Our Maggie is 6 weeks old tomorrow. I love having a newborn again. The cuddles, the baby smell, the love as she stares at me, the feeling of being able to comfort her. She started smiling this week, but don’t blink, or you will miss it.
She was definitely my most eventful pregnancy, but maybe that’s what you get when you are pregnant at 40. I had debilitating fatigue and nausea and vomiting the first trimester, and then I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. I ended up on insulin right away, mostly at night for my fasting blood sugars and a little in the morning after breakfast that I didn’t really have to titrate. By the end I was on 60 units of long-acting insulin at night! Being on insulin also bought me biweekly NSTs in the OB clinic.
Our other issue was that she looked quite large on ultrasound. I have already had larger babies, and the doctors assumed she would be even bigger because of the GD. We made the difficult decision to choose an elective c-section over induction at 39 weeks to avoid any possibility of shoulder dystocia.
I thought I was never going to make it to the end, when we hit another snag. I tested positive for breakthrough Covid at 37 weeks. I quarantined in my room for 10 days and prayed constantly that no kids would get it. We knew we didn’t want to bring a baby home to that! Sean and the kids did everything. If Sean was at work, we made lists of things for the kids to do during the day, and I FaceTime’d them to help and answer questions. It was wild. It’s a miracle that no one got hurt or got Covid by the end of everything. My NSTs were switched to the Family Birth Center at the hospital, so they could have all the protective gear they needed to treat me.
Finally our sweet girl arrived on November 5th at 8:03am. She was only 9lbs, 1oz—the same as Jack. But we were both alive and well, and that itself was such a huge answer to prayer.
Recovering from a c-section is definitely not my favorite thing, but everything gets better every day. We are already wondering what we would do without our little Maggie and how we ever lived without her.
