Noah Blake's Birth Story: Part 2

After Noah was born, my mother-in-law brought the girls all the way up to Dayton to visit us.

Daddy with the girls in the elevator on the way up to the birth center.


Abigail meeting Noah for the first time.

Elsie was just a mess. She had a runny nose and was confused and upset to see Mama with another baby besides her. She really just sat and cried . . . except if a camera was pointed at her. Funny girl. If she saw the red eye reduction go off on my mother-in-law's camera, she would smile and ham it up for the camera. I think you can still see her tears though.

Abigail was instantly an adoring older sister.

"Nana", my mother-in-law, with newborn Noah.

I held Elsie on my lap and played with her to try to make things feel "normal" for her. She was still pretty confused and upset.

My father-in-law works in Dayton and so he met the rest of the family at the birth center after work. He's holding Noah for the first time.

During the birth, there was some confusion as to whether I was a carrier or not of Group B Strep. It's still a mystery. I had tested positive (I think) at one point during my pregnancy but the doctor retested me at 37 weeks and the test had been negative so I didn't end up having antibiotics during labor (yeah yeah yeah for no IV!).

After he was born, all the medical staff was in a tizzy thinking he could have been exposed to GBS even though I had tested negative in late pregnancy. He was born pretty quickly after my water broke, so I wasn't concerned. Procedure stated that he had to have his blood drawn and monitored for infection. They did that before we went to bed for the evening.

During the night I was requesting pain medication from the nurses and they told me that his blood work had come back and they were concerned about infection. So we were supposed to stay in the hospital an extra day.

*A typical stay in our birth center is 24 hours after birth, which is what we did with the girls.*

I was disappointed to hear this news because we wanted to go home but we agreed to stay just to make sure that Noah was okay. He seemed to be fine to me, nursing, sleeping, was fine. The doctor agreed with me that he would have showed some abnormal fussiness or refusal to eat if he had been sick.

Later the next day the pediatrician checked him out again and just said the elevated while blood cells were probably stress from the birth (you're telling me, kid!) and that he was checking out fine now. He still had not been circumcised and so we had to wait until the next day for that - by that point - anyway.

Everything else was fine. We just simply were anxious to get back home and to be honest, a bit bored by that point. Having never stayed 48 hours after a birth before, it was an interesting experience. I longed for the comforts of home and my own bed.

Noah with his Great-Grandma, Rosalie Myers:

Noah with my mom who the kids call "Roro".

And . . . that is Noah's birth story!