Newest pictures of Emma

This picture (below) was taken on November 28, 2009.

Sun Fiesta Parade 2009

On October 17 Savanna's gymnastics team (the Venice YMCA Goldstars) were in the Sun Fiesta Parade. The Sun Fiesta Festival is held here every year around that time, and it is basically the last yahoo for the locals before "season" starts. (Season is when the snowbirds come back...usually this starts in earnest right after Thanksgiving.) It was in the low 80's and slightly cloudy that day.

When everyone first arrives, it's always a bit of organized chaos...

Then the kids all get a bit more together...

Here is Savanna with two of her best buds, Frannie and Abby, after the parade.

Dazed much?

And here's a cute side story...

Earlier that day in the same area as the parade, the Miss Sun Fiesta Pageant took place. My good friend Linda has three daughters, and her middle child, Justine, was supposed to compete in the pageant, which awards a nice-size scholarship to the winner. She arrived and was set to get ready when she realized she had exactly the same dress as another girl. She was understandably upset, and when she sobbed the story to Linda and exclaimed that she would just have to drop out, a woman approached them and said, "Come with me." She took them down the street to a local boutique, and somehow arranged for Justine to borrow a dress for the evening gown portion.

Not only was her dress a beautiful standout, Justine won! And even more ironic, the girl with the other dress got 1st runner-up. Here they are (Justine is the girl on the right)...

Congratulations, Justine!

Halloween without cold rain?

This was a pretty fun Halloween for me, though I guess lower-key for Savanna. This is the first year that Devin didn't dress up and go TOT-ing with his friends. For the love of Pete, the boy's 18 and 6 feet tall. I'd laugh my ass off if he showed up at my door. We didn't take many pictures, and we didn't dress up the house at all; that's a big switch for us. Just too darned busy, I guess, and it's just not quite the same since Eric couldn't come home for the weekend.

Anyway, we just did the TOT in our neighborhood. Turns out every year one man in the area puts out a box of little stuffed animals, and has a sign asking each kid to take only one. He apparently services and owns some of those "Claw" toy machines. There were two "haunted houses"--done up in one house and in a tent outside another. Only in Florida! Savanna dressed up as a half-angel/half-devil, which I found appropriate. Little Emma didn't go out, but we dressed her up in some cute things that some folks gave her.

Here are some pictures, including one I love--Emma's screaming (she really hated that hat) and that is one of the best I've seen of Savanna--look at those beautiful blue eyes!

Emma's First Month

Emma came home on Grani's birthday, October 5. Her first month at home was filled mostly with the normal...eat, sleep, poop, repeat.

Here are a montage (to follow when the upload works) of a lot of pictures plus big versions of my three favorite pictures from that month:

And...sorry for the un-terrific quality, but the prettier one just refused to upload:

What went wrong??

I thought I'd interject one post here to tell you about what happened with the birth that ended up with Holly and Emma both being in the hospital.

FOREMOST--this had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she was delivered by a midwife, or that she wasn't born in the hospital but at a birthing center. The center itself had everything that a standard delivery area would have, with the exception of more specialized equipment like ultrasound. And the center is literally just a few minutes to the hospital by ambulance. Christina is a nurse midwife, and as most of us who gave birth in a hospital can attest to, it's

the nurses who do most of the labor and delivery, even in a hospital. Heck, I never even saw the physician who caught Holly, and even with Savanna, Dr. Joe merely swooped into his gloves and caught her.

So what happened is this...

Holly and Emma had a lovely pregnancy, with no real problems outside Holly having a bit too much glucose in her urine. She watched her sugar intake through the pregnancy, and she never had high blood glucose, so no diabetes. Her ultrasound at about 4 months showed nothing unusual, and she gained about 40 pounds--a bit much, but not terrible.

Although she had a long bout with off-and-on labor (even going to about 90% effaced), she didn't go into "real" labor until she was 12 days past her due date. She was very antsy about the possibility of having to be induced, and said she just had this gut feeling that doing that would be a bad, bad thing. When her water broke, there was no big gush, but it was quite a relief in a way, because we knew that she'd made it before the 2-week mark, after which Christina wouldn't be allowed to deliver Emma.

Labor went extremely well, and with Nicky's help, Holly was able to ride out almost all of the active phase of labor at home--you can not imagine how much easier this is to do with a doula. I highly, HIGHLY recommend them, and I truly believe that staying at home where she was more comfortable made the labor go much faster. Big pains started at around 6 pm on the 27th, and by 2 am, she was having to try hard not to push, so off we went to the birthing center.

When we got to the birthing center, we had just enough time to get the water into the tub while Christina examined Holly, and it was really time to push. All went pretty well, but near the end, Holly felt a strong sense that she needed to get this done, like...NOW. Emma was born at 4:55 on September 28, 2009. By the way I (GRAMMA) cut the cord. A bit of wow, a bit of ICK. Special, nonetheless.

Emma was a bit gurgly, and when Christina aspirated some of the fluid, it was lightly stained with meconium--which meant that pretty late in the birth process, she had a bit of distress. This is what ultimately led to Emma being put in the NICU for a week. With swine flu being so prevalent here, pediatricians and hospitals are being extra cautious with any patients with respiratory issues, so even though she was much better after 24 hours, they kept her in for the full 7 days.

The placenta was stubborn. 30 minutes of nursing Emma, good strong "ejection" contractions, but still no placenta, and Christina was getting concerned because when she tugged lightly on the cord, it appeared not to be too strong--so she couldn't do that anymore. She started pitocin to help it along and help slow the bleeding. And finally the placenta was

delivered, but it was obvious that there were still some membranes hanging on in there. After getting her somewhat stable, she took some time while fluids were going in by IV to give us a little show and tell on the placenta and the cord.

Turns out that Holly had a "battledore placenta" and a "partially velamentous cord." I'll explain.

This is what a normal placenta looks like compared with a battledore placenta. See how in a normal placenta, the cord inserts in or near the middle? Notice that in the battledore placenta, the cord inserts at the side. This is generally not much of a problem by itself. (These images were taken from the Frontiers in Bioscience Journal and Virtual Library in a subsection under Encyclopedia: Reproduction called "An Atlas of Xenopus Embryogenesis".)

The problem here was that "partially velamentous" cord. Normal umbilical cords contain veins and arteries surrounded by a thick tissue called Wharton's jelly--this is the tough stuff that normally protects those blood vessels from pressure and keeps them intact. In velamentous cord insertion, as you can see above, the blood vessels emerge from under the Wharton's jelly and snake through the membranes until the reach the placenta. I've made a red line in this picture to show you approximately where the edge of the placenta is. These exposed veins and arteries are risky because they can rupture. According to all the professional, medically-sound sources I've found (and not just on the web), the highest incidence of these vessels rupturing is during amniotomy--the artificial rupturing of the amniotic sac--which is routinely done during artificial induction in the hospital. It is said that it only takes a few minutes for a baby to exsanguinate (that is, lose all her blood) in these cases. It is a bit eerie to think that this would have been entirely possible if Holly would've had to be induced.

As it turned out, natural birth led to perhaps more maternal hemorrhage, but perhaps not. And in any case, Holly's recovery was better in the long run for having natural childbirth because she didn't have the complications associated with emergency C-section. Emma may literally owe her life to her mother's decision to go the natural childbirth route (and the courage to go through with it!)

Emma at birth

These next few posts are strictly pictures and videos, done in pieces. Some are animations, so if you have any trouble viewing, just email me and I'll send it to you in a different way.

This is Holly after about

9 hours of hard labor pains, when she'd just begun pushing. Doesn't

she look happy? She did extremely well...at one point she looked at Christina and said, "I don't know, I guess I just thought it would hurt more." We all laughed, her included. I've pointed out Christina in the picture--we love her devotedly, and she is a supremely pro

fessional, skilled midwife who has earned my respect. Holly would probably do anything for her.

This is Holly a little farther along in the

pushing, which truly only took a couple of hours at most. Nichole is a doula--she has nothing to do with the actual

delivery of the baby. A doula is there to provide emotional and physical support to the mother (and the birth partner!), and she is usually someone who's been through natural childbirth and can therefore truly understand what this mom's going through. She is another person we cherish--she went WAY above and beyond what was necessary, even to the point of staying up almost 2 days.

And at last, here was little Emma! Everyone who sees this picture says, Oh, my goodness, look at those beautiful Angelina Jolie lips!

We think she's much prettier than AJ.

Holly did pretty good, huh?

These last two are Emma, still at the birthing center, after they put the ointment in her eyes. She's about 1 hour old in these.

Finally got a CAMERA!!

It has been forever (and a day) since I last posted here. I'm not really sure anyone really looked, because I never got much feedback. But I am going to give it a go again. And since I love the power of the internet, I've made everything I think might interest you into a link, so that you can follow it and learn something about each thing.
My granddaughter (still seems weird to say that) was due on 09/15/09. If things go as we hope, Holly and I and our doula Nichole will soon trek up to the Birthways Birthing Center in Sarasota, which is only about 15 minutes up the interstate, and we'll have ourselves a baby. You can take a look at the website for the birthing center if you want, and I have a little video of the room below.

I've been so proud of Holly; she's taken good care of herself as you'll see in the videos, and she's done a bit of growing up that was probably much needed. She's done a lot of reading, and she's taken the reins on her own pregnancy. She decided that barring any true complication or emergency, she wants to have a waterbirth, without pain medications and with as little intervention as possible. I'm sure many of you wonder why anyone would want to do that without an epidural or some sort of medical relief. If so, I encourage you to

For those who don't know about birthing centers or midwives or natural childbirth or any of that, I encourage you to read up. Natural childbirth does not just mean that you get no pain meds. There are a whole slew of reasons to give it a go, and a whole lot of reasons not to do this at the hospital unless necessary.

And you can see the trailer for a video called "The Business of Being Born" (we're going to rent it, but haven't seen it yet).

First I'll give you a very short video tour of the room at the birthing center where Holly will be giving birth (hopefully!):

Looks like any old bedroom mostly, but comfier than mine. The big teal tub will have a brand new, one-use-only liner in it. Right now, Holly thinks she may actually do the birth in the water. I bet she won't really have a preference at that point.

Here is THE VERY FIRST VIDEO OF EMMA (undercover, of course):

I plan on keeping that and showing it to her later, of course, so I just decided to talk to her.

Taking these videos has me thinking I always sound a little disgusted...something about the tone of my voice, especially at the ends of my sentences, makes me a little nuts.

Here is a video Holly took of Emma moving around, from her perspective:

And I took these, and caught some impressive movement.

I couldn't have planned the next one any better if I would've tried:

We also took some video of a huge bunch of ducks in the tall grass near the lake at the birthing center. This little snippet reminds me of that Whack-a-Mole game because of their heads popping up.

Onward to the remainder of the family...

Devin is really enjoying his automotive technology class (an all-afternoon class for college credit taught at Sarasota County Technological Institute-SCTI), so much so that he is talking about wanting to get a 4-yr. degree in it and become a master mechanic. He would like to eventually go to University of Northwestern Ohio (UNOH), which is supposed to be the best in the country for that. I certainly hope he can do his first 2 years here Bright Futures scholarships to help), and I wish him luck with the rest. I wish I could help him, but I figure he'll find a way.

Savanna is a level 5 gymnast now. She has practice 3 days a week from 4-7 pm. She also has a bars class the other 2 days until 5 pm. These videos were shot just a week ago. The little hop you see her do at the ends of the flips she does on the floor is intentional. They teach them that as a first step to learn how to connect one trick to the next.

Eric is still working at Crawford Communications in Atlanta. It's pretty difficult, and we hope we don't all have to be apart forever.

So that's about all that we have going on.

Congratulations again to Mandy and Jay on their wedding. I bet it was beautiful.