You asked. I answered. Birth story edition, Part I.

I love questions. It's probably an indication of how much I love talking about myself. Which probably isn't a good thing. But then... we're all bloggers, which means, to some degree, we all love talking about ourselves. So. To answer your questions...

(Okay, so this first one requires that I slip into um, shall we say, mother speak? It's the sort of language where you refer to things like your cervix and dilation and pelvic floors as if they are all a regular part of conversation. So. Read on, if you dare, but don't say I didn't warn you.)

Wonder Woman wants to know birth stories...

Jordan, my oldest, is my only Utah baby. I was a student at BYU when he was born, my due date the very day after my last day of final exams. I worried that this would be an issue. Ha! Jordan had other plans. See, Jordan didn't really want to be born, stubborn little thing that he was. My due date came and went... and went... and went. My mother flew out to be there for his birth and planned to stay for two weeks. Two days before she was supposed to fly home? STILL NO BABY.

So, my doctor, trying to help me along a little bit, strips my membranes (if you don't know what this entails, um, Google it. I really ought not go into detail here!), then sends me to the hospital for a generous application of prostaglandin gel. You KNOW where that goes, right? Yeah. There. The plan? Come back in twelve hours and you'll probably be close to labor.

THREE times, we did this.

Prostiglandan. Wait twelve hours. Go back.

THREE times, I was checked, monitored, and sent home, no closer to labor than I was twelve hours before. Finally, they scheduled a regular doctor's office visit for the following Monday morning. I was two weeks late and SO miserable! Do you know how not fun it is to watch your nurse draw extra boxes into your chart, cause she's run out of weeks where she can record your weight? So, the doctor decides it's time to bring out the big dogs and start me on pitocin. Yay! Baby will be born today!

Heh.

12 hours of pitocin. 12 hours. And not just a little dose. They were pumping me as full of the stuff as is medically allowed. AND... nothing. I had a few mild contractions throughout the day, but nothing that had me sweating. At the end of the 12 hours, I was dilated (are you ready for this?) to a 2. Jordan was high and happy and showing no signs of distress so the doctor actually considered sending me back home to wait a few more days.

I think when I threatened self applied C-section, she opted to keep me in the hospital. Next on the menu? Manually breaking my water... NOT EASY when you are only dilated 2 centimeters.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Long story short? With my water broken, Jordan no longer had a happy sea of amniotic fluid to hang out in and he FINALLY decided he could join us in the outside world. Had I known it would only take four hours, I might have tried without an epidural, but the road seemed long and weary and I was happy to become wonderfully and blissfully numb...

Thinking I had a good eight or nine hours before it was time to deliver, I curled up on my side and went to sleep. Josh was watching Patrick Dempsey in his compelling film, "Can't Buy Me Love," when the nurse came in to check my progress. And then, like a pit stop in a NASCAR race, the room became a flurry of activity. The lights were turned on, the end of my bed removed, doctors and nurses bustling about getting everything ready.

Five minutes later, I was holding my baby boy. He was perfect.I remember thinking he seemed tiny, though at 9 lbs. 4 ounces, he wasn't, really. He had more hair than I'd ever seen on a baby and eyes so dark brown, they looked black. Suddenly, I completely forgot the agony and torture of waiting two extra weeks for his arrival. He was here. He was mine.



Sigh.

And now he's almost nine. Good grief, it happens fast! He's old enough that in order to share a picture with you on my blog, I can't just pull one from the picture file on my desktop and upload it to the blog. I have to pull out a picture... a hard copy to scan and save on my hard drive.

There will always be a special place in my heart for Jordan. He was my first - the baby that taught me how to be a mother, that endured the difficulty of my learning and growing, my stretching, my becoming. He's still teaching me, as we go along this path called life. I learn, I marvel.

I shake my head as we sit across the table from one another, talking about Harry Potter as if we were friends, or coming up with strategies to make answering one hundred multiplication problems in under five minutes more doable. He's this little person now... still a kid, but a big kid. A kid that can make himself scrambled eggs, and wash his own hair. He can dribble a basketball and read big books and hang out with his friends, without wanting his Mom around.

And yet, he's still that baby up there. He has his moments... when he's sick, or disappointed, or just feeling sad that he'll cling to me just as he clung to my womb. A baby refusing to be born, and a kid not quite ready to grow up.

Keep clinging, dear heart, for my baby you will always be.

And that is Part I. It turned out to be more than a just a birth story, I see, and is longer than I expected, but then, maybe not. When am I ever short about things when it comes to words? Part II will come along shortly, as well as the answers to the rest of your questions.