A little quilter is born

The wait is over. My husband and I welcomed Angela Elizabeth Soebbing into the world at 2:49 p.m. on May 8, 2014. She was was 5 pounds, 14 ounces and was 19 inches long. She’s got a full head of dark black hair just like her mama.

It took a whole two days for her closet to be filed with pink and white baby clothes given to us by excited family and friends who could’t wait to find out if we were having a boy or a girl.

Regular readers may have suspected I had given birth judging the the absence in posts over the last week. But this is the first time I’ve had a chance to take a break from new mom duties of being a 24/7 milk machine to share the news officially with you all. And my moment of freedom may or may not be due to a hands free attachment for my breast pump that makes me look like a far less sexier version of Madonna in the 80s.

http://instagram.com/p/oB9yGfv4av/

While I’m just happy that she is here and healthy after a rocky end to my pregnancy, I am very excited to have a girl that I can sew frilly dresses for and teach to quilt someday. I already bought her a “Future Quilter” onesie at 4:30 a.m. on the morning after she was born when I was up from a feeding. Unfortunately she is too small to wear just yet. She also is too small for the super-cute cloth diapers I made, so we’re using disposable for now.

The delivery itself wasn’t so bad. At 29-years-old I’ one of the last of my friends to have a baby, so I’ve heard all the horror stories of pain and deliveries that didn’t go as planned and ended in cesarean sections.

I went into the doctor last Wednesday afternoon to get my blood pressure checked again for the gestational hypertension. It was high again and I was sent over to the hospital for monitoring. We’d been through this routine multiple times before and it was getting old. I was incredibly frustrated with thinking today would be the day at the doctor’s office, only to get sent home once we got to the hospital.

I vented those frustrations verbally on the way from the office to the hospital and by the time I got hooked up to the monitor my blood pressure was up to 150/100 and the midwife came in and asked how we felt about having the baby today. I was beyond ready, but my husband took some convincing that the latest research showed the best outcome for moms and babies at 37 weeks with hypertension was to deliver, rather than monitoring and bed rest.

The plan was to give me medication to prepare my body for delivery overnight, let me eat and shower in the morning, induce me and have the baby sometime late Friday or early Saturday.

But the medicine ended up starting my contractions and by 4:30 a.m. that night I was in full blown labor and dilated enough to get an epidural by 7 a.m. I don’t really remember much of the pain, not because I instantly forgot it the moment the baby was in my arms, but because the doctor gave me a sleeping pill to get me a good night’s rest while the medicine worked. Instead it just ended up making that painful part of labor kind of foggy for me, which probably isn’t the worst thing in the world.

Once I got the epidural everything was pretty smooth. I actually spent the morning reading a book until it was time to push around 1 p.m. Two hours later I had my little quilter. Her small stature and early arrival helped with that I’m sure. But mostly I think I’m just pretty lucky.

We’re all doing well at home and I’m learning how to breastfeed, sleep when she does, and occasionally fit in a minute or two of sewing in between it all so I can finally finish her nursery decor.

I’ll leave you with one last picture of our little cutie. I took it when she was one week old on the quilt my aunt made for her. The plan is to take one each week with the quilt as a backdrop to document how she grows and changes over the first year. Here’s our little Angela.