We went to the Zoo!

Yup... so I went to the Dallas Zoo yesterday with my family and even some extended family and also met up with fellow blogger, Ziona over at I want to look like a pinup! Had a great day with the kids and it was Bethany's first major outing. I was exhausted from being up all night with her the night before but still managed to have a good time anyways. Got a lot of walking in, that's for sure!

I've walked every day for the past week except today. Planned on doing some walking with my fiance today but he ended up taking a long midday nap and I didnt wanna bother him since we were also up pretty late with Bethany last night, too. I figured one rest day wasn't so bad. We'll pick back up tomorrow.

I also jump started my stroller group back up again this past week. We had one successful meetup on Friday so far. :) Already have another meetup planned for this Friday and possibly another on Saturday, too.

And in other news, a friend of mine introduced me to a new app called Nexercise where you can have fun losing weight by kind of making it in to a game where you earn points and rewards. I've been using it this past week and like it so far. I haven't checked too deeply in to how to redeem points or rewards just yet, but if anyone else has it be sure to let me know so we can friend request each other.

Back to basics

Well my baby girl is 3 weeks old today. That means I have 3 more weeks until my doctor clears me for getting back to my regular workout routines. In the mean time I have started walking again. So far I'm down about 20 lbs from when I gave birth. That's not to mention the extra weight I gained after being readmitted to the hospital with an infection and pumped full of fluids for 3 days. So in actuality it's been more than that.

I cannot wait until I can start running again though. I am so pumped. The weather changed here over this past weekend and its finally cooled off again! Autumn is absolutely my favorite time of year and I am so excited to see all the leaves starting to fall and even change colors already. It's rained a bit lately too and that has helped things chill out a bit, not to mention all the wind that has been picking up. I am so in love with this season!

Today I went for a walk with just me and my daughter and she was awake for about the first 20 minutes. She kept looking around at all the sights and sounds and just calmly enjoying being outside with her momma. :) Then as we were about half a mile from the house I noticed something strange out of the corner of my eye. To my surprise I did a double take and then saw this creature laying completely still while looking at us. It was so motionless that I even questioned myself for a minute whether or not it was a toy.

Sure enough, after snapping this picture it decided it better turn around and slither back into the bushes directly behind it. I tried to video it but it was too fast to really see much of anything. lol.

Good news and bad news...

Well I'll start with the good... My baby girl is finally here! yay! I'm just gonna copy and past my labor story in here so I don't have to rewrite it all. lol.

This is my second birth and my first child was so easy so I knew my little girl was going to make things hard on me. lol. After several hospital trips and dr appts where I thought for sure my baby girl was getting ready to come I set up an induction for Tuesday August 28th at 5am.

I get there right on time and after I signed all of the paper work. They check me for dilation and I'm still at a 3, same as the last couple weeks. The baby is high and moving a lot as per usual. After waiting around for whatever I finally get pitocin started at 6:30am. My contractions start coming more regularly but nothing too terrible just yet. At 8:44am my doctor finally shows up to break my water after I get checked again and they see I am 5cm now. Shortly after this I start feeling my contractions pick up and get much stronger and closer together. I wait around hoping I can hold out for awhile to assure that I am dilating far enough so that I don't get the epi too early. With my son I got the epi at 7 or 8cm but it was starting to wear off just as he was crowning and so I felt every bit of pushing him out except for my legs were still numb. Finally I can no longer sit still or breathe right through the pain so I call the nurse to ask for some IV pain meds. She said the anesthesiologist was actually already on the floor with another patient so if I was ready for the epi he would come in shortly. It felt like forever but was probably just a few minutes. 10:40am he is there to give me an epi. As I'm sitting up trying to get in the right position I keep getting contractions only a couple minutes apart and I think wow he is taking forever to do this. lol. He finally gets it in but I'm still not feeling any relief. My legs are a little tingly but thats it. He goes off to give another girl her epi and they told me if it didnt start working soon to let them know. When they come back to check me I am at 8cm and I tell them I'm still feeling every contraction and they are only getting worse, not better. I want to cry they hurt so bad and my stomach is in agony. They call the anesthesiologist back to see what's wrong and come to find out the first epi is just leaking down my back not doing much of anything for me. They take it out and give me a 2nd epidural and this time I finally get some relief but started to feel pressure while i was sitting up getting that 2nd epi. It's about 11:06 at the point they finished there and check me again to see that I'm fully dilated and the baby's head is considerably lower. Now we waited a few minutes for the dr to show back up and as soon as she gets there I get to start pushing. I was to push about 4 times with each contraction and it only took 3 or 4 contractions get get her all the way out.

At 11:23am my baby girl, Bethany, was born! 7lbs 4oz and 20 inches long. 13 and 1/2 inch head with a 12 and 1/2 inch chest.

here are some hospital pics a photographer friend did for me









and here are some 3 day old newborn pics another photographer friend did for me.
















Now for the bad news... as I said before... I knew this little girl wasn't gonna make things easy on me! I woke up a few days ago with some post-partum complications. I literally felt like I was dying and didn't know what to do. So I have spent 6 out of the last 9 days in a hospital. Here's a copy and paste of the story on that.

I woke up in agonizing abdominal pain early Monday morning at 3am and was shaking so much from being cold that it felt almost like a seizure. I had my fiance take me to the local emergency room and there they told me I had a fever of 102.2. They took my blood, gave me an exam, and did a cat scan. The blood and cat scan showed nothing abnormal but from the exam they determined that I must have some sort of infection in my uterus. They ended up making me take an ambulance to the hospital in a bigger city where I gave birth and decided to do cultures on my blood to see if they could figure out what type of bacteria was causing the infection. I was immediately put on antibiotics to try and kill the infection. At one point my fever ended up spiking again and was at 103. They then decided to give me another type of antibiotic and kept switching out giving me both of them since they still didnt have results from my cultures yet to determine which one I really needed. After that I didn't have any more fevers. The pain kept coming and going throughout taking pain meds to try and control it. I was told yesterday that I could finally go home that evening as long as nothing else went wrong and they would just prescribe me both antibiotics until they got back the culture results. They took me off the IV's that morning and said they would start giving me pills to get me ready to go home. A short while later a nurse came back in and said she was just gonna give me one last bag of antibiotics but she didnt double check where my needle was at and apparently it had removed itself from my vein whenever she pulled out the other IV's earlier. So instead of pumping antibiotics into my veins it just started filling up my hand like it was a waterballoon. That was incredibly painful and I had to call her back in there to come take it out right away. After some warm rags and elevation the swelling went down a lot but it still looked very puffy and still does today even. Made it home last night but the pharmacy only had one of my antibiotics so I have to go get the other one at some point today from a different pharmacy. Still feeling kinda awful but much better than I was Monday I suppose. I have no idea what really happened to me though and hoping when the cultures come back I'll have some real answers. My 2wk postpartum checkup is on Tuesday so maybe by then I'll know something.

So yeah... that is the craziness that has been my life lately. Ugh... hopefully the worst is finally really over now. Crossing my fingers anyways...