Tomorrow morning MM will become a big brother. By tomorrow night I will have experienced my second “delivery” and soon I will have two birth stories to share with the world. To celebrate the birth of little Baby Blueberry, or BB, I’ve planned a week’s worth of guest posts for you with a myriad of fabulous guest posters – you’ll see a bunch of great birth stories, a Wordless Wednesday style collage, 13 semi-fabulous tips for mothering more than one and more – there might even be a surprise appearance from my fabulous husband.

Today I’m featuring the birth stories of first borns and I thought I’d kick things off by sharing MM’s birth story, which up until now I’ve only outlined in memeish form – which you can see here. I’m going to try and do him a bit more justice now and write it out as a real post, but we’ll see how that goes…

MM’s Story

MM was one week late when the doctors decided to go for an induction. After experiencing his birth and becoming a bit more well informed, I sometimes wish we’d simply waited another week, but at the time I was tired of being pregnant and trusted my doctor (who I now like to refer to as Dr. Evil or Do Not Let Her Be Your OBGYN EVER) – and when she suggested an induction date of April 7, I couldn’t pass it up – you see four and seven are my lucky numbers – and that had to count for something, right?

So at 6:00 am we arrived to be induced – then after spending about two hours doing paperwork (how is there always more paperwork?) and waiting around, they came in to give me some petocin. I began dilating, though it was a slow process and I never got terribly far in that process… Around 10am they gave me something – maybe more petocin, maybe something else, to be honest I’m not sure but I bet my husband or mother-in-law could tell you – they weren’t drugged up at the time after all. At some point after that I went into what we call “labor” – something resembling serious contractions and my eyes rolling into the back of my head permanently. She (Dr. Evil) broke my water (by force) sometime in the afternoon.

Then I spent the evening being all in labor except not so much, as I never progressed past 2 or 4 cm or something – they gave me pretty much every drug the hospital had in stock that day, trying to move things along, ease the pain of this, and make up for that but by midnight it seemed pretty clear that not much was happening – except of course for MM trying desperately to come out – when his heart rate dropped they immediately called for a c-section – at which point I think I thought, “Hurray” as I simultaneously puked everywhere. Or that might have happened later, I’m not sure. Did I mention the drugs?

MM was delivered 10 minutes before midnight, if he’d waited any longer to drop his heart rate we would have missed the 4/7 Lucky Numbers Birth Date – so that was kind of sweet of him I guess? I remember that the operating room was hotter than hell – hot enough that my husband got light headed shortly after MM was “born” and had to be moved to a wheel chair for a little while – although I like to think that he was making me feel better or trying to share in my pain or something – either way we all got wheeled out of the operating room and into the recovery room, where I stayed for like a week. I can’t remember exactly how many days I was in the hospital but it was somewhere between four and ten probably. Over that course of time I had lots of visitors, far more than I ever expected to show up – never mind the continuous comings and goings of nurses and doctors who helped me and didn’t help me and bugged me and ignored me in turn until were finally allowed to leave.

There were some nurses who were extremely helpful and kind, unfortunately I don’t remember a single thing about them – what I remember is the anti-nursing nazis who seemed to decide, “If she ain’t figured it out yet, she never will – give the kid a bottle.” Thanks nurses.

Learning to breastfeed was a long, arduous adventure made worse by the length of my labor and recovery. I was barely conscious when they delivered MM and I opted to let them give him the first feeding but specifically requested to have the next one. This of course didn’t happen. I don’t think they handed him back to me for a feeding until about 4 or 5 meals in – and being a nursing newbie I had my own sea of troubles, i.e. I had no idea what I was doing and unfortunately neither did MM. It would take months to figure that out. Anyway…

My son had the pointiest head in like history or something for all his efforts which is really too bad because most kids born by cesarean have nice perfect round heads – but MM wanted to try a little bit of everything for his birth so he got the cone head to prove it, minus the movie deal.

And that’s how our little MM was born. Check back later today for the first guest posts of the week from Krystyn @ Really Are You Serious? and Jen @ Our Daily Big Top!