Back Again

Hi Guys

So I'm back and just posting in here to see if anyone is still checking this thing. If so then I'll write up a mini borth story here. Suffice to say that I made my presence known at the hospital! Hee hee! Harriet is absolutely awesome, about her only problem is that she's sleeping in the day rather than at night. Last night was great though, she was back to how she was sleeping at first (ie: waking only for feeds adn then dropping back off again asap). We're hoping that continues!

Anyway, leave a comment if you're still on this site and I'll keep updating.

Cheers!

More pictures

We have a whole bunch more pictures available

First Pic

Here's a quick pic, this one was taken by her grandpa on Wednesday night. She's about 10 hours old in this pic...

She's here

Harriet Dora Ryder arrived at 10:02am on the 17th August at Mercy Hospital, weighing in at 9 pounds 3 ounces (4.125kg - about the same as 12 cans of beer). Mother and baby are both fine; we will post more information and pics etc in the next few days.

Paranoid OB

Hi all again

Well I did go to the Ob appointment on Friday afternoon and when I was lying down having my FH measured, he asked casually how she has been going. I reply "Oh, she's been moving less in the last few days".

WELL!

You'd think that I mentioned she had half died or something. He looks at me and says "We take reduced foetal movement very seriously". *sigh* I am really not worried, but he starts looking as though he's about to pass out, so I agree to go and get a CTG scan at Mercy straight away. I mean I can still feel her moving around, but definitely not as much as she has been doing, but I thought that was all normal considering that she now has her head down in my pelvis and no room to move about in.

So I go and pick up Jimbo from work since it was late in the afternoon and he'd just been at a team bonding exercise so things were pretty slack around there anyway (sorry for taking you away from the fun, babe!). We drive down to Mercy Hospital in the pouring rain and get stuck in a horrendous traffic jam which makes a 10min drive stretch out into a fascinating 40-odd mins. When we get there the midwives place us in a room, give us both some juice with ice (mine was to get the monkeyspawn wriggling, his was to quench thirst) and starp me up to the CTG.

So the requirements for a normal foetal heartrate (FHR) are that it has to meet a certain baseline for a 20min period, with two elevations that rise above 15bpm on the baseline over that period. Hope that makes sense. So we sit there for ages with me strapped up to the monitor (you have an elastic band essentialy over the top of your belly and another band with the transducer and gel over the heartbeat). Luckily we watched cricket on their crystal clear SBS picture while we're hanging around. The midwife comes back in and says that it all looks good and that she's just going to call my OB and let him know.

WELL!

He decides that he wants to come in and see the trace...at 8pm on a Friday night! When he got in I said to him "Don't you have anything better to be doing on a Friday night?!". I mean it's great that he's all concerned and everything but really, no need to get that stressed. He says to us that it is essentially a perfect scan but that just to be sure he'd rather we went in on Saturday morning to get one more trace done just in case and if it's not up to scratch then he wants me to go for an u/s.

So we go in on Saturday morning (it's not like we have a whole pile left to sleep in with, so I was pretty disgruntled about having to give it up I can tell you). Wait around to get seen to for about 30mins (which was fine, they were busy) and then get another prefect trace. YAY! No scan for us, which was lucky because we were having my dad, his wife and daughter over for dinner that night and had done nothing yet to prepare for it.

But I suppose it did put into place for me the fact that it could really happen anytime soon now! So I drew up the groups for SMS-ing into my mobile phone. If you think we might not have your mobile number to be informed, then make sure you send me an email.

So anyway, that was our exciting weekend. The cats have been extraordinarily sooky around me the past couple of days so I wonder if they know something I don't?

The TENS Machine

TENS is a form of pain relief for childbirth. I don't really know how it works, although I'm sure Casso can fill in anybody who wants to know. Anyway, this is what the machine looks like:

The Flowers

Cass' new tulips:

The Quilt

So here is the quilt that Jennie made for Harriet:



It's really very cool. This is the inscription that Jennie wrote on the quilt:



Thanks Jennie! You're a star!

Cranky Cass

Hey there

So I got into trouble from Jimbo today about not updating the blog. Fair enough I spose. For the last two days I have been uber cranky. Today I went to the shopping centre up the road and this fresh-faced young girl behind the counter happily asked me, "So, how long do you have to go?". I turned to her, eyes flashing with the fires of hell and a voice laden with the ire of the perenially uncomfortable and growled "A week and a half and I'm over it". She just kind of looked at me, scanned the rest of the purchases in silence and handed me my bag.

Normally I would feel a little bad about this exchange, but I have been feeling so evil that this actually made me feel GOOD! Mwahahaha...

James was a sweetie and bought me a big pot of growing purple tulips in this terracotta pot yesterday. They are so beautiful, they give me something to look at and adore when I'm feeling particularly black.

As for my dark mood, it's not really from anything particularly except for being uncomfortable. The other night James snored his head off so I had to go and sleep in the other bed - it has this massive ridge in the middle so I woke up with my whole left side out of whack. Actually now that I think about it my bad mood started from the following morning which actually makes sense.

We had the carseat installed in the car and now James has to drive everywhere because it pushes the passenger side seat so far forward that he can't physically fit in the chair! HA! His legs are just way too long. The Golf is too small but unless anyone has a spare $30k our dream of owning a Forester is just going to have to wait. We went and test drove one on an overcast boring Saturday morning recently when we had nothing to do - oh, it was so nice. The main benefit was for Jimbo though because he had so much space in the drivers seat as well as the passenger side.

The girls from work rang me up to invite me to a birthday lunch for a few people next week which was sweet - apparently clients have been ringing up to find out if I've had the baby yet! It's so reassuring to hear that clients ask after you, makes you more confident that you'll be well received when you go back there, that's for sure.

Have another OB appt tomorrow. Last week I found out that I had lost a kilo?!! And that I am only 2kgs heavier than I was at my appt in early June! Well then where the flipping heck is this massive medicine ball sticking out of the front of me coming from? HUH?!

Well I don't really have that much to say which is why I hadn't been updating. I took a photo of the tulips which I'll upload. Let's hope that the next post in here is from me, all surprised that the baby has come early. We'll be changing to a new site once she arrives since I will no longer be pregnant - yay! The first thing I am doing after popping the spawn is to sleep on my stomach like a normal person! One of the girls from a forum I'm on just had her baby and posted that she also went home and the most enjoyable aspect was to just slept in a normal position.

Another picture

This one was taken about a week after the previous one - you can see that Harriet sticks out more and has dropped...