Tag: #birthstory

Welcoming Ellenor: A Birth Story About Redemption

On By David CarterIn KidsLeave a comment

The birth of my 2nd daughter was so different than my 1st. That’s what I felt God say to me about this go around: “it will be different.”  In case you missed Miriam’s birth story, I’ll briefly recap: 22-hour labor, lots of interventions, she still wasn’t coming and resulted in an unplanned c-section. This is scary to admit but the whispering voice of the Holy Spirit told me that morning, 5/1/14 through a feeling”you will have a c-section” to which my inner-dialogue said “hell no.” (Call it pride, call it wanting to give it a “good ol’ try” as a 1st time mom, call it whatever), but had I walked into that hospital fully trusting what God had told me and changed “my birth plan” it would have saved us/me (who am I kidding, ME) about 11 hours.  To say that was a crazy day would be an understatement. But she and I were both kept safe. The Lord’s presence was all over our room and the OR and we were blessed with the sweetest of nurses. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t “have the magical birth experience I wanted” and spent way too much time grieving it and beating myself up about it and feeling so ashamed. Thank God that’s over! I’ve healed a lot from that experience. I’ve turned trauma and sadness and confusion and “why me?” into joy and thankfulness (I’ve had lots of inner-healing prayer, or SOZO to help with that) 🙂

So this time around: new location, new hospital, new OB. My hospital and OB do not practice or advocate VBACS, so with that option off the table (because home-births are also out of the question for our family…not knocking it, but not for our family), both David and I agreed beforehand that we would like a scheduled repeat c-section. Fast-forward through a fairly easy and wonderful pregnancy and at 39 weeks, we were ready to meet our Ellenor! It’s funny that with Miriam she was almost 2 weeks late and I prayed “please come today, please come already”, ate whole pineapples and spicy foods and tried every freaking trick in the book to kickstart labor and NADA, but with Ellenor I prayed, “please stay in there, please” and felt way more relaxed and less anxious (for knowing exactly when she was coming) 🙂

The night before surgery, on May 2nd, David and I treated ourselves to a date night consisting of coffee, Barnes and Noble, Papa Johns and the Marriott (right across the street from East Cooper Medical). It was awesome! Then we woke up at 4:30 to cruise into the hospital at 5am for paperwork (all those questions!) and getting hooked up and prepped. The hardest part was waiting the 2 hours to get started. Our friend, Alicia is in training to be a midwife and doula so she came to the hospital to “doula-nate” (our word, not hers) and to watch my c-section. She was amazing and I can fully advocate for c-section mamas (unplanned or elective) to hire a doula! At her initial suggestion, I wasn’t sure about how much she could “do”, but was I wrong. She met us at the hospital early (she’s got 2 babies of her own), prayed with us beforehand, kept our excited-nervous jitters down, got David coffee and offered to take pictures while we were in the O.R.. She also offered to stay with me at all times if David needed to leave with the baby so that I would never be alone. (um, yes, please!) Afterwards, she stayed with us in recovery, offered support with breastfeeding, offered to get us anything we needed and was always there as a calming presence and as a friend. Thanks Alicia! You already are an amazing doula!

7:15am hits and after talking with the anesthesiologist, I make a last minute decision (well, made the night before) that I wanted to watch my c-section. Not the whole “slice and dice” bit, just the part where my daughter is born. And I wanted skin-to-skin as soon as possible. Easily enough, the doctors were ok with that. Done. Then, I find out that I have to walk alone to the OR…wait, what? David and Alicia had to stay behind until I was fully prepped. You don’t know how surreal it is to walk into an OR as the patient, until you have to (last time I was wheeled in on so many drugs, I don’t recall it because I was fighting sleep) so this time I’m fully alert and the nurses are like, “ok, let’s go.” But this sweet, amazing nurse, Ms. Connie, comes and embraces me and prays over me while I’m getting my spinal inserted and that calmed me down a lot. Fun fact: a spinal is instant numbness as opposed to an epidural gradually kicks in. Didn’t know that, but I felt SO relaxed and told my nurse, Susan “wow, I feel so at peace and relaxed. I bet all moms say that coming in here.” She said, “um, no, they don’t.” Did you know that there is a countdown on the wall of the OR counting backwards from 35 minutes? Not sure what happens if it hits 0:00 but we didn’t have to find out.

Ms. Connie called roll and David and Alicia came back to stand next to me. When they were ready (which unbeknownst to me they had started the surgery) and they lowered the sheet so that I could see (keep in mind, from my vantage point, I have a bowling ball on my stomach, so I’m spared seeing my own blood and guts) and I saw them pull her out of me. It was the most surreal, wonderful, amazing moment. I was crying happy tears before they even lowered the sheet and I lost it when she came out screaming. I think I said “hey baby.”Miss Ellenor Beverly was born at 7:44am and she was perfect at 7 lbs, 5 oz, 20 in. long. I got to hold her skin-to-skin after a few minutes while they checked her over. She laid on my chest for 20 minutes or so then they were going to take her out of the room with David to do the APGAR tests and all that jazz. I was SO thankful that Alicia stayed with me while I was getting stitched up. Then I was wheeled into recovery where David handed me back Ellenor and Ms. Connie helped me with breastfeeding (cue nausea), but Ellenor latched on immediately like a champ and that’s been an easy road for us.

Now she’s a little over a week old and we are so in love! Miriam is adjusting well and loves her baby sister! While I wouldn’t say that recovering from a c-section is “fun”, maybe because it’s my second time and not my first, it IS easier the second time around. Miriam’s birth was a testimony to the Lord’s goodness and GRACE. Ellenor’s birth was a testimony of REDEMPTION and healing. Everything went so smoothly and wonderfully! In Blake Healy’s book, The Veil, he describes the scenes of watching his children being born. Because Blake sees angels, he describes that at each birth, “there is an angel in the room…who can hardly contain his excitement; with anticipation that as soon as the baby is born, he or she is assigned for life to that angel.” So I envisioned with Ellenor’s birth (and can envision with Miriam’s too) that there was an angel in that OR that was dancing and trembling and jumping up and down with joy in the moments leading up to her birth. Dar la luz–to bring to light!

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first family pic
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Miriam and Gramps meeting Ellenor

Miriam’s Birth Story: A Testimony of Grace and Goodness

On By David CarterIn KidsLeave a comment

I (Jen) was 41 weeks and 4 days pregnant. I wasn’t tired of being pregnant, but I was so ready to meetour sweet girl and waiting is very hard. I felt as if I tried everything on my part up until her debut. I went for long walks, rolled around and bounced on my yoga ball, ate an entire pineapple, tried accupressure….nada. Nothing was happening. Until the night of April 30th, when David suggested that I go have some “God time”, I locked myself in our room and put in headphones, blasted some Bethel tunes into my ears and danced around in worship. I hadn’t done that in a long time.

Well, God and I enjoyed worship together that night so much that I woke up May 1st at 2AM with contractions that I finally thought were “real”. I didn’t wake David up until 6AM to tell him. Our doctor’s appointment that day was at 8AM so we thought we would wait until then to find out for sure. I went in for Miriam’s stress test and once the doc checked me out she said, “Yep, it’s the real thing. You are at 4 cm. Go to the hospital.” So we checked into the hospital around 10AM.

Once at the hospital, we were given a rockstar of a nurse, Mandy. She made me feel as if we were in control of whatever we wanted to do. When she said that I was “the only one on the floor listed as wanted a natural birth” I told her that we were going to “wing it and see”. While worship music was playing, we carried on. She checked me out and said I was at 5 cm. Five hours go by and after doing everything I felt like I could handle, I asked to be checked again. …no change, still a 5. At this point, I was thinking “I’ve tried for 12 hours by myself…yep, that’s a good attempt.” I didn’t feel guilty at all for asking and thanked God for the person who created epidurals.

At 3:30PM, I got the epidural and didn’t feel anything anymore. So we waited. My water was broken for me which didn’t speed things up. Around 6PM or so we kicked in some Pitocin (which at this point, my thoughts are “Great. I can’t feel a thing. You might as well.”) Other than uncontrollable shaking like I had seizures, I was able to rest for a bit, talk to our other wonderful nurses (thanks Lisa and Pam) and joke around with David. Finally around 8:30PM or so they announce that I can start pushing.  So I pushed, for an hour and even with 2 assists from the vaccum, she wasn’t coming out. Miriam was fine, of course. Her heartbeat only dipped once and our other nurses couldn’t believe “what a happy baby we had, who was just too stubborn to come out.” I also wasn’t feeling any pain at all and the doctor and I were chatting about him planning a trip to Machu Picchu in between contractions.

When the words “I think we should do a C-section” came out of my doctor’s mouth, I started to cry (mostly due to being so tired, mostly due to crazy preggo hormones, mostly due to feeling scared). But David and I had already talked about that the only thing we wanted was a healthy and safe delivery of our baby girl. God was reassuring me throughout the 20ish hours of labor that “the end result would be joy” and that He was with us every step of the way. So we opted that she did come out, by C-section. The last thing I remember David saying to me before I was wheeled into the OR was “Jen, I think I lost the car keys.” (Don’t worry, we found them 2 days later).

Within 15 minutes, Miriam was born. She was perfect. We also found out (from David watching the last little bit) that my uterus is apparently heart-shaped, exactly like that of a Valentine’s card. The doctor said in his 15-something years of practice that he’s never seen that before. (We think that it’s God’s humor that he would surround her with love in every way…we just had no idea that meant literally). David got to cut her cord and once she was cleaned up and put on my chest, she smiled. They say babies can’t smile yet, but I know she smiled. She was and is so beautiful!

Today, Miriam is 3 weeks old and I’m tearing up as I think of all that went into bringing her into the world. I know that I couldn’t have done it without David by my side. He was amazing support through everything! He loves “his ladies” so well!!

We are also very thankful for all of the well-wishes and prayers that covered us before, during and after her birth. When asked, “would you do it again?” Absolutely, 1000%. We felt God’s presence in our labor and delivery room and there was so much peace around everything that had happened. God really took care of us with an amazing staff of doctor’s and nurses. I felt so much grace was extended to me, to us. God is so good and so faithful to entrust a daughter like her to us! We love you Miri-Bear so much!! You teach us so much about the unconditional love of the Father. Love, Mommy and Daddy.

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