Tread Heavily

We are now home with baby Emma. The grandparents have all gone home and we are now all alone with our eBaby. Or at least as alone as we can with three other kids. It was wild with Meme, Mammy, Pappy, and Uncle Tinker here. Our kids are good kids, but they tend to turn up their personalities to the highest setting when the grandparents are around. They all left on Sunday and things are just starting to settle down a bit. We were lucky that the snow didn’t keep everyone snowed in.

We have been living in the Atlanta area for over three years now, and have never had more than a flurry. On the week that eBaby was born, we had two snowstorms where the ground was covered…at least for a short time.

It has been a week since Emma was born, so I figured I should finally get around to summarizing what went down and how everything turned out. This might take a while, so you might want to go to the bathroom or get a drink if you plan on reading all of this. My wife says my posts are too long. This one may just make her hit me.

You can read my previous posts here and here about how all of this came about. Not the baby herself, but the events surrounding her birth and how I got permission to liveblog the whole thing. This post is going to summarize the time we spent in the hospital after the birth and what has been going on since. In a day or two, I will write my review of the software (CoverItLive) we used to blog the birth.

Once the blog ended…

From the beginning, I didn’t have a lot of faith in Emory Crawford Long. It was a rather new facility, but we didn’t have the nicest experience when we came in the first time with the false alarm. The people were nice, but they treated you a bit like cattle when you weren’t dealing with them one-on-one. This is the 4th hospital we have had a baby at, so I sort of know what I like and what I don’t like.

Once Emma was born, I liked the fact that the nurses came in and did all of the tests in the room. We were there to see exactly what they did and were able to tell them to not do things we didn’t think were necessary. The Hep shot and the stuff in the eyes were not necessary in our case, but are things they’ll do to/for every baby born if the parents don’t specifically tell them not to. I was also pleased with how everyone basically cleared the room once she was born. You didn’t have a lot of people milling around telling you to do this or that or asking a hundred questions. They scooted in, delivered the baby, cleaned her up and took off. It was pretty good.

Jenny didn’t stop bleeding immediately after everything was over, so we had to sit and hang out for a bit, just to be safe. I was a little worried for a few seconds there, but in the end, she was fine and we started down the hall to our room.

Now here is where things got a little…sketchy. We came in a few weeks ago for our hospital tour. We saw the triage rooms, the delivery rooms, and the mother/baby rooms. They were all nice and spacious. Very modern with comfortable-looking sleeper sofas. We were told that if we didn’t get one of the rooms on the front hall, there were overflow rooms in the back hall. That was nice, right? Well, when we took a left instead of a right and went down a different corridor, we became a bit worried. “Oh, we’re going to Unit 42, or overflow unit.” I asked about the other overflow unit we saw during the tour and she said, “Well, we have been very busy this week.”

I figured one room was like any other room at the hospital, so we just followed along. And followed. And followed. When we turned down a long spooky hallway that looked like it was built and last decorated in the 60s, I got a little nervous. When we turned into an honest-to-goodness FREIGHT elevator, complete with graphic graffiti scratched into the bent stainless steel sides, I got really worried. “Where is this place, in the basement?” I asked, only half joking.

The nurse laughed it off and said we were going up to the forth floor and that we were in the ‘old’ section of the hospital. The other side is considered the ‘new’ section. “Funny, they didn’t tell us about this on the tour.”

When we finally made it up to the 4th floor, I was expecting the nurses to all be wearing white uniforms with the little hats on. It was around 4 in the morning, and the place was dark, lit only with flickering fluorescent bulbs. I swear I felt like we seriously got the bait and switch. The walls and floors were white and the decor was straight out of what you’d see in an old episode of Marcus Welby MD.

The room was actually pretty large, if not spartan, and the TV worked. The view was of the roof of the next building. I asked about my sleeping arrangements since it was obvious that the bench that they called a couch didn’t turn into anything. The nurse said that the rocking chair made a bed. I was wider than the thing, but I was too tired to complain. We took a few minutes to settle in and I went around the corner to get my wife some juice and crackers. She was starving and needed sugar badly. On the way back, I asked for some diapers, since the bassinet we were given was empty. She handed me a pack and actually asked me if I knew how to change a diaper. I laughed at first, thinking she was kidding. I know my wife JUST told the woman that this was our fourth baby. What kind of father did she think I am?

After changing the baby, I passed her to mommy for her next feeding and I tried out the chair. I am not small. In fact, I am what you would call ‘holy crap that guy is big.’ The chair fit me side to side, but when I laid back in it, it actually tilted back so that my head was below my feet. I was so tired, I slept for about ten minutes before the chair tipped back further and I started sliding down off of the back of the chair. I had to struggle to get back upright. The nurse walked in just to see me flounder my way up and onto my feet. Then I did complain and asked for something else to sleep on.

About thirty minutes later, I had an old couch that could be transformed into a short bed by pulling one end out and putting the back cushions on the exposed box. All the while, my wife was laughing at me. I wasn’t going to dare complain to her about it. I would have slept on the floor first.

The first night we slept for about four hours. At least, I slept that long. They kept coming in every hour or so to ask my wife when the last time she fed the baby was. How cruel is that? You’ve just been in labor for several hours, pushed a baby out of a space smaller than the baby’s head, and haven’t eaten since getting to the hospital. I know they are looking after the baby, but come ON! Give the mother some space and let her rest. It is obvious that the baby was fine, so back off.

Anyway, we only had one or two worthless nurses…the kind that tell you they will get you your Motrin and don’t actually bring it for you until you ask for the third time. Or the kind that turns on all of the lights when she comes into the room in the middle of the night to ask you how you are resting.

The food at the hospital was good, except that you didn’t get a great selection in the cafeteria. It wasn’t expensive and they were generous with the portions. It was very easy getting in and out of the Mother/Baby unit, and they pretty much left you alone when you brought guests in. All-in-all, it wasn’t a horrible hospital, but the post partum facilities and the way you were treated at the hospital as a whole would keep us from having another baby there. IF we were thinking of having another baby. The best experience we’ve had at a hospital was at North Fulton in Roswell. Crawford Long was the worst of the four.

When we all got home, we were greeted with a house full of people. I was sent out for supplies, since we didn’t have everything we needed with an additional 4 adults in the house. Apparently, my in-laws and my mother expected my wife to have dinner for them, so she actually cooked for them just hours out of the hospital. And mind you, we actually left 24 hours sooner than the normal stay. I came home and I was furious! Jenny was only mildly annoyed, but she was feeling up to it then. Two days later the pain pretty much came back and she crashed.

That’s it for the complaining. Now it is time to talk about the eBaby.
Emma Rose is beautiful! I know all babies basically look the same, but to me, she’s absolutely gorgeous! She looks like a perfect mix of all of our other kids. We have a picture of each of the kids in a USC outfit and you really can’t tell which one is which. As they get older, they start to look a little different. Anna has the biggest brown eyes I’ve ever seen and Tanner has cute little dimples. Hollis has sharp features and has this look that makes him seem almost…grown up. It is scary how he looks in some pictures. Emma’s eyes are as big as Anna’s were and she has thick hair like Tanner’s she is a little bit jaundiced, so we can’t tell if she has the alabaster skin of the older two (and their mom) or Tanner’s almost-olive complexion, like mine.

I just hope this one ends up with green eyes. Come on, one of them have to take after me, right?

Since Sunday, I’ve been running around doing all of the chores and making sure everyone gets to school and home on time. I seriously don’t know how my wife does it. It isn’t that it is extremely strenuous, but gah. It is very tiring driving back and forth and running after a little Monster. We’ve been shopping a couple of times and doing some errands. In the afternoon, I usually get some time to relax as the Monster sleeps and the older ones are doing their after school collapse on the couch. Jenny is getting to know Emma and doing what she feels like doing around the house. We’ve been keeping the place amazingly clean and haven’t argued at all. I have actually been more calm since the new baby came home and don’t snap at people like I did before. I think it was the stress of a big decision on top of the baby coming. Not knowing what it would be like with number 4. Now that it is a reality, it is a huge load off.

Yesterday, the Monster and I went to Sears to return a gift. My dad gave us a set of phones…a really good set, for Christmas. He didn’t know we were getting rid of our home line. We traded it in on a new Digital Camera…something that we haven’t had for a while. This isn’t a top-of-the-line, but it is 7.2 MP and works very nicely. Here are some fun shots we’ve made since yesterday.

That’s it for now. I hope I didn’t complain or ramble on too long. I have spent too much time in front of the computer writing this and have been handed the eBaby to hold for a while. I hear things falling apart downstairs, so I need to go.

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Filed under: liveblogging, eBaby, Family