You are viewing stuff tagged with birth.
Some library books we’ve been reading to Ess recently:
Herman and Rosie is a jazz and NYC-themed love story and when Ess wanted a story read to her in the middle of the night, that’s the one she picked. I think she picked it because it’s long for a children’s book, but it still has a nice gentle pace for late-night.
I think Mykala had been up for 38 hours at this point. Nice smile!
I went to bed on Tuesday evening, expecting to head to work the following morning, a little disappointed that our baby girl’s due date, July 22, had come and gone without a hint of her arrival. But instead of sleep, I felt Mykala’s gentle nudge and heard her voice just a few hours later at 3am: “My contractions started, I think.” She sounded so calm that it took me the better part of an hour to fully wake up and realize that this is The Big Show. We began timing duration and interval of contractions, and true to my computer geekery, I created a new text document in BBEdit that I would later save as labor.txt, here’s a snippet:
Rates of Caesarean sections are climbing, according to a Time magazine article that raises more questions than it answers:
Rates of C-sections have been climbing each year in the past decade in the U.S., reaching a record high of 31% of all live births in 2006. That’s a 50% increase since 1996. Around the world, the procedure is becoming even more common: in certain hospitals in Brazil, fully 80% of babies are delivered by caesarean. How did a procedure originally intended as an emergency measure become so popular? And is the trend a bad thing?