The Meaning of Being "Pree"...

As a child, birthdays are one of the best, if not the best, "holiday" of the whole year.  Next only to Christmas and maybe Halloween or Easter, for the candy of course.  Counting down the months, then weeks, then days, until finally you're a whole year older.  Yippee!  Cupcakes at school, friends over to play or spend the night, cake and ice cream, and oh yeah, PRESENTS!

Well somewhere in that whole mess of fun are mom and dad.  As a kid they're the ones setting everything up and buying your cake and supervising your party, but from a kiddo's perspective, that's really all they're up to.  I know that's how I used to think when I was five, six, seven, years old, but in reality, there's a completely different side to birthdays...

And you never see it coming until you become a parent and your child's very first birthday rolls around.  It usually starts the day or night before.  For me and the hubs, it started that morning for our oldest little guy, Bubba.  Come the morning of April 1st, April Fool's Day, we started recalling the days events as they ocurred three years ago...

I remember my parents were out of town, so hubby was driving me (37 weeks and 1 day pregnant) to work.  On the highway we joked about an April Fool's Day baby, and the fact that my parents were flying back that day, so we were officially out of the woods for baby coming while they were gone.  I said, "Unless something starts RIGHT NOW, there's no way we'll have this baby before they get back".

I got to work.  Normal day, normal comments...."You're going to pop any minute now!"  "When were you due??!!" "Wow!  You've really dropped!"  But I didn't notice anything different.  So 2:45pm comes around, I'm on my last break, sitting in the hallway talking to my mom (they had just got home) and I felt a "pop".  My very first thought was "that was my water", but I shook it off because hey, let's face it, this isn't a movie or television.  It's real life and that's not how it really works.  Less than 10% of women have their water break on it's own.  It's not like on TV when WHAM water starts gushing, plus, nothing came out, so I just continued to sit and talk for a good five minutes more.  I was getting ready to say goodbye and head back to work, so I stood up...and that's when my movie moment hit.  There was the gush and my pants were soaked.  I told my mom I thought my water broke, but she didn't believe me.  She told me to go to the bathroom, squat down and see if more came out, which it didn't, but walking out of the bathroom I had my second and third "gush".

The clinic was only a few miles down and with no car I decided to make my first attempt at calling a cab, so I could get checked out first before running to the hospital for a "false alarm".  After all, it could be pee right? Since I had no idea what the number was for the cab company, I asked a co-worker which it when the stuff hit the fan.  She noticed my pants were wet and freaked out.  Screaming  my water broke and pushing me back into the call center yelling for a doctor.  I wasn't even contracting LOL  Anyway, the docs came over and I assured them I was NOT contracting, but I think they figured I just didn't know what they felt like, so they deduced that I should take an ambulance to the hospital just in case.  I was reluctant, but hey I didn't have a ride anyway, so what the heck.  They didn't call the 911 type ambulance, it was more of a "medical ride" type of thing.

The made me take a wheelchair downstairs and had the scrawny EMT guys lift my 225lb self into the ambulance and then had to check and see if I was crowning on the way there LOL  After that things pretty much went as they normally do at the hospital.  Got checked it, confirmed it was my water, moved upstairs, and by this time my parents were convinced and started to come to the hospital, and I was finally able to get ahold of the hubs who was on his second day of training at a new job and couldn't have his phone.  What timing huh?

Upstairs they started me on Pitocin (meds to simulate contractions, since I truly was not having any. Things went slow for a while and by 7:30ish the fam decided to head across the street for sandwiches, which was fine with me becuase I still wasn't feeling contractions.  About an hour later when they got back I was in awful pain (well I considered it awful at the time...I had yet to experience "natural labor"-that comes with baby number two, Sissy).  I got the epidural and didn't feel a thing.  They checked me at about 9:30pm and I was only 3cm.  Up until this point the epi was working great, but about 10pm (only half an hour after my last check) I was feeling a TON of pressure.  I kept buzzing the nurse saying I felt pain/pressure and they kept saying they'd send someone in.  This went on for about ten minutes with nobody showing up, so I finally decided to tell them I "felt the need to push".  That got them moving. LOL

The nurse came in, checked me and said, "Wow.  Uh.  Wow."  I'm like, "What? What does that mean?"  She's says, "You're fully dilated and there's no cervix left".  I this point I don't know too much about labor, so I'm like, "Am I supposed to have cervix left?" LOL  She said, "No. You're 10cm. You're ready to push."  I was shocked.  They got everything set up, the doc came in,  the hubs came up next to me and at 10:45pm on April 1, 2008 Cooper James was born.

I remember laying in the hospital bed, holding him, thinking about how fast he was going to grow up.  I actually remember thinking, "Before we know it, you'll be three, then five, then in Kindergarten, then graduating."  I really couldn't even grasp how quickly it would actually go.

Now that I'm "grown-up", birthdays have a whole different meaning.  The word "birth" actually makes sense, and you realize just what an important day it really is.  As a kid you know what your birthday is, but you never realize what it truly means to be "pree"....