I'll start this post with a giant apology! I know that I have been absent and not good about updating the blog, and well, a lot has happened since my last post. I am so sorry for the delay, but hopefully once I share the details you can forgive me? And the best part, our sweet, sweet baby GIRL has arrived!! Emmaline Hope Hinman arrived via induction on February 23 at 1:29pm weighing in at a whopping 7lbs, 8oz and 20in long. And yes, she was early, born at 35 weeks, 2 days.
The biggest reason for me not updating the blog was my declining health. At the beginning of February, I started to have headaches. They started off mild enough, but gradually increased to pounding, relentless pain everyday. My blood pressure was also on the rise, but not alarmingly high at that point. My nausea returned with a vengeance and along with that came feeling just "blah" which is the best way I can describe it. I was having a particularly bad day on February 10th. I had been awake most of the night before with what I thought were contractions, but wasn't 100% sure. My head was pounding and I was just plain miserable. I had an appointment scheduled with my OB for the morning of the 10th, so I decided not to call, and just go in at my regular time. Thankfully, Steve decided to work from home since we also had a house full of contractors working on our master bath reno (again, never a dull moment...). My OB took one look at me, decided I needed to head over to the hospital for 24 hours of observation and "rest". Once admitted (which is wonderfully quick in labor and delivery!), the doctors started a battery of tests to rule out preeclampsia (I had this with both Stella and Simon) and HELLP syndrome, which is a much more serious complication from preeclampsia. I also had an emergency ultrasound to determine baby's size, in case they felt delivery was immanent. I had really mixed feelings on being delivered at that point. While I was 33 weeks and change, my goal all along had been to make it to 35 weeks (to hopefully avoid another stint in the NICU) and ideally to 37 weeks. I desperately didn't want to have my third baby in the NICU for any mount of time. The baby weighed (an estimated) 7lbs, 3oz on the ultrasound, which is GIGANTIC for 33 weeks. I spoke with not only my OB, but perinatologist as well. We determined a "wait and see" approach would be best along with a 24 hour urine collection (so.much.fun) to determine where I was on the preeclampsia scale. Oh, and I was also contracting every 5 minutes, so an IV was started to hydrate me. They couldn't control the headache (which was unbearable by that point), so I ended up on two Percocet every 4 hours with Phenergan. That combo finally kicked the headache by the next afternoon.
I was released from the hospital the following night and placed on modified bed rest. A completely practical solution when you already have two kids and two dogs. Thankfully, I had stabilized and the contractions were back to random. We decided that perhaps it was time to bring in some reinforcements and asked my parents to come down and help us out the following week.
Stay tuned - my computer time is short lived these days - I'll update with Emmaline's birth story soon - it's a good one!!
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