Theo's Birth Story

Well, it’s been almost 5 months since I had Theo and I’ve been working on this blog post for about 3 months so... that maybe tells you a little about how things have been going. Also, please ignore the fact that I haven’t written a blog post in over a year! 

I have a lot of thoughts about how my pregnancy and postpartum was that I want to get out but it’s also kind of scary to admit a lot of the things I’ve been thinking. I’m going to save that for another post. For me, writing down my thoughts has always been the way I work things out. “Writing crystallizes thinking” is for sure true for me! I don’t remember who said that quote but it’s stuck with me since I heard it. Anyway, I’m just going to start and hopefully this will turn out ok. And if no one reads the whole thing that’s fine too but I feel like I need to write this for me and if someone can relate to it or find something in it for them then great! Here we go. 

At my last OB appointment, I scheduled my induction for April 4th. I got induced at 41 weeks with Peyton and I originally wanted to try to go into labor on my own this time. Since we were moving and I was so stressed about everything, I changed my mind and decided to get induced so that I could be a little more prepared and lower my anxiety a little bit. I also wanted to make sure that I had a doctor that I liked for the delivery since my office has a bunch of doctors that I would see. Really there was only one doctor I wanted to avoid. More on that later. 

On April 4th, I called the hospital at about 8am to see when they wanted me to come in. They said they were really busy and low on staff because it was spring break so they kept telling me to call back every few hours if they didn’t call me first. Every time I called, my heart rose and sank and I got more and more upset. So much for lowering my anxiety. I cried a lot that day. I was just so ready to be done and I felt like I was never going to have this baby. I know, very over dramatic of me. 

At about 7:30 or 8 at night, I called the hospital one more time with no real hope that they were going to tell me to come in. To my surprise, they told me to come in at 10! Woo hoo!!! I just wanted to get in the hospital I didn’t care that I was exhausted and it was so late. We packed up our stuff and took Peyton to my in-laws to spend the night. I could spend hours talking about my thoughts of Peyton and those last few times before she wasn’t our only child but I’ll save that for another time. 

We got to the hospital and got settled in our room. My nurse was really nice and reminded me of a family friend whom I love so I felt really comfortable with her. I think it’s super important that you feel comfortable with your delivery nurse because they really are your best friend and biggest supporter while you’re in labor. She got my IV in with one try, which made me love, her more. I did bleed all over the floor for some reason, but at least I only had to get poked once haha! 

They started me on Pitocin at 11:40 and I got my epidural right after midnight. When I got my epidural with Peyton, it was a weird experience (you can read about it here if you want) but it didn’t hurt at all. That wasn’t the case this time. He kept hitting a nerve and it kept making my leg Charlie horse and sent shooting pains through my whole body. My back is hurting just thinking about it. I kept thinking, “Does this guy even know what he’s doing?! Am I going to be paralyzed?!” But then he finished and I was happy to see him leave. 

It was time to wait. I told the nurse that last time I didn’t progress at all on Pitocin until they broke my water and I went from 3cm to 10cm in about 45 minutes. Which was me trying to nicely say, “Please send someone in here to break my water so we can get this show on the road!” Well, for 5 hours on Pitocin I was stuck at a 3 and 70% effaced. So at almost 5am on the 5th, the doctor came in to break my water. 

The doctor that came in was the only doctor I didn’t want to see at all my whole pregnancy. I had a bad experience with him last time and I think I had some PTSD because just thinking about him made me want to cry. Anyway, it ended up not being that bad. He was probably only in the room for like 10 minutes max and then his shift was over! Hallelujah! I was so nervous he would be the one delivering so I happily watched him walk out of my life hopefully forever! 

With the shift change, I got a new nurse too and she was wonderful. Her name was Tisha and she was a literal angel and made me feel so comfortable and strong and brave. I love her still to this day! 

Now on to the real waiting. I tried to sleep but that didn’t really work out because the blood pressure cuff would go off and cut into my arm every 15 minutes. Also, I kept getting really light headed with every contraction, but the nurse said everything looked fine... but still. Lots of nerves. 

My mom and sister came around 8:30 or so to wait with us. My sister is a photographer (check her out!) so I wanted her to be there to capture some moments for us. Best decision ever! I love the pictures so much! 

I was progressing pretty steadily and at about 9 I was fully dilated. The nurse said they were going to let me “rest and descend” which pretty much means they let the baby move down by himself without having to push. The doctor on call was now Dr. Bennett so she came and checked me and said she would be back later when I was ready to push.

My nurse brought me a peanut ball to put between my legs to help everything move along. She kept calling it “Bob” because it looks like a minion. But Bob was the best and helped me progress so fast!

I felt like I was waiting forever. Dr. Bennett was stuck in a C-section so I waited a lot longer than usual once I was fully dilated. I just wanted to get the baby out!

I’m not sure what time it was but maybe around 10:30 Scoty started to notice some blood on my sheets and in my catheter bag. I figured it was just normal bleeding stuff but LUCKILY he went to find the nurse to see if it was ok. She came in and checked me out and didn’t really say much. But a couple minutes later she came back with the doctor and they said they better get me ready to push. So everything started to feel very real! Everyone started rolling in beds and baby birthing things and other nurses came in. It was time! 

Dr Bennett delivers babies on her feet instead of sitting down so she rose the bed way up and I thought it was pretty funny to be up on this huge bed for everyone to see. Modesty is pretty much out the window at this point. I didn’t really care who was seeing what. I just wanted that baby! 

Finally at like 11 it was time to push! I did a few practice pushes but the doctor told me to stop. She didn’t take her eyes off me, and started talking quietly and very fast to the nurse telling her to grab a bunch of different things, including forceps and my heart sunk. I could tell something was going on because everyone got really serious and started moving faster and grabbing different tools. I asked what was going on and she said the baby was posterior (face up instead of face down like they’re supposed to be) and I had a placental abruption. I said I don’t know what that means but she didn’t answer me. In my head I started freaking out because everyone was acting so serious so I knew something was wrong. I asked her about forceps because I didn’t want to use them but she said she was going to need to use them if I couldn’t get the baby out fast enough because of the abruption by she was going to try not to use them so I needed to make my pushes count.  

From my understanding, a placental abruption is when your placenta pulls away from the wall of your uterus and you start to bleed. Apparently it’s pretty serious (hence the mood in the room) and if its not taken care of quickly I could have bled out and died... so there’s that. Which is why I’m so glad that Scoty went and got the nurse when he noticed the bleeding! If it were just me, I wouldn’t have said anything and things might have ended up a lot different. 

Anyway, at this point I was pretty freaked out because no one was telling me what was going on. I told myself I needed to just focus on pushing so that I wouldn’t need forceps and I just wanted to get it over with because everyone was being scary. With good reason in the end but like I said, no one was telling me anything. After a few pushes they said my oxygen levels kept dropping down to like 89% so they put a mask on me and I went back to pushing. 

Luckily I only pushed for about 20 minutes and at 11:25, Theodore Daniel Stobbe was here! 7lbs 11oz and 20.5” long! 

!!!WARNING!!!! 

This next picture is pretty graphic. Not like... pictures of.. my stuff graphic but just pretty gory. Theo was covered in blood since I was bleeding so much and I thought it was interesting. Usually babies are covered in other stuff but not a lot of blood. It also helped me understand why they took him away from me for so long. 

You ready? 

Really don’t look if you don’t want to, just blur your eyes haha! 

Crazy huh?? It looks like something from an old horror movie to me! Birth is a weird, scary, incredible thing!

Ok ok the other pictures won’t be so graphic I promise! 

So right after he was born I didn’t really get to see him. They held him up for like 2 seconds and rushed him over to the warming bed to check him out. So I just sat there trying to catch glimpses from across the room when the nurse wasn’t blocking my view. I was still feeling a little panicked from the whole ordeal and still not really understanding why I couldn’t hold him right then because they asked me if that’s what I wanted to do… and I did...so give me my baby! JK but really. 

They were trying to pump blood out of his stomach since he swallowed a bunch but they couldn’t really get much out. As I was trying to see over everyone to see if my baby was ok, the doctor and my nurse just kept telling me how great I did. Which is honestly what I needed to hear because it was such a weird and confusing experience and I wasn’t sure what was happening for most of it. They were probably saying a lot of things and praising me because they knew how freaked out I was but I’ll take it anyway. I think every mom should be over praised after giving birth anyway!

Finally after what felt like forever they brought Theo to me. I have a love hate view of laying the baby on your chest after. I love it because of the snuggles and the closeness but I also don’t love it because I can’t see my baby! I always like when other people hold my kids so I can see them better.

One of the first things I noticed was his GIANT ears! They were so big they were resting on his shoulders! So cute and perfect! They told me his head looked kinda crazy but that it would fix itself quick. And it did! But he for sure looked pretty scary for a while. Scoty took a picture of him where he straight up looked like Darth Vader when he takes his helmet off in Return of the Jedi.

See??

Anyway, that’s pretty much it! We got moved to our new room and Peyton came to visit us! I missed her so much and I just wanted her to meet her new baby brother. She was so sweet and cute with him! She loves babies so I knew that it would be great! She just kept saying how cute he was and giving him kisses. 

Oh man, if you stuck around this long, you’re a true friend and deserve a treat. I owe you cookies. Life is still pretty crazy but after almost 5 months I feel like we're kinda getting the hang of it! 

view post

Peyton's First Birthday

view post

Life Dump

Well, well, well...
It has been nine months since I have blogged... Every time I would think about writing I would think of something better to do like sleep or binge watch shows. Since it has been so long I just went through all my pictures and picked out a few (or maybe a lot) of my favorites to do a rundown of what's been going on! Mostly this is an excuse to look at all of my pictures and cry because Peyton is so big. Anyway, here we go. 

September 2015

view post

Peyton's Birth Story

Well, I have been a mother for six whole weeks and what a crazy six weeks it has been. I'm currently typing as fast as I possibly can hoping that I can finish this post before Peyton wakes up which could be any second since I just heard her sneeze. Fair warning this will be scatterbrained and probably wont make a lot of sense to most of you. Also, please excuse any typos and improper grammar because "aint nobody got time fo dat!" 

I feel horrible that I haven't been very good at documenting this huge change in my life. I had high hopes of posting lots of pictures, writing in my journal every day, and remembering every detail of everything but that didn't happen. So I'm going to start from the beginning and hopefully while I write it will help me remember some details that I probably forgot. Here we go!

Irony: As I wrote that my sweet baby had the biggest blow out that she has ever had. So, after many wipes, a hurried bath, and changes of clothes for both of us, let me try this again.

Friday, September 11, 2015
I had my final doctors appointment to schedule my induction because I was almost a week overdue. From what the other doctors had told us, we were probably looking at being induced on Monday since they usually don't like to do it over the weekend because doctors like to have the weekend off... Well I wanted my baby to not be a week overdue so... Anyway at my appointment everything looked good. I hadn't dilated any more (I had been at 2ish centimeters for a couple weeks) so the doctor said they would induce me. I was expecting him to say that we would have to wait until Monday but he was just like "So, when would you like to go in? You can wait until Monday or you could go in tomorrow, or" and that was all I heard. I had just told Scoty that I wished they would just let me go the next day so that I wouldn't have to wait around anymore. Scoty pretty much stopped him right there too and told him tomorrow would be great! He left us to go call the hospital to make sure that was ok and get a time for us to go in. Scoty and I just looked at each other, wide-eyed and realized that this was really happening. The doc came back and said we were all set for 6am the next morning and sent us on our way. I was feeling great because I had been so anxious just waiting around and now my baby was finally coming! 
Scoty and I decided that for our last night as a childless couple we should go out to dinner. We went to Romano's Macaroni Grill since that was the place we went the night before we got married and we figured it would be a fun thing to do. As I was getting ready to go I started feeling some pains in my stomach and I thought I was having contractions. Through dinner, I kept timing them and they seemed pretty regular for a while but then they went away so who knows what was happening. We filled up on way too many carbs and decided to go hang out with a few of our friends and family to finish the night. I knew we had an early morning and I wasn't finished packing for the hospital but I just wanted one last night of normalcy before this baby came.

Saturday, September 12, 2015
After maybe two hours of sleep, we got up and finished packing the last few things and headed out! I had hopes of doing my hair in a cool way or putting on make up but I figured I was going to be a mess when this was all over anyway so it didn't matter.

Signing in at the hospital

My go to "I don't know what to do in this picture so I'll just give a thumbs up" pose.

We got all settled in our room and the nurse came in to hook me up to all of the monitors and things. I was nervous about the IV since I have awful veins and it usually takes a good five or six tries to get it working. I told the nurse about my past struggles and luckily she got it in on the first try. Seriously, huge blessing. Then she asked me what I wanted to do about pain management and if I wanted an epidural right then. I didn't really have a birth plan but I her that my two main goals were to get the baby out safely the best way her and the doctor thought and for me to be in as little pain as possible. I have always had a really low pain tolerance so I knew that I wanted to get an epidural as soon as they would let me. She said she just needed to go grab the anesthesiologist and he could get it going. 

At this point, they had already started me on pitocin to get my contractions going but I didn't really feel them yet. Our nurse came back in and said there were two anesthesiologists there at the time because one was about to get off and one had just started his shift. She wasn't sure which one we were going to get but she told us about one of them to kind of give us a heads up. She said "If you get Dr. so-and-so (I forgot his name) I just want to warn you. He's very... hands on. Like he's going to pick you up and move you to where he wants you to be and he can be a little rough. But he's great!" That made me a little nervous and it didn't help that when the doctor came in. He was this old man with crazy hair and smiley face suspenders. I thought, "Great... I got the one she warned me about." But I am so grateful I got him! He was a crazy old man, but he was so nice and after he left the nurse told me he was the best one but she wasn't going to tell me that if I got the other guy. I was also grateful she had warned me about him being hands on because sure enough he pretty much threw me around like a rag doll. The nurse told Scoty he should probably sit down if he was going to watch me get the epidural because this was the part that spouses usually got woozy. Scoty is crazy and likes to watch everything happen. He watches when he gets IV's and things which I cannot do. I don't want to see anything. 

Anyway, there I was, curled up about to get stabbed in my spine by a crazy man. He had a huge cart of contraptions to get the epidural going. Scoty later told me that he was like a mad scientist, mixing all these different things together in the syringe and squirting it to get the air bubbles out like in the movies. I was so nervous but he ended up being very gentle (which I wouldn't have guessed by the way he got me into position) and I hardly felt a pinch when he put the epidural in. Next thing I knew my toes were tingling and I was on my way to no pain for the rest of the day. 

This is where it gets pretty boring... I pretty much just sat there for 5 hours waiting for something to happen. I don't remember what I did to keep myself busy. I think at one point I tried to take a nap but I don't think I did. Scoty and I tried to watch a show but I'm not sure if we did... Like I said, I regret not writing this sooner because I don't remember the little things. My mom and oldest sister Sarah came at some point to hang out and wait with us too.

After a few hours, I wasn't really progressing so the nurse went to get the doctor to break my water. The OBGYN that I had been going to has about 10 doctors and they just rotate what days they are on call. Luckily I ended up getting Doctor Jacob. I saw him a few times at my appointments and he was great! I liked all the doctors that I had seen except for one so as long as I didn't get him I was fine. Dr Jacob was one of my favorites so I was hoping that the baby would come before his shift was over so he could deliver. It wasn't looking good though since I had only dilated about a centimeter in five hours. So he broke my water and they said they would come check on me in a little bit to see if that would help me progress faster. Having your water broken is the weirdest feeling. I don't even know how to describe it except with sound effects that I don't know how to convey here... maybe like the feeling you get in your gut when there's a deep bass beat in a song... but only once... yeah it makes no sense.

About an hour after they broke my water, I started to feel some pain in my left side. I was faithfully pressing the epidural button every 15 minutes but I could still feel the pain. They told me that my contractions might get so painful that they could be felt through the epidural. Which was not what I wanted at all. So I called the nurse and asked if I could get my epidural checked. The anesthesiologist came back in and said that he would mix me up a little boost so that I wouldn't be able to feel the pain anymore. After that boost, I was feeling fine again but I was extra numb from my waist down. Like to the point that I had no control over my muscles. Weirdest feeling ever. I couldn't turn over or use my stomach or leg muscles at all. 

The nurse finally came back to check if I had dilated at all about an hour and a half after they broke my water. She looked at me with a confused face and just said "Nothing." I took that as "Nothing has happened still" and my heart dropped. I figured I was in for the long haul and would be there all night. Turns out "nothing" meant there was nothing there. She couldn't feel my cervix and said I was fully dilated and ready to go! We were all super surprised since I hadn't progressed at all and then all of the sudden I was ready to push! They let me rest for a little bit before the nurse came back in to help me start pushing. 

This was right after they told us that I was ready to push. Obviously, Scoty was excited.

Everything started to happen so fast that Sarah kind of got trapped in the room when I started to push. She found a little nook to hide in but we didn't make her stay there the whole time. Originally it was just going to be Scoty and my mom in the room but I was glad that she was there too. I got to be in the room when she had her last baby and I thought it was awesome! Also at that point, everyone had seen my everything so I didn't care anymore. The more the merrier. 

No one really tells you about pushing and how weird it is when you can't feel what you're doing. Luckily our nurse was awesome so with every push she kind of gave me this little mantra. Deep breath, chin down, push. Seems pretty simple and I should have been able to remember it every time without her having to say it but I think I would have forgotten if she didn't. Since my body and legs were so numb I didn't feel a thing. I said it felt like I was holding a whale when I had to hold my legs. Yes, a whale. I don't know why but it makes sense to me. Like they were warm and blubbery and heavy. I guess thats what I think a whale feels like. I think I was also getting a little loopy from the drugs and the lack of oxygen from holding my breath to push. 

I pushed for about an hour and a half and finally I heard the tiniest, cutest little squeal and I knew our little girl was here!!! After that first little sound she filled her lungs and screamed good and loud! The first thing I noticed about her was that she had good chubby cheeks! I always said I wanted a chubby baby so that I would be able to squish them so I was happy I got one! 

The second thing I noticed was how incredibly purple she was. Like grape soda purple. I was worried for a second but they told me if we just rub her she will turn red and sure enough she did! 

When they laid her on me thats when it really hit me that this whole thing was real. I had spent the last 9 months growing this tiny human inside me and she was finally here! Even while I was pregnant it didn't really feel real. We finally had our little baby and we were a family of three!!!

The loves of my life

Once everything calmed down a little bit, Scoty and I needed to talk about what we wanted to name her. I didn't want to decide 100% on a name until I actually saw her but we were pretty sure we wanted to name her Peyton almost my whole pregnancy. We had a couple other names that were like back ups if Peyton didn't seem to fit but once she was actually here we both knew that was her name! I wish I could say that it was a family name or something but its not. I heard it on a dumb TV show about 6 years ago and really liked it. Just the name, not the character on the show. Jane was a middle name that we both really liked and it was also my great great grandma's middle name so it worked! Peyton Jane Stobbe!

A few people from Scoty's family came to watch Peyton get her first bath while I rested a little bit in the recovery room.

They put blue and white bows in her hair since there was a BYU game that night. Go Cougs!

I love this picture because I love her squishy cheeks so much!

After everything was over and we were just sitting in the room by ourselves I started thinking about the whole day. I just had a baby... and it didn't feel real. I was thinking about how easy it was and I started to feel a little bad. A lot of my friends had recently had babies and some of them had hard, painful, or scary deliveries. I felt bad that I didn't feel any pain and it went pretty quickly. Then I realized that was dumb and I should be thankful that everything went so smoothly. I had a beautiful baby girl and I was healthy. I guess I was just expecting it to be a lot more dramatic than it was. Becoming a mom was not hard for me and I don't take that for granted. When I think back on that day I feel so incredibly blessed!!!

There is a lot more I could write and I definitely could have written this better and less scatter brained but I just wanted to at least get it written out while I had a little time. I feel like I am so behind on everything but there could be a lot less cute reasons I am so busy. I love my little family.

view post