ice. . .ice. . BABY!

Everyone says that you forget about the pain and discomfort associated with labor and delivery or that you'll back on it and laugh someday, and while almost two weeks out I don't know if that day has officially come quite yet, I thought it best not to wait until 2017 before documenting our little girl's arrival. So here we go!

We checked in to what would be our home away from home for the next two weeks on Sunday, February 24th for our scheduled induction. No less than 10 minutes in they started the party with some drugs that were supposed to get things kick started over night.  Over night turned in to 10 minutes and we were rocking and rolling with some contractions right away that lasted until around noon the next day at which point they decided to step it up notch and administer Pitocin.  For some reason they couldn't get the drugs for a couple hours so we spent an uneventful, but no less comfortable, afternoon just playing the waiting game and cruising the halls in my ever so stylish hospital gown and polka dot robe. Once the Pitocin came the contractions stepped up a notch, and things really started to go down when my water broke around 9:30 Monday night.  Although I knew this was coming I was still freaked out and grossed out by this new turn of events and Mark tried to comfort me be reminding me that this was 'natural', to which I raised my arms with all of the monitors, IVs and tubes - the vessels of this artificial torture, and responded 'what about this is natural?!' After 28 hours of pain-inflicting drugs I made the call for the epidural guy aka 'the candy man' to make a stop by our room just after midnight Tuesday morning  Had I known the relief this would bring me I would have opted to have the valet guy hook me up with one on the way in had it been an option.  Around 6AM Tuesday morning just as Mark was heading out to get coffee the doc stopped by to check me and said it was 'go time' and that the coffee would have to wait.  They immediately wheeled me down the hall to the operating room where we had to deliver due to the Goose's special circumstances. The room felt like a cross between a scene from Grey's Anatomy but in a bad dream sort of way where I'm on display on a table with  an audience of no less than 8 doctors and nurses inside, and another slew of people outside the door (the room was small) waiting to whisk the Goose away after arrival, but times that by two as there was a shift change half way through so you can imagine we became intimately acquainted with a third of the L&D staff rather quickly.  The whole thing felt pretty surreal and very laid back, making small talk and cracking jokes with the nurses and enjoying my new found appreciation for ice chips in between contractions.

'North of the border' ice chip dispenser

After 34 hours of labor and almost two hours of putting my prenatal yoga and pilates to the test, she made her arrival at 8:30 AM, Tuesday February 26 weighing in at 7lbs 11oz. Moments after she was delivered the doctor exclaimed 'she's looking at me!' and our blue-eyed baby girl with daddy's eyelashes flashed us a look before they whisked her away.

In recovery we were happy to share the news with the anxious grandparents who were eagerly awaiting her arrival down the hall. As they came in to the recovery room I directed their attention to the white board on the wall that read 'Welcome Makenna Rose!' They'd come to tell us later that they had already discussed having a fake immediate response to the name regardless of what is was just in case they didn't like it, that it would buy them time to come up with something nice to say about it. Luckily we didn't get the pleasure of enjoying this charade as they assured us the really did like it - or so they say. As many people have asked, I don't really have a good story about where the name came from, except that its the only name on my long list that Mark didn't veto.  But we made up for it with her middle name which is after my Mom Rosanne, Mark's Mom Rose, and my grandma Concetta Rose - the trifecta!

After a few hours of being assessed in the NICU and some recovery on my end, Mark wheeled me over to visit our beautiful baby girl. Just steps before we made it to her crib side, we were intercepted by one of the doctors with the recap of her status.  The verdict - the exact contents of the omphalocele were still unclear and that they wouldn't really know what they were dealing with until she was actually in surgery, which is kind of what we had anticipated all along. What we had not anticipated was that she had been diagnosed with an incredibly rare (1 in 100,000) and completely unrelated vascular condition called Klippel-Trenaunay Syndrome.  We'd come to find out later that there are no documented cases of any person having both these rare conditions and that she will be the subject of a case study in the months to come.  To say I was shell shocked by this news would not even come close. The fact that the omphalocele could be fixed immediately and that she would have no lasting effects (or recollection) of any of it is what kept my sane-ish throughout the second half of the pregnancy, but the news that this little person who had already been dealt more than her fair share of struggles so early on had even more to deal with, with a much less clear course of treatment or resolution (the prognosis is it will get better or it will get worse) was hard to comprehend.

Makenna Rose Mohnacky - she's new here

But all of this would have to wait as moments later we rolled up next to what was the most beautiful little girl we had ever seen (ok, we're biased) and we fell completely in love with her. We even got to hold her later that day which was something we didn't expect to be able to do and it was just the most beautiful experience getting to hold her in my arms, and to see the way that Mark looked at her with so much love. We hadn't known her for long but we could already tell she was pretty awesome. We've decided she doesn't look exactly like either one of us, but that she is a combination of both of our features - Mark's eye lashes and dimples, my eyes and nose (sorry about the sloop!)  And because I have a penchant for nonsensical nicknames, even though we still refer to her as 'Goose' 95% of the time, we added on a new one calling her 'Hedgehog' after her Sonic-style shaped head and hair cut.