On Tuesday, April 3rd, my water started leaking in the afternoon but since we had already been scheduled to go in to the hospital the following morning, I decided to just wait it out. We arrived at the hospital at 5:30am on Wednesday and started getting ready for pre-op. Despite my water leaking, I was still having painless contractions, so I had to decided to go ahead with a scheduled c-section. By 8:28, Reese was out! There was meconium in the water, but she let out a lusty cry when the doctor pulled her out. What I remember most clearly was him saying "wow! That's quite the head! wow! look at those shoulders! This is a good sized baby!"
She and Stephen went quickly to the nursery as the doctors wanted to make sure she was doing okay and I went into recovery, for what was supposed to be a one hour stay. This quickly turned into a three hour stay as I started hemorrhaging while still on the operating table. It was really rough to lay there completely numb with many people surrounding me looking so concerned. They called my doctor to come from his office when it had been an hour and I was still bleeding some rather large clots. They managed to get the bleeding under control a little bit as they moved me to labor and delivery. They chose labor and delivery instead of postpartum as they wanted to monitor me closely as I was still bleeding really heavily. This continued throughout the day with the maximum amount of pitocin administered to try and stop the bleeding and many blood draws to check my blood counts and levels. Finally around dinner time, the doctor decided to do a blood transfusion because my levels were so low. This didn't bring my levels up as well as they hoped so they gave me another transfusion shortly after dinner time. According to Stephen, I went from a gray color to pinking up a bit in a very short amount of time. I did get to hold Reese for the first time and nurse her in delivery- she is so precious!! She had absolutely no problems latching. My nurse in labor and delivery was so awesome- he was the perfect person to have there.
Eva's first time meeting Reese
She had to see what was under the hat.
Oh, hair
We asked her what she thought and this is what we got.
My loves
Meeting Uncle Nate
She couldn't stop loving on Reese!
I absolutely love these two pictures. Eva's face says it all. She couldn't be more pleased with her new sister.
So on our second day there, the doctors discovered that when Reese gets very upset that she tends to turn a little blue and have trouble breathing. And as the neo doctor told us, "Blue isn't a very good color on Reese." So they decided to monitor Reese in the NICU to see what they could figure out. They believe she has tracheamalacia which basically means that her trachea is underdeveloped. So the little rings in her trachea are really floppy and when she gets upset, they collapse a bit. We are still waiting on a visit from the ENT doctor at the moment as he is on vacation, so she is currently still in NICU. She is connected to lots of wires to make sure she is breathing right and that she doesn't have any more problems. She has had at least 4 episodes now where she turned blue and needed some help breathing, one of which required oxygen.
Here she is in the french fry warmer (mom's words, not mine) right after they transferred her all hooked up.
The machines that tell us what her little body is doing :)
This is part of her hookups :)
And the little miss after 24 hours of observation was transferred to her regular bed.
We have had SO many awesome nurses in the NICU, they have been so helpful and they are great with Reese. I can't say that we have had even one that I didn't like. Reese wasn't peeing for the first day or two that she was in the NICU, but now she is peeing like crazy :)
Little baby hands <3
And sweet girl, Reese Avril Adaline Bailey
About her name: no, she is not named after Reese Witherspoon or Averil Lavigne. The names are not family names, they are names that Stephen and I liked and that fit her perfectly. Avril means life, which is also what April and Eva mean, so we loved it for that. Adaline was on our list for Eva and we just didn't use it because it didn't flow as well. However it fits perfectly for Reese. And Reese, well, she's just a Reese. If you meet her, you'll know what I mean.
