Tuesday, 28 October 2008

• Been a long time... for anybody who reads this!

  So, we had our baby! Onnie Lee Jackson Williams!

  

  Onnie Lee Jackson was one of Lee's grandparents. Lee was named after him, and we really like the name, so we decided to keep all three names! It is really important to us that Onnie knows about his family and his history.

  It's been 5 weeks since he's been born (the picture is him at about 2 weeks I think). Since then, he's been in the clinic 4 days for jaundice, my parents came to visit for 2 weeks, we did his Peruvian paperwork (including his Peruvian passport!), we spent a week in the capital of Lima getting his American passport and report of birth abroad, and our apartment building got broken into so we are packing up our things and looking for a new place to live. It's been crazy!

  He's doing really well. He was going 2-3 hours between feedings, but for the past two weeks he's upped it to 1 and 1/2 to 2 hours. Makes a mommy tired! But he is a very calm baby and we are so thankful! He smiles a lot at daddy and has been making funny grunt/growl noises all the time. We love him!

  I posted about the birth on facebook, but here it is on xanga:

  I think the procedures for birthing babies in Arequipa would be described as old school, but I have faith in them, at least in my doctor! When I went in to the ER in the morning of the 22nd, I was really disappointed. The ER was really old and warm and not very clean feeling. And there was a little baby behind a partition nearby that was crying and crying and all of the sudden I got freaked out and nervous that I was going to have one of those!
  
  I was in the hospital by 8:30 or so, got a room, an enema, an IV, a good shave, then I was left alone with Lee and we hung out through some mildly rough contractions until our doctor was able to come. Probably about 11:00 or 11:30, she decided to give me oxytocin in my IV to speed up the labor (I thought I was doing just fine on my own!) and broke my water, which sped up labor uncomfortably mucho! Oh, I forgot to mention, before that, she gave me a tank of gas to suck in during contractions. It didn't really help all that much, except it distracted me a little. What it really did was numb my lips and make my eyelids tremble a little.
  
  Probably only 10 minutes after they sped up my labor I was dying! I don't really remember now how it felt, but I remember thinking that it felt like my bottom half of me was being torn apart from my top half and there was no room to breathe! Lee was awesome through all of it. I was sure I bruised his arm or shoulder, but I guess not. We had decided that I was going to do it all natural - no epidural, not just for the baby's sake, but because we weren't sure how safe it was to have an epidural here. But by this time, I felt like I couldn't handle it anymore. I was expecting pain, but not excruciating unbearable pain (naive I guess?). So I told Lee I wanted an epidural and I knew I was asking him to put me in a spot that he wasn't sure about. But he said if I really thought I needed one, we would do it.
  
  By now, they had to take me to the delivery room BY HAVING ME GET OFF MY BED AND GET ONTO ANOTHER! Needless to say, I didn't want to move. Anyway, it took about 1/2 an hour to get the epidural and by that time, Onnie was only 1/2 an hour away! I kept saying "I still feel everything!" which I guess I couldn't really know, maybe it did take some edge off. But I was expecting a little more relief!
  
  They did an episiotomy, so it took a while afterward to take care of that. It felt pretty dang weird, but I had no complaints after what had just happened!

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