Buffy's Ramblings

THE BIRTH Today’s my birthday, so I thought it fitting that I post this today. WARNING: I will hold nothing back in this story, so it’ll be long and graphic. On August 16th, I woke up at 4PM to watch a League of Legends tournament. I went out to the living room and sat down. I was still groggy from my nap, but I thought I felt weird. Couldn’t put my finger on it, but I felt weird. I was having a conversation with the hubby and right in the middle I noticed that I felt wet and squishy. I didn’t say anything to Greg; I just got up and went to the bathroom to look. There was some clear thin fluid. I was suspicious, but just changed my panty liner and made a mental note to keep an eye on it. I stood up and took three steps before I felt another little squish. I turned around and checked again and there was a little mucus in there too, but still it was more of that fluid. At that point, I called Greg in and told/showed him what was going on. I put an actual pad on and w...

THE WAITING GAME So in addition to all the discomfort of the 3rd trimester, there’s the waiting. The constant wonder of “when?!”. There’s worry in that for a lot of reasons, at least for me. At 32 weeks, your baby has a good chance of surviving if born early, but there’s likely to be complications. The doc will say that if you have more than 5 contractions in an hour – call them because you could be in early labor. Well in class we learned to try some things before panicking. SWEND – Shower, Walk, Eat, Nap, and Drink. If absolutely none of those things stops or slows the contractions, then yes, call the doc. If they help, then you’re pretty safe. I knew that walking tended to induce the contractions so I stuck to the other four to gauge my intensity level. All 5 of those activities play a part in my birth story though, which will post on October 12th. At 34 weeks, I lost my mucus plug. Nobody warns you that you could lose it early and don’t need to worry. I lost mine ...

DIAPERS: CLOTH VS DISPOSABLE So when you think of diapers you think of the disposable kind, right? I always did. It’s the most common path to take and it’s the easiest. However, it’s not the best for the planet, the baby, or your wallet. Now for the record, I do NOT mean for this post to be preachy about cloth diapers. I’m just going to toss what I know out there and y’all can take it as you will. My mom did cloth diapers with me when I was a baby. My grandmother paid for a service to come and pick them up weekly and wash them. They were even the kind that you had to pin closed (my mom admits to having stuck me a couple times – ouch!) and needed to be covered with plastic undies to help protect clothes and stuff from leaks. Guess what? It ain’t like that anymore! We decided to go with cloth diapers after hearing about the experience from our Bradley teacher and reading about it. We got our diapers from Bum Genius and they’re awesome. There’s cool designs, they snap sh...

THE SHOWER & THE NURSERY I think you generally have a baby shower in the third trimester, though not too late. I know someone who had a baby within days of their shower, and I myself did about two weeks after mine. Thankfully we’d gotten pretty much everything we’d need! So about thirty people were invited to my shower, and only 9 showed up (including my friend who hosted the event). A little disappointing, but it was all family that showed up, so that’s the important part! We played a bunch of silly games. Baby item bingo that is played while opening presents, word scramble, names of baby animals, and word search are the little ones that are played with a pen and little board. We also did the guess how big my belly is using yarn one (my mother NAILED that one) and the lottery where you guess when the baby will arrive and all the stats (another one my mother nailed). Then of course there’s presents and cake. The cake was delicious, especially to a pregnant woman w...

OBSTACLES There are a lot of discomforts and issues during pregnancy. Thankfully I didn’t have any series issues, but still some concerning ones. There’s a lot of blood work done in the 1st trimester, but that slows down later. The main thing they check for is a blood count. Now I have had chronic problems with anemia for years so I really wasn’t that surprised when I was told to start taking iron pills early in my 2nd trimester. I was, however, surprised to get a phone call early in my 3rd trimester saying I was anemic. It’s common at that point apparently, but having already been on iron pills, I was concerned. Anyway, I just ended up taking two pills a day and I was fine. It helped with my energy levels some, but it’s really not something that you notice all that much outwardly. There are some other very common ailments that a pregnant woman is more susceptible to. I had a UTI (Urinary Tract Infection) once in high school and it was miserable. It hurt to pee, but I h...

BIRTH PLANS & DOULAS One of the many scary parts of labor, at least for a first timer, is not knowing what’s going to happen other than “I’ll have painful contractions and eventually have to push a giant baby out of a small orifice”. If you take a class, you will learn about what to expect from the experience. In that class, you’ll be asked, or at least advised, to make a birth plan. A birth plan is basically a bulleted list of what you want during labor. Things like whether or not you want an epidural or some other drug for pain relief, who you want present during labor and delivery, what positions you want to labor in, where you want the baby after he/she is out (get cleaned up first or directly on you), and other related things. My birth plan basically had line after line of “I want…” or “I don’t want…” though maybe phrased a little more politely. I didn’t want drugs to even be offered and I wanted no intervention or augmentation. Everything on mine leaned towards “j...

THIRD TRIMESTER Now begins the home stretch. It’s a little surreal to be in the third trimester because it suddenly seems very imminent that birth will happen. Obviously it’s got to happen eventually, but it’s suddenly very real and feels kind of like “omg it could happen any time” in your head. At least that’s how I felt. Oddly enough, transition from second trimester to third happened a lot quicker than first to second. It was like a switch was flipped. I started feeling more tired and achy, a little nausea (the 3rd trimester seemed to mirror the 1st in the fatigue and nausea department, only not as severe – thankfully!), and I felt like my belly grew even faster. I couldn’t get comfortable sitting, standing, or even lying down much at all. This baby loved to be in my ribs making it hard to bend or even breathe. The early movements from the second trimester, which felt like bubbles, are a lot more distinctive in the third trimester. You can mostly tell exactly what the...

BIRTHING CLASSES Birthing classes are another choice to be made, and one to really think about as they do cost money, but they’re also VERY helpful. As you consider it, you’ll want to look into the different types that are out there. The main three (that I know of) are Bradley, Lamaze, and Hypnobirth. Lamaze is the one that I’d always heard about and the one most often pictured in movies and shows. It has the same information, but different laboring techniques. I assume the same is true of Hypnobirth, though I honestly don’t really know much about that one. The class the hubby and I decided on was the Bradley Method. The deciding factor was that in our reading we learned that it was all about going completely natural. That was something that was very important to me. I’d always wanted to have the bragging rights, but once I became pregnant, it was more about what was best for baby (and my own healing). It’s hard to describe exactly what class was like, but I’ll do my be...

FINDING OUT THE GENDER The second trimester is the time to decide if you want to know the sex of the baby or not. I always thought I didn’t want to know, because there are few surprises like that in life and I figured that should be one of them. Once pregnant I crumbled under the idea of being able to focus on what names to think of, how to plan the nursery, etc. etc. It just makes it simpler, so that’s what decided things for us. Plus it was nice to call the baby “her” instead of “it” or a generic “he” that people might mistake for a definitive pronoun. When it comes to names, we’d always had at least one in mind for a girl, but we’ve never been able to really agree on a boy’s name. So we vowed not to discuss it (*cough* argue *cough*) until we found out if it was even necessary. Thankfully we didn’t have to go there. At 20 weeks, the doctor will do a sonogram, but this one will be a long one. They’ll do a full anatomy scan to measure the brain, look at the face, look...

SECOND TRIMESTER Everyone will tell you that the second trimester is the best, but you might think they’re full of crap for the first week or two. In my case, it took me almost a month. A friend of mine said she started feeling better at about 14 weeks, but I was still feeling exhausted all the time, though the nausea did start to dial back a little. It was pretty much gone by about 16 weeks and then I discovered that I loved food again (which was reflected in my weigh in at my doctor’s appointment when I had gained 6 pounds after having lost at every other appointment haha). In addition to the nausea going away, I also got an energy boost. I was able to do some household chores again, was not only willing but anxious to get out and run errands and things. It was nice not to feel so tired that I felt drugged! However, with my newfound energy and love for food also came a few new and stronger symptoms. The main one that got worse was the nosebleeds. It was no longer just ...

SHARING THE NEWS Spreading the word that you’re pregnant is bittersweet. It’s a life changing event for you, but for others it may just be a “oh, cool” kind of thing. I was lucky that most people we told were excited for us. One thing that could affect how people react is how you tell them. You could just blurt it out, like we did for the most part, or you could plan something special to tell people (or at least certain people). If you look online for “ways to tell people you’re pregnant”, some neat ideas come up. Unfortunately for us, none of them were very relevant or feasible. However, for a few people, we wanted to do something cute. It’s not easy to plan something for ALL the people you want to tell, especially if you have a large family. My husband’s family is on the west coast, with only his immediate family here in the area (VA). We get together every Saturday for lunch, so the weekend that I hit 12 weeks, we just kind of blurted it out. Greg goes “so Hillary’s ...

FIRST TRIMESTER When someone hears “1st trimester of pregnancy”, there are two things that are immediately thought of by pretty much anyone: fatigue and nausea. Those are the two things that TV and movies always portray and that I think everyone associates with the term. However, that is just the tip of the iceberg! Yes when I found out I was pregnant, I instantly realized why I was so tired over our trip, I was sleeping in more, and I took naps. I also noticed a couple things that I could no longer eat, most specifically chocolate. I had a cup of hot chocolate, took a sip, and it tasted strangely nasty and I couldn’t take another drop. Certain veggies started making me gag the moment they hit my tongue such as carrots and green beans. And yes, these only got worse as the weeks passed. I’ve known women who were so sick their first trimester that they threw up every single day. I wasn’t like that; in fact I threw up only about 5 to 7 times in 12 weeks. However, I gagged ...

Finding Out Finding out you’re pregnant can be shocking no matter what your circumstances. If you’re single, yeah that’s a hell of a shocker. If you’re with someone, it could be a scary situation if you don’t know how they’ll react or if you’re ready to go where that road will lead. If you’re married, you could be happy, but maybe scared if it’s sooner than you would have planned. If you’re married and trying, it’s still a shocker because you’ve likely gotten at least a few negative tests and when the positive one comes up you just don’t quite believe it. I was that last one. We started trying to get pregnant at the end of August 2012, and naturally being hopeful, I tested every month if I didn’t start within 24 hours of when I expected to. 3 months go by with negative results. I knew it would probably take a while (a friend even warned me it took her like 18 months for one of hers), but it was still discouraging. Maybe that’s because of my past or maybe that’s just becaus...

GETTING PREGNANT My hubby and I met when I was fifteen and he was seventeen (my junior, his senior year in high school) at a mutual friend’s birthday party. That was a Saturday, and after spending all that Sunday talking online, we’d planned on going to Homecoming together and he was my ride to and from school. He met my mom that Tuesday and on Friday it was my turn to meet his parents. That Friday there was a really funny (now, then it was mortifying) story. His dad came downstairs and where was Greg’s hand? That’s right; it was up my shirt… After going upstairs, his dad told him “next time I’ll knock” while laughing. I was all girly and “Omg, how am I going to go upstairs to leave later?”. Greg’s response was to say “well, it’ll make a good story to tell our grandkids”. I pounced on that! “’Our’ grandkids?” So you can see that we have known since the very beginning that we were “it” and had always planned on having children. Of all the dreams of what I wanted to be wh...

INTRODUCTION Hey all. I just wanted to get this series of articles so to speak rolling with a little intro into exactly what my thoughts are regarding its content and purpose. I know I didn’t get a whole lot of interest, but I did get a little and I wanted to do it anyway, sooo….it’s happening (go figure!). This is my first pregnancy and it’s an incredible experience in every way. There are boring times, miserable times, awesome times, and there’s really nothing that quite compares to it. I discovered that I like reading about others’ pregnancies and birth stories and I decided I wanted to share mine. In addition that, there’s a lot of discomfort and awkwardness and more that comes along with pregnancy, so this will give me an outlet so that maybe I’m not a whiny wuss around the house all the time (LOL…a girl can dream). It’ll also give me a creative outlet for what little writing urges I still have, since it mostly disappeared once this pregnancy kicked into full swing. ...