Educating the Wheelers

I can’t believe it’s been almost a week since Owen was born, it’s gone by in such a blur. I sure appreciate all the goodwill everyone has been sending this way. We had some complications with the birth, but thankfully everyone is fine, and we didn’t even have to transport to the hospital during or after the birth. [We just barely dodged that bullet, though.] Owen had his first appt with our pediatrician this morning, and was declared to be strong, healthy and recovering quite nicely.

For those who are curious and appreciate a good birth war story [heh], it turns out that we had “velamentous insertion of the umbilical cord.” This is apparently a fancy pants term meaning that the cord was loosely attached to the placenta. We were very, very blessed that it did not detach from the placenta at any moment in time before the one that it did — he came out with the cord around his neck, and as the CNM was removing the cord from his neck, it detached from the placenta. Had it happened before then, it would have been an almost certain death situation. As it was, he was a bit blue when he came out, but she gave him mouth to mouth and he bounced right back. Unfortunately, we could no longer get the placenta out by tugging on the cord, so it had to be removed manually. That wasn’t a lot of fun, but thankfully it worked and I didn’t have to run to the ER to get it out.

We are also having the same breastfeeding latch issues with Owen that we did with Audrey, but I’m going to make that a whole post of its own later.

And, for the cherry on top, our blog hosting provider totally went casters up last week, and almost all of Andrew’s really nifty blog formatting and whatnot got totally hosed. Hopefully we’ll get that straightened out soon, but it’s a little lower on the priority list than it would usually be right now. Heh.

All of our photos are up at our Flickr page, but these are some of my favorites:

Owen, waking up from his nappy this afternoon
Audrey, what do you think of your new baby brother?
Dada and nakedbaby Owen, out getting his sunlight for his jaundice.
Gratuitous cute Audrey photo
Okay, one more gratuitous cute Audrey photo
Mama and Owen
Audrey looks dubious

Owen Patrick Wheeler was born at 1:40 this morning.  He weighs a wopping 8lbs, 15oz, and is in high spirits.  Mom is in good spirits, too, and is recovering reasonably quickly.

This birth was definitely rougher than our previous one, and has left us a bit shaken.

Photos, details, etc., to soon follow!