The Grays

We just had to take a couple photos on our way out of the hospital.

Leaving the Hospital

Lilly's first car ride

Photos from the first two days with Lillian.

Introducing Lillian’s first video blog post.

She is about one day old in this video.

Dear Friends & Family,

Kristy and I are thrilled to announce the birth of our daughter!

Lillian Grace Gray
July 15th, 8:44am
6 lbs. 6 oz., 19 inches

Kristy and Lilly are currently resting, everyone is healthy, and we could not be any happier!

Above are some photos from delivery day and we will continue updating this blog with news and photos.

We can’t wait for you to meet our little girl,

Bill, Kristy & Lilly

Yesterday during our weekly appointment we learned that our little girl is in a breech position. This news came as a surprise as we have been under the impression for the last several weeks that she was in a head down position (as assessed by two different midwifes and two different doctors). We think she was probably breech all along as the ‘bumps’ in Kristy’s abdomen have stayed in the same place. What we thought was our little girl’s boney butt all along is actually her head.

Kristy and both of her brothers were all in the breech position and our midwife thinks Kristy must be shaped like her mother.  Mark was delivered vaginally (breech) and Todd & Kristy were scheduled c-sections.  Our midwife was very surprised to hear this – only 4% of pregnancies are breech and it is extremely rare to have a breech baby on more than one occasion.  Apparently Kristy is built more like her mom than we previously thought!

We have a couple options moving forward. Since breech delivers are risky (and illegal in 49 states) and there is little chance of the baby rotating on her own this late in the pregnancy, we need to take some action. One option is to try to rotate our baby into a head down position with an External Cephalic Version (ECV) procedure. This procedure if fairly successful around 36 or 37 weeks and is a little more difficult at full term. The doctors think that our chance of successfully rotating the baby at this point in the pregnancy is around 20%. Our other option is to schedule a cesarean. Since Kristy is now 39 weeks and 4 days, we could do a cesarean at any time, and the doctors would prefer sooner rather than later as it becomes more difficult once labor starts.

We have chosen something of a middle ground. Tomorrow morning at 6:00 am we are going to attempt the ECV. We have also scheduled a cesarean for 8:00am so that if we are unable to rotate the baby we will go right into the cesarean. Our intention is to give the ECV an honest try and not make any heroic efforts. If it doesn’t seem like the baby is going to turn without a whole lot of manipulation, then we will move forward with the cesarean.

Our perferred plan was for a natural delivery and Kristy and I had been looking forward to the labor process. So, yesterday’s news was a little disappointing. The important thing is that everyone is very healthy and there is a good chance we will meet our daughter tomorrow!

A few months back Kristy and I watched The Business of Being Born (preview), which is a documentary on the US birthing practice. The overall argument of the movie is that the US medical industry had drifted away from a philosophy that childbirth is a natural process towards an attitude that childbirth is dangerous and requires significant medical intervention to make it safe. The documentary then proceeded to show a couple assembly line type birthing wings where almost all the women received Pitocin to control the birth process (I have vivid memories of the nurses calling out ‘up the pit’). There were also several interviews with practicing obstetricians who claimed they had never seen a natural child birth. One point of discussion was the rapidly changing graph of cesarean rates. It does make you wonder what has changed over the last few years that has caused the cesarean rate to spike (currently around 30%). While the need for a cesarean is often clear in a particular instance, the overall trend is hard to understand.

The documentary then followed several women through natural childbirths that were assisted by midwives. In contrast to the almost 1 in 3 cesarean rate of doctors, one midwife claimed that she delivered over 300 children naturally before requiring a doctor’s assistance to perform a cesarean. Granted, some of this discrepancy could be explained by the difference in populations between the midwife patients and the obstetrician patients. I think the more important distinction to make here is the underlying difference in birthing philosophy between midwives and doctors that leads to such startling different numbers.

We loved our doctor in Charlottesville and would be delivering with him had we not moved back to Michigan. Basically, we liked his philosophy for birthing. Once we decided to move back to Michigan we started looking for a midwife to help deliver our little girl. We would still be fine with having an obstetrician deliver our child, providing they shared our philosophy. Our thinking was that we might have to interview several obstetricians to find one we liked whereas finding a midwife would be much quicker. In fact, Kristy met with three midwives when visiting Michigan and liked them all. In contrast, we meet with a couple obstetricians and were fairly turned off by their attitudes.

Yesterday was Bill’s 29th Birthday!  We celebrated Thursday evening at his parents house.  Judy made our favorite peanut chicken and Bill asked to have mango pudding for dessert, which we made together Wednesday evening.

Yesterday we went to the Chop Shop in Birminham to prepare 12 meals for the freezer.  We now have plenty of goodies (including the homemade cookies, zucchini and banana bread, and spaghetti sauce I made earlier this week) to get us through the first few weeks without leaving the house too much.  We also went out for Korean BBQ at Shilla, which was the location of our first date.

Bill was kind of hoping that he would share his birthday with our little girl.  Although that didn’t happen we can’t wait to celebrate her birthday soon!