For someone who was born so easily A has been a real pain in the keester since then.  Actually the lead up to his birth wasn’t all that easy.  In fact it was anything but.

    My husband and I had been married for 17 years.  In that time we had separated and gotten back together at least three times, had lived in nine different places, both large cities and small towns, moved 13 times, had ten cats, gone through over ten years of fertility tests and treatments and lost three babies.  At the time I got pregnant with A we were in the midst of another move.  My husband decided he liked his old employer, whom he’d left just 14 months earlier, better than his current employer, which was probably the best one he’d had in 17 years.  I had just returned from the pestilent ridden city we’d left 14 months earlier where I’d taken a bus to look for an apartment. 

    That trip is practically a post in itself.  On the way out there I’d been sitting next to a drug dealer who was transporting product to the city we were bound for when he was arrested half way through the trip.  On the way back I was sitting next to a smelly, dirty drunk and behind a young couple with a young baby who spent most of the trip sleeping and ignoring the baby.  They had been on the bus for two days and had to go several hundred miles yet when I got off. 

    Anyway, the employer decided that my husband was so valuable that they broke precedent and hired him back.  I drove him the several hundred miles to settle into our apartment with what we could carry in the car to start his job and drove back to pack our condo and drive back again two weeks later.  On the way back to the new apartment I became ill, chalked it up to allergies from the dust from packing the car and cleaning the condo, and stopped several times to throw up.  I wasn’t pleased to be moving back to that particular city so that might have had something to do with it as well. I had been treated for an ulcer a few months before that and thought that was part of it as well. 

    After we got settled in the apartment life evened out and I still experienced nausea from time to time.  The scent of my husband’s aftershave seemed to bring on a bout of vomiting every morning, but I’d always been sensitive to scents so I didn’t think anything of it.  We’d given up on ever having children and stopped all the fertility stuff and I figured the nausea was just more problems with the ulcer.  A barium test a few months before had shown it was worse so it made sense.  I went to the doctor and scheduled an endoscopy.  On the day of the endoscopy they asked the normal questions including the one about when my last period was.  I did a quick count back.  My periods had always been irregular and it wasn’t odd that I’d skip a month, but it had been three months!  They insisted on a pregnancy test and I was sure it would be negative, but it was positive!  Since our sex life had slowed down naturally over the years I knew when I conceived.   I was nearly through my first trimester.  I’d nearly missed it!

    Physical activity and I have never been companions.  We’re hardly casual acquaintances, but I wanted to be as healthy as possible so I signed up for water aerobics.  I was doing pretty well until one day I got severe abdominal cramps in the pool.  That scared the crap out of me. 

    About the same time my hubby decided that he would rather be living somewhere else.  Seems he got the idea he wanted to die and this was the place to do it.  He had been sure he was dying since we met.  He was 20 at the time and sure he wouldn’t survive to see thirty.  He has a death wish that refuses to come true.  Anyway the baby had given him a reason to live so we packed up again.  Luckily most everything was still packed.  Off to the new place for a job interview and house search.  Houses were selling like ice cream on a hot day.  We made three offers and were outbid on all of them.  Soooo we decided on an apartment temporarily.  It was a military area so you could find an apartment with a month to month lease with a three month minimum.  So pack up the car and the cats and follow the movers on to the next new place.

    The doctors I went to at the beginning of my pregnancy didn’t seem to think there were any concerns with a 37 year old woman having her fourth pregnancy, the first one to go past the first two months, so I went to my first appointment with my new doctors without any preconceived notions of disaster.  From the first visit they told me about being cautious and the dangers of having my first baby at my age.  There were tests and ultrasounds and classes and then another specter reared it’s ugly head.  In a class for high risk pregnancies I met a woman who was expecting her second set of twins.  She had gestational diabetes and tested her blood right there in the class.  She had to test six times a day.  She’d had it with her first set of twins too.  It wasn’t long before I had to endure the test for gestational diabetes myself.  Of course it was positive.  In the beginning it was only a dietary change, but I wasn’t gaining weight so they tried insulin.  No matter how much I took there was no weight gain and I had terrible hypoglycemia.  Yet every month I got a threat from my doctor, no weight gain and I’d go back on insulin.  So I’d gain a pound.  Then the next month the pound would be gone.  It was the only time in my life I had trouble gaining weight.

    I kept looking for a house, looking through the paper and driving around.  Hubby had certain requirements, which I’m sure had something to do with him not wanting to buy a house.  One day I found one with all of his requirements.  It was a bit odd, but in an interesting way.  We went to see it and made an offer the same day.  It needed a little work, but nothing we couldn’t handle.  We made a list and I started getting bids from contractors.   Most of it was out of reach so we broke It down into manageable pieces and started painting and cleaning.

    I was in the grocery store checking out one Saturday morning.  I was almost exactly six months along.  As I was bagging the groceries I got a hard cramp in my abdomen that nearly took me off my feet.  Being the idiot I am I finished packing my groceries and took them out to the car, experiencing at least two more of the cramps.  Hubby was downtown at a piano lesson so I drove to the music store to get him.  There wasn’t a place to park so I had to go around the corner.  On the way to the music store I had to go to the bathroom really bad so I stopped in a restaurant on the way to use the bathroom.  When I got to the music store he had already left and the cramps were worse.  I nearly sat down on the floor.  Do you think I asked for an ambulance?  I was about to when he came back in the store.  We could get going faster than an ambulance could get there so we walked to the car and went straight to the hospital.  I was in labor.  They stopped the labor, but I was put on bed rest for the rest of my pregnancy. 

    We were in the middle of painting the inside of the house and putting in woodwork.  That ended my involvement with redecorating.  Hubby did what was left himself.  We moved into the house with the help of friends.  The day we moved in the basement stairs were missing.  They’d been taken out the day before and new ones weren’t going in until after we’d moved in.  So practically everything was piled in the diningroom.

    You’d think that someone who was no friend to physical activity would have no trouble laying in bed for three months, but it is not easy!  The only day I was allowed to get up was the day I saw my doctor, and that changed to once a week.  We had food delivered every day.  It was a very very long three months.  Two  months out my husband did something that both surprised and shocked me in it’s show of consideration for my safety.  He moved the guest bed downstairs to the dining room so I didn’t have to come down the stairs in the middle of the night.  We only had one bathroom, downstairs, and our staircase was less than safe.  It was one of the things on our list that needed to be fixed. 

    Due date was fast approaching.  The bags were packed.  We were down to two days when I went to my weekly doctor’s appointment.  I’d been having problems with pre-eclampsia, a blood pressure problem during pregnancy.  So far it had been under control, but this time the nurse took my blood pressure and went out to get the doctor.  He came in and asked me if I’d like to have the baby right away?  He wanted me to go right over to the hospital to have labor induced.  I wanted to get my husband.  Apparently my blood pressure was so high he didn’t want me upset so he relented and let me go get my husband.

    We got to the hospital two hours later, labor was induced.  After the first few contractions Dad took a powder to the waiting room.  I had a hired labor coach.  Things moved along so quickly I never got my epidermal.  Six hours and three pushes later I had my son. 

    He came into the world at the beginning of the current wave of breast-feeding enthusiasm.  They pushed breast feeding to such an extent that I hadn’t even bought bottles.  I thought it would be the easiest thing in the world.  Women have been breast feeding for millennia - since the first baby!  Nope.  It took two days for him to attach once.  Then we were out of the hospital and home.  After hours of trying and many, many phone calls he latched on to one of them.  I didn’t want to take a chance on him not latching on to the other breast and getting too little so I didn’t switch. 

    Then the colic kicked in.  We didn’t sleep until early morning and hubby’s family was coming to see the baby.  Four hours.  We got four hours sleep before we had to get up and greet them.  Thankfully they stayed the night and my sister-in-lay got up to take care of the baby so I could sleep. 

    We went out and bought bottles and formula and I pumped as much as I could to mix in.  He threw it up.  It took months to figure out he was allergic to formula and we had to use soy formula.  I got an electric pump from the hospital and spent the time he was asleep pumping.  By the end of the first week my legs were killing me from taking care of him all day, trying to clean, do dishes, and laundry at night, and walking the floor with him.  21 days after birth I couldn’t get the milk to come out.  I had to hook up to the pump and have my husband stroke my breasts to force it out.  When we were done that was it.  Not one more drop of breast milk.  And still the kid threw up a third of what he ate.  Trips to the hospital, trying everything we could figure out  to do for the colic, I was exhausted. 

    Baptism day, one month later and trying to get him to eat.  “You’re starving him!”  He’s not getting enough to eat” advice from my family.  He takes a whole bottle for the first time.  Hubby takes him back to our room to change him and takes forever.  I go to see what’s happening and he’s changing his clothes.  Two thirds of that bottle is on the back of his shirt.  No cause is ever found for the vomiting or the colic. 

    The colic is solved accidentally at a visit to Grandma’s when I’m inspired to sit him in the warm tub after his bath.  He’s a month and a half old. And I’d been afraid to put him in the water to give him his bath.  He can’t sit up yet, but I can sit him up in the tub of warm water.  For the first time he goes right to sleep and there is peace and rest.  He sleeps through the night for the first time.