Happy Birthday, Drew!

Actually, his 6th birthday was yesterday, but it was such a busy day I didn't have time to write anything. It was also such a highly anticipated event that I wondered if the actual day might be let-down, but I think it was a good day for the young man in question, and it ended on a postivitely GREAT note for him when just before bedtime Dave was finally able to pick up our gift and bring it home - two leopard geckos. Wow. My mom had asked about getting Drew a reptile or amphibian after she gave my nephew a Pacman frog, and we had been thinking about it as well, so we all decided to go in on something like it for this birthday, only I declined the Pacman frog, which grows to baseball size and eats mice. No, thanks! But Drew loves lizards, and particularly geckos, so when one of the employees of the nearby pet store (where we sell some of our bunnies from time to time) mentioned that she raised them and could give us a deal, we made arrangements with her. When Dave brought them home last night I was a little taken aback, not having realized just how large they are - I pictured something slightly different! - but of course they were a HUGE hit with the kids. Drew promptly named them Betsy and Aimee (a dubious distinction for his sister, I would think, but apparently it was a great honor and was taken as such!) and can now handle them with ease. Unfortunately, so can Ryan, who spent a great portion of his morning perched atop his dresser, picking up the lizards and giving them presents. I think Chase would do the same if he could (heaven forbid!) figure out how to climb up there. He calls them "alligers," which means alligators, and that's either his favorite animal or just his favorite word to say - at any rate, he's delighted with them as well!

Well, I always wanted boys and the kind of life they would bring, and I certainly got it! But I doubt if I really knew all it would entail when I gave birth to my first little boy six years ago. :-) I didn't have the easiest pregnancy with Drew - it was about halfway through that Ibegan .having severe pain that the doctors eventually discovered was from a severely dilated kidney. They didn't know why it was so dilated, so to be safe, my urologist insterted a stint. Later, another urologist said he only puts stints in pregnant women as a last resort, and I certainly wish I would have known that at the time! When I had the procedure done, at 28 weeks, it stimulated contractions that couldn't be stopped right away, and I had to stay overnight for observation. There was some worry about the future of my kidney at this point, but there was nothing more to be done until after the baby was born, so the immediate concerns were for my unborn son, as well as for two year-old Aimee, who, according my OB, needed to be weaned at that point. It was nice to have a doctor who was otherwise supportive of breastfeeding even through a pregnancy under normal conditions, and I felt I could trust her judgement. But I was also reluctant to wean Aimee abruptly, and so after the contractions stopped and I went home, I made the decision simply to cut back to two short nursing sessions a day, being careful of any uterine activity. It turned out to be a good compromise that worked for all of us, and Drew made it to full-term with no more major scares. But I was in a great deal of pain from the stint, which had to be carefully managed, and Drew promised to be a much larger baby than Aimee, two issues which prompted the doctor I saw at my last visit to schedule an induction. I remember talking to Hannah about it (we were in the same playgroup in Greenville at the time), and she asked if that was something I really wanted to do. I thought - a thousand pardons, Hannah! - that she was speaking from natural-birth extremism and just didn't understand. :-) Why WOULDN'T I agree to getting the baby out as soon as possible? The induction was scheduled for six days before my due date, and we arrived at 6:00am to begin the process. Just a few hours and hardly any dilation into my labor, I consented to an epidural, when I was hardly feeling any pain at all, and thereafter I was confined to bed, not altogether comfortably, for an agonizingly slow labor. Hours passed, and I was barely progressing. Drew, too, was suffering, as the pitocin was causing his heart rate to drop, so I was hooked up to all kinds of monitors. At one point they said we were an hour away from doing a c-section, but because they were so busy, they took longer than an hour to check me, and I had progressed sufficiently enough for them to leave me alone. Finally, over 12 hours later, I was complete, and after waiting for the doctor to finish with other deliveries, I began pushing. After some inefficient pushing, the doctor used a vacuum extractor, and finally, at nearly 8:00 pm, Drew was born, weighing 8 lbs. 3 oz (almost two pounds bigger than his sister!). He looked so tired and battered, and in the midst of my joy at seeing him, I felt terrible that we had done it that way. It was hard on me and harder on him, and he wasn't ready. It was something I struggled with even through the following weeks of recovery, and I knew why exactly induction wasn't - isn't - something to be done lightly. But I had my son - my handsome, intelligent, one-of-a-kind Drew. His name, Drew Trahaearn, means "wise" and "strong as iron," and both are certainly true of him. He can be a "bull in a china shop," often not realizing his own strength (or volume!), but he's one of the most tender-hearted and perceptive children I know. He's ALL boy, and he's growing up so fast!