A Surrogate Adventure

Little Maverick will be one month old tomorrow.  It seems insane to me that he has already been out of my belly for that long!  I have been very fortunate to be able to see him at least once a week (much more the first few weeks) due to 1. his parents being awesome and wanted us to visit and 2. I have been able to hand express and pump for him since his birth and provide his sole source of food. I had always planned to pump for them since we started this process but was always a little scared that my supply wouldn't be very good due to just pumping.  This is somewhat crazy since I had a a great supply with Kendall and an over supply with Charlie - but exclusively pumping can be a whole different world.  Sometime the body doesn't respond the same to a pump as it would when a baby is nursing plus it takes A LOT of commitment, especially at the beginning.  But it was very important to me to be able to feed my belly buddy and, honestly, vanity played a part in my ...

At 38 weeks and 1 day (barely), my little belly buddy decided he was ready to meet his parents!  I had been bouncing back in forth in my head about being ready to be "done" and wanting more time with the little being in my belly so it actually caught me a little off guard that I was going into labor early.  Both of our kids were right on time around 40 weeks and I felt like I had mentally prepared to lose the bump before hand.  I hadn't really done that officially with this round but none the less, it was go time! Around 4:30am I started to have contractions. Because we were all concerned about baby coming very quickly, I tracked maybe 3-4 contractions before waking Mike up. After a few quick phone calls to the IP's (who answered on the first ring! They must have sensed it.), my parents and our case manager, the contractions started to pick up as we gathered up our last minute stuff and paced the house.  My mom showed up about 20 minutes after my call and out the d...