Birth Plan

Below is our completed birth plan, thoroughly discussed with and signed by our doctor today.

She's an awesome doctor. I think she's as close as you can come to having a homebirth without actually staying home and being attended by a midwife. She lives only a couple blocks away and has given us her cell #. We're to call her when we go into labor for sure and she'll likely head over and check me at home. If it's at night she said she'll just snooze on our couch for a while. Then we'll head to the hospital (3 minutes away) to deliver the baby and head home within a few hours. Since labor was only 8 hours for Cedric with 10 minutes of pushing, she's expecting this one to come pretty fast. She warned not to stay home too long or we may seriously end up with a homebirth after all. I just really do not want to end up having the baby in the car!

Anyway, here is the birth plan:

Tim & Lindy Vassar's Birth Plan

Our goal is to deliver our 2nd child as naturally and safely as possible. We view childbirth as an inherently normal and safe process and as a profound rite of passage, even if medical care must be a part of the birth.

We ask that no procedure, large or small, be performed without our full knowledge and consent. Please provide us with information on all available options with adequate time to ask questions and to make our decision.

Lindy's mother and two sisters may be present at the birth. We ask that during labor family and friends may come and go as we see fit.

Thank you for all your hard work and support in making this special time as peaceful and intimate as possible!

First Stage:
· Keep vaginal exams to a minimum.
· Intermittent external fetal monitoring.
· No IV unless mother becomes dehydrated, will accept heparin lock if necessary.
· Please do not offer chemical pain relief.

Induction and Augmentation:
· We prefer to use natural methods. No labor stimulants or the artificial rupture of membranes unless absolutely necessary. Under normal circumstances there is no hurry.

Second Stage:
· Prefer a natural tear to an episiotomy. Please use compresses, massage, and support to help avoid a tear.
· Mother to push at her own pace. Under normal circumstances there is no hurry.
· Use of delivery aids such as manually spinning or pulling the baby only with parents’ full consent.

Third Stage:
· Spontaneous placenta separation and delivery encouraged by nursing and fundus massage only. Please no cord traction, use of pitocin, or scraping of uterus. Under normal circumstances there is no hurry.
· We would like to view the placenta before it is discarded.
· Ideally, we would prefer to be discharged home within a few hours of birth.
· If baby is Rh positive, we will return within 72 hours for the Rho (D) immune globulin injection.

Baby Care:
· Baby held and nursed by mother immediately.
· One of parents to stay with baby at all times.
· Delay clamping of cord until cord stops pulsing. Grandfather to cut the cord after mother is draped.
· Delay routine examining until parents and 2-year-old brother have had sufficient time alone with baby.
· Breastfeeding only please.
· Baby will receive its first bath at home.
· We refuse the erythromycin/prophylactic eye treatment.
· We refuse the vitamin K injection. If abnormal circumstances exist, we may choose to administer oral vitamin K ourselves, which we will have with us.
· We refuse the hepatitis B vaccine.
· We refuse the newborn screening routinely done before discharge. We will return to have it done when baby is 1 week of age.

Tim's project

We have been using this decrepid old dresser that Tim had gotten for $5 several years ago as a changing table. The drawers were falling apart, the knobs were loose and at least one was missing. It was quite ugly with scratches and nicks, so Tim decided to refinish it and fix the drawers before this new baby arrives. Here are the before and after pictures.


Cedric spent some time helping his daddy sand. Tim would sand and then blow off the dust, and Cedric copied his every move. It was fun to watch.

Here is the finished product. It's beautiful and as good as new! I am so pleased to have it in the nursery now. :)

We have another, larger dresser that needs refinishing as well. Tim plans to start that project this week. I'll send the before and after pictures when he finishes that one.

Parking Pics

It has been soooo long since I've blogged. I've got a long list of things to mention and pictures to share, but I rarely have much time so I'll just start posting short blogs as I can.

Here are a series of pictures taken back in June of Cedric. He likes to "park" his toys throughout the yard, and I thought I'd take a picture of him with his then latest location, however he was having a hard time giving me an actual smile. Here is the series of tries until he finally gave me a good one.

Take #1

Take #2

Take #3

Final Take

Here are a couple more parking locations I caught on camera. It is such a cute thing for him to do that I had to record it:

Cedric also likes to "park" the tools. They've made their way around the yard several times as well:

Various news

Last weekend we had our big adoption fundraising yard sale, and we made $1155! That is so much more than we anticipated. A few families had donated stuff, including Mom and Dad, so the sale was quite good-sized. We weren't completely done setting things out and pricing until Sunday afternoon! Thank you to Mom and Dad for the huge amount of work that they put into this with us! On Saturday I don't think there was a time when somebody was not there browsing until around 2pm. It was nearly the same on Sunday. I had been secretly hoping and praying that we would at least reach $1000 and God beat it by $155. :) It was great weather (I got a bit of a sunburn that first morning).

We ended up donating some of the left over items to a garage sale that the youth group at the Oroville Free Methodist Church was going to be having and then boxing a good deal of it up for another adoption fundraising yard sale some time in the future. There are more people lined up who say they are collecting items to donate to another sale, so I'm thinking it should be good-sized again even if we do it as soon as this Fall.

We're going to be putting the money from this sale into a CD so we can make some interest off it until we're ready to start the adoption paperwork, which will hopefully be mid to late next year.

After almost 2 years of praying and educating ourselves, we finally have a strong feeling about where to adopt from. Our plan is to adopt from Ethiopia, Africa. That's the direction we'll head until God changes the plans. The agency we are most interested in going with is Holt International based in Oregon (http://www.holtintl.org/ethiopia/).

Oh, by the way, we have decided on names for the soon-to-arrive Vassar baby. If a boy, it will be Creedence Dean. If a girl, it will be Cienna Yvonne. The meanings of names are important to me so for those who are also interested, Creedence Dean means "power in faith" and "prosperous". Cienna Yvonne means "the Lord is gracious" and "shielded". Here are a couple pictures of little Creedence or Cienna at 29 weeks:



Cedric has so nearly weaned himself. Until this afternoon, he hadn't even asked to nurse since Sunday morning. It's good. He's ready and it hasn't been traumatic for him or I. :) Very sweet and satisfying.

We're to the stage of having prenatal checkups every 2 weeks now. I can't believe it's already that time. I am so anxious to meet this new baby!

Last Saturday of May

I am at work today. Today is Founder’s Day in Tonasket, and their having their annual Founder’s Day Parade. I am so jealous! It’s beautiful weather outside. I’m so glad that Tim and Cedric will be enjoying it. They’ll have fun.

Cedric has taken to saying “hi” in the sweetest voice to almost anything. He’ll cock his head and wave and croon “hiiiii” in a high-pitched voice, sometimes accompanied by a hug and kiss. Some of the funniest things he’s said hi to has been my armpit (Seriously, he’d ask me to raise my arm and after he’d waved and said ‘hi’ he’d tickle me. It was adorable.), some calking he pulled off the bathtub (This got a hug and a kiss too), and his own pee. Yes, pee. He was playing naked in our yard the other day, and he wee’d in the grass, after which he waved and said “hiiii!” I tell ya, there’s not much cuter than that. : )

Every time Cedric gets an owy, or “bonk”, he needs a kiss, of course. He’s such a sweet boy (or else confused…) that, after he’s gotten his own kiss from me or daddy, he’ll return to the object on which he bonked himself and kiss it. That’s included things like the dryer vent and his trike and Hemi, our dog. He keeps me giggling all day.

Cedric has a love-hate relationship with our riding lawn mower. He adores sitting on it when it’s parked but is terrified of it when it’s running. He asks his daddy to get the keys and turn on the “mow-loan” every day (with a sweet voice, cocked head, and a “pease?”), but the moment Tim brings out the keys and head for the lawn mower while Ced’s out there with the lawn mower, he gets so worked up! He’s done well riding on Tim’s lap before and riding in the trailer with his papa, but he must have been traumatized by it. So we’re warming up to it from inside the living room window or while in someone’s arms. Silly guy. He’ll get there. He’s just a tiny guy still. I love how he calls it “mow-loan”.

While playing with Hemi the other day Cedric got his first nose bleed. Hemi had been racing around the house and must have jumped off the couch right into Cedric’s nose. It was just a tiny bleed, but it was a milestone. : )

Sorry all you’re getting are stories about Cedric lately. Not much else has been going on. Pretty average days for both Tim and I waiting while this new baby grows. : )

Cedric stories

Cedric had his first (as far as we know :) taste of a bug this week. He was out on the porch, I was in the kitchen and had just given him a piece of cheese. I heard him yelling at something and in a minute or two he came in pointing to his mouth and saying "eat" over and over and gesturing for me to follow him. So I did and there on the porch was a half chewed piece of cheese right next to a half squashed beetle with a little bit of cheese stuck to it. The beetle was still alive but it's abdomen was not in the best shape. It was just gross. Every time Cedric eats cheese now he talks about beetles. :)

Cedric can be pretty emotionally responsive to music (runs in both sides of the family). King of the Road used to make him burst into tears but now it is Rock-a-bye Baby. I was reading him a nursery rhyme book earlier this week (singing all the ones that have tunes I know), and the very last one was Rock-a-bye Baby. About 30 seconds after I had finished, Cedric burst into tears. He was soooo sad! He kept saying, "Baby. Tree. Baby. Tree." He apparently understood the words enough to be very concerned for the baby up there in the tree (I've always been confused about the purpose of that song too...), and adding the melody to it was just too much. The silliest thing was that he kept asking me to sing it over and over again. I tried to get him distracted with something else, but no, he wanted the "baby" song. Every time I'd sing he'd burst into the saddest set of sobbing and tears you've ever heard. After singing it a few times, I started just reading it, hoping that it would help him process it without so much emotion. He'd make it through a few read-throughs before he'd start crying again. :) Silly guy. We finally wrapped it up and went to bed. No bad dreams luckily. :)

I thought these two pictures as comparisons were just adorable. The first is of Cedric at 4 days old. The second is of Cedric at 22 months.



Cedric has grown 1-1/2 inches in the past 4 months and gained almost 1 pound.

Update

Baby has been really active this week. A few nights ago I felt it hiccuping for the first time. I am getting so big. 8-) I'm feeling good though. Just 15 weeks or so to go.

There are some big black beetles around our place that Cedric has found fascinating. One of the first ones he found, he got down on his tummy and forearms with the beetle right below his nose and leaned down as close as he could to "hug" it. It was so sweet. Here are a series of pictures of him chasing and capturing one:

It has been hot the last couple days. It got up to 92 degrees yesterday. I finally had to turn on the AC for a bit last night.

There has been two recent nights that Cedric actually declined nursing to go to sleep. He just wanted to lay on the couch with me for a while and then accepted when I offered to bring him to his crib where he fell sleep. He's getting big enough where I think it's more comfortable for him to fall sleep in the crib than in my arms, so he's been doing that frequently, though he often needs to cuddle for a while first. It's so satisfying to see him naturally weaning himself away from not only nursing but also the need to be in our arms to fall asleep.