I apologize for keeping you all in suspense, so without further ado, I present our daughter, Nina Adele. She was eight pounds, 7 ounces and 20” long at birth.

Since it’s 2:45 and my thoughts aren’t very coherent right now, I’m going with a bullet point post of what’s going on with us right now.

Nina’s birth experience was simultaneously one of the worst and best experiences of my life. As much as I tried to focus on how excited and happy I was to meet her, my emotions got the best of me as they prepped me for the spinal. I’m sure that a lot of it was just fear of the surgery itself, but I found myself totally emotionally overwhelmed by the fact that my husband was not allowed into the surgery room until I was completely prepped for surgery. We went through so much together to get to Nina’s birthday, and it felt completely wrong that he was not able to be there for me when I was scared and nervous. I was in tears by the time he was finally allowed in the room and he said his wait to be with me was agonizing as well. Of course the fear, tears and nerves were all quickly forgotten when we heard those first cries from our baby girl.

Apparently she must have taken her “larger than expected” birth weight personally and has been dropping ounces like no one’s business. By her second evening, she was down over a pound to seven pounds, five ounces, which earned her a “baby milkshake” with every meal. She gets 15 cc’s of formula with every feeding and at her weigh in today she was up to seven pounds, seven ounces, so we’re moving in the right direction at least.

I learned to listen to the doctors and nurses when they tell you not to “get behind the pain.” Due to some circumstances that would take way too long to type out, I was late taking my meds by a couple of hours on the day we were discharged. Bad mistake. Bad, bad, bad mistake. Don’t let it happen to you.

I love Target’s Gilligan & O’Malley nursing tanks. LOVE THEM. I know so many women who recommend just staying in the hospital gown until you go home because they’re “so easy” to nurse in and I absolutely could not disagree more. I knew the second I tried nursing Nina in the hospital gown that I wanted out of it as soon as possible. I put one of these tanks on the second my IV was out and I have been living in them ever since. They are so comfortable and perfect for nursing and I literally cannot get enough of them (we’ve been back to Target twice in the two days since we’ve been discharged to buy more).

My recovery from surgery has not been anywhere near as bad as I thought it would be, which is such a pleasant surprise. The meds I was given in my PCA seemed to make me pretty nauseous, so I stopped using those pretty quickly and was happy to find that I still felt really good pain wise. I’ve been trying to be pretty active, though not too active and so far so good. I’m really, really happy with how much I’ve been able to do following surgery.

I love being a mom. Nothing is better. I walked into the living room today to find my husband lying on his back with Nina on his chest doing skin-to-skin contact and I immediately started tearing up. He didn’t understand that my tears were tears of joy and I couldn’t seem to put into words what was going through my mind. I just kept saying “she’s ours, we get to keep her” and “we’re so lucky” over and over again. This perfect little being is our daughter. I would wait for her over and over and over again.

There is so much more to say, but the little one is due for a feeding any second now, so I’ll leave you with a few pictures to hold you over until next time.