Reflections on the story of my pregnancy with Violet

Our sweet baby Violet was born on September 23rd, 2014 at 8:09 am and weighed 8 lbs 9 oz, measured 21.5 inches long. I feel like I should back up a bit and tell about this pregnancy, it was harder folks. I was a bit more nauseated than I have been before- which isn't saying much because really I wasn't bad off but I did vomit several times early on... at about 32 weeks I think she dropped or something because I started feeling SO MUCH PRESSURE- I feared I would be on the toilet and accidentally have a baby there... and I had SO MUCH pubic bone PAIN- I did experience a little of that with Adilene but this time- holy rollers! There were times when I literally couldn't walk up the stairs without crying, or turn onto the other side in bed without a team called Josh physically helping me move- seriously terrible, but most of the time it was tolerable pain, so I guess I am thankful for that. We planned a home birth with the midwives at Better Birth in Salt Lake City. They were awesome. I initially was a bit concerned about the fact that I could have any one of 3 midwives at my birth along with a couple student midwives too, because as I've learned I'm all sensitive about on lookers and people I'm not 1000% comfortable with- especially in something so important as the birth of a child. But after praying about it we felt right about it so there you go.

Violet was head down the whole time, which gave me a lot of much needed emotional comfort and peace. The pregnancy was very healthy and great. At 33 weeks my protein was really low and I had to work to get it back up- lots of peanuts and protein shakes were had, and at 36 weeks I found out that my Group B Strep Test came back positive. I didn't even know what that would mean since I have been negative before. Basically everyone has germs down there on and off throughout their lives, but if the bacteria is there when the baby is born, the baby has about a 1 in 1000 chance of getting ill, possibly a blood disease.
Anyway, we had several treatment options,
1- choose not to treat,
2- apply a special cleansing wash every two hours during labor,
3- antibiotic shot in my leg,
4- IV antibiotics.
This stressed me out a bit because obviously I don't want my baby to be ill, I don't want labor interrupted a million times to do a cleansing wash down there (talk about slowing labor and being intrusive- which again, I'm extra sensitive to) the antibiotics are only effective if you are on them for 4 hours before the baby is born and I am likely allergic to penicillin (whole other conversation and back story- you apparently can't test that out while pregnant) and the antibiotics used are all in that penicillin family.

*As a side note, antibiotics are a great invention, because of course some times they are needed- because they kill all the bad stuff- but they also kill all the good stuff and that can cause other problems down the road. 

So, after reading way too much info about it, and prayerfully considering our options we chose not to treat it. Which we didn't advertise because I didn't want everyone's extra unprofessional but "expert" advice. But we felt comfortable and used pro biotics and garlic to help be proactive about the small chance of anything happening.

While not our first "out of hospital birth" this was our first official home birth and we were really excited about being in our own home- be it the ever so humble 2 bedroom apartment it was. Josh accepted a new Chiropractic position in Salmon Idaho, so we were also preparing to move...

These are the last pregnancy pictures we took on September 21st, two days before Violet was born. They were taken on the phone and so aren't the most fantastic quality, but I'm glad we have them:)

Something different we did with this pregnancy was had our good friend Angela Stewart take some prenatal pictures for us, she is great and we are so thankful that we had these done:)