Sinner's Alley Happy Hour (Part 1)

Parent Cafe
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<p>Ah, birthing stories…the tie that binds the sisterhood everywhere!</p>

<p>I was in labor for 18 hours, but it was the annoying, disruptive to general activity, but not painful variety. Of course, it started at midnight, so sleep was not an option. After a day of this, I called my midwife to ask her what I should do, since I was more concerned about a second sleepless night than the unreal prospect of birth. She suggested I come to the hospital so she could “poke around a bit” and see if she could prescribe something to help me sleep.</p>

<p>I told my husband, and he asked if we could wait until the movie we were watching was over. I didn’t see a problem with this…at that moment…but halfway through the movie, I started hard labor. I again suggested to my husband that we needed to leave, but he kept saying, “The movie is almost over…just a few more minutes.”</p>

<p>As the closing credits were rolling, I finally just yelled, “Now, d*** it!”
We arrived at the hospital, and our daughter was born 15 minutes later.</p>

<p>The movie, which by virtue of its cinematic excellence, almost led to a home birth? “Harry and the Hendersons”…</p>

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<p>Alumother, not only did my husband stop at each traffic light, he stopped at the frickin’ ATM!</p>

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<p>Great stories!!!</p>

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<p>one of my favorites and worth an ‘on the road’ delivery imo. Man learns to curb aggressive instincts and nurture an alien species. Excellent preparatory training for fathers-to-be. Should be shown in delivery waiting rooms throughout the uncivilized world. Your film companion is obviously a devoted and rigorous husband.</p>

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<p>And the moms are making me LOL. </p>

<p>My other story of profanity, this time from birth #1? #1 started at midnight, I slept until 5am, went to the doctor at 2pm, was told you are in early labor, come get comfy, by 6pm was in transition and begging for drugs I had swore I would never request, good doctor told me it was really too late, I then began to moan so loudly in pain (I do not remember this as apparently I was somewhat unconscious as well) and exhibit so much distress that H began to cry. At which point I looked over at him and hissed in rage, “Why the F are YOU crying!”</p>

<p>Pushed for an hour. When D was born her head was so pointy she looked like Jane Curtin as one of that alien family on Saturday Night Live.</p>

<p>Ha ha. Those were the days.</p>

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<p>now there’s a guy in touch with his inner bigfoot!</p>

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<p>Hey! Bringing this back from the seventh circle, otherwise known as Page 2 hell. Who coined that term, Jmmom?</p>

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<p>LOL, good birth stories you guys. Little did we know, that was going to be the easy part. </p>

<p>At some point during SluggJr’s delivery --backwards and upside down with his arms and legs sticking straight out like a 9-lb. Ninja throwing star, while holding onto my spinal cord the whole way-- I would have preferred a cesarean by decapitation. Just surgically remove my head and yank the baby out. </p>

<p>And, what was the deal with being too late? Was this some sort of Eighties joke played on unsuspecting pregnant yuppies? Were we being punished for our big hair, Jane Fonda workouts, and shoulder pads?</p>

<p>I’m sorry, Mrs. Slugg, but the joke’s on you. You’re too late to have any of the 150 kinds of instant miracle pain relief that we have lying around the hospital! (Snorts of laughter erupt from doctors and nurses in the maternity ward.) </p>

<p>Transitioning Mother-to-Be From Hell: Okay, then. Chop off my effing leg and pretend that I was run over by a Safeway truck! If I weren’t trying to extricate a f%@!-ing Statue of David from my hoohah, I’d get off this table right now and kick your ass!*</p>

<p>And, they should have warned the fathers-to-be that this was a hint of things to come. What miniscule shred of dignity they might’ve had left after the delivery would be extinguished during the highly anticipated 6-week checkup. What guy doesn’t like to watch his wife get a pelvic exam?</p>

<p>Doctor: Okay, you guys can have sex again. Just be sure to use 3 kinds of birth control simultaneously unless you want to end up doing this all over again in 9 months! Har-har-har! (God, I AM funny!) If you’re interested in a vasectomy, call my office for an appointment. Oh, sorry I was at my class reunion, and Wong Wei, the visiting college student, had to deliver little what’s-her-name over there.</p>

<p>Ovaries and testicles shrink to the size of bb’s. Sleep-deprived for 6 weeks, neither parent has the energy to kick his ass… :D</p>

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<p>and</p>

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<p>ROTFLMAO</p>

<p>:D</p>

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<p>Okay, I’m finally coming in to the old sinner’s alley…I have been laughing at the birthing stories and have one to share, so pass me a frozen daquiri, please…</p>

<p>For baby #3, when visiting the hospital pre-delivery, hubby and I casually asked our tour-guide if video cameras were allowed (understand, this is the baby that is now in college…so this is a while back!). She quickly asked us to stay after and…long story short, we became features in the good-old childbirth education movie that you see when you take classes at a hospital…</p>

<p>SOOOO, we had cameras present at doctor’s visits, at a midnight false-alarm visit to the hospital (imagine pacing up and down the hall trying to encourage labor to proceed AND trying to ignore the news camera following you…). When my water broke and we were admitted, my darling hubby was mic’d. There was a remote camera positioned in my labor room (which was on reserve for me!) which was left on during my entire labor, so there was a lot of extra footage which had to be reviewed after the fact for editing. </p>

<p>The film crew called me the day after my daughter’s birth laughing pretty hard to tell me the following: There were some pretty interesting extra sound effects added by my husband’s mic. As the nurse started MY IV, he can clearly be heard moaning and groaning… </p>

<p>Later, they noticed as I was just lying in bed, darling hubby disappeared behind a door. Turns out, he went to the bathroom. But forgot to turn the mic off. </p>

<p>Gotta love it!!!</p>

<p>Nice to see you all here in the old alley!</p>

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<p>Lol, Cmm! See, a good reality show producer like Mark Burnett would have known how to edit that into a really good weekly series. Viewers would have been glued to their TV’s every week relishing these off-camera daddy-to-be reality moments. </p>

<p>This week on Survivor Baby, we share a moment with Keith at the urinal as he ponders being voted off the island by a newborn!</p>

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<p>My first born was a painless childbirth…though maybe it was the nitrous oxide (yeah I’m still laughing!). </p>

<p>Howver,my second was a nightmare birth and might qualify for “Survivor Baby”. I was delerious and apparently reciting nursery rhymes for most of the labour (I don’t remember anything until after the epidural). Son was born with what looked like yards of umbilical cord wrapped tightly around think Michelin Man. They even had to enlist me to sit up and hold the slimy little critter while they had all the extra nurses & docs holding bits and pieces of cord…My hubby missed all the excitment as he had decided to go all out with a ‘Sympathetic Labour’, and was up on the 7th floor recovering from an almost burst appendix. He did manage to float down to the 5th floor later in the day, in a morphine fog, declare that DS’s ears were too low down on his head…and then wander away down the hall rolling his IV before him like a demented shepherd…I had to smile (grin evily) as his hospital gown flapped open and he disappeared bare assed down the hall…</p>

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<p>Welcome back BHappyMom - We missed you! Guys! Gals! Let’s line up to buy BHM a drink or two or three; see if we can’t keep her around. She’s always got a story to tell. BHM - I’m buying. :D</p>

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<p>Sheesh, Thanks jmmom… If you’re buying, I’ll have one of those supersized Margaritas with the wind up propeller toy… :)</p>

<p>Last summer I ran into a mother who had just been through the college admissions process with her daughter, and I hardly recognized her…bags under the eyes, bald spots, and a newly formed dowager’s hump…Now I Understand, …</p>

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<p>Yep, sluggbugg…that whole episode yields a bunch of good tales. Like, we had to call the camera crew before calling the doc when we went into labor…</p>

<p>And, lest anyone think (who is NOT a mother and who has NOT witnessed a birth recently…) I am a glamorous movie star, there were three moms in this “production”; I was the ONE who had no anesthesia for the birth. Guess who looked the “best” of the three??</p>

<p>Yep, you guessed it!</p>

<p>“The Exorcist” has nothin’ on me!</p>

<p>The beauty part was that, because my d was really born faster than the doc expected (they started a pitossin drip…not sure how to spell that, sorry!..to speed up labor…) , she had her head out and was turned before the doctor laid a hand on her. The finished movie (the one they showed in the classes) never showed that particular detail of the event. They just showed my panicked face as I shouted “She’s COMMING!!!” over and over, making ME look like a nutcase as the Doc calmly talked on in that annoyingly soothing voice. Suffice it to say, my “modesty” (HAH!!! What a concept!!!) was preserved for the purposes of that particular edited version.</p>

<p>They made a priceless one, however, for our family which included our older sons as they got to see their sister for the very first time later after she was cleaned up a bit. She was nursing, and my younger son (who was 2 1/2 at the time) asked “Does she have a face?” Oh, the memories!!!</p>

<p>:)</p>

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<p>My other good story was the kids for my littlest S’s birth… </p>

<p>All natural and rather, achem, <em>loud</em>.</p>

<p>The older two were there for the birth. DD was 10 and DS was 6.</p>

<p>We have a favorite family photo of both DS and DD watching their brother come out. DD has tears rolling down her cheeks and a happy proud smile… DS has an irritiated look, and his index fingers are jammed in his ears.</p>

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<p>LOL. The little boy asking does the baby have a face. The other little boy with his fingers in his ears. The fathers off camera groaning or upstairs having their appendix out or on the sofa finishing a movie or in the car proposing to stop for traffic lights, ATMs or backup tapes…</p>

<p>A theme anyone?</p>

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<p>churchmusicmom, how did they talk you into taping you?! You glossed by that one in “long story short.” Did you get paid?</p>

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<p>Ha! Actually, we were taking the tour and had just gotten our first video camera and had asked if it was okay to take video in the delivery room (this being way back when, you know!). </p>

<p>Understand this was back when the movies you watched at the hospital about “prepared childbirth” featured folks in mumus with really long shaggy hair (both father and mother) who, well, you get the picture. Let’s just say, these movies were rather outdated and needed to be replaced. This was a Baptist Medical Center and their original vision was to make a movie sort of from a dad’s point of view and then follow that one pregnancy very closely.
I had also had my other two completely “naturally” and without any real complications, so I guess they figured they would be pretty safe with me. Plus, on baby number three, I figured “???Modesty???Shomdesty!!!”</p>

<p>So, when they explained the project to us privately and that, as a result of our being involved, we would get our own film edited to include footage of just our family (which, by the way is priceless!) we said," 'kay". They planned to get several additional moms to agree to be taped during delivery; however, the concept gradually evolved to focus on three moms: one (me) “natural” (with no required anesthesia) birth; one with an epidural; one C-section (who also happened to be a single mom).</p>

<p>But out of the deal, we ended up with literally hours of professional video interviews, conducted in our home, of us and our two boys, plus a doc’s visit (not the exam, LOL!), part of one "false alarm hospital visit, footage of my mom seeing my daughter for the first time (my mom has been gone now for 10 years), and, as I said before my boys seeing her for the first time. That movie alone is worthless. From time to time I imagine watching that with my daughter when, some day FAR IN THE FUTURE, she is expecting her first child…</p>

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<p>I feel I must say, lest I defame my marvelous best friend and former childbirth “coach” that, former stories notwithstanding, he was a CHAMP when (umm, please excuse me) “push came to shove”.</p>

<p>ouch</p>

<p>See, our first kid was just over 3 weeks over due (yes, I know, but it was 25 years ago) and he weighed 10 1/2 pounds. AND the doc was not to be found for a while, so there were ISSUES. There was a period of time where (unbeknownst to me) I was ready to “go”, needed to “push”, but there was no doc to be found, any where. My wonderful CMD stayed IN MY FACE and got me through it. I don’t remember it as pain, really, just really, really hard work. Must have been really scary for him, but he never let me see that fear. I love him a lot!!! But it IS fun to tease him about the IV thing…</p>