tune my heart to sing thy Grace

Um, I guess I went on hiatus?  Hello, blog, it’s been a while.

(This is the part where I apologize for my long absence, make some lame excuse(s) for it, and vow to do better from now on.  Except the two or three of you reading this have heard it all before, so we’ll just skip it this time.)

So what’s been going on with me since I last wrote?

(This is the part where I ask a chatty question of myself within the text of my own journal entry, and then give myself a totally unnecessary and painfully long-winded answer.  This part, we’ll keep, because maybe some of you don’t know that…)

I had a baby!  On January 8, to be exact, after two weeks of no sleep due to the worst virus I’d had in years.  I was completely exhausted heading into labor, and couldn’t really breathe through the contractions without coughing.  Somehow — after about 17 hours of labor, 14 of those marked by extremely slow progress and 3 containing the super-fast crazy transition from you-know-where — with the help of my husband, doula, nurse, and two different midwives, I managed to birth my second daughter, Grace Emilia.  Eight pounds, eleven ounces, twenty inches long: she looked exactly like her big sister.  It was uncanny.  Apparently my husband and I only know how to make identical girl children.

Grace was born in the same room at the same birth center where our daughter Abigail made her first appearance in February 2008.  We now have a three-year-old and a nine-week-old.  They make our days quite long, are demanding in entirely different ways, and rarely nap at the same time, but, you know, we love them anyway.

Grace is a sweet, gentle, unassuming sort of baby.  (You know she doesn’t get any of that from me.)  Sure, a few things really piss her off, but for the most part she rarely complains.  She’s already a hugger.  Sometimes whole days go by when I realize, hey, she barely cried at all.  Not that Abigail was this crazy fussy baby, but, you know, she was loud.  And she had opinions.  And she was very particular about the way you had to hold and bounce her (faster bounces! bigger bounces! go up and down the stairs while bouncing! NO NOT LIKE THAT, THAT IS ALL WRONG!).  Grace is far easier than Abby was, and it’s a good thing, since Abigail is still pretty particular, and parenting her still takes up most of our time and energy.

Not that Grace doesn’t get plenty of attention, too; in fact, for several weeks she has been the focus of our parental worry.  After a routine healthy birth and a few good weeks postpartum, she was hospitalized at three weeks for a rare, long-lasting form of jaundice (breastmilk jaundice; it peaks around 3-4 weeks and can last as long as 12), which was dramatic and terrifying.  I had an emotional breakdown in the ER, my husband threw up, my mother-in-law flew in from Connecticut to stay with Abby, and poor Grace had to lay under bili lights and be poked and prodded and tested every which way.  She had to have a catheter (at three weeks old!) so they could get a clean urine sample; she had many tubes of blood drawn; she had an IV line put in her tiny hand.

The hospital stay was brief (but nightmarish), but the medical saga is ongoing.  Even now, nearly two months later, we’re still carting Grace around for doctors’ appointments and neverending lab tests, and her bilirubin level has only very recently begun to drop (technically it is still elevated, but we’ve been assured that at this level, even for this duration, it’s not actually harming her).  Her form of jaundice is one that a lot of doctors, even pediatricians, have little experience with, and so there has been a great deal of testing and talking to determine whether the diagnosis is in fact correct and how it should be treated.  It is not reassuring, as a person with no medical or scientific training, to find yourself looking up articles to send to your child’s doctor so she will actually understand what is happening with your child.  It is also not reassuring to have doctors come into your child’s hospital room and tell you, “We think this is what she has, but we don’t actually know what causes it; it’s a total mystery to us! Oh, and no, we can’t do much about it, because it will take care of itself. At least, we think it will.” When this happens, you find yourself thinking a lot of very sarcastic things such as, Gee, I’m glad you all spent like twelve years becoming doctors so you could tell me you cannot actually help my child and you don’t know what you’re talking about.  (But you don’t actually say those things. If you’re me, and you are three weeks postpartum and very emotional, you just start to cry. Again.)

I now hate heel sticks with a passion, and I am sick of people taking my baby’s blood.  And with all the worry and inconvenience and copays and medical bills has come a new,  if only slight, understanding of what parents of sick kids go through.  I know that we are very fortunate to only be dealing with persistent jaundice, as opposed to the far scarier and harder things that some babies and children have to deal with.  I know that we have little reason to complain; except for her yellow, Grace is a healthy, thriving baby (uhhh 14 pounds; back massage, please, anyone?), and she doesn’t seem bothered by her condition.  I feel terrible about the ongoing blood tests and the doctors’ visits, of course, but I can take comfort in the fact that, in a few weeks, the jaundice should finally resolve itself, and this will all be but an unhappy memory for me and my husband (Grace won’t remember it at all).  Yet I feel as if we’re in some sort of club now, the Club of Parents Who Have Actually, Literally Been Worried Sick, and I wish I could revoke our membership.

Nothing can really prepare you to join this club.  I had two relatively easy pregnancies culminating in two normal, intervention-free births, and Abby was such a robust and obviously healthy child that I just assumed Grace would be the same.  Honestly, it was me I was worried about, since, after Abigail’s birth, I dealt with a host of medical issues for months afterwards — nothing too serious, but all of it quite exhausting and inconvenient and, at times, painful.  In the midst of all this nonsense, I was also laid off from my job.  I thought that was about the worst I could expect from a postpartum experience, barring some kind of truly horrible problem with the birth or my recovery, but I was wrong, of course.

It was so much worse seeing Grace in the hospital, talking to doctors and specialists about possible scary side effects of her jaundice, being processed and admitted and seeing people do awful but mostly necessary things to help my three-week-old, who I knew should not be sick.  It felt all wrong — like it just wasn’t supposed to be this way.  We were not supposed to be there.  We were all supposed to be at home together, safe and healthy and exhausted, watching Abby adjust to big sisterhood, drinking too much coffee, and complaining, as do all parents of newborns, about our sleep deprivation.  We were not supposed to be in a small dark hospital room watching our tiny, vulnerable newborn baby chew helplessly on her IV.

But after that very low point for us, things have gotten better, if too slowly for me.  Grace looks less yellow now.  She seems healthy, other than the jaundice, and she is down to one nighttime feeding most nights.  She was just baptized about a week and a half ago, and it was a wonderful day filled with the blessings of God and family and friends and good food.  Our friends Kathleen and Brian flew all the way from Chicago to stand up with us as godparents.  The baptism and party as well as Grace’s health concerns leading up to it have served to remind me how fortunate we are to have caring family members who helped us through Grace’s medical crisis, as well as good friends who stepped in to bring us food and comfort in the hospital (Victoria), watch Abby (Leslie), pick up Dan’s mother from the airport (Vina), field my annoying emails filled with medical questions (Dr. Lisa, Nicole, Kelli), send thoughtful gifts to ease my stress (Tope and Bekah), and offer sympathy and encouragement as we dealt with weeks of uncertainty and intense worry.  We know some truly excellent and stalwart people, and we are blessed to have them in our lives, and the lives of our children.

Grace has never seemed bothered by the jaundice, and she is beginning to look a bit more pink.  She still looks a lot like Abby, but I can now see far more differences between them (not just in personality, I mean; that’s always been obvious), and I no longer worry that one day I won’t be able to tell their baby photos apart.  Abigail is the best big sister in the world, and tells Grace about a hundred times a day how cute she is and how much she loves her.  My mornings and afternoons alone with both of them can be rather overwhelming, especially since I started trying to work part-time again, but it makes my heart so full and happy to see the the two sisters together; they clearly adore one another.  Grace smiles all the time now — sometimes in response to Abby ordering her, like some crazy stage mother, “Smile for me, Gracie!” — and chatters and coos a lot, too.  She is such a sweet baby, so cuddly and curious and serene.  Plus, sometimes they do actually nap at the same time, and, as my friend Aleks remarked, that is like the double rainbow, work-at-home mom-style.

It’s hard, of course, having a newborn again, but the difference between this time and the first time is that, well, it’s not the first time.  I know that things will eventually get easier, and I know that someday I’ll actually miss this time when they were still really hard.  So, as much as possible, I am trying to enjoy and treasure these moments with both our children.  And now that things are just a tad more stable, I’ll do my best to write more often, too.  Like my girls, I always have something to say.

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