I really need to get over my writer's block

Two years ago today/night I was in a delivery room being induced and trying to have fun while I was hooked up to an IV of pitocin, a fetal heart monitor, standing at the side of my bed swaying back and forth like my life depended on each and every sway. I was cracking jokes and taking only a moment to pause mid thought when my contractions were too much to talk through. I tried every distraction technique I could come up with including watching "The Social Network" while posting to a social network.

I filled the room with many distractions, because unlike my previous live-birth where I wasn't certain everything would go well with Opal's delivery. I wasn't the least bit certain the universe would shine on me and smile that day. Every time that fetal monitor paused for a half beat to long or Opal moved I had move the little dodad to find her heart tone again my heart would skip a beat. And for a fleeting moment I would worry that I would leave the hospital without this baby girl too.  I was less than a 10 feet away from room where I gave birth to Owen Samuel and maybe 15' from where I last heard Olive Lucy's heart tones over the fetal monitor the night before she was stillborn. I was not prepared for the surreal experience of giving birth to a baby that looked and felt so much like the baby I never got to bring home.

As the hours ticked by today I found myself thinking about Olive Lucy & Opal Lenore often, I wondered how long I will be able to look into the face of my beautiful living daughter and see the face of the one little girl I only saw for a handful of hours. I wonder about Lucy everyday. Today wondered if Owen Samuel is right and they are the *same* baby. crazy rambling nonsense right? maybe, maybe not. Either way I feel blessed to be the mom to such an amazing little girl. Opal Lenore brought another kind of joy into our life when she was born. Happy almost Birthday to our most adorable 2nd daughter who gives us a glimmer of Lucy each and every day she is in our life. what a special gift Opal  is for us.

Opal & Peanut

MommaClown & 2 BabyClowns

ClownFamily Oct 2012

Opal Lenore age 20 months

Owen Samuel Danger age 4

did ya miss me? Prolly not. Listen i'm not gonna lie life with two living kids is hard. like holy crap what was i thinking this is harder than AP chemistry hard That said it is also rewarding.

quick recap of the last almost year:
Danger is still most awesome, he will be 4 in a few months! he is smart, funny, clever. did i say smart? this kid is also intuitive beyond his years. he says so many precious and precocious things to recap. find e on Facebook i write them there most of the time.

The wee miss is... well perfect. a few days before she turned one she tried to learn to fly which resulted in a nasty head wound. guess who got the award for bad mommy that day... yup me. but truth be told i am glad it happened while she was wee and not in high school. her scar is healing nicely and you can hardly see it because her eyes are mesmerizing.

Watson has had an exciting year he was moved from NY Presb, to Sloan Kettering after many years with Clown Care. He continues to clown for the circus locally. he has become a great dad, makes me wish we could afford to have more babies and live somewhere we could just be with our kids all day long.

As for me lets see, I am no longer at WIC. I now work at a OB/GYN clinic as a clerk/registrar. I still help breastfeeding moms, but now i volunteer through an organization called Breastfeeding USA. Breastfeeding USA is currently fundraising through an indiegogo.com campaign. So dear reader do me a solid and click here then donate $10, $25, or $50 to a great organization that is not only changing the way way mothers get breastfeeding support and evidence-based help, they are making more expert breastfeeding help available to women across the nation for FREE.

I will try to write more soon, i promise.  in a few weeks time my lovely girl would be 5...and a few days before that something i worked on for a while now will come to be a reality. stay tuned.
from our house full of love and laughter, i wish you all peace, light and love! ClownMomma

well in AUG blogger ate 3 years of posts.

and am i not even going to pretend i have the time to recreate each and every one of them.

so blogger you suck for eating my blog and here is a recap of the last 3 years

Danger is Awesome he turned 1 then i went "to work" as a Breastfeeding Peer Couselor and then i became a Certified Lactation Counselor (CLC) then Danger turned 2 and somewhere along the way we got pregnant again. I didn't tell anyone until i was almost 24 wks and i must have been looking might funny thinking i could hide the giant belly and puke face i was sporting the whole time. She was born in march, her name is Opal she is also crazy awesome.

For father's day we went to see the Ohmies i even shared a coupon code, pictures, and review it was AWESOME and everyone should check them out. it's too bad Blogger eat that post because it was supper funny and i even got to poke fun at my brilliant but sometimes dim comic partner in life...
Watson: oh.. i get it..
Me: you get what
W: You know i didn't get this was a show with yoga in it...i now get the "Ohm" thing.
M: you didn't get that they were teaching a sun salutation?
W: Nope
M: it's a good thing you get paid to act dumb, silly and look pretty.

Lucy would have turned 4 this year and instead of going to the cemetery we spent the day hunkered down bracing for a hurricane. I joined up with some co-worked to bring back bereavement support at work and it started back up this summer. I worked hard (along with many others) to lobby NY State legislators to pass the Certificate of Stillbirth Bill and we succeeded in doing so as of last Friday.

Danger turned 3, Opal started Solids and we just got back from a Ringling Clown reunion and i still miss my girl Lucy,

there now you are all caught up.

OMG i thought i lost you bloggy

bad bloggy!

The birth story

this story has some minor scary moments. it has taken me some time to get it all down and processed. If you know me you know that close call stories are stories i don't like to read or hear.  i feel like they flaunt one's joyus outcome in the face of a mother that had a loss. an bring to question the very thing we fear --if only the circumstance was different than our outcome could have been different. OSD's story isn't so much a close call story as thank you universe thing but some might see it as a close call. and i don't blame any one for skipping it over. 

I went in to labor on my own at around 2:45 am... i woke up with some good strong contractions.

did some breathing through them... not so bad. got up wen to the bathroom and i was bleeding. NOT GOOD.

called L& D and spoke with a PA told her i was coming in and paging Dr. Hellraiser on my way.

woke up watson. got dressed and told  mom we were leaving to hospital and that we would get in touch.

got to hospital and was still bleeding not a lot but enough to worry me. waited for my room we had best room in the house. next door to the room we delivered Lucy in, but this one was made over into state of the art delivery room. high tech.

once i was settled in exam was done i was was at 4 cm & 70 % effaced. not bad. that was around 5 am ish. 6 am Dr. Rockstar got in he was bummed i didn't wake him up at 3 am with my call. if only all Dr. were so freaking COOL! (i am sure his new wife would have loved that wake up call) anyway around  9 am ish Dr. Rockstar does another check an NO change... writes orders to start pitocin. he'll be back around 1pm to deliver me he has to do clinic hours across the street. no sweat i am only 4cm 1 pm shouldn't be a problem. then in come DR. Hellraiser. morning how you feeling pleasantries etc. i say bleeding scary, he says not to worry about it can be normal for labor. PHEW! slight headache and my BP is a little on the high side but still not unusual given my history. lay on left side to relive some of this.

Pitocin starts to kick my ass around 10am.  i ask for Epidural casue the back pain is not making me a nice girl i think i cussed out watson for not knowing i was having a contraction in one of those low growl voices like demon... scary scary cris.

10:30am Epi was a breeze the Dr. that placed it was super fantastic and was kind enough to stop my pitocin while i was getting the epi. Bless you kind man. 

shortly after that maybe 1 hour my Bp was up again, so back on my left side i went...

... then around 12:30 the baby had some decels and my uterus was contracting like crazy so they stopped the pitocin and put me on oxygen... tried to staycalm and not worry have the best Dr.s on the planet.

shortly after that they check me and i was 10cm and +2 baby was good to go water not broken but leaking. OK must call mom & Nan and tell them to giddy yup already or they'll miss it.

so now we find Dr. rockstar and tell him to come back (not me personally, as i couldn't walk was in labor and had an epi rememebr and certainly i had no cell service to call him.) he came over checked me,  ruptured my water, and said do you feel like pushing i said not really maybe in a few minutes.

he was like ok. i'm gonna grab a slice of pizza  i'll be back in a sec. Ok see you in 5 or so.

3 slices of pizza later i was ready to push... or i should say baby was crowning on its own. Drs. hellraiser & rockstar said i didn't need to wait for a contraction that i could just push and i did 1 small effective push and we had the head out OH baby. He was crying right away (yeah for good lungs) but the cord was around his neck loosly but all i heard was the cord is around the neck deliver through it... so i just concentrated on the crying i new that was good it meant the baby was breathing. one more small effective push and we heard... It's a boy! woohoot! cheers & tears all around. cord was also wrapped tight around his leg. watson cut his cord and my placenta delivered straight away again as the cord was getting cut i think.

beautiful perfect baby boy born on his own terms more or less. and his cry was the answer to many many prayers.

-- i haven't checked this for typos or errors it was hard to write but i will  someday just not now.

what's in a name

Owen Samuel Danger

What's in a name or more specifically what's in his name.

Watson and i had list of several names that we liked but in the end we settled on this name for a few reason. going to try and put some of it down here.

I/we wanted a name for this baby that had gravitas, weight and meaning... and it had to be fun and clever if possible.

Owen -- this was my Mom's surname.

The Name Owen: Its Origin and Legacy
By Jhood, published Dec 25, 2007

Owen is a Welsh or old Irish name derived from Latin Eugenius meaning "Well-Born". Owen is pronounced O-en, or OH-en. The first syllable has more emphasis. The name is a variant of Eugene, and Gaelic variant for Eoghan. The meaning of the name in Welsh is young warrior, in Celtic it means young fighter. The word Originated as a loan word borrowed by the Welsh from the Latin and Greek before 500A.D.

When were were Pregnant with Lucy, Owen Henry was our one & only name for a boy. Coincidentally O. Henry was what we joked we would call that little baby if it was a boy which it  wasn't it was our Olive Lucy instead. the real O Henry was born on Sept 11th -- OSD shares his birthday.

Samuel -- this name came to me on a whisper one day. i had been researching names and i love old names and was looking for just the right out of fashion name i wasn't having much luck... then came the whisper. I had noticed that most of our Docs had biblical or hebrew names, James, Paul, Hadar and Sammy. that last one stuck with me... Sam, Sammy,  Samuel i looked up the meaning.

his name means God, from God, of God

I/we feel this baby was a gift to us from the universe. he had been prayed for by many  from long before he was conceived.  he had been cradled in my womb on prayers and thoughts of a safe arrival.  the name fit. It was as if whatever had gone wrong with the universe the day Lucy died had been made right the day he was born. that and it made Dr. Sammy D Rockstar smile when we said Samuel was one of our name picks.  which was nice too but mostly it was the God & Universe thing.

DANGER -- um DUH very cool.

n.

1. Exposure or vulnerability to harm or risk.
   
2. A source or an instance of risk or peril.
   
3. Obsolete. Power, especially power to harm.
   

[Middle English daunger, power, dominion, peril, from Old French dangier, from Vulgar Latin *dominiārium, authority, power, from Latin dominium, sovereignty, from dominus, lord, master.]

actually this started as a clever little game between Watsy & I. Wats would say what about this name or that name... and i would make a face or laugh then i say what about Huckleberry Fion then he would make a face... and we would start all over again. when he offered up Danger it stuck. i liked it, he liked it, baby seemed to like it and it went with every name we put it with. so it was settled no matter it it was a boy baby or a girl baby Danger would be it's middle name.after all we had been through this past year. i figured Danger was  fitting name for this  little baby, it was a risk we took and  it paid off. so maybe having a risky middle name will keep him from harms way.

with a name that in part means warrior from God  i think we might be ok for now.

week 2

we had some milestones this week. if we were still Prego Tuesday Sept 23 would have been 39 wk 3 days for Poppy (aka Owen Samuel). the gestational age at which Lucy died. We knew from the start that we would never again carry to 39 wk 3 days. but some how it still was a scary day to make it through. I am not sure how to explain it. i know he is already born but i was still worried.

 Today OSD turn 2 wks his physiology is developing into an infant. I can't remember all the timeline but neonates are not "infants" so to speak they are still fetuses for a time. i think it is like 4 wks more a less.

Part of me was holding my breath until we hit that magical number of 39wk 3days... like if we made it past that then all the worry would disappear. not so much, still worried but i get that the worry doesn't go away.

I know i haven't posted his birth story yet but he came on his own with just the tiniest bit of help after i had already gone into labor on my own. I was not induced.  I am one of those "lucky" women who's children take pity on her and come a little early on their own. 

*sigh* i just wish that 39 wk 3 days wasn't always going to be a gestational age i fear.