So, if you haven’t heard, I’ve given birth. I’m no longer “tired pregnant lady.” Now, I’m just “tired lady.” Heh. All the details of the birth and stuff are located at Bean’s site, if you’re interested. In the meantime, let me pass on a bit of weird story telling I’ve collected from my time at the hospital during the last 4 days. In the maternity post-partum room I was staying in, I had to share the room with two other beds. One bed kept rotating in and out, with new mothers leaving before I did (due to them having natural births versus c-sections, like I did), while the other bed was occupied by the same new mother for as long as I was there. This new mother was incredibly… how do I say… inappropriate.

Dude. She must have been all but in her late teens, and her boyfriend who also happened to be the baby daddy to her new son, was also there with her. The baby was taken away primarily because he had a little heart murmur, but I think the real reason is (after eavesdropping on several of their conversations and hearing what the nurses had talked to them about across the hall from my bed, etc.) that the hospital was concerned about child neglect and abuse. The girl presented as borderline retarded, and the boy didn’t seem much more intelligent than that. The first day and a half, the baby didn’t get fed because the girl “tried” breast feeding a “couple of times” (according to her), and got discouraged because the milk wasn’t coming in (duh, it’s only the first day!). So then she just didn’t feed the poor kid, from what I gathered. She didn’t even ask for the nurse to come in and give the baby some formula (like any sane mother would do if she was concerned her breast milk wasn’t coming in to give sustenance to her baby). When the hospital found this out, I think they had to investigate and see if the couple had the capacity and ability to parent appropriately. The pediatrician on duty was called and she asked them a whole bunch of questions about her possible drug and alcohol consumption and/or abuse during pregnancy, and whether or not they were feeding the baby. The girl slurred her speech and was really low affect, so it was concerning. The baby was taken away and was put in an incubator for a couple of nights, hence prolonging their stay at the hospital, hence why I had them for as long as I did. Her labor was natural too, so she should’ve just had to stay one night.

Then one day, their whole extended family came to visit. Literally, like, it felt like an episode of “Trailer Trash Boys” exploded in my hospital room. There were about 10 visitors there, and they were all bragging about how they were all wasted last night. Even the grandmother inappropriately was going on and on in this weird southern hick accent about how she was completely wasted on Crown Royal the night before. The nurse later on came in to ask how everything was going, really casually, and the girl responded, “Oh, I’m a little drunk.” And the nurse had to do a double take and ask again, “Wait, wha..?” The girl said she was depressed because she was kept against her will at the hospital cuz they wouldn’t release her with her baby. The girl was also bragging to her friends earlier the previous day about smoking during contractions to relieve the pain. Dude. Geez. As much as the contractions were killing me, never once did it occur to me to smoke throughout it. What the hell.

Anyway, that was a little weird. It made my stay that much more annoying, knowing another newborn born the same day as our Lily Bean was being treated this way. It just makes me sad.

But on to happier notes, we are so in love with this beautiful baby girl of ours. We can’t stop staring at her. The faces and expressions she makes are just so classic. We’ve got a camera literally permanently shoved in her face, poor thing. Heh. We’re trying to get a normal schedule going, or as normal as we can make it now. I’m thinking of getting some more laptop memory for both of our laptops, but that may not come for a while. Right now, everything revolves around Lily. :D