MandiBox Beauty

Tomorrow marks 1 month since my HunnyBee made his arrival and those 10 long days in the NICU almost seem like a lifetime ago. However, I promised to share, especially because I want to encourage DiversAble Models out there to be fighters and to always do what you know is best. 2 hours after my boy was born and we had just been transferred to our recovery room, the nurse came in to check my vitals. I was in pretty stable condition. At 35 weeks gestation, the hospital checks things on babies they normally don't check for, thank God. In the delivery room, HunnyBee's sugar level was tested and was at 38. I didn't know how to interpret this number at the time, but I was encouraged to breastfeed him as soon as I could. I tried, but because breastfeeding is quite the mission for me (another post for another time), I wasn't very successful. Back in the recovery room, my boy's sugar had gone from 38 to 24 and I saw the nurse race to get one of the doctors. His face looked ...

The last month or so has been a whirlwind, filled with tears...joy, pain, sadness, and many emotions in between. If you've been following my Facebook posts, you've been on the journey with me, but when I started writing about my pregnancy, I really wanted to focus on the uniqueness of having a baby as a person with Diverse Abilities. This post is intended to get back to that focus, which obviously includes the emotion, but can't ignore the more practical things. At 32 weeks and 5 days gestation, I had a regular appointment scheduled with my high risk OB/GYN. That morning I woke up not feeling well and had been having Braxton Hicks contractions for over a week. That all to familiar heavy feeling in my pelvis, the one that caused me hip pain that never went away during my first pregnancy, was back with a vengeance. I went to my appointment and she decided to do an internal pelvic exam. I was only 1 cm dilated, but the baby's head was a bit low and my doctor felt I shoul...