Thank you all for your messages of congratulations after I announced Maisie's early but safe arrival.
She's now 5 days old (35+2 corrected) and remains in NICU. She's stable and doing well at this point which is promising and such a relief, though we still have a little way to go. Three of my nieces were born early and also required special care so initially I felt relatively familiar with what was happening etc., but it's just so different when it's your own child. She's had a significant weight loss and is now 4lb 8.5oz (birth weight was 4lb 14oz) so we are working hard to regain that as well as establishing her feeding and breathing. Overall, she's doing well and although we've decided not to ask the staff when we can expect her home, we're hopeful that she'll be with us before we know it.
In terms of delivery, I'll do a quick breakdown of what happened. As you may or may not have seen, I posted that I felt I was having some BH contractions around midday. Initially I wasn't hugely concerned about these as I was 34 weeks and knew to expect them but as time went on I felt her movements had decreased significantly so telephoned the unit and went in. OH and I had been moving over the weekend so I was anxious that the stress of that was inducing my labour but tried to remain calm. After being hooked up to several monitors it became apparent that she was getting distressed, causing her heart rate to become dangerously low at times, and more worryingly she wasn't recovering from this, so the decision was made to go ahead with an emergency c-section.
Shortly afterwards little miss Maisie Grace entered the world and Adam and I became parents. Perhaps not quite the journey we were expecting but she's here, she's safe and she's ours.
Sorry for such a long post! Hope you didn't fall asleep during that. I'll attempt to catch up on all that I have missed over the past couple of days.
She's now 5 days old (35+2 corrected) and remains in NICU. She's stable and doing well at this point which is promising and such a relief, though we still have a little way to go. Three of my nieces were born early and also required special care so initially I felt relatively familiar with what was happening etc., but it's just so different when it's your own child. She's had a significant weight loss and is now 4lb 8.5oz (birth weight was 4lb 14oz) so we are working hard to regain that as well as establishing her feeding and breathing. Overall, she's doing well and although we've decided not to ask the staff when we can expect her home, we're hopeful that she'll be with us before we know it.
In terms of delivery, I'll do a quick breakdown of what happened. As you may or may not have seen, I posted that I felt I was having some BH contractions around midday. Initially I wasn't hugely concerned about these as I was 34 weeks and knew to expect them but as time went on I felt her movements had decreased significantly so telephoned the unit and went in. OH and I had been moving over the weekend so I was anxious that the stress of that was inducing my labour but tried to remain calm. After being hooked up to several monitors it became apparent that she was getting distressed, causing her heart rate to become dangerously low at times, and more worryingly she wasn't recovering from this, so the decision was made to go ahead with an emergency c-section.
Shortly afterwards little miss Maisie Grace entered the world and Adam and I became parents. Perhaps not quite the journey we were expecting but she's here, she's safe and she's ours.
Sorry for such a long post! Hope you didn't fall asleep during that. I'll attempt to catch up on all that I have missed over the past couple of days.
I will post a few maternity pics that we took last week later.
To be fair, they kind of looked like they could have just been a short and shirt combo, but when I look at pics I can't help but think he's wearing his jammies! So this time I've only packed clothes for the older kids that go together and I would be happy to have in pictures. 
that sounds so worrying.
