My new best friend is a doughnut pillow

I hope all of you have heard the good news already about the arrival of Anneka Christina VanderWoerd on August 11... She's just the sweetest little thing and M and I are crazy about her! She's just over two weeks old now and part of me still doesn't believe that she's ours or that she actually came out of me... all 8 lbs 2 oz of her...

In the time after her birth, her birthing story was a big topic... which is natural I guess, being still fresh in my mind and in M's mind. However, there came a point where it was still too fresh and I just didn't want to relive it again and again (and again and again). M didn't mind talking about it (easy for him, being on the other end of things) but I finally put a stop to it. I just couldn't hear about it or talk about it anymore...

So here I am now, planning to write about the very same event... sparing the detailed details, I woke up on Friday morning at 4 a.m. with strong contractions... back labour. I breathed through them for about 2 hours and at 6 I woke M up and said we should start timing them.

I only have one thing to say about the first 9 hours of such excruciating back labour that I could hardly walk, let alone do all those neat things that I had planned to do during labour (like go on the birthing ball): Thank God for epidurals! Once I got my epidural at 1 in the afternoon, it was smooth sailing until about 4... it seems that Anneka was already showing signs of being stubborn because I was 8 cm dilated and she was not coming down... Also, her heart rate was showing signs of being erratic and my doctor wanted to warn us that at that point it was a 50% chance of me having a C-section...

Skip ahead a number of pushing hours... after 3 tries with the vaccuum, Anneka finally came into the world, not a Friday baby, as we all expected, but a Saturday, Aug 11, baby at 12:10 a.m.... and was whisked away by the doctors to help her start breathing... Poor little thing. I went through a lot, but so did she...

The support before and after her birth was overwhelming... the nurses at the hospital were amazing with their help and advice... and got me through the first three days.

Sometimes I still wonder if I'll be a good Mom... I get premonitions of her being a teenager and fighting with her over what kind of clothes she wears and I see myself blurting out to her that I don't want my daughter dressed like a whore (because sometimes I do blurt out things like that! sometimes it just comes out! and then I wonder what in the world I got myself into). But I know I'm not alone in this... M has way more patience than I do and heavenly wisdom and Presence and help is only just a prayer away...