BABY ISAAC!!!!

So guess who was born on my half birthday?! And has a dimple?! Our fourth (and final) baby: Isaac Kellen Wilson. He was our smallest baby at 9 lbs, 3 oz! Yeah for ultrasound due dates! I wonder what sizes my other kids would have been if their due dates would have been determined by ultrasound as well...

I already wrote about the issues I had with this pregnancy and birth (click here to read), so I will only focus on the good stuff here. It took us awhile to decide on his name. We kind of have a theme - boys with Bible-inspired first names and family-inspired middle names. I like the name Zack but not so much Zachary (not to mention it is very popular these days), so I liked the idea of Isaac and Zack for short. And since we decided this was to be our last biological baby, I wanted to used one of Kellen's names for the middle name. Kellen wasn't too keen on Isaac at first, and felt weird using his name, but I eventually won as Kellen realized how awesome Isaac Kellen is :) Besides, I was NOT going to allow Giddeon. Too many bad nicknames to make fun of.

But Kellen's mom was able to fly out to help us out, which was awesome. Not only did our kids get to spend some great quality time with their grandma while Kellen and I were at the hospital, but we didn't have to impose on someone in our church to watch our kids for us :) It was a win, win.

I was up a lot the night before (and week before) with coughing fits, so I didn't get much sleep. Always great to start out a planned surgery/birth exhausted. But I got up early to shower, fix my hair, take my zofran (I wasn't allowed to eat after midnight, but still had a very upset stomach), and get Shade's backpack ready for school. Then we were off.

I never took the time to figure out where the labor and delivery entrance was before the surgery, so we just decided to get there a bit early and wing it. We got it figured out, then went into a very large room with many beds separated by curtains where they did my admission. There were women on both sides of me in active labor. It was crazy, and a lot different than the other hospital I gave birth at. But at least we had some privacy for the prayers we said together. After they got all my information, they gave me a hair net, an IV (it was a nurse in training, but she did a pretty good job) and some anti-acid stuff to drink (nasty). Then they gave Kellen some clothes to wear in the operating room and wheeled me in for surgery.

They gave me a spinal block anesthesia, where I bend my back over a pillow and the doctor sticks a needle and catheter into my spine. I remember it was not nearly as relieving as the one I got with Eli (I felt somewhat cheated), but I also had a sore upper body this time from all the coughing I had been doing. But it still did its job, so that is good. After they got me hooked up to the machines and prepped for the incision, they let Kellen come in. People were asking me questions and such, but I was nervous to talk too much because I didn't want to have a coughing fit. So I let Kellen do most of the talking and I tried to focus on controlling my breathing so as not to trigger any cough.

Of course I can feel the tugging and pressure and such, but no pain. It is very weird being completely awake while someone is cutting you open and digging around your insides. Another thing I feel cheated out on is that after they took out Isaac, I was unable to take that first deep breath - the one where you can finally expand your lungs fully for the first time in months - because it would have triggered a coughing fit :( Oh, well.

Kellen got to see them take out the baby, and of course he took tons of pictures with the camera and his phone. He even got a few pictures of the doctors stitching up what looks like my uterus. Yuck. After they cleaned up Isaac, they finally brought him over to me and I got to see my precious little angel for the first time. What a sweet piece of heaven!

Afterward, they gave me the tubal, stitched me up (there were two doctors - my well-experienced surgeon [Dr. Mironda Williams] was teaching another surgeon), and took me back to the original room separated by curtains to watch my vital signs for a bit before they took me to the postpartum area.

After I had Eli, I had a slight heart rate drop (from the 90's into the 30's). My heart rate is still lower than it used to be, but they did an echo after Eli (heart ultrasound) and didn't find any abnormalities. This time, I had no problems with my heart, but after the surgery, my body's core temperature was too low to be read on a thermometer. This continued to be a problem for several hours post surgery and they basically had to put 4 layers of warm blankets on top of me until my body finally responded and my temperature went back to normal. It was pretty weird feeling cold while having that many layers on.

After they did the workup on baby Isaac, Kellen went home to get his mom and the other kids to come and meet their baby brother. It was the cutest thing! Baby Eli was only 14 months old, yet he still recognized Isaac as something special and kept wanting to give him kisses. And Olive was super excited to hold a tiny baby. And Shade is such a natural big brother. He would often tell Olive and Eli to be careful around Isaac and protect him. Our kids are generally so loving toward one another, I sure hope it lasts!

The only problem with having the kids at the hospital, is that after they saw the baby and realized they couldn't really do anything with him, they got bored pretty fast, and there wasn't really much to do there. So Kellen would blow up the gloves into balloons to give them something to do until it was time to go home. Those kids sure were rowdy!

I ended up staying an extra day in the hospital just to make sure I wasn't going to bust open my incision from all the coughing and to make sure my pain was being controlled sufficiently enough. And even though it was difficult, I still managed to heal just fine, even with all the coughing. At home, the coughing fits lasted another 2 weeks, and were still fairly painful, but at least it was manageable. I had already had my recovery area set up for when I came home from the hospital - I had a pack-n-play with a bassinet attachment set up with all the newborn clothes organized and diapers next to it. It is easier for me to sleep on our couch after surgery because it has places I can use to pull myself up and over so as not to have to use my stomach muscles, and it has a reclining function. Plus, then Kellen wouldn't have to wake up each time Isaac did :)

So even though it was a difficult pregnancy/labor, and I felt kind of cheated on not being able to enjoy my last baby experience because of the nasty cough/cold, at least baby and I were and are overall safe and healthy, as in no MAJOR complications. I really am very blessed!! It can just be hard to see those blessings while the negative things are happening. And even though I often wonder why, what is the purpose of this or that, why are my prayers not being answered how I want them answered, am I asking too much or something, etc, etc... I cannot deny that God does take care of me and my family. And in the big picture of life, these little things really do not matter, it is only how we choose to react to the little things and let them affect us that matters... I actually had that realization a couple of months before I got pregnant, although I still had a hard time applying that to my situation at the time. I now look back (almost 4 months later), and see that it really is the way things go. Bad things happen to good people all the time. We may not be able to have much control over those things, but we can have control over how we let those things affect us, even if it takes awhile to get there!