I asked Mom to write up her memories about each of the kids births for this blog (2020): Because of our experience with Cory, I had to go into the hospital at least a couple times when he was nearer to term. They would hook me up with an IV with Pitocin (?) I think and induce labor and track it for a while to see how my body was handling it. It took a few hours. Then my doctor wanted to induce me a couple weeks early, since that was the point when Cory had died. So I remember us going to the hospital early in the morning for them to induce labor. I had heard that induced labors take longer, especially done that early, before your body is quite ready, so he wasn't born until about 6 p.m. that evening. 6 lbs. something. I had my first epidural with him. They didn't do routine ultrasounds back then, like they do now. But I chose to have one and to have the amniocentesis procedure done. It is not without risk, but I really needed the peace of mind it could bring. If there had been a problem with the baby, we would not have aborted anyway, but chances were high that all would be normal, so I could relax a little more with the pregnancy. So I think Derek is the only one of our 8 where we knew the sex before our baby was born.
On one of the pages of the baby book, Dad wrote up some of the expense totals for the time ...
- Margie/Dr.Brown(OB) $685
- Margie/St.Marks (Hospital) $1056
- Margie/Dr.Morris (Anesthesiologist?) $346.50
- Derek/St.Marks (Hospital) $525.10
- Derek/Dr.Carr (Pediatrician) $130
- Derek/X-Ray $6.50
Total costs charged $2749.10 (no notation of what insurance covered and what was out of pocket).
It would be interesting to have the medical bills from all the births to compare ...
and to compare to the costs when the Westra kids had their babies, and to today!
There was a page in the baby book with all of the siblings holding baby Derek ... sans Jen! Where was the picture of me holding the baby? I KNEW it existed. I guess I had taken the picture for my personal photo album (but Wendy has her photo in her album too, we usually got double prints). These had not been in the Dropbox folder for the year (until now) so I wonder if there are still some negatives out there that didn't get converted with the rest. There are a LOT of photos of baby Derek (the folks hadn't gotten around to taking pictures with baby Kellie and didn't have any of Cory, and I'm sure that played a part in the plethora of pictures now).
More notes from the baby book ...
- Likes to sleep on tummy
- Not good in infant seat for very long at all.
- Sleeps good at night, but not great during the day, just small cat naps
- Sucks his two middle fingers of his right hand
- Blessed June 6th, 1982
There is a "Gifts and Goodies" list in Dropbox, a scan of the "births" section from the newspaper (they give the home address of the families ... that would not be acceptable in today's society!) and a couple other snapshots and memorabilia. There was also another blog post about Derek Memories on his last birthday.
Here's the DMarie TimeCapsule
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