Shana's pregnancy (child #1)

This is the story of my pregnancy with my first child, my one and only daughter. She was born in May of 2001.

About me and my partner:
My husband and I had been trying to get pregnant for over 4 years with only 1 (miscarried) pregnancy to show for it. After receiving a diagnosis of unexplained infertility and undergoing a year of fertility treatment, we decided to try IVF in one final,last-ditch effort to conceive. Amazingly, it worked.

I'd been saying for years that if I could just have a baby before I turned 30, I'd be happy. My due date was one week before my 30th birthday.

Most unusual cravings:
Cereal! Cereal in the morning, cereal in the evening, cereal late at night. All I really wanted to eat was cereal with cold, cold milk.

Morning sickness: When it started, how I tried to cure it.
It started around 5 and a half weeks and stopped around 9 weeks. It was never REALLY bad. I tried eating ginger snaps, but that didn't seem to help much.

The baby's sex -- to know or not to know?
Oh yes, we wanted to know, desperately -- and we found out with an ultrasound at 17 weeks.

Best piece of advice I can give about giving birth:
If you are determined to give birth with minimal interventions and pain medication, prepare yourself beforehand. With my first child I just figured I'd "tough it out". Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! After a few hours of back labor I was begging for an epidural. Loveliest shot in my back I ever received.

With my second and third children I again wanted to avoid pain medication, but this time prepared by attending a Hypnobirthing class. I am proud to say that I gave birth without an epidural both times, and I was much better able to manage the intensity of childbirth.

Hospital or home birth?
I gave birth in a hospital, actually at the hospital where I had been born.

Breastfeeding or bottle feeding?
I breastfed exclusively for the first two months. The day the baby turned two months old I found myself back at the hospital with a very sudden and rare neurological condition. I had to have emergency surgery and was hospitalized for a week. I completely lost my milk during the ordeal (apparently when you're close to dying your body stops making milk because it just isn't a priority anymore). After I returned home I was able, with a lot of work, to relactate. I was never able to breastfeed exclusively after that because I simply wasn't producing enough, but I did the best I could.

When I went into labor, I was. . .
Running around town in 108 degree heat doing errands. It was my due date, and I had just finished my 40-week appointment with my OB. We had discussed inducing labor in the next week or two -- I had no idea labor would start within an hour.

My labor . . .
Was far more intense than I had imagined it would be. I was also unprepared for the rush of endorphins after. It was amazing!

About baby:
She was perfect in every way and so, so worth the wait.

Looking back on my pregnancy, these moments were the:

Funniest: Crying in the middle of the grocery store because they were out of my favorite cereal as my husband tried in vain to console me.
Happiest: Finding out I was pregnant. Also finding out our baby was a girl. It made the entire pregnancy so real to me.
Most unforgettable: That first ultrasound at 6 weeks, when we saw our baby for the first time (well, since she was an embryo) and saw her little heart flickering away.