Fourth

Last week we celebrated the fourth birthday in our family. It belonged to Munchkin. He turned 7. Seven!! Where does the time go??? I think my favorite quote of the day from him was, “I’ve been waiting to turn 7 forever! Now I don’t have to anymore!” What a funny kid.

We’re trying something different party-wise with our kids this year. In the past, we’ve done a party for each of them, inviting mostly inviting their grandparents and aunts/uncles/cousins. Last year, we had a joint party for them following the same model. This year, they have more friends than they’ve ever had before. The girl who lives next door is really sweet to them (she’s 12 and in 7th grade at public school) and there’s another homeschool family just around the corner that our kids have grown attached to. They have a girl right between Seahawk and Munchkin (age wise) and a preschool age boy. Plus, there are now around 20 or 30 kids at church, whereas before, my boys were the only two (this was before Small Fry was born). 

So what we’re doing is having a special grandparents only birthday dinner on or near the actual birthday for each of them independently, and between the two birthdays, a joint party for friends. For personal reasons, we opted not to go out of our way to reach out to the aunts and uncles.

Munchkin chose pizza for his grandparents dinner. This was a-okay with me! I like cooking for people, but it was pretty hot last week, so take and bake was just right. We had a lovely time celebrating a special guy with (most of) his grandparents, as well as the lady who lives across the street from us and has become a grandmother-type figure for the boys. She loves them and they love her – a good portion of the time, they’d rather hang out with her than other friends! So it was wholly appropriate to include her in the “grandparents dinner.”

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’d go over my birth experience with Munchkin when his birthday came around, so I’ll go ahead and do that. But  no worries – I won’t get too graphic.

He was born on a Wednesday, the same day I had a regular checkup. I woke up that morning and knew something was wrong. This was around 7. I was worried, but my doctor’s appointment was at 9-ish anyway, so I didn’t call or try to go in early. They put me on a non-stress test which came back “not perfect,” so my doctor decided to induce. I didn’t get to go home from that doctor’s visit. The doctor’s office is just on one wing of the hospital, so they admitted me right from the clinic and we went straight to The Birth Center.

Labor was progressing normally for the first four to six hours. Around that time, we (by “we” I mean the medical staff) noticed that the baby wasn’t handling the contractions very well. His heart was doing funny things with each one, but it settled out when the contractions ended. They started tossing out the idea of a c-section at that point. I was devastated. I’d never in a million years considered that I’d end up with one. I have to hand it to my doctor – she did seem hesitant about doing the surgery, especially with my disappointment at the forefront. So we rode out the labor a little longer. I got an epidural, and we kept going, waiting for the baby to come. At 7:30 p.m., I had a contraction. My doctor happened to be in the room for this one, and the fetal heart monitor went crazy. Baby’s heart rate dropped down to 30. 30! That’s too slow to be healthy even in an adult, much less so in an infant. So she hollered at the nurses to prep the OR and call in the surgeon (he’d left not long before and was about 10-15 minutes away). 

My baby was born via emergency c-section at 7:55 p.m.

He’s had a whole slew of health issues (brain surgery when he was 3, a correction to some scar tissue in his boy parts when he was 4, and ear tubes when he was 5), but now he’s just perfect. And health problems or not, I wouldn’t take him any other way.