First we had each other, then we had you, and then we had everything!

Ever since my hospital stay in week 26, my doctor has been keeping an incredibly close watch on my blood pressure. I’ve been going to the doctor twice each week and having an ultrasound done weekly and doing fetal monitoring at each appointment to make sure that Emmy isn’t under any stress (Lord knows Mommy has enough for the both of us!) along with being on bed rest when I’m at home but my blood pressure is still out of control and at my appointment on June 17, the ultrasound revealed compromised cord flow to Emmy which means she isn’t getting the blood and oxygen that she needs. The fetal monitoring showed that she wasn’t as active as she should be either and my urine analysis showed that I had over 18,000 units of protein in my urine compared with just over 1200 three weeks ago. All of that, combined with the fact that I had gained almost 10 pounds in less than a week because of fluid retention, led the doctors to diagnose me with preeclampsia (something we had feared would develop from day one) and since the environment outside of my body was less harsh for Emmy than the one I was currently creating for her, the doctors decided to fly me to Little Rock to UAMS Medical Center. I certainly never expected to experience my first helicopter ride like this!

I delivered Emmy via emergency C-section on June 18, 2009 at 3:20 p.m. She weighed in at a whopping 2 pounds 1 ounce and was 14 and ½ inches long. The C-section was a very strange experience! I couldn’t feel any pain thanks to a spinal block (which I was terrified to death of getting but then felt really stupid when it didn’t hurt!) but it’s kind of scary when the doctors are pulling on your stomach so vigorously that your upper body is rocking back and forth on the table. Of course, I couldn’t see anything thanks to that lovely blue curtain in my way but Tony was giving me a play-by-play from the view he had. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to be able to see anything either but he kept cheating and looking over the curtain anyway. It was kind of funny because I had a doctor standing at my head alongside Tony and every time Tony would stand up to see what they were doing to me, the doctor would look over at him with a look on his face that said, “Oh no! Please don’t let that dude faint! I sure wish he would sit back down!”

Emmy was breathing on her own at delivery and scored 8 out of 10 on the tests that they perform on each newborn to evaluate how well they’re doing (better than some full term babies), but the effort that it was taking for her to breathe on her own was making her too tired so they went ahead and put her on a ventilator to help her conserve energy, but by the beginning of the next week, she was breathing on her own again and has been doing just great ever since!

It is so strange how quickly everything happened. I went in for what I thought was a routine doctor’s appointment, thinking I still had 11 more weeks to wait for Emmy to make her appearance in my life and the next day, I have this little baby that I can’t even hold in my arms yet. I’m a Momma now but yet I don’t feel like a Momma because I can’t hold her and change her diaper and feed her. I can’t be a Momma to her yet. I just have to pray to God and ask Him to keep His loving arms wrapped around her until I can hold her in mine. And I know that He will. Lord, thank you so much for our precious baby girl!

I had never had heartburn a day in my life but have watched my father struggle with it for years due to damage that he did to his esophagus from years of chewing Copenhagen since he could walk and I know that it can be miserable. I had never had heartburn, that is, until this week and I think I just made up for all those years that I didn’t have it because my chest feels like it’s on fire and it feels like I’ve eaten a meal big enough for 5 people and all the extra food is lodged in my esophagus with nowhere else to go. Not my idea of a good time! I feel like I could burst into flames at any moment so here’s a word to the wise: Don’t stand too close to the pregnant lady with a bottle half-full of Tums!

Week 27 finds my blood pressure still way too high so I’m still on bed rest. I’ve had to make 3 trips to the doctor so far this week and am not supposed to be doing anything around the house except lie on the couch and go to the bathroom (which I’m doing more and more of these days since Emmy’s new favorite spot in the womb is on my bladder). And since I’m not supposed to do any housework and my mother thinks it’s a mortal sin not to vacuum your carpet everyday of your life, she’s been coming over and doing my housework for me. To some people this would be their dream come true but to me, it’s a nightmare. No one can clean my house like I can and I don’t exactly like the fact that my mother is touching my husband’s dirty underwear. To top it all off, I’ve started to get the worst headaches EVER because of my blood pressure so all I want to do is sit in the dark with an ice pack on my head. Not working would be so much more fun if it were my idea and not someone else’s and I were on a beach in Mexico instead of the couch watching my mother clean!

I have been under a lot of extra stress the last few days and haven’t been feeling very well. At work Wednesday morning I started experiencing the symptoms of an inner ear infection so off to the doctor I went and sure enough, they told me that I had an inner ear infection. I was so dizzy that it made my stomach upset and that made me throw up for the first time in my entire pregnancy—at 6 months pregnant!

I thought I should let my OB/GYN know what was going on and when I called them, they wanted to see me too, so off to the doctor I went again! Only things got a little more interesting when I got to my OB/GYN’s office—I ended up staying in the hospital for 2 nights because my blood pressure was through the roof and they couldn’t get it to come down. What a nightmare! I was admitted to the hospital through Triage (basically the Emergency Room where women come when they think they are in labor) and had to lie on a what felt like a cardboard bed for 5 hours on an empty stomach with a chick in labor beside me who had 4 people in her less-than-soundproof-curtain-wall room, one of which was eating McDonald’s and kept proclaiming loudly just how fantastic her French fries were, all the while my stomach feels like it’s going to eat a whole through my abdomen it’s growling so wildly. Let’s just say I was NOT having good time. When they finally realized that my blood pressure wasn’t going to go down on its own, they put me in a hospital room and told me to get comfy. After what felt like a week (but was actually just 2 nights and 3 days) I got to come home but was ordered to bed rest. The only good thing that came out of the hospital stay was getting to hear Emmy on the fetal monitor getting hiccups (so cute!) and a shot of Demerol (NIIIICE!).

My office schedules two annual weeks worth of vacation time every May and October and this week was my annual May vacation. Since the clock is ticking on time that Tony and I get to spend together just him and I before Emmy makes her grand entrance into our lives, I decided to surprise Tony with a night in Branson in a quaint little cabin with all the comforts of home (and some comforts that we don’t have at home like a jacuzzi and a double-head rain forest shower). Tony and I try and make it to Branson at least a couple of times a year and the trip normally includes a couple of days of roller coaster riding at Silver Dollar City but since that was obviously out of the question this trip, we decided just to take it easy in our cozy little cabin. We got Olive Garden take-out and had a feast in our beautifully appointed kitchen and I was asleep by 10:30. How’s that for romance?






I have been seeing little Emmalines everywhere these days! I recently learned that Emmaline is a family name not only on my side of the family, but on Tony’s, too! I originally picked the name Emmaline from one of my all-time favorite movies when I was about 14 years old. In “Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel”, there is a character that is a pupil in the class that Anne teaches named Emmaline and as soon as I heard that name, I fell in love with it. My Granny told me some time later that had been my Great Grandma Rouse’s first name as well. And Tony just found out a few weeks ago that his Great-Great Grandma’s name was Emmaline, too! And as Tony and I were watching the movie “The Blue Lagoon” the other day (which I hadn’t watched in AGES), guess what Brooke Shields’ name is in the move? You guessed it: Emmaline!