In honor of Emma's 13th birthday today, here is her birth story.
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When I found out that our third child was due on Halloween, I told everybody that I hoped that she'd be born any day but that day. But she had other ideas...
We had moved cross country when Spencer was only 10-days old, then moved cross country again when I was 32-weeks pregnant with Cami. After that I decided I was done with moving anytime even remotely close to having a baby and that is why we have our biggest space between Emma and Cami. They are three years and four-and-a-half months apart.
With the bigger space between them (and the rosy eighteen months without having to buy any diapers), I was actually quite excited to be pregnant again. As with my pregnancy with Cami, I had mild morning sickness during the first few months, but it wasn't much to speak of other than having a strong aversion to cantaloupes. Grocery shopping was absolutely torturous, because I could instantly smell the cantaloupes above everything else as soon as I walked into the store, which would set off my nausea and make the whole rest of the shopping trip miserable. Luckily the nausea only lasted the first trimester, but it was another couple of years before I could stomach eating cantaloupe again.
The rest of the pregnancy was relatively easy. I exercised the whole way through--doing aerobics and often walking at least 4 miles a day. In fact, a lot of the memories associated with the last month or two I spent pregnant with her were of long walks on gorgeous autumn days.
When I went into labor naturally on the night of October 30, I still held out hope that she would be born before midnight. Besides avoiding Halloween, the rest of our family's birthdays all fell on multiples of 5 (Glen and I on the 25th, Spence on the 30th, and Cami on the 15th) and I thought it would be cool to keep up the "tradition".
Alas, Emma had her own plan.
The clock ticked past midnight and I was still in labor, although in my labor frenzied mind I started worrying that they'd forgotten to turn the clock backs for time change that had occurred two days before. I knew I was getting somewhat close to the end and I must have asked the nurse a gazillion times whether the clocks had been changed or not. She assured me that they had and at some point after midnight I finally accepted that Emma was going to be born on Halloween whether I liked it or not. (
fyi--she has always absolutely loved having her birthday being on Halloween)
In the meantime Glen's mom was arriving from Colorado that night to help. It was before we had cell phones, so we ended up having to page her at the airport to let her know that we wouldn't be there to pick her up. She ended taking a taxi to our house instead.
Finally at 1:40am our little pumpkin was born....very promptly on her due date. At 7-lbs. 13-oz., she was the smallest of all my babies. I had exercised so much during my pregnancy that I got a lot of comments from the nurses about how young and fit I looked for having three kids. Other than being very tired from having given birth in the middle of the night and my roommate having the most annoying husband in the world, the hospital stay was pretty uneventful.
I remember Glen bringing Spence and Cami to the hospital on Halloween night. They were in their costumes and so excited about meeting their new sister (and going trick-or-treating right afterward).
We were between cameras at the time, so every picture we have of her as a baby was taken by someone else. She was definitely our least photographed child, despite her absolutely loving being in the limelight.
From day one, she was my wiggliest, loudest, and most active baby. She was cheerful as can be, but never stopped moving and got into more mischief than any of my other kids combined. There was one week when I called poison control about her three times during the week...once for eating three entire
packs of gum in one sitting. She's thirteen now and is a hard-working, determined , and still always has to have something to do--whether it be reading a book, cooking us breakfast, exercising, playing the piano, or singing.
Speaking of singing, I will finish up Emma's birthday post with a little video of Emma when she was 2-1/2 years-old, singing, "Families Can Be Together Forever." In addition to seeing what our ugly old bathrooms used to look like, you'll also see that non-stop motion I mentioned earlier and the fact that she is the only one of our kids to have strongly inherited the musical genes from Glen's side of the family. She's loved to sing from the time she was little and still brings joy and beauty to our home to this day with her lovely music (clarinet, piano, and singing)!
that shares other fun facts about Emma and mentions how she won a big prize basket from a local girl scout troop because she was the first baby girl born on Juliet Gordon Low's birthday (the founder of girl scouts).
