If you are unsure about having another child, or simply want to teach your teenagers the importance of abstinence or birth control, read on.
Five years ago today I went into labour, just over 5 weeks early. My babies were due on Christmas day, and even though my scheduled c-section was booked for mid-December, I was hoping and praying the babies would come early. I felt like a house, even though I only gained 30 pounds, and my insides felt compressed and painful. Of course, I couldn’t sleep because when I laid down the babies woke up and began performing water ballet.
It was dinnertime, my 6, 4.5 and 3 year olds were waiting impatiently for their food, and I was cooking and baking cookies at the same time. When my water broke I wasn’t sure what the hell was happening, I simply thought that I had lost my bladder control and continued cooking. After all, it would have been just one more indignity I was to suffer during pregnancy, and my kids were hungry!!!
When I finally accepted that I was in labour, I realized that my back pain wasn’t coming from standing all afternoon, it was labour pain. I made the mistake of saying out loud in the bathroom that the babies were coming, more to myself than to anyone else. Strangely, although my kids never hear when I ask them to do something, they all came running and then wildly began running circles around the house screaming ‘the babies are coming, the babies are coming.’
My father drove me to the hospital and then proceeded to hightail it out of there as quickly as possible, perhaps not comfortable with the fact that the nurses assumed he was my husband and the father of my twins. My hubby arrived from his office as they were whisking me into the OR and it was all a blur, happening much faster than in the past because it was a high risk twin pregnancy.
And then, suddenly, we were parents to five children and I had no idea how we were going to care for all of these little people. But my worry didn’t last long because then I had to be taken into OR for a blood patch procedure to fix a hole in my spinal dura that was leaking fluid and giving me a terrible headache. It got me an extra night in the hospital and even though I begged them to let me stay about 6 more months, those insensitive witches made me leave after day 5.
For your amusement, I am posting this pic of myself taken a couple of weeks before my babies came. And a close up of my veins, which throbbed and ached basically from the minute I got pregnant until the day my baby’s came. I had to wear prescription stockings that cost hundreds of dollars and needed to be put on with rubber gloves (my 75 year old mother in law wears the same kind). I was never happier than when I threw those suckers away, after all, I wore them ALL SUMMER LONG.
Obviously I am a slow learner, but after 4 pregnancies, this glutton for punishment feels ‘done’. There will be no more pregnancies, no more babies. I do, however, get twitchy at the sight of a newborn and I ache to hold it, SMELL it. Ahh, how I miss that new baby smell.
Pretty gross right? Be kind-remember I couldn't see or reach my feet!
