welcome baby cosette!

The day has finally come for me to officially introduce you to our sweet new baby girl, Cosette Marie! I have intentionally taken the last five weeks to not think at all about blogging or writing or anything other than her and our family.

These past few weeks having her here has been wonderful, and hard, and tiring…and pure bliss. I still cannot believe she is ours! And compared to how rough the pregnancy had become I would take 1000 sleepless nights before wanting to go through that again!
I want to share her birth story and some precious pics with you.

We were set to be induced (for a myriad of reasons) just before my 38th week. We went in for one last OB check up thinking our plan was set for the following morning to go in at 5am to start pitocin.

But the doc told me my body hadn’t progressed much since the week prior and he was nervous about going straight to pitocin. He told me to go home, get the kids in bed and then go to the hospital that night so that we could put cervadel inside me to loosen everything up.

So that was the plan. I went home put the kids to bed, showered and blow dried my hair (of course!!!) and finished packing my bag…but then the hospital called and told me they were slammed with mamas delivering and that if I showed up they likely wouldn’t have a bed for me! They told me to wait on their call once the L&D floor had cleared they’d let me know.

I waited and waited and waited up for that call….and it never came! Finally close to 2 am I called them back to ask if they had forgotten me 🙂 but they hadn’t! They said they were still unusually busy and that I should just stick with the original plan to show up at 5 am.

This was such a huge bummer…because not only did that mean I didn’t have those hours throughout the night with the cervadel…but it also meant I was going in to labor completely exhausted not having slept at all.

We showed up at 5am and the staff was clearly exhausted from the night prior. Everyone was making comments about the night before and the nurses were joking about how much wine they needed after “that” shift.

Thankfully by 7 am we had some fresh rested faces show up with the new shift change.

The new nurses started the cervadel and told me to get as comfortable as I could because I’d have to rest with that in me for the next 12 hours. Ugh….was going to be a long long day.

Within the hour my doctor showed up, saw that the cervadel had been put in incorrectly and decided to speed up the plan. He then chose to put a double balloon in me to shorten my cervix and move me along more quickly.  On a side note…I really really should have gotten the epidural before he put those balloons in…that was one of the most absolute painful things ever.

I’ll spare the details…but if you are reading this and are ever put into a situation where your doctor starts talking about putting those in let them know you’d like to get some pain meds first! The balloons themselves are nothing, once they’re in you don’t feel them at all….but getting them where they need to be is soooo not fun.

The plan was to start a heavy dose of pitocin and I made sure to get my epidural before then. We were talking through a more aggressive approach since I was already so exhausted and still recovering from being so sick and the last thing we all wanted was a two day delivery…and honestly I think my doctor really wanted to me to deliver on his shift so he wouldn’t be up all night too.

The epidural went amazing and as soon as I was numb the IV starting pumping with pitocin.  Apart from a few rounds of throwing up from my blood pressure dropping super fast it all went pretty smooth.

Before long I started to progress.

My doctor came to check me numerous times and each time said it would be a few more hours. After one of those checks my nurse leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I absolutely think it won’t be that long…you’re much closer than he thinks you are!”

When he left the room she told me to call my family to have them start making their way to the hospital. We definitely wanted to have Kate in the delivery room with me (by my shoulders of course!) and my mother in law and one of my best friends Natalie also came. Once they arrived my sweet nurse upped the pitocin just a little bit more…. 😉

While we waited we ate popsicles….

My nurse came to check me once again and knew at that point I was getting close. When she left the room and told me to call her if I felt anything change because by then she absolutely knew the doctors projected time table wasn’t correct.

Sure enough she went to go check on another patient and something definitely changed! I knew immediately I was at the end and was going to need to push soon! I told Matt, “call her!!!!” He did, but only to realize she had forgotten her phone in MY room while she’d left to go to another! It started ringing right by my arm!!! So Matt called the nurses station and told them to have someone run and go get her!

She hurried back, ran into the room laughing and saying, “I knew it I knew it!!!” She quickly called my doctor but by the time he got back to me my little baby was crowning!

At this point everyone was rushing!!!

They turned on all of the flood lights, got all of their gear on, dropped the bed and put everything in place.

My doctor sat down at the foot of the bed, looked straight at me and asked me if I remembered how to push.

Um…of course I do…this isn’t my first rodeo sir. 😉

But it was “game time” and with all seriousness he said, “Okay let’s do this. Next contraction it’s time. I want you to listen to my voice and follow my instruction and do whatever I say. Are you ready?”

I loved this approach. My kinda plan.

No fluff. No messing around. Let’s do this.

So here came the contraction and he told me to push with all I had!

I took one deep breath….and I started pushing!….I mean giving it all I had!!!! Buuuuuuuuuut only for about….oh, 4 seconds?! All of a sudden he told me to STOP!

Clear as day he said stop pushing!

What???? STOP????  I just got started!!!!! WHY AM I STOPPPPIIIINNNNGGG??????

But I listened to him…I stopped…

I ease up but I’m so confused! I’m looking at Matt for him to tell me why in the world I’m stopping pushing right after I started. I thought something was wrong! But he didn’t say anything! He is looking, well, not at my face…..

So now I’m looking at all of their eyes trying as fast as I can to figure out what is happening….and then I hear him say, “Her head is out!”

At this point it just does not at all register what my doctor just said. It all was happening so fast! I was still so confused because surely I misheard him because her head could not POSSIBLY be out yet.

I look again up at Matt to repeat what the doctor just said or show me any sign that things are alright…he is still not looking at my face!!!!!

Someone PLEASE TELL ME WHAT IS HAPPENING!!!! (but again…this was all going on in my brain in a matter of 2.4 seconds!)

I glance quickly back to the doctor to try to read his face and get my next command…all while I try to process what I think he just said….but by the time I looked back at him instead of seeing his face I see him holding up my baby!!!!

She was literally born in less than half a push!!!! Ahhhh!!!! I’m like a professional baby deliverer now!!!! lol!

Oh my word! I couldn’t believe it!!!

Instantly I started crying!

SO. MUCH. JOY!

I couldn’t believe how simple and easy it was to get her out! Maybe sixth baby is a charm??? lol!

The nurse, my amazing nurse, right in the middle of all of that fast chaos, somehow managed to grab my camera and happened to get a pic of Kate’s precious face just as she saw her baby sister for the first time. (This nurse is seriously amazing and I love love love her!)

And this photo will go down as one of my all time favorite photos I have ever seen in my entire life.

The staff was all watching Kate, knowing how much she has hoped and begged and wished and prayed for a baby sister and when they saw Kate’s reaction there was not a dry eye in the room. The doctor was crying, all of the nurses were crying…it was the most beautiful moment ever.

Cosette Marie Wallace was born at 2:59pm was 18 inches long and weighed 5 lbs 4 oz

We chose Cosette for a number of reasons. Obviously we love the broadway play Les Miserables. And we for sure needed a ‘K’ or a ‘C’ name to match the other kids’ names.

But more importantly, Cosette means “Victorious” and also “Little One” and both are so absolutely perfectly fitting for this sweet baby girl.

The story our lives in the past number of years has not been one of ease or comfort or simplicity. There has been hardship and difficulty and circumstances that have led us repeatedly to the end of ourselves and to the feet of Jesus over and over again.

After we had our second miscarriage, right before we became pregnant with Cosette, I wondered if I’d ever have the chance to have one more baby.

It’s something I secretly wanted and hoped for, but for a couple of years had tried to talk myself out of, even to the point that we had given away all of our baby things.

Everything.

Trying to make myself believe we were finished.

We already had five…and I know…that’s a lot…but I also knew my heart wasn’t done. We’d take the jokes and teasing about how silly it was that I wanted more, and how there’s “other things in life than having babies” and “you know what causes this right?” and I’d always play along with my mouth…while inside my heart ached alone.

Even Matt began to wonder if something might be wrong with me…especially on hard mama days the joke would often be “and you want more?!”

But this little precious gift in Cosette is a story of God seeing, God hearing and God answering the quiet prayers I prayed alone.

She’s a literal dream come true.

A whisper of grace, something undeserved and granted upon no merit of my own whatsoever.

Simply a gift.

A present.

A treasure.

An answer.

I’ve heard it all my life…that God will always respond.

Sometimes the answer is no, sometimes it’s yes, but sometimes the answer is wait…and I am learning so much lately about that answer of wait.

Waiting without a grudge, without impatience, without an agenda…I haven’t always gotten it right.

So often I want what I want right now…yet this present, this sweet baby girl is His perfect timing, and it’s one more tangible reminder that His ways are far better than my own.

And that wait….it is never ever wasted. He uses the wait in so many ways to refine me and to mold my heart into one that beats for Him…that wait is to remind me once more that although the gift is what I’m asking for, He himself is where my hope and joy is ultimately found, not in what I want.

Sweet friends, this is my final baby, my precious girl, my long awaited fervently prayed for perfectly tiny victorious gift from an amazing Father who loves beyond measure: my daughter, Cosette.