Birthdays and Cake Pops

Last night I spent the evening making cake pops for my middle girl's 10th birthday. They love taking in a homemade, fancy treat to share with their classmates on their birthdays. Cake pops are a pain if you do them by scratch like I did. Lots of steps and far more tedious to put together. I love to bake, but I hate the decorating part of the whole process. I much prefer a pie that comes out of the oven ready to go!! Fitting on the night before her birthday I should go through some painstaking baking procedure...

I was remembering 10 years ago on that night...I so wanted a VBAC, and since I had just gone into labor on my own, my doctor, though skeptical, agreed to let me try. Things were starting off pretty good once they started me on the Cervadil gel/tape, but things got pretty painful pretty fast, although I wasn't dilating very fast at all. After two attempts to get the epidural correct with no real pain relief, the head of OB Anesthesia who was working on me said if I was in that much pain this early in labor, then the baby wasn't positioned correctly or the fit was too small, or something. I spent most of the night literally crying in pain with a husband who just wanted me to have a c-section so he wasn't being very comforting, and an African nurse who thought I was being a baby and kept telling me I had an epidural so I shouldn't feel any pain! (I don't respond well to just plain epidurals, I learned this from my first pregnancy.) By the time it got to be about 5am, they informed me that since 12 hours had passed and the Cervadil wasn't doing enough, they would be started Pitocin now, I had had it and lost my shit. I screamed at the nurse to not even think about starting the Pitocin, that I wanted my doctor called and I wanted the C-section. Right as my doctor got there to check on me, my water broke, but I was still only at barely 5cm, so C-section time it was.

I remember falling asleep after the spinal because my body was so relaxed, finally. I woke up when they pulled her out, not knowing if it was a boy or a girl. She didn't cry a lot and I kept asking if she was OK because I couldn't hear her. She was fine, but needed extra suctioning because she swallowed a lot of amniotic fluid. It was about 4 hours until I really saw her, and I was all alone when they brought her to me. I will always remember that time I got to have, just her and I, when I stared at her and watched her sleep. There was about 18 months of trying involved in getting pregnant with her, and I had waited almost 4 years since my first baby to be able to hold her. I just remember feeling so grateful for her, in a totally different way than with my first child. Probably because I knew what I was missing all those years I longed for her existence.