Welcome to the World Joni!!!

 Hello my lovely blog readers! Long time no speak! How the hell have you all been? Me? I’ve had a baby. WOOOOOHOOOOOO!

So I left you in the lurch (what IS a lurch?!) right after my BMI clinic. The rest of the pregnancy was fairly non eventful. I got bored. Bored of being preggers, bored of banging on about being preggers, bored of moaning about being preggers (I know, ME? Bored of MOANING? WTF!). I couldn’t even bring myself to type about it anymore. Which is extremely lazy and flaky of me. I don’t deserve readers, I REALLY don’t.

But the bitch is back, as they say. And with me I bring a lovely new Mini Copter and subsequent Blog title change and therefore blog direction. Now I will be just nattering on about how brilliant my children are. Ha! Of COURSE I won’t. I’ll just be moaning as usual but it will be more kids/life in general themed rather than blathering about being pregnant and how much it sucks. If that sounds like your bag then dig right in....

Firstly I would like to describe to you in minute detail (!) the process of having my baby. Because it was, for me, my ideal birth. I feel SO lucky to have had a good one this time around. I really feel like it was a “One Born Every Minute” style birth.....you know the ones which make you blub and feel all warm and fuzzy. And I still can’t believe I was lucky enough to experience that after fretting so much about induction and c-sections etc.

I was due to be induced at 38 weeks on the wed morning because of having Obstetric Cholestasis. I was fairly ambivalent about this because I wasn’t looking forward to days on end waiting for the induction to work but I WAS looking forward to end to the pregnancy and the sheer not-being-able-to-move-muchness of it. By the end I was MASSIVE and had pretty bad

SPD, was almost always anaemic and felt dizzy, sick and lightheaded if I tried to be on my feet doing anything for longer than 5 mins. This is probably a big part to do with being a massive jabba as well as being heavily pregnant. I don’t know anyone else who couldn’t even stand up for long by the end of their pregnancy. Thankfully that has gone completely and am up and about and feeling great, despite still being a jabba. Hoorah!

The week before I saw my consultant and she told me I was a Polyhydramnios which meant I had a lot of water and that they wouldn’t give me a stretch and sweep that week (as planned) because they wanted me to be in hospital when my waters broke.

In the week leading up to my induction, I tried everything natural I could to bring labour on myself...I really didn’t want to go thru the artificial route again. So I scoffed loads of fresh pineapple, drank loads of raspberry leaf tea, ate loads of hot chilli sauce and had sex. Well it worked!!!!!!! On the Monday I noticed I was having a show. With Gus my show had happened after the induction had started and it was a one-off mucus plug. This carried on from Monday night thru to tues morning, at which point I started to get quite severe tightenings/Braxton hicks every couple of minutes. So much so that it scared me because I thought, if this how painful at the beginning, how the hell will I cope by the end?! But they stopped. But I was VERY excited because I knew something was happening and I knew it would mean that even if I was still being induced the next day, there’s a good chance that it wouldn’t be as long a process.

At 4.30pm I was sat on the sofa chatting to my cousin and pop! Some of my waters went! I say some, because although I knew that some had definitely gone and I hadn’t just lost all bladder control, I knew it couldn’t be the whole lot given how much water I was carrying.

By 7pm I was heading to the delivery suite with contractions every 3-5 minutes. Boy, they were painful. But that’s ok, I thought...they’re supposed to be. It’s a good sign. It means I’ll dilate quicker! And they’ll give me gas and air as soon as I get to hospital right?! WRONG. They put me on a trace for 40 minutes before even examining me. BoooO! And then when they did I was only 2cm! I wasn’t even in ESTABLISHED labour! Wtf!!!! NOOOOOO! They told me they wouldn’t examine me for another 4 hours and I might as well go home and I wasn’t even allowed gas’n’air til I was 4cm! (which would be in 4 hours!!!!!). I was distraught. Contractions are REALLY fooking painful man! It was agony. I didn’t want to go home because I didn’t know how I would cope with the pain. So they let me stay in a room on the maternity ward for the 4 looooong hours. I say long. They weren’t really that long. They were mainly spent with me hanging on to various surfaces around the room, staring at the timer on my phone counting thru the contractions and breathing slowly and deeply. But I was SO relieved when I was allowed upstairs and on the gas and air. It was bliss. It made me SO chilled. And thank fuck because the epidural I demanded didn’t work, despite countless top ups and industrial strength doses (apparently). In fact it did make my lower body completely numb...because my bum is so fat it felt like I was sitting on a bouncy castle! But all my contractions were still really painful and my back was killing (because she was back to back).

But even tho it WAS painful, the gas and air gave me focus and relaxed me in between. SO much so that Emlyn managed to get 3 hours sleep! After 12 hours (from the beginning of the contractions in my house) I was getting ready to push. I still couldn’t quite believe they were going to let me push her out and that they thought I would be able to. I know that sounds crazy but because I was whisked off to theatre for a forceps delivery last time, I really kept thinking it was going to happen again. And actually, even tho I didn’t KNOW this at the time, they were trying to leave it as long as possible for her to come down as far as possible into the birth canal because they thought there was a chance I’d need intervention because she hadn’t turned. Thankfully I was unaware of this and when they told me to push, I was pushing with all my might. I pushed just a handful of times and suddenly her head was out....I was so shocked! I had pushed with Gus for an hour and a half and NOTHING happened so I could not believe it! So getting completely carried away with it all, instead of waiting for her to tell me to push again, I just carried on pushing and pushed her right out ...when the midwife wasn’t even looking..and resulting in some unpleasant tearing...but OMG the flood of emotion at that point in my life was absolutely IMMENSE. I was instantly in tears, sooo shocked I’d pushed her out (I didn’t believe Emlyn when he said she was out!), SOOOO happy she was alive and well and HERE, and so shocked the pregnancy was all over and Joni Angharad had arrived in the world at 7.36am on 16^th October 2013 weighing 7lbs8oz! And she was immediately plonked straight onto my chest....just like in One Born! I had skin on skin! I fed her! I properly fell in love with her immediately! Which probably sounds weird to say because you’d think that would be a given....but with Gus, even tho I knew I loved him straight away (of course!)...it took a while to have soppy feelings for him because I felt so overwhelmed and scared and ill. It was amazing to have these feelings straight away this time. I can’t overstate it enough.... 

It was amaaaaaaaazing!

The badly stitched up foof which had to be done with a supervisor in tow, wasn’t so amazing...the construction workers outside the window dropping tons of metal every 10 minutes thus rendering every nap obsolete was less amazing and the steaming hot ward, with one toilet on the whole floor working, every child crying and every bed having 20,000 visitors was also less amazing. But thankfully I had the confidence this time around to tell them I was discharging myself by the end of the day if they had not given me the all clear. And I was home and sleeping in my own bed with Joni and Emlyn by my side that night.

Hi! I'm Joni and I'm cute!!!!

I have SO much more to write....about Gus meeting her, about a little unplanned trip back to hozzie, how we’re all doing now, 5 weeks on. But I need to feed a certain young lady! So I will endeavour to not leave it as long next time blog fans! But hope you've enjoyed the first new blog bout lil Joni Jo's arrival. Ciao for now!

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX