Childbirth comes and goes with lightning speed!

I had a FAST labor. He was 6 weeks early so we were a bit unprepared, but we were at home one day, my water broke, we threw clothes in a bag, and drove the 5 minutes to the hospital (lucky we live so close to the biggest hospital in this part of the country--in some ways I adore living in a downtown section of a city, in other ways I just want a house in the country! but I digress...). I had my first real contraction as we pulled into the parking lot, and for the first half hour of that we were checking in, I put on a gown, etc etc, they put a machine to my tummy so they could listen to his heart rate, and then the contractions hit like BAM, so much harder and only a few seconds in between. They shoved me straight into the delivery room, and they told me I was nearly completely dilated (and this was the first time they looked!), so I had to sit out one or two more contractions and then I could push. Less than an hour after I first got wheeled into the delivery room, my son was born. No time for an epi, no time for drugs, no time for me to use all that Bradley Natural Childbirth stuff my husband and I prepared. I just threw my arms around his neck and beat my fists against his back from the delivery table (he was hunched over down to my level) and screamed incoherent things like, 'help me help me help me'- it was just so darned intense, and only a few moments in between. But all's well that ends well, and that's what counts. Aleksi was in an incubator to get extra oxygen for a few days, and he didn't start breastfeeding until the second week, and I only breastfed him a couple times per day - the rest of the time he got fed with a hose through his nose. He was 13 days when he came home and started only breastfeeding, and started gaining weight even faster than when they were pumping my milk into his tummy around the clock! Go figure. We've had no problems with it so far, except that so much oxytocin comes out at first that it puts him to sleep. Sometimes I can't imagine that he eats enough per meal (sometimes 3 minutes of suckling and he's out like a lamp) to grow, but he's growing at a faster rate than your average baby, so I suppose he's not starving!! Oh, Aleksi had jaundice, too, but a little photo therapy cleared it up, and he was in intensive care and then nurse monitoring at the hospital anyways, so, not a big addition to the picture. Man was it stressful having to go back and forth to the hospital from early morning until late at night to spend time with my newborn. NOT how I pictured my first days as a mommy. I wanted to totally spend the first hours after birth, days after birth, weeks after birth just totally attached with my baby and with lots of privacy, but I need to just focus on the huge thing, which is that he could have had much bigger problems as a result of being born premature and he didn't. So yay. Healthy boy.

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