YiYi gave a nickname " Tui Tui" (推推） to his younger brother when we went out for a walk along the Potomac river. Not sure whether it is because of this name, ZIXI did turn out be be pretty good at " Tui 推"(Delaying). Though doctors kept telling me that I would most likely expect to have an early delivery and I started dilated 4 weeks ahead of my due date, ZiXi did manage to postpone his "debut" till 3 days after the due date :)
ZiXi's delivery was quite a smooth one. I started feeling regular labor contraction from 3:30 pm when I was shopping at the mall ( I did not have any labor contraction for Zi Yi ). When it came to the dinner time ( 5:30 pm), the contraction built up to 5 minutes apart. However, the pain was still tolerable and I even finished my dinner :) We checked into the hospital around 8:30 pm and I was told that " You are 3 centimeters dilated and the baby is at zero position"... Woooh, when the doctor was about to break my water, I suddenly remembered that I needed something very important.. that was EPIDURAL... For some reason, that night there was a baby boom at this hospital with six mommies checking in almost the same time ( there was no baby born the day before and during the following two days), so we waited for about one hour for the anesthetist. When the epidural was ready, it was almost 11 pm and I was wondering how long it might take this time as ZiYi's record was 18 hours. One hour later, when I was watching the FOX News report about the 2008 president candidacy, I was hit by a sharp pain down in my thighs... I pushed the epidural control button but the pain was still there and then the nurse came in and told me " OH, you are now 10 centimeters.. the baby is ready to go"..... GOSH, how come the second baby could be so easy???!!!! 15 minutes later, I was holding ZiXi in my arms...2 hours later I went to the bathroom by myself and I sent out baby news to my colleagues and friends via my B-berry. I still remembered after ZiYi's birth, I did feel like loosing some of my brain power in the first 2 weeks. This time, I don't feel any changes except for the fact that I am indeed now physically much easier to feel exhausted..
We did have some minor " surprise" in the first week. First, ZiXi was born with a pretty big blood bruise bump on top of his head. Because of this bump, his bilirubin level was abit higher than the normal range. After two blood tests and doctor visits, we were finally confirmed that ZiXi is ok and we don't need to worry about a jaundice. Second, on the fourth day after birth, I was hit by a sudden milk duct congestion. Thanks for the blessing of God, the congestion was found quite early and after a whole night spree of warm compression and massaging, the symptoms was relieved.
While, I have to say even though ZiXi is our second child, we still act like first-time parents with lots of puzzles and we are still easy to feel panic about small things. I guess that is because many of the memories of ZiYi was already wiped off from our CPU for some reason and every baby is quite an unique case by himself or herself. So, never feel embarrassed to ask silly questions to your doctors and never expect your friends who have kids could always know what to do :)
