Adilynn's Birth

**I need to replace pictures with birth pictures for this post, but they are on my harddrive. I promise I will get to it someday though!! For now, enjoy these cute ones!**

When I first found out I was pregnant with Adilynn, Ben and I were so excited!

 It seemed like it took us forever to get pregnant, and we were starting to get nervous. After 10 months it finally happened! I surprised Ben with the news, gifting him a baby shoe and the results of my pregnancy test. And we started planning. I was almost done with my degrees at BYU and working as a journalist for the Daily Herald in Provo, UT. I would have about 3 weeks left of the semester after our baby was due, but I knew my professors would allow me to bring my little bug to classes. I figured after those last few weeks of schooling I would need to get back to work in order to pay off my student loans. We were wondering who we could find to watch our baby for free, given we had no money or knowledge of government assistance at that time, and we were a little nervous. That's when Ben secured a great job as an engineering co-op and we talked with some extended family who agreed to let us live in Ben's grandparents old home for free. Talk about lucky! That meant I could stay home with our baby full-time, something I never thought I would want to do, but it all felt perfect. 

We told our families on Easter weekend 2011 that we were expecting. Honestly, no one seemed too thrilled. Perhaps they hadn't eaten enough candy Peeps yet. Ben's side of the family had just finished their annual GPS egg hunt. We got a few hugs and congratualtions. When we told my side of the family, people seemed even less enthused, some even leaving the room without muttering a word to us. It wasn't what we had hoped for, and it felt like our happy moment was darkened. Our whole pregnancy went on that way. Some family had their reasons for not wanting to be involved, be it jealousy of our pregnancy or whatever other reason, and it made us worry what our family life would be like. That's when Ben told me that we were our own family.

Ben helped me through the pains and scares of our first pregnancy. He gained the weight with me, calmed me when we wondered if I was miscarrying, helped me stay comfortable when I had to sleep on the floor at a family reunion, and tried to keep my naturally negative mind remembering the positives of that pregnancy, despite the reactions of others. I was going to be a mom, and Ben is the one who helped me know what that really meant. He is the one who helped me know what being a family was, and together we knew our baby had all the love he or she would ever need.

After our second prenatal visit, Ben and I went to visit his sister, Heather, at work. She is a nurse and had mentioned that a friend of hers did ultrasounds and could tell us the gender of our baby if we wanted. We jumped at the chance, not wanting to wait for our 20 week anatamy scan ultrasound. The friend told us we were having a boy! When we learned a few weeks later that our baby boy was actually a SHE, we were sad...for about a day. We felt like we had lost a baby, even though we hadn't. It was such a weird feeling. But the next day we went to look at baby things and all the sadness disappeared. We were going to have a girl!!! And she didn't want to wait long to make her appearance.

November 8, 2011 I was very sick, so sick that we went to the hospital because I was suffering from dehydration and we were worried about our baby. When we got to the labor and delivery room, the nurse hooked the IV fluids up and asked how long I'd been having contractions. Ben and I looked at the monitor they had placed around my belly and saw that I was indeed having contractions. They were close together, and I wondered why I couldn't feel them. Had I puked up my ability to feel physical pain!?

I was wheeled into another room where Ben and I figured we would wait till the IV fluids were gone. When a nurse came in and asked if I'd like my epidural we were so confused. What? Were we having our baby? Five weeks early? 

I agreed to the epidural, even though I hadn't felt any contractions. I was ready to sleep off my terrible night of illness, when Ben and I realized we hadn't brought anything with us to the hospital for baby or for us. Ben called his mom and asked her to bring some things to the hospital for us. She did, and then we waited. 

The epidural made my legs feel so heavy, and not the good kind of heavy you get from morphine. Still, I had heard how painful labor was and I had no energy to deal with pain after being so sick, so I stuck with the epidural. At one point I had Ben try to rub my feet becasue I felt like my bones hurt. Weird right!? I asked him to bend my toes down and he said if he moved them anymore my feet would break! Epirurals are weird. 

My labor lasted about 10 hours. My mother-in-law, two sisters-in-law, my mother, and one of my sisters all made periodic visits. When the nurse discovered I was crowning (that's right, I had no clue thanks to my pefectly working epidural), we asked everyone to leave so we could be together for our birthing experience as a couple. This really offended some people, which confused us and made us kind of mad. We hadn't had their support throughout our pregnancy, but they felt like they should be included in the birthing experience with us. Ben and I calmly explained that this was something we wanted to do together and again asked everyone to leave. That wasn't the end of the drama involving why we didn't want extended family present for the birth of our first child, but Ben and I did our best to brush all that aside and focus on the good thing that was happening: our baby was about to be born!!

Active pushing took less than 20 minutes, and little Adilynn Elva, named after her Grandma Jackson, was born, perfect and tiny and beautiful. Her dark hair was curly and her tiny features gorgeous. Ben and I savoured some time together, the three of us, in our new family, holding our little doll of a baby. The doctor who delivered Adilynn at 11pm set her directly on my stomach after birth. I didn't know if I could touch her or hold her, so i just put my finger in her hand and talked with her. Ben cut the cord, and the nurses examined her shortly after that. When Adilynn was found healthy, I got to hold her in my arms, and Ben so did Ben. I did some skin to skin and nursing with Adi for a little bit given it was a recommendation from books I had read as well as from the hoapital staff, but I didn't enjoy those moments. It just felt so unnatural to me. Plus we didn't need to bond or get to know each other. We were already best friends. 

Ben, Adilynn and I enjoyed about an hour of alone time before inviting others in. Everyone seemed to love Adilynn instantly. The grandmas gushed over her and the aunties held her with nervous excitment. Even the nurses commented on how beautiful Adilynn was. 

Despite having terrible jaundice and an underdeveloped mouth, she was perfect! We got to bring Adilynn home, although she had to stay in a lightbed for over a week to combat the jaundice. When her jaundice worsened, we learnes her liver needed more of a jump start. I pushed my guilt aside and spoon fed her breastmilk and eventually moved her onto a bottle. She immediately improved. This made me both happy and sad. Adilynn had a hard time sucking and was so tiny she was rarely awake. Breastfeeding was hard for her, which made it hard for me. I felt so guilty about pumping and bottle feeding, but honestly it is what worked for us. I continued pumping for about 2 months when Adi developed some stomach issues. We decided to switch to formula, and her stomach issues improved. I worried about judgement from others, but only one person ever made a negative comment to me about our decusion to formula feed. We were all much happier with our decision.

Having Adilynn cost us just over $10,000, draining our savings account. That made life rough, but we were okay being poor again. She was worth every penny.

The next two and a half years we spent as a family of three were just magic! Ben went to school at the Univeristy of Utah and continued to support us financially. I started teaching piano and voice lessons from our home two hours a day to make a little bit of extra money for trips, date nights, and swimming lessons for Adi. I look back now and realize we should have used that money to pay off our debt, but we had more fun making memories.

Our next post will be about our parenting style.  Here is a little preview of what it will include:

Ben and I deffinetly parent differently than most people we know. We are seen as strict and we lack the free parenting style that is so popular right now among our peers raising their families. I say to each his own! But we are happy with the way we are raising our children. We can take our children anywhere, so far (knock on wood!!), and never worry about them throwing tantrums, screaming, hitting, not listening, asking for things, being ungrateful, being disrespectful, running off, or getting bored, all things we have heard of other children doing and most parents complaining of. We attribute their "weirdness" to our parenting style and their natural good-natured attitudes (and the fact that God knew if he gave us crazy children none of us would live, ha!). We will include our schedules for different ages. Hope it helps explain why our kids are the way they are, and why we choose to be "strict."