24 years ago, after keeping my mum in labour for 3 (or was it 4?) days, I was born. At 11.49am to be precise. I’ve had a lot of awesome presents through out the years, this year it came early. That is VERY close to the top of best ever gifts, along with the gorgeous watch J gave me on my first birthday after meeting him.

HOWEVER, I think this year’s present most definitely trumps everything else. I woke up at 6.30am this morning from Zack making it known that he was WIDE awake, and realized…. MAX SLEPT THROUGH THE NIGHT!!!!! Of course once I realized that I had to go in to check on him - out for the count and I was wide awake… typical.

So, this week’s Thursday Thirteen is a wish-list of things I know that I’ll never really get but would be great if ya have some spare miracles or millions hanging around to send my way

1. The winning lottery ticket, and I don’t mean a tenner, I mean the whole lot - a double rollover type winning ticket that could mean we would never have to work again. THAT kind of ticket.
2. A 5 bedroom house. Enough for a bedroom each AND a study for J and I plus a playroom for the boys. Oh, and a HUGE kitchen with all mod cons would, of course, be a must!
3. A full time Nanny.
4. A full time Cleaner.
5. Max to sleep through on a regular basis. Oh, and I mean regular like every night, not once a week
6. Extra hours in the night for sleeping would be good too…
7. A whole new wardrobe.
8. The wardrobe would have to come after a full-body nip & tuck though.
9. ohh, I forgot the live-in chef!
10. A grape-peeler, obviously.  In the form of Heath Ledger.  Hey, I said miracles didn’t I? That would be an awesome miracle!
11. My very own library with every book I could possibly ever want!
12. A personal Hairdresser.
13. A round the world holiday to meet all of the wonderful bloggy friends I’ve met!

It’s the eve of my birthday, you’d think I’d be more excited than I am, but you know what? All I want to do is S.L.E.E.P. I’m sooo tired and I have no idea why. Well, ok it might be something to do with only having had about 4-5 hours of (broken! Thanks Maximus…) sleep last night, you never know.

So off I go to bed at 21.20, cause I just really need to be more awake tomorrow than I have been today.

Normal posts will resume shortly I promise!

…it’s just not on this blog! If you *really* want to see how geeky I am you can find it here. Have fun laughing at me, but I haven’t missed a day yet and we’re almost a 3rd of the way through Blog365 so there!

Went over to a friend’s house this afternoon with Max… Oh my word I’ve never seen him act so freaked out! He was fast asleep when we got there and when he woke I think he was just *really* freaked out that we were somewhere so different from normal! Once he realised it was his Aunty Sarah though he cheered right up bless him.

Oooh and he decided to have a chomp at my apple today! I’ve been reading some stuff about Baby Led Weaning and I think it might be the way to go, since he hasn’t seemed that interested in food when we’ve been spooning gloop into his mouth. He loved nommin away on it and I was even able to get some pics of it which will be up as soon as I can be bothered getting the SD card out of my camera.

Right now though I’m off to bed! Night night bloggy friends

Lotus is asking for birth stories for her Birth Story Carnival, and as I love talking about having my boys I thought I’d jump right on this bandwagon

This is a (highly edited!) copy of the original birth story I wrote down for Zack way back before I even knew blogging existed.

Zack’s Birth Story

I woke up on Sunday morning (17/7/05), 5 days overdue, at around 5am to go to the loo and had a definite show, and what i thought at the time was just the usual sore pelvis and hips etc, so toddled back to bed and attempted to get comfy. I got an almightly pain around my back and tummy as I lay down- ouch!

I tried not to think anything of it as I didnt want to get my hopes up, but within about 7/8 min it happened again, and again… well, you get the picture. By about 7 am they were coming every 4/5 min and lasting over a minute - bl**dy painful too! so i called the hospital and they said to take some paracetamol and have a bath…an hr later contractions coming every 1.5 min and lasting over a min… with the usual advice being when they get to less than 5 minutes between and over a minute long to get to the hospital, I figured with the pain I was in I must be progressing pretty fast and to see about getting my butt up to the hospital asap, at least to be checked over.

I got to the hospital at about 9am ish, and it took the mw about an hr for the mw to actually check me over - they were understaffed and had LOTS of babies coming into the world…what were we all doing 9 months ago??? Anyway, she said i was about 2/3 cm dilated and did i want to go home or stay and have entonox… Oh b*gger! Well guess what - gas and air RULES! :O)

I was able to have a bath in their oh-so-huge bathtub and managed on the g&a till about 12.30 ish, by which time I decided something stronger was most definitely in order. Diamorphine here we go…no one told me it’d make my nose itch, but it definitely helped take edge off the contractions.

I got examined at around 3/4ish to find i was about 7cm dilated… time to go down to the labour suite (finally!). The mw here was an absolute darling, although I hate to say it but I can’t remember her name! Did I mention I was told to be quieter while still up on the maternity wards because I was “disturbing the other ladies”… seriously I wanted to rip that MW a new one when she said that… I’m sure she never would have said it if I hadn’t been a ‘first timer’.

So anyway… by this point I was ever so slightly spaced out with all the G&A and diamorphine! My waters *finally* broke at the back of 5 and almost instantly wanted to push. I’ll never forget the feeling of pushing him out. I put my hand down to feel his head, it was squishy and wet, not exactly what I was expecting, but then I found out later that actually I’d been touching meconium, yes that’s right, my lil Zack likes to wallow in his own sh!t! One last huge push and out popped Zack at 17.18 :O) as he had passed some meconium he had to be taken away for a wee bit to check his airways etc. Luckily he hadn’t inhaled any on being born, so about 5 minutes later I finally had my lil boy in my arms - I have never been so happy in my life!! His little eyes stared up at me and I was hooked.

Max’s Birth Story

Ok this one’s a copy and paste from the original post which you can find here.

****************************************************************************************************************************

We got to the hospital at 9pm, I was still feeling really uncomfortable but hadn’t yet twigged that I was actually in labour - no contractions that I was aware of or anything, I just thought I was more uncomfortable for yet another night!

I was shown to a room and my midwife came in… a guy who introduced himself as Steve. Well that was something I hadn’t even thought of - that my mw could be male! I knew they were about but hadn’t for a second thought that I might get one, lol! He was nice enough though and definitely knew what he was talking about so I wasn’t too bothered about him being my mw - anything to get the baby out remember?

I was strapped up to a monitor for 40 minutes ish so they could determine what the baby’s regular heartbeat was and to see if i was having anything resembling contractions. Cue me starting to feel regular pains and starting to have to breathe through them - bloody typical!

Steven told us that once they’d monitored me for 30-40 minutes he’d do in internal and see about breaking my waters. If that hadn’t worked in increasing contrations then they would see about getting a syntocinin drip started to induce contractions.

At about 10.30 the print outs from the past 40 min were looked at and yes, I had been having moderate contractions by this point for the whole time, with them getting stronger and stronger. We were all pretty sure by this time that once my waters were broken I’d go straight into full blown labour. 10.45pm and my waters were broken - oh god those contraction all of a sudden got a hell of a lot worse! I managed to last til about 11.30pm without any help but then I decided it was time to try the Gas and Air - ahhh I love that stuff it was the closest to feeling very happy-drunk that I had in a loooong time!

By 12.30am the contractions were becoming unbearable even with the gas and air. I was practically constantly using it as the contractions were that close together. I was out of it and in pain. I asked for an epidural - I figured there was no way I could cope with this pain if it was going to go on for another 3-4 hours!

Steven asked if he could do an internal to see how far along I was and then decide what to do. I was 7cm!! I’d progressed VERY quickly and so we decided to try out the diamorphine before going to an epidural - although by that point we kinda figured that it was unlikely to last long enough for me to get one as things seemed to be moving along really nicely.

12.45am and I am doped up to the eyeballs in Happy Land. Oh it was nice

I was practically snoozing in between the contractions and was out of it on G&A the rest of the time. By 1.30am I had been having the urge to push for about 5 min, but had managed to breathe through it for the most part, but it was getting more and more difficult to do that. I followed my body’s instinct and started pushing, or should I say my body took over and started pushing for me! I could feel him coming out pretty nicely, 2 pushes and the head was out, then a few breaths and with the next contraction and one more push, his body slithered out at 1.40am on Oct 11th.

Apparently the cord had been wrapped around his neck twice, but it was easily unravelled. We were asked if anyone wanted to cut the cord, J’s waay too squeamish so I did it - not something I had been intending to do but I was happy to do it at the time! He pooed all over me straight after this, but I didn’t notice! I was too busy realising that he was finally here to care! The first things I noticed about him were a birthmark on the back of his hand and a tooth - yes he was born with a tooth! He had a hell of a voice to him already and was screaming his wee heart out!

I had been worried about how the SPD would affect the birth, but it didn’t seem too bad, although it was even more painful to move about for the first week or so after the birth than before hand. Now it’s completely back to normal and I can sleep on my stomach again which is a great relief!

I didn’t get my home birth, but I did get the birth I wanted, it really couldn’t have gone any better than it did! The staff at the hospital were excellent and more than happy to leave me to it than they were first time around with Zack, I guess that’s the plus to being a 2nd time mum - people tend to be less condescending when they know you’ve been through it all before.

So here’s to my newest lil boy - Maximus Iain William G (last name not used for some sort of privacy) ,

born weighing 8lb 8oz, 51.5cm long and a head circ of 35cm (ouch!!).

****************************************************************************************************************************

I love giving birth. I’d do it again in a second, it’s the horrendous pregnancies that I couldn’t do again, but hey, I can’t complain. I’ve had two straightforward (albeit late) births, no complications and two wonderful and healthy boys to show for it. It doesn’t really get any better does it?

This week we got out Max’s first proper toy that he’d received for Christmas from my parents. He’s even been bashing away at the top of it - not bad for a 5 monther eh!

He’s also figured out how to lean over while sitting on the sofa

AND he’s been catching his toes!

Then on Wednesday we got our new sofa.
J’s first words were “How am I supposed to take up the whole sofa now?!”

The three stooges really like the sofa.

and if you look really closely, you can see the tooth Max was born with in this pic.

So all in all it’s been a pretty busy week!

If you like these then head on over to Sarcastic Mom to see more weekly winners!

And if you have a little time, please drop on over to Sarah at Imaginary Binky and give her some love, she’s had a tough time at the moment with her dad and she needs all the love and hugs we can give her right now.