I’ve finally gotten around to writing up G’s birth story, and it’s posted over at my Babble blog.

I was totally shocked when I found out that I was unexpectedly pregnant with Baby G. Throughout the pregnancy, I worried and fretted and struggled to accept that another child was really going to join our family. During this same period, I was so worried about Henry, my first baby, that it was really difficult for me to focus on the baby on the way, much less bond with her in utero. I was more than a little worried that I still wouldn’t be able to connect with her after she was born. After losing Henry only a few weeks before she was due, I felt guilty, like she didn’t deserve to be born to this heartbroken mother. She deserved a mother who was excited and whole and eager to welcome her. On June 27th, her birth day, I was none of those things.

I worried about my ability to mother her, to even love her enough or focus on her needs even as I was lying on the delivery table, feeling her being tugged out of my belly during my c-section.

But as corny as this sounds – like a bad Lifetime movie or something – the moment G was placed in my arms, I adored her. I immediately loved her madly. And after nine months of feeling uncomfortably disconnected from the very idea that I was pregnant, I knew her immediately when I actually looked in her eyes for the first time. It was like, “Oh…so THAT’S who you are. Now I get this whole deal with you coming into our lives right now, at this very strange and painful moment.” And when she looks back at me, she doesn’t seem to mind that I am heartbroken. She looks perfectly content with the mama she got.

This baby is the closest thing to an honest to goodness miracle that I’ve ever experienced. She is an amazing gift to Jon, J, E, C and me. She is grace for our broken hearts. I am so attached to her that I can’t sleep because I don’t ever want to put her down and stop looking at her.

Two weeks old now.

These photos of me were taken one week before G was born – so about 2 weeks ago – while I was undertaking my first public outing beyond work since Henry’s death. Jon and I and a few good friends went downtown with our kids to enjoy a meal outdoors on a beautiful, sunny afternoon. The hat and sunglasses were supposed to serve as my emotional protection from people who might see me or speak to me. But I am guessing that a HUGELY pregnant woman wearing a hat pulled low and dark glasses probably actually drew attention rather than deflecting it.

I still haven’t done anything else “social” since that time. And now I am cocooning at home with the baby for the next week or two at least. Then I might start forcing myself to emerge into the world to some degree. I return to work in about 5 weeks (at which time Jon will begin taking G to work with him – a family business – where his mother comes each day to help care for her grandchildren. We are also planning on having C start 2 or 3 half days of nursery school this fall.)

Looking at myself in these photos – the full face and extra chins, the bodice-ripping cleavage, the swollen fingers and the giant belly rising up out of my lap – it’s odd to think that I will never be pregnant again. That part of my life is finally, truly over after a first pregnancy at age 23 and a last one at 42. It’s so bizarre to have lost my first baby just as I was giving birth to my last. There’s an unbelievably cruel and painful symmetry there.

C has had a lot of major, very stressful and confusing changes in her life recently to which she’s now adjusting, and that’s what I am blogging about over at Babble tonight.

If you had told me last Friday that by THIS Friday I’d be home with a new baby, I would have scoffed. Sure, there were definite signs that pointed to the baby coming early, but somehow I just couldn’t wrap my head around the possibility. I was focused on the 13th as a delivery date – which still would have been 2.5 weeks early. But of course, my body had other plans. And here we are!

Bringing G home was as momentous and joyous as it always is when you carry that new family member across the threshhold for the first time. The sun was shining and the sky was blue as Jon slowly drove us the five minutes home from the hospital, with me riding in the back with her to make sure she didn’t flop completely over in the car seat. As you can see, at only 5 lbs, G hasn’t quite grown into her carseat. (The eagle-eyed among you will also notice that in my exhausted state, I fastened the leg straps completely wrong, but thankfully, Jon caught my mistake.)

When we arrived home, my mother and MG (my three older kids’ wonderful stepmother) were there to greet us. They had cleaned our house from top to bottom, and MG had filled the rooms with fresh daisies and hydrangeas. Big hugs were exchanged all around, and we went inside, where I quickly became overwhelmed by emotion: gratitude for G and her safe arrival, sadness over the family member who is now missing from our home, and a sense of profound relief that after nearly two months of being inside of hospitals (or anticipating being inside a hospital again), I was home.

My new mantra: NO MORE HOSPITALS.

The first thing I did when I got inside the house was beg to be allowed to look at the newly redone bedroom that my sister, MG our dear friend and neighbor JR and numerous other little helper elves have been secretly working on for weeks. The bedroom was a first floor junk room (understatement) that attaches to our bedroom through the only full bathroom in the house.  Ever since we bought the house in 2006, we have intended to renovate this rundown, junk-filled room into a first floor bedroom for C. Once we found out we were expecting G, we REALLY wanted to get the room finished in time for the baby’s arrival – thinking that C could then transition to a big girl bed in a real bedroom before the baby moved into our bed. Also, at this point, C has a lot of toys and books, etc and without a room for them, they have just been scattered all over the house. However, time and finances prevented us from doing a single thing to make the room liveable during my entire pregnancy.

Then, while Henry was hospitalized, and it looked like we would be bringing home a child with major physical disabilities, I began thinking about how I would instead get that room cleaned out, painted and made handicapped accessible before Henry was released from rehab. As the only first floor bedroom other than ours, that was the logical space to prepare a room for Henry. Plus, since it’s attached to our bedroom, I wouldn’t have been far from him at night, which would have been reassuring for me.

My sister and I began talking about what would need to be done to this room in order to make it wheelchair friendly, etc. before Henry came home, but then Henry got worse…and then he died. After May 31st, even thinking about doing anything to the room just made me sad and seemed overwhelming. I gave up on the idea of doing anything to it until some far future date; I certainly saw no way to find the time or resources to do a single thing to it before the baby arrived.

But it turns out that Betsy was secretly getting folks organized to renovate the room for us before G arrived. She quietlychose paint colors, fabrics for the curtains and for the canopy on the vintage canopy bed that my mother had given us when she moved from her house, etc, etc, etc. She quietly asked family members and friends to give her Target and Lowe’s gift cards as baby gifts so to pay for all the work the room needed. And then, while I was in the hospital for four days after my c-section, our dear friend and neighbor JR, along with my older kids’ stepmom, MG, worked their TAILS OFF cleaning the junk from the room, scraping and prepping, painting, repairing a broken window and so on. MG hit garage sales to find an end table to match the bed that we had, and she painted the old, ugly dresser and changing table that we had used for C. Betsy continued getting things measured for fabrics and choosing accessories.

By this time, I knew that something was happening with the room, but I had NO IDEA of the extent of the work that Betsy, JR, MG and various other friends were putting into it while I was hospitalized with the baby. Trust me, this room was a terrible wreck before I left the house on Sunday to give birth, and the idea that it could be transformed so completely in less than one week was inconceivable to me.

But when Jon and I got home from the hospital with the baby yesterday afternoon, I was dying to see what they had done. Suffice it to say that I was TOTALLY unprepared for how radically changed this room was. When they opened the door and showed me, my jaw hit the floor. This formerly junk-filled, dirty, rundown room with peeling paint and holes in the walls had been made over into THE most beautiful, peaceful little girls’ room that I’ve ever seen. The walls are a gorgeous robin’s egg blue. The trim is a beautiful, high gloss white. The windows were repaired and the closet was cleaned, freshly painted and organized with beautiful new wicker toy baskets. The new canopy bed was set up and the other, previously banged up and ugly furniture had been made over into shabby chic adorable with MG’s mad decorative paint skillz. I could NOT BELIEVE how gorgeous it was, and this is before any of the fabrics are finished for the canopy, curtains, bedding, etc. It’s a magical, amazing room for C and G to share as they grow up, and I can’t believe that my wonderful friends and family pulled off such a makeover miracle in less than one week.

Here are a few photos of the room that I took when I first had the big reveal yesterday. They aren’t very high quality because I took them with my BlackBerry. I will get some better ones as soon as I get a few minutes. And my sister keeps reminding me that it will be even prettier once the new wall sconces and light fixture are installed, the rug she’s ordered arrives, and the curtains, canopy etc are all up. But I have to say that I think it looks pretty amazing now. I can’t believe I have a nice place to change G and such a beautiful, peaceful space for C to play and (eventually) sleep. The room is so lovely and the transformation is so radical that I can’t stop going back in there just to look

C and NC already loooooove the new room.

Welcome to the world Georgia Allison Hickman!

Our beautiful new daughter was born at 11:45 pm on June 27 at Fort Sanders Hospital in Knoxville, TN. She weighs 5 lbs and 7.5 ozs and she’s 18 inches long. SHe’s a teensy little thing! (She is getting a little extra oxygen in this photo because she made her arrival 5 full weeks before her due date, but she’s breathing on her own just fine now)

More details soon, but I wanted to share the wonderful news. We are over the moon with happiness. She’s just gorgeous. I truly felt Henry with me as Georgia came into the world.

Dear Contractions:

Please stop for the day. In fact, please stop for two more weeks until I finish several MAJOR WORK PROJECTS that I simply must get out the door before any baby is allowed to come live at our house.

OK? Thanks! – Katie

This may be baby # 5 for me, but I feel so spacy and out of it that I am having trouble figuring out what I need to do to get ready to go to the hospital for a c-section and then bring her home.

And we’ve done NOTHING. Seriously, nothing.

Here’s what I am thinking I need to get ready in the short term:

-Two nursing nightgowns (anybody got any leads on places to buy inexpensive nursing gowns? All the ones I am finding are ungodly expensive – not a good thing for us right now…)
-Bathrobe
-Slippers
-Set minicrib up next to our bed as co-sleeper
-Find and wash sheets for minicrib
-Haul baby bouncy seat, swing, carseat, newborn clothes, etc up from basement to air out and wash
-Find boppy nursing pillow. Wash cover.
-Find our newborn size cloth diapers and covers in basement. Wash, sort and put away. Buy some newborn size disposables and more wipes
-Get changing table down from upstairs junk room and set up somewhere. Find and wash covers for changing table.
-Get Leo the dog clipped short so he isn’t blowing his coat all over the house, making me insane with dog hair ending up all over everything.
-Find/buy baby bathtub, cotton balls, rubbing alcohol, baby washcloths, newborn nail clippers, etc for bathing her
-Find and wash the supercool swaddling blankets that C loved as a newborn
-Find in basement, air out and wash the “snugglenest” cosleeping thingy that we loved using until C was 4-5 months old.
-Price and locate double stroller to buy
-Wash sling
-Find Baby Bjorn carrier
-Find and wash receiving blankets
-Pack bag for hospital

Install infant carseat. Clean house thoroughly (ugh). Stock freezer. Finish all work-related projects by middle of next week. Buy big sister/brother gifts for J, E and C. Make childcare plans for J, C and E for 2-3 days I will be hospitalized.

What am I forgetting here? I know I’m forgetting something…

I never thought in a million years that I would want to have a scheduled c-section for one of my babies. I did have a c-section with my last birth, but it wasn’t something I planned. This time, until Henry’s hospitalization, I had decided with my doctor to try for a vbac – allowing myself to go into labor naturally and then only ending up with a c-section if things didn’t go as planned. But I really can’t deal with any more uncertainty right now; I need to see and touch and hold my baby as soon as it’s safe to meet her. So I am trying not to feel guilty about the new plan my doctor and I have decided on, which is an amnio on July 12th to check her lung maturity (she will be 37.5 weeks then) and a c-section on the 13th if she looks ready.

I definitely have moments of feeling like I am not putting the baby first with this plan – that I am putting my own emotional needs first – but I also really feel like I have hit my limit when it comes to coping with stuff. I need to not be pregnant any more. I need to meet my baby, and see that she is okay. I need to be past this place – pregnant and grieving. I need to just do one thing at a time, and I can’t stop being heartbroken about losing my child. I can’t change that or speed it up or plan for it. So I am making the choice to plan for a c-section on my own timetable. Maybe it’s a selfish decision, but it makes me feel like I have some small measure of control in a situation that is largely beyond my control, and my doctor, whom I really trust, supports me in my choice.

So in less than three weeks (or sooner if baby G has her own plans), I will give birth to my new daughter, my fifth child. In the space of two months, I will have gone from actively mothering two sons and two daughters to mothering one son and three daughters. Even as I am living it, I still can’t comprehend a change that profound happening that quickly. It’s all too fast, too much.

Tectonic plates moving, shifting – new continents being created by force.

I miss my baby. I miss him so much.

I had my weekly OB appointment today. The baby continues to look healthy and wonderful. She’s apparently just happily floating around in there, oblivious to everything. And that’s good.

The ultrasound tech told me that Baby G already has hair on her noggin, but I am skeptical, since the ultrasound tech also told us that C had copious hair before she was born, and, well…see for yourself.

She really didn’t.

I now have a c-section scheduled for July 22nd July 13th. It feels good to have an actual date to focus on. But I also had a positive fetal fibronectin test today, so I guess it’s possible I won’t make it til then. (For the record, C was born at 36 weeks and E came at 37 weeks).