Well She is Here

So she is finally here after all of the waiting and all of the drama. Here is the story of labor and delivery and then later I will post the story of the first week.

I started having contractions on Saturday morning but nothing ever happened. I walked and I vacuumed and I played board games. Nothing. Went to bed Saturday night and still felt the contractions. They were intermittent. I was trying to time them but I was sleeping through half of them. Finally at about 4:15 I got up and walked around. They started coming every three minutes. I woke Jeff up and told him to shower and get ready to go to the hospital. We were admitted around 6:00 a.m. I was dilated to about a 3 which was pretty good considering I was a nothing on Thursday. But then the contractions sort of simmered down. I walked around the hospital. The bummer of it all was I was hungry I hadn't eaten since 6:00 Saturday night. They wouldn't let me eat, only a popsicle. They put in an IV and started some pitocin around 8:00 or so. Jeff and I watched Monster's Inc., the contractions started to get stronger. About 10:00 the pain got pretty bad. I stuck it out until 11:30 or so. I wanted to wait to get the epidural until I was dilated to a six or so. The nurse convinced me there was no reason to wait, I was almost a four. So I took her advice. Thank goodness. I was in an awful lot of pain from about 10-12. The epidural kicked in and then you could have dropped a piano on my legs and I wouldn't have felt it. At 2:00 they broke my water and I was a six. I asked them to scale back the epidural a bit because I felt too numb. At this point I had been on and off the pitocin. Things would go good on the pitocin and then they would take me off because my natural resting state was too high and things would peter out. Around 5:00 or so they said I was an 8. I was starting to get discouraged. This was the second time the tears came that day, pre-epidural was the first time. They said this was fairly normal for first time moms, a centimeter an hour, but that the last two centimeters would go pretty fast. At this point I could feel the contractions, not painful just immense pressure because the baby was so low. At 7:00 they decided I was 10 centimeters and ready to go. They gave me a test push to see how quickly that would go, decided this wasn't going to take long and called the doctor. At 7:15 I started pushing for real, I pushed through 4 contractions and at 7:31 she was born. She was great and the whole experience was pretty darn good. So far I feel incredibly blessed but am still having a bit of baby blues which I will write more about later. For now here are some photos.