The Story of Baby Bea

Monday morning at 5:30 am Matt and I dropped off Micah at a friends house. Thus begining the day of our little mystery's birth. We got to the hospital at 6:00. On the elevator I started to panic alittle bit cause there was no backing out. Matt grabbed my hand and said, "we could turn around right now and go to the beach." I just looked at him wishfully cause I really really wanted to run away from all that was coming. But instead we went up to the maternity wing and I was admitted. By 7:30 I had gone through all of the initial paper work and they began the labor inducing medicine. My contractions began soon after that.

At first I was laying down on the bed and the contractions were manageable. Thanks to the tricks I learned from the midwife I had had with Finn. They slowly intensified and by 10:30 or so were really bad and hard to handle. I asked the nurse to come in and help me to the bathroom. As I was sitting on the toliet (TMI?) I had a contraction and said to the nurse, "Man these are way easier to manage sitting here." She said, "well the bed does convert to a sitting postion almost like a large chair. Do you want to try that?" I said yes and so we did. Surprisingly they were very managable like that. I labored in that position until noon when the nurse checked me and I was at a 4. So they ordered the epidural. Matt went to the hallway for awhile as he almost passed out when I got mine with Micah. It hurt really bad this time and there were some scary moments, but over all I got the epidural and the rest happened rather quickly. I was at a 10 by 2:30 and ready to push. The nurse told me that we were going to go ahead and start pushing. I told her that I only pushed 3 times with Micah. She said really even with an epidural? Yep, I said, I'm a great pusher! So she had me try one so she could see how I was and after that she told me to hold it and that yes indeed we were going to wait to push until the doctor got there. So they called him. I would have had her at 2:45 if he would have been there, but we had to wait for an hour for him to get to the hospital. The nurse checked me once and I knew the baby wasn't far! Let's just put it that way.

You may wonder how I was actually feeling while all of this was going on.... The whole time was a constant battle in not allowing fear to one hundred percent over power me. I was terrified that something was going to go wrong with the baby and this time I was terrified that something was going to happen to me. Leaving Matt alone with a new baby and Micah. I prayed the whole time. I cried alot... and I tried to stay above the negative thoughts that threatened to take me over. Matt was amazing! What a gift of a husband he is to me. I am so thankful for him. For the source of strength he was to me during it all. For the honesty that he brought to all of it. For the way that he heard my fears, tried to understand, but also spoke truth to me so that I could fight them. Anyway back to the point of pushing...

The doctor finally arrived and sure enough 1,2,3,4,5 pushes and out the baby came. Setting the baby on my chest, neither Matt nor I asked the doctor what the sex of the baby was. I think we both just assumed it was a boy. Finally Dr. Sacks said "It's a girl". Matt and I literally looked at each other confused and then Matt put his hand over his mouth and said NO WAY! we both started laughing. We never thought a girl was a true possibility. What an amazing surprise!!! It was so worth waiting to find out the sex just for those few moments of total and true surprise.


So we enjoyed an hour or so with Beatrix. They handed her to us, we took pictures, videoed the nurses checking her over and weighing her. Then Matt left to call family and friends and I tried to nurse her for the first time. While I was feeding her the nurses came in to the room to tell me that they needed to take Beatrix to the NICU for some tests. Here we go again, I thought. Why, I asked. They told me that while I was in labor they had been able to hear that her heart beat sounded off and they wanted to take her down, hook her up to the heart moniter, do an EKG and just make sure. They tried to reasure me that her coloring was great, she was eating well, and she was active. All I could think of was "what is Matt going to do when he comes back up here and has to hear this news..." So I asked them not to take her until Matt got back so that I could reasure him that she was ok and that the tests were mostly precautionary. Plus I knew that he would want to go with her. So I did wait, I explained it all to him, held his hand and reminded him of the tests we had had when I was pregnant and that it couldn't be too bad and to stay positive. He left. I called my parents, 3 really good friends and had some dinner.

When the nurse came in an hour later I was in good spirits. Pretty happy at what a blessing had just occured. My DAUGHTER was here, there were very compitent doctors checking her over and Matt was proud of me and thought me AMAZING (his words). She wanted to help me to the bathroom. After checking to make sure my legs were relatively funcitonal we went to the bathroom. The following may be too much information and is relatively gross so don't read it if you get sicked out, but this is what happened next... I was sitting on the toliet, and after peeing I noticed that it still felt like I was peeing. I looked in the toliet and blood was streaming out. I said is this normal? to the nurse. She said, "Yes, you just had a baby." I didn't really think that it was, but I got up and went back to the bed. She left me alone. Sitting there though I noticed that it still felt like I was peeing and the more I moved the more it came out. I lifted up my gown looked down at my underware and they were soaked with blood and it was spreading rapidly. Right then and there my friends I really thought my fears of dying were coming true. I calmly (don't know how) pressed the call button for the nurses station and said I think I need a nurse. She came in and I said, "Christina I don't think this is normal". And showed her what was happening. She went to the door and yelled a bunch of things came back to me and lied to me by saying you're fine everythings fine. I knew it wasn't. Nurses started to file into the room and they laid me back in my bed, hooked me back up to the IV and started another drip. One of the nurses came over and started to push on my stomach. Blood poured out and then clots the size of oranges and grape fruits. And this is how I was when my dear husband came back to my room pushing our daughter back from the NICU. (He later told me that when he walked in and saw my lower half covered in blood he thought I was dying too.) Anyway, he rushed to the bed by me and grabbed my hand I looked at him terrified and began to sob! They are still pushing on my uterus to get all of the clots out, I am sobbing and saying I just wanted everything to go perfect this time. Matt is rubbing my head saying I know, I know. The nurses are saying you are going to be fine and I am thinking that I have just ruptured my uterus and am bleeding to death. It was very chaotic! It felt like forever, but I am sure it was only minutes. They got the bleeding under control. And they finally explained what had happened that my unterus hadn't contracted on its own, clots formed blocking the normal flow of blood, thus the reason it all backed up and then flowed out. I was beyond myself by this time and just wanted to disappear. I was relieved and very confused as to what had just happened. Though it left me quite anemic and I have to take iron now for a month.

Fast forward a bit, we got to our recovery room and Matt started to call people to once again pray for one of our new little ones. So many things about this pregnancy were reminders even to our bodies of what we had gone through once before. The army that emerged to pray for Beatrix's heart was and is beyond comprehension! So many family, friends and even total strangers began up lifting our family to our God. We were so humbled! The cardiologist took Bea to do a heart ultrasound and then came in to tell us the next afternoon that she had a small hole which he believed would correct itself, she had a minor murmur which he also thought would correct itself. What he did say we needed to watch out for was the extra heart beat that she has. This he said could lead to something alittle more serious, but that more then likely it would also correct itself and that our pediatriction would just need to watch it and we would need to watch for any strange moments of her acting lathargic. In our minds our prayers were answered. She would be fine and we could take her home.

Micah stayed with his little friend the first night and then Tuesday night Matt brought him up to meet his sister and then the two of them went home to have a guys night. It was pretty cute when Micah ran into the room. He saw the little bed and yelled, "A BABY!" He couldn't believe she was really here. I was standing there video taping it all and he came up to me and said "Mommy no more baby in your tummy?" I said, "no buddy no more baby, she is right there". He looked from me to her and then back to me again. He looked at my stomach and then at my face and said, "Mommy now you can run!" "Yes, buddy now I can run." It was a precious moment. He wanted to hold her so he sat on the bed and did an amazing job holding his sister for the first time.

I came home on Wednesday and since then it has been mostly wonderful with a few tough "what is happening?" moments. I feel emotional alot and I guess that is to be expected since I just had a baby 5 days ago. This morning Matt took Micah to Boo at the zoo and so he wanted a picture with Micah in his tiger costume and Beatrix in her little ghost onsie. I think he looks so happy in the pictures....

After Beatrix was born and we were sitting in the room feeling alittle overwhelmed with the fact that we now have a daughter to raise, Matt looked at me and said, I am so proud of you, you really are amazing. I told him I couldn't have done it without you, and I actually meant it with every fiber of my being.

My final thought for this posting is Lord, may I never forget the love and appreciation that I felt for my husband at that moment. It was so pure, so raw and so real! Thank you for Matt, thank you for my beautiful son Micah and thank you Lord for my new precious daughter Beatrix Sparrow Harrison, born on a Monday afternoon.

The story of her name...

Beatrix - we just loved the name and found out after wards that it is derived from the Beattitudes in Matthew.

Sparrow - 2 fold explanation... one, we liked it all the way back in Toronto when I was pregnant with Finn and didn't know it was a boy. We used to watch the sparrows in the park and thought them such happy little birds. Matt nicknamed them "hoppy birds" cause they bounced all around looking for food. So he started calling the baby in my womb "hoppy" and we joked even then that if it was a girl her middle name would be sparrow. However, the name took on a new meaning for me this pregnacy. Early on I had a dream that the baby was a girl and the fear began that something was wrong with the baby. Later that same day, I was reading in a little booklet called "Our Daily Bread" and this song was listed at the bottom of the page, "I sing because I'm happy, I sing because I'm free. For his eye is on the sparrow and I know He watches me.... We need not fear the perils around us because the eye of the Lord is always upon us." I didn't know for sure that nothing was going to be wrong with this baby but I was assured that as much as He watches every little sparrow he was watching over the new life growing inside of me. With out a doubt right then and there we decided that if the baby really was a girl her middle name would be Sparrow. What a beautiful promise is in our daughter's name!

Micah holding Beatrix at home. He is so gentle and loving to her, So far!

Matt with his two favorites!