's basically like getting the spinal block all over again. And when my doctor told me that I probably had to have another spinal done I burst into tears. It sounds like I'm being super dramatic and ridiculous but it was honestly a really traumatizing, painful, scary, horrible experience that I was determined to never repeat and I just couldn't handle the thought of going back to do it again the very next day. But on the other hand the headache made it physically impossible for me to sit or stand. So the doctor gave me the option of resting for a day while drinking lots of fluids and caffeine and wearing an abdominal binder to see if that would help before they sent in the anesthesiologist. He made it sound like none of those would help enough and that I'd pretty much have to do the procedure but he would humor me for a day. And oh boy did I worry and cry and pray that whole day... And guess what. My spinal headache went away even though the odds were really slim! After that recovery didn't seem so bad, at least I didn't have to endure spinal torture again.

We also found out on Wednesday that Cooper's cold he woke up with the day before Ruby was born, was actually bronchitis. We were so careful in the weeks leading up to Ruby's birth not to get sick. I kept Cooper home all week long but he still somehow got sick anyway. So upon taking Ruby home we were going to have to keep her and Cooper completely separated for five days. Another unplanned experience. Luckily my mom was here to take care of Cooper while we took care of Ruby sequestered in our bedroom. We were so lucky to have my mom here with us to help us through this experience, we definitely would not have managed without her. I owe her a lot, starting with 27 years ago when she went through childbirth for me. It is no small sacrifice that parents make for their children to be born. Ruby girl, I love you. And I'm pretty sure you owe me one. ;)