PeNsIvE

Here are a few pictures from our Trip to Filoli Garden last August 7, 2007.

In just a week, my son will be 2 months old…wow, time really flies by. Here are a few pictures from Carl’s First Month. See how fast my baby has grown!

Finally, we’ve caught up a little bit now…Carl’s been sleeping for at least 4 hours at night now so I got to put in some time to reading the last Harry Potter book and finally finished it this morning. (Still haven’t seen the movie though…but that’s okay, I’ll just wait for the DVD) Please if you have not finished reading the book do not read on…I do not intend to give anything away, but I just have some sentiments that I do not want to share with you if you do intend to read it.

Okay, I’ve really been a huge fan of the Harry Potter series since I read the first book. And I was really excited about this last one coming out coz finally I will get to rest my mind from wondering what happened. But quite honestly, I was hugely disappointed with this last one. And yeah I know, leave the writing to the writers. Sorry! I can’t help but feel like the last book being the first plot written did not do justice to the initial books in the series. I felt like the ending was rushed. After Rowling’s amazing work on building up such interesting characters in the book, it’s such a waste that the book ended without giving them enough lines in the book to at least talk about what happened to them. The way the last book was written, I kinda feel like J.K. is so rich already even if this last book is crap people will buy it anyway. I have no complaints about the plot. I give her props for the ingenuity and creativity as she always have been for the storyline, well — except for how Dumbledore’s life was explained in the end, I always thought he was among the best heroes of the story — I didn’t like how his character turned out to be. I was hoping the details could have been better. Also, it kinda seemed like having the epilogue was a poor retreat to not have people ask stories about what happened to the rest of the characters who suffered an ill-fated end and whom she really put into life in prior books because it’s a happy ending anyway. Kind of feels like a diversion to not have more questions asked.

I’m not saying do not read it, I don’t think there is anything I can say to anyone who’s read the first 6 books to not read the last one — coz I know nobody can stop me from reading it either. But I guess I was just expecting something better. Oh well.

Anyway, I’m just so glad I have Carl to keep me busy now. Otherwise, I would probably be itching now thinking what would I be doing now. Actually, I was so excited to get to the last page coz I could not wait to just focus on baby right now. I’ll be uploading some first month pictures of Carl on my next blog.

Yes, it’s amazing how time flies by so fast. I have meant to send out the links to my son’s pictures, or at least update you guys about what’s been happening but believe it or not — I haven’t got the chance. Yeah, even I couldn’t believe that taking care of a newborn is this much work. In my mind, I thought it was just about feeling happy all the time about how cute and huggable they are…I never realized it is this EXHAUSTING. I am getting a lot of support from Bobby, I wonder how others do this by themselves. Yep, I do not mean to undermine how difficult it is especially when you are doing hands on parenting. Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining. I am the happiest person in the world right now — tied to Bobby of course. I’m just saying it is not easy, and I never really understood what everybody have been saying until I’ve experienced it myself.

I thought the most difficult part was going to be the pregnancy, labor and delivery — especially since we had quite an eventful nine months to show for it. But aparrently that’s the easy part. My coworker friend told me that there is something in women’s memories that erases the pain they feel on delivery after some time…I guess that explains how people get to have kids again. Personally, I preferred to not know anything until I had to. A close friend of mine even sent me a Lamaze DVD that I intended not to watch, sorry Da — takot ako eh. I thought I’ll just cross the bridge when I get there. It kinda worked for me…I just didn’t want to make myself more nervous than I already was.  I had tons of things running through my mind — it was more challenging mentally and emotionally for me. But even so, I would not trade this experience for anything in the world. I don’t even want to think that I only have about a month left before going back to work. I will definitely miss spending time with Carl.

Here are some pictures of our very cute baby. Carl’s First Day Pics and More. I will upload more pics later.

Here are some details about the delivery.
We tried to have a normal delivery, I was scheduled to be induced Tuesday July 3 at 7am (originally July 2 but when we saw my OB that morning, she said the hospital was fully booked —gosh didn’t know that can happen). My estimated due date is July 5 but she didn’t want to wait till then since my prior week’s ultrasound already estimated baby’s weight to be 8.7 lbs.  However, Monday night around 10pm, I felt my contractions were already regularizing to about 5 minutes apart but no pain. So we decided to call the doctor and see if we need to go to the hospital already. They had us come to the hospital and we were admitted at around 11pm. All night, contractions went on but I wasn’t progressing enough but I couldn’t sleep — everything was uncomfortable. I felt itchy around my belly because of the monitors etc. I was just able to sleep around 3am when I asked for pain medications when the contractions started to be painful. They ended up doing the induction around 6:30am to speed up the process. By 10:30am the nurse said I was ready to start pushing. We started pushing at 11am, but within 30 minutes of pushing, baby’s heartrate dropped to 73. So we stopped and they revived his heartrate to normal. The doctor didn’t want us to try pushing again and said she would like to just do a c-section in the afternoon. At 3:15pm, we were taken into the operating room. It was weird, I was conscious the whole time, Bobby and the anesthesiologist were sitting over my head and we were talking the whole time. By 3:33pm Carl Benjamin Tatco was born. I cried when I heard baby cry finally. He scored 9.9 on the APGAR. After letting me have a glimpse of Carl, Bobby and one of the nurses took baby to the nursery and they took me to the recovery room. I was in the recovery room for 4 hours to wait for my blood pressure to stabilize. The most difficult part was the recovery days later when all the strong pain meds were starting to wear off. We went home Saturday July 7, 2007.