I guess I'll start with a little back ground before I jump right in to the purpose of this blog.
I met my husband in the beginning of November 2008, we actually met on a social media site and we hit it off from the get go. I had a daughter, Harley (age 4) from a previous relationship that I had sole custody of and he had a son, Tre (age 7) and a daughter, Kendell (age 4) from a previous relationship that he had sole custody. We quickly came together as a family and a year later we were married in November of 2009. My daughter's biological father had never really been a part of her life and spent more time on the phone with his lawyer trying to figure out how he could "get rid of her" than he ever did getting to know her so my husband adopted her and she finally got the daddy she deserved in January of 2010. My husband's 2 children were in need of something as well, they needed a mom. There mom had left when they were younger to join the military and wasn't able to be around much and the summer before my husband and I met, she was murdered by her husband. So we were all in need of love.
We had always talked about having a baby of our own... it just always seemed as though the timing wasn't right. My first pregnancy was not planned & I wanted to make sure I did it right if I did it again. Since combining our families I had been a stay at home mom. But when the youngest, Kendell, started 1st grade in the Fall of 2011 I wasn't needed as much and there really was no great job opportunities in our community. I have a background in the medical field & really wanted to continue that so I decided to go back to school. I planned it so that 3 out of 4 of my classes were online.. so should the kiddos need me, I'd still be available.
In early Fall we broached the subject of a baby... for like the zillionth time. We kind of started talking about maybe in another year... and we were actually talking seriously, not just "maybe someday". Later that night my Grandpa passed away from stomach cancer and caught up in trying to balance my grief with still being a mom and a student... a baby became the farthest thing in my thoughts.
My husband and I celebrated our 2nd wedding anniversary that November with a kid free weekend at home. I killed a whole bottle of Barefoot Bubbly Pink Moscato Champagne by myself and a few weeks later I discovered I was late. Not entirely unusual... I am very regular but between school and the kids sometimes I am off a bit on the days in my head. So it was not alarming or unusual when I made my hubby stop off at the store so I could get a pregnancy test. I tend to panic or worry so I usually kept them on hand for cases like this. We both expected it to be negative like ALLLLLL the other times so you can imagine our surprise when it was positive! There were 2 tests in the box so I immediately repeated the test and got the same response... in disbelief I left my husband to figure out what to feed our 3 children and went right back out to the store and bought 3 more tests. Sure enough... all of them were positive! My husband was happy and excited... I was terrified. I'm not sure why considering this time around I was 30 years old and married (opposed to 22/23 and not married)... I had wanted a baby for the longest time...throughout my husband and I's relationship it was something I felt we needed to make our family complete... a baby would be something to tie all of us together in a complete circle.... but suddenly the weight of the responsibility was crushing!
But I soon got past that knee jerk reaction and the excitement quickly replaced the anxiety... and morning sickness was quick to follow! Ohhhhh it was horrible, so bad I had to go on medication and it lasted almost 6 months! There were many days I did nothing but the bare minimum... get the kids off to school in the morning and lay around for the rest of the day... rushing through homework when I had to and spending the rest of my time trying to sleep thru it all. Hubby was great about picking up the slack when he got home from work while I laid on my blankets and pillows on the livingroom floor, curled up with our 4 legged kid- a pitbull named Portia.
As I mentioned before, I am a worrier. I am also no skinny mini & with being soooo sick I didn't gain any weight, actually lost weight, for the first 5-6 months of my pregnancy and when I did start to gain I basically only gained back everything I had lost and didn't really go over my pre-pregnancy weight. But I constantly worried that my baby was not getting enough nurishment or was going to be tiny... I also am a smoker & while I cut back on the number of cigarettes I smoked a day, I couldn't cut them out all together-- hell, I had already given up my anxiety & insomnia meds as soon as that test was positive! I did the same thing with my first child but wasn't near as sick as I was with the 2nd and she was just fine & weighed in at 6lbs 5oz. For the most part I ate as healthy as I possibly could... gave up most sweets and chips, etc. I was always measuring right on track and ultrasounds were all NORMAL!!
Now, like most parents we didn't care what we had, boy or girl as long as it was healthy... BUT we were really hoping for a boy. A boy would completely balance out our family- 3 boys/3 girls... and it would also be my parents 1st biological male grandchild (my sister had 4 girls) as well as my mom's parents 1st male (great) grandchild. My husband would constantly say... "oh I'm sure it will be a girl"... I think he was trying not to jinx us... Tre and Kendell wanted a baby brother and Harley was odd man out wanting a baby sister.... so at my 5 month ultrasound we were elated when we saw HIS little peepee!!! On the drive home I called my parents, & even though I talk to my mom daily on the phone, I called my dad at work first and he had this giddy boyish giggle/chuckle that I will never forget when I told him he was having a grandson!! Then I called my mom and she already had a feeling it would be a boy due to the fact I was carrying this pregnancy sooooo differently than I did with my daughter. I also called my grandma on my mom's side... the side of the Grandpa I had lost just months before... and I told her what I had been thinking throughout the whole pregnancy... "this was Grandpa's doing"... I don't mean literally folks! I just mean it was just another sign that it was meant to be. Here we'd been talking about the whole baby idea the night he passed away and a few months later I get pregnant out of the blue... it was like a sign from him telling us life is too short to wait... and then for it to be a boy... WOW... that just added to the confirmation this was something Grandpa would've wanted for us. Of course, I then cried after I got off the phone with her because it finally hit me that he wouldn't be here for any of it and that was a really tough dose of reality to swallow. We ended up stopping off at the local flower shop on the way home and got the biggest "It's a Boy" baby foot balloon we could find. We left it at the top of the stairs for the kids to see immediately when they came home! They were definitely excited!!
My husband immediately took to every baby name website he could find and started filling up a whole notebook page of boy names. We knew the middle name would be Michael, after my father. I wanted the first name to begin with an "L" after my husband's father who had passed away when he was 24 but we just couldn't agree on any and finally we gave up the "L" search because my husband said "he will have my and therefore my father's last name and that's good enough for me". About a month later I finally sat down and seriously began to compile my own list of names. I hadn't really give much thought to my husband's list cuz frankly we don't have the same tastes and I was actually dreading trying to come up with a first name cuz I was certain it would lead to a few arguements. When the time came for us to trade lists we were surprised to find that we both had the name Grayson/Greyson listed... I had recently read a book in which one of the characters was named Greyson and he had found it on a baby name website. We narrowed it down to Greyson (my one and only choice other than Liam) and Devlin (my hubby's other choice). I was opposed to Devlin because I knew this child would be partly my hubby's and trust me... he didn't need any help or further encouragment in the "lil devil" department. So it was quickly and painlessly agreed upon that our baby boy would be named Greyson Michael!!
Greyson Michael
Quickly we began buying all the necessary baby paraphenalia and soon we had everything we needed except for baby!! Over the next few months my belly got bigger than it ever had with my daughter (you could barely tell I was pregnant when I had her) and he was sooooo active. I loved to lay there and poke at my belly and make him move around. As someone who had 3 previous back surgeries (one being fusion) my back did surprisingly well! No pain at all (like in my 1st pregnancy) in my back... just all kinds of pains and stretching in my belly!When I was 7 months along we were given temporary custody of our 15 year old nephew by DHS. My husband's sister's family was in utter chaos which in turn brought chaos, worries, and anxiety to our family. I spent the last 2 months of my pregnancy sooooo stressed due to the family situation and the financial situation and the straight up guilt that we could only take one of the kids instead of all 3 and we could only keep him temporarily at that. When baby time came our nephew would have to go somewhere else. It killed me that we couldn't do more and these kids were going through what they were going through. It was a very rough time for us all and to be honest it completely killed the excitement of the upcoming arrival of our bundle of joy. I constantly felt guilty that here we were adding to our family and another family we loved was falling apart.
A few weeks before my due date our nephew left our home and it was really weird not having him around & I really missed his company. The excitement started to grow day by day and I couldn't wait to have someone new back in the home to occupy my time and attention cuz my other 3 rarely came out of their rooms... too cool to hang out with mom! Each day I became more and more uncomfortable and just wanted my lil guy here. I hoped every day I would go into labor even tho I wasn't scheduled for a c-section til 3 days before my due date... and just my luck he stayed in right up until the scheduled cesarian! At every prenatal appt the doc would say all is good... all is great! At the final prenatal appt, one of the doc's predicted that he would be small and guessed he would weigh between 6 and 7lbs.
August 1st, 2012... we had made arrangements for the kids to go to my parents while we were welcoming Mr. Greyson into the world. I met my mom for the afternoon and handed off my kiddos... I cried the whole way home- I always get super emotional before surgeries and when you add pregnancy hormones to it, I was a lost cause! The hubby and I enjoyed a quiet evening at home... he dined on McDonald's and I enjoyed Subway and we talked about how our lives were going to change the next day. We went to bed early since we had to be at the hospital super early to prep for surgery, and poked and played with my belly one last night! Surprisingly I slept alot better than I thought I would!
August 2nd, 2012... FINALLY time to meet our little guy! I was a bundle of nerves... I cried off and on for the drive to the hospital and we upon arrival and registration were quickly taken to our room and they began prepping me for surgery. It's kind of a blur... I know I cried alot... I know I was very nervous and scared! They wheeled me back to the OR and got me on the table and then began getting the spinal block in to me. This was an issue because of my previous back surgeries and all the scar tissue, we ended up having to wait 20 minutes and the anesthesiologist had to give me more because only one side completely numbed up initially. I finally couldn't move my left foot/toes any more and then it was time to bring the hubby in and get my baby out! Now, I had quite the morning in store for me because as soon as lil man was out I was scheduled to get my tubes tied and I had a fibroid that they were going to try to remove if possible. My main focus was to get out of the OR asap and get to my room so my son could be brought in and I could immediately begin breastfeeding.
So, my hubby is sitting by me head anxiously awaiting the arrival of our son and I'm crying and not really able to say much of anything and out comes our lil man and of course, I can't see ANYTHING but the hubby keeps alternating between "he's big" and "he has hair", the later important cuz my daughter didn't have hair til she was like 4! The nurses are telling me he's healthy and adorable and perfect and I'm listening to my baby screaming and I'm just thinking "I want to see him!!!!" At this point, I still couldn't really say much... I didn't know what to say and of course, I was still crying! HaHa... my hubby left my side to go to Greyson where they were cleaning him up and getting apgar scores and such.. I recall hearing someone say he was an 8 for his first apgar and that was the best thing I could hear. My OB immediately set to getting my tubes tied and finally my baby was brought over and he was perfect... it was love at first sight... and he was soooo much bigger than I expected! After posing for a few pictures I suddenly began to feel extremely nauseas and I was starting to feel pain on my left side so I told my hubby to take him to the nursery. As the room cleared out, I relayed to the anesthesiologist what I was feeling. He immediately gave me meds for the nausea but the pain steadily grew worse and worse and it was actually terrifying... they ended up having to give me emergency iv narcotics because the spinal block had worn off on my left side and I was feeling everything they were doing to my uterus. The OB also informed me that she had no choice but to remove the golf ball size fibroid cuz it was right where she needed to close me up. I can remember thinking "just hurry up... I want my baby"... finally we were done and surprisingly I was still awake despite the additional meds that should've knocked me out... I was awake but pretty out of it and I remember thinking "I survived, the worst is over... we survived.. let the fun begin"! They took me back to my room and once again things are a lil blurry til they placed my lil guy in my arms and after a few moments of bliss and perfection.... our world turned upside down.....
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