Introducing Our 7th baby, Primrose Elowen Roberts! Come Say Hello!
After much anticipation, on February 20th, 2018 at 8:57pm CST our 7th child was born! She was 20 3/4 inches and 8 pounds 6oz. Say hello to Primrose Elowen Roberts!
This now makes 4 boys and 3 girls for us.
Her birth story is quite interesting, but first a little backstory…
The Pregnancy Announcement
At the time (July 2017) my wife, Jessica, had a pretty decent sized Instagram following consisting of about 10k followers and wanted to announce the pregnancy on her feed. She decided to go with a really simple picture of us “stair-stepping” our kids against a white wall with a golden number balloon above each of their heads, and then she would hold the number 7 balloon in front of her stomach.
Simple enough. We took the picture, posted it and the rest is history.
Over the next day, Jessica noticed a flood of new followers, likes, and comments on her picture. After a little bit of digging, she realized that a popular website, PopSugar, had shared her picture and linked back to her Instagram account.
Within something like 48 hours, she had been shared dozens of times across huge websites including: Popsugar, Babble (owned by Disney), and Parents. There were also several equally as big Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages that had gotten ahold of it and shared it.
I wish I had saved all of the pages that shared it, but honestly, there were literally too many to keep track of. If you want, just Google, “pregnancy announcement balloons”, find our picture, and follow the rabbit trail of suggested pictures Google gives you. It was so crazy of an experience that we even received two separate emails from different TV producers asking us if we wanted to interview for a TV show. That’s when you know you've struck a chord haha. Not just one TV show offer, but two! (BTW, we turned both of them down because we couldn’t shake the thought of how terrible getting into reality TV was for families.)
Anyway, after the picture went viral, Jessica’s Instagram shot up to about 55k followers and her blog pretty much broke down from all the new traffic it was getting haha.
At first we were excited. Then slowly (or actually quite quickly rather) people’s opinions and negativity started rolling in. Facebook pages that had shared it, like MetDaan, were getting tens of thousands of likes, shares and comments. Some of them were positive and congratulating us. But honestly, most of them were very negative and hurtful towards our family.
And I’ll just leave it at that. It was not a very great experience for my wife, who was incredibly close to shutting down her Instagram account at that point so that the picture couldn’t get shared anymore than it already had.
After about a week, things finally calmed down. The people that had been positive towards our announcement actually stuck around to see what our family was all about and all those negative people left. 👍🏻
Gender Reveal
At 20 weeks you can find out if you’re having a boy or a girl. For us, we like to say we don’t care about the gender, and I guess we really don’t. But actually, we were really hoping for a girl so we could even out our current 4 boy/2 girl ratio!
And we found out it was a girl! Needless to say we were very excited!
The Birth
That finally brings us to the day of the birth. What a crazy day it was!
First off, Jessica was 8 days overdue, which is really crazy to think about since this was her 7th baby. Tuesday, the day of her 41 week doctors appointment, she figured it was pretty safe to assume that her doctor would want to schedule an induction for her. We also knew that our kids would be staying with the grandparents whenever she did have the baby, so we just decided it would be best to have them go to their grandparents house now, the day of the appointment.
We went to the appointment, and sure enough, she wasn’t dilated (ready) at all. Like, zero sign of having a baby. Jessica scheduled the induction for that evening. She would be getting a phone call about an open room “sometime after 6pm”. Great.
11:30 AM
It was 11:30 am and home was about 45 mins away. We were right next to the hospital with 6 and a half hours to kill before 6 (the soonest we would be getting the call). It actually worked out really well because Jessica’s best friend had just delivered her baby earlier that morning, so we went to visit her at the hospital. We stayed a few hours talking and hanging out until we were ready for lunch.
1:30 PM
We decided to go to the newest burger place in town, Shake Shack!
Jessica had been a couple times already with some friends, but this was my first time going and I was pretty excited as you can see!
It was so good!
When we were done, we still had about 4 hours to kill. We didn’t really want to drive all the way home and sit around doing nothing, just to drive all the way back out. So we went to a couple places, mainly to waste time, but also to walk around and hopefully get some contractions started.
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
We went to IKEA first. That was fun. I always enjoy walking around IKEA. Next we went to Old Navy. As we were getting out of the car, Jessica had a big contraction! It seemed like when the hospital did get around to calling her now, she would be much more progressed now that she was getting some good contractions.
4:30 PM
After Old Navy, we went to the mall to continue our walking. After walking around for a good 30 mins, her contractions were coming on about every 2 minutes and we decided it was time to go back to the hospital so we could at least be in the building when they called. Plus it was easy enough to spend a little bit more time with our friend and her new baby.
5:45 PM
We got to her room and Jessica’s contractions were still going about 2-3 mins apart and getting really strong. I kept telling her to just forget about the phone call for induction and go get checked out like a normal labor. She kept saying that we could wait a little longer. She didn’t think they were strong enough yet, and she remembered not being dilated at all earlier that day at the doctor. I guess she would know since it was her 7th.
7:30 PM
She finally got to a point where she thought it was time to go get checked, so we headed down. When she got checked in, her contractions were coming on super strong. They checked her and she was at 9 cm. (Sidenote: If you don’t know anything about labor and delivery, 10 cm equals baby time. And she went from 0 to 9 cm in a matter of hours. Just goes to show you how quickly your 7th kid comes! I’m not totally sure, maybe someone can enlighten me, but I think women can go for weeks being at something like 2cm.) All that to say she progressed super fast.
8:00 PM
Anyway, they rushed her upstairs to the delivery room and Jessica was freaking out because she wanted the epidural (never delivers without it) and the nurses were telling her that she probably wouldn’t have time for one. Yikes!
Thankfully, the nurses worked super fast and were able to get an IV in really quickly and allowed Jessica to get her epidural, which she was so relieved about!
8:45 PM
Pretty much everything was ready to go at this point and within the next few minutes, doctors and nurses were all ready to deliver a baby. It only took a few minutes and seriously not even one push, and our baby girl was born!
It’s so crazy to think that just within a few hours, we went from not even close to having a baby, to barely getting into the room in time! Like, seriously, we were getting checked in for the first time, to having baby in our arms in a matter of like an hour.
We were thinking about all the different scenarios like what if we had gone home and sat around after lunch instead of hanging out around the hospital area? Maybe Jessica did push off getting checked at the end a little bit longer than she should have, but would it have been the same if we would have been at home? She probably would have said to leave for the hospital sooner than what she did since we were already there, but would we have been stuck driving in the car when all this would have happened? I don’t even want to think about that!
All in all, it was a pretty special day. Not only did we have our baby, but she also actually shares the same birthday as Jessica’s best friends baby! How cool is that?
Anyway, thanks for reading the birth story for our 7th baby! It’s been a wild ride so far, and I can only imagine that adding to our current household will continue the craziness!
Ha I remember seeing that picture somewhere I can't remember where now. Did you always plan to have a big family? Your new baby is gorgeous and I love her name.
Haha yeah. It seriously felt like that picture was everywhere at the time. It was a really weird feeling being turned into a meme too at one point. And no, we didn’t plan on it in the beginning, but we also didn’t NOT plan on it, if that makes sense? It’s always been one of those things that we both really love our kids and so the thought of adding one more has never really been a crazy thought to us. And thank you so much! We love her name too!
A big Congratulations to you and your gorgeous family on the arrival of baby Primrose (love her name) I am a mother of a 10 year old boy and twin girls that are 7 and that alone has been a "wild ride" so I have total admiration for you and your wife for having 7! WOW, you are so incredibly blessed. I enjoy following your posts as they are so relatable . :)
Thank you so much! And yeah, I always joke with people saying that your first kid is always a shock because it totally changes your whole world. Then your second is hard because you feel like you’re juggling a newborn with (usually) a toddler. 3 is a total circus, but then honestly, once you get past 3 it’s really no different in my opinion. The oldest is at that point usually old enough to help a little and you’re used to a crazy houseful of kids anyway haha.
And yes! We definitely do feel totally blessed! Thank you for your kind words! I really appreciate it!
I can see that, people ask me all of the time how hard it was to have twins and honestly if they were my first I would have said crazy but because I had already gotten my first time parent stuff over and done with everything was so much more laid back and yep, if you are doing for two might as well be three..or four..or heck why not seven ;) I also love your family pic from the hospital bed as it's full of so much happiness but mostly I enjoy how #6 (sorry I don't know her name) is seemingly not as thrilled to give up her title of youngest just yet. LOL
As much as I am in awe of you for having time to blog, I am looking forward to following you on your Steemit journey! :)
hahaha! It's actually a funny story. We let all the kids take turns holding Primrose that day when they first met her, and #6 (Clementine) was actually crying because she didn't want to let anyone else have a turn holding her! She's a little obsessed with her new baby sister haha.
And BTW, I followed you back and read your introduction post, and was about to comment back to you saying how interesting it was that you are an aesthetician because that is what my wife did for about a year right before we got married! Then I realized that it had an "A" in front of it. Jessica was actually an esthetician, not an aesthetician haha. I had to look up the difference!
She went to school for it and got a job at a spa for about a year and lost her job right before we got married! It was pretty devastating at the time but it was at that point we decided that we wanted her to be a stay at home wife (and mom when the time came) because we didn't want to be dependent on two incomes. So yeah! Jessica has been stay at home for ten years now, but she used to work in a spa, doing a very closely related career name to what you do haha.
Lol, ok gonna be totally honest but I just thought it was proper to use the A in Aesthetician (I heard that somewhere) I thought,until my friend Google just informed me, that they were one in the same as is how we Canadians spell "colour" instead of color. I work in a Day Spa and am not clinical or paramedical in any way. So is that what Jessica did as well? Manicures, pedicures, facials, waxing etc.? I am 18 years as an __sthetician ;) Although have had several other jobs along the way. Sorry to hear Jessica lost that job but it was just a stepping stone to where she was meant to be it sounds. I'm a true believer in everything happening for a reason. Thank you for the follow back, I am new to Steemit but really enjoy it as my new "hobby" and am trying to absorb all I can in the time my days will permit :)
Oh wow! Yeah, that's exactly what she did. So cool! And yes, we both looked at it that way too. It got her where she was meant to be!
Just the other day I had a talk with my son about that exact thing. He said "Mom, do you ever wish you could go back in time and change something that you wish happened a different way?" I replied by telling him that even though we may not understand why things don't go a favourable way at the time, I embrace every bit of my past as a learning experience and I would not change the past no matter what because ultimately it would shift my future and may not have lead me to being their mom which I would not change for anything in the universe. ;)
Yeah, I totally agree with you. I used to teach guitar at a guitar store and when they shut down it was a major income loss for our little family of 3 at the time. It forced me to consider teaching guitar from home. It was a major turning point in my life because I realized that I made just as much money with half the students because I didn’t have to “pay rent” for my lesson space at the store. I’ve never looked back from the idea of doing things for myself and having an entrepreneurial mindset.
There are so many things in life you can think back on and wonder if you did it the right way, but you’re right when you say it’s a learning experience and it takes us on a path to where we are now.
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