As you can see, Emmett was a vampire for Halloween. It just seemed to suit him because he has so many teeth (he got his first at 3 months and it just kept going from there, he has 12 now). He bites everything! And although I don't always like to admit this, he was named after my favorite vampire in the Twilight series. At least that's where we got the idea for the name.
Here he is showing off his biting skills. He got that scratch on his head the day before while practicing his walking skills. This was taken right before we went out trick-or-treating. We took him around to the houses of people we know in the neighborhood and stopped at any of the ones that had lights or decorations because Emmett really liked looking at that stuff. He didn't really understand what was going on of course, but he had fun being carried around the neighborhood at night.
As his first birthday rapidly approaches I have been reflecting a lot on Emmett's birth. Almost a year later I find that I still have some unresolved issues related to how he came into the world. I'm not sure if I will ever really "get over" the negative feelings that I have. And I hate that I have more bad memories of his birth than good. I can't get past the _______ I feel over having a c-section. And yes, that is a blank, because I cannot come up with the right word to explain the emotion. I started to say "regret" but technically its not regret because it wasn't really my decision, I didn't have a choice. Then I thought "guilt" which is only partially right. I feel guilty that I let myself go 2 weeks past due, thinking I was doing the right thing for my baby by letting him come naturally, which only served to let him get too big to be born vaginally. But there's no way of knowing if his head was small enough at my due date to have been born vaginally even then. Now that I've lost so much weight, it is becoming aparent to me that I have no hips. With the extra fat gone I find that my pelvis is quite small and I wonder if that was part of the problem. But the c-section is what led to the fluid getting in his lungs causing the pneumonia and his breathing problems. I hate the fact that I didn't get to hold my baby in my arms for 2 whole days after he was born. Luckily we were able to bond despite that fact, but I know that is part of why it took us so long to figure out breastfeeding. I hate the fact that the pain I had after the c-section made it so that I was not able to stay with my baby in the NICU and I had to rely on the nurses to take care of him. I wanted to be there for every feeding (even though he wasn't nursing yet), every diaper change, every nap. But I physically couldn't. I didn't start feeling like a mother until he was released from the NICU and we were in the room in pediatrics. Then I was finally the one taking care of him, with Chris of course and the help of the nurses if we needed it. It was still really depressing being stuck in the hospital, especially since it was the first week of December and Christmas just exploded on TV. Commercials, Christmas movies, the works. Nothing sadder than watching Rudolph and The Griswalds in a hospital room. And the frustrating thing was that by then he was totally fine, we were just stuck in the hospital because he had to receive 10 full days of antibiotics intravenously. He was still hooked up to the monitors, but they just monitored him from the nurses station and we couldn't see or hear any of the beeping and such and he never had a problem. I guess what I'm getting at with all this ranting is that as I look back and remember it all, I still feel sad about it. I'm working on getting past it, and you would think that almost an entire year later I would be past it. Ultimately this is why I am not ready to have another baby yet. I need to come to terms with these issues before I can even be close to thinking about going through all that again. I know that next time it may not go like that, it may go just fine. But it could even go worse. I have even considered stopping with Emmett and not having another baby. However, even with all the horror we went through bringing him into this world, I still know that I want to do it again, come hell or high water. I just think I need a little more time.
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