When I See You Smile....

Here she is! Our beautiful new baby girl who is now nine days old.

She was born last Saturday, June 9th, 2007 at 11:30 a.m. after about 17 hours of labor. She weighed in at a meager (hah!) 9 lbs. 13 oz and was about 20.5 inches long. I totally blame my husband's genes for her size, by the way. She's almost the spitting image of several of his family members, especially his mom.

And she's really a very good baby. Until the night before last, I was having to wake her up every three hours to feed her. Now she seems to be on the three hour schedule, when she's not cluster feeding for four or five hours at a time.

Okay, here's the long and short of it....

Thursday, June 7th, I had a doctor's appointment. No real progress. I was about 2cm dialated, there was some effacement, but nothing to get excited about. I almost cried when we left, I was so disappointed. I just didn't know how long I could continue to go to work and act like we weren't on the verge of one of the most exciting events in our lives. It's hard not knowing when.

The doctor sent me away with a Tuesday appointment for an ultrasound (do you think she suspected the baby was large?) and a Thursday appointment for induction.

Friday, June 8th, I finally broke down and admitted that I couldn't drag myself to work anymore. So I spread the word and told my boss that I was most likely not coming back to work the following week, even if I hadn't had the baby. It was just too hard. Plus, my immediate boss had left the country a couple of days before for a family emergency and I really had nothing to do.

I left around 2:30 to go deposit my last paycheck for a while and run a couple of errands. Husband and I had plans for some last minute activities over the weekend and were looking forward to what was our last weekend as a couple. The weather was getting bad so Husband asked me to come home and we could finish errands the next day.

We chilled on the couch for a while and watched t.v. Once we decided it was time for dinner, I went upstairs to change. Whoosh! It was about 6:30 p.m.

"Um, okay, I know I've had issues with bladder control a couple of times recently, but that was strange. Husband, it's very possible that my water just broke."

I laid down for a few minutes because I'd read that sometimes the baby's head can work as a cork if you are standing or sitting. After about 10 minutes, I got up again and whoosh! Yep, water just broke. Meanwhile, Husband had already started loading the car, just in case. So we gathered everything up, fed the cats and went on our way to the hospital.

Initially, they put us in triage so they could verify that I was, in fact, in labor. Once the nurse verfied that my water had broken, they admitted me and put us in a labor and delivery room. I guess that was around 8 p.m. by the time we got settled in there. Let me just say that all the books I had read talked about being able to walk around and all the different laboring positions you could do to get through the contractions. It's really hard to do any of that when you're hooked up to three different machines. I was a bit annoyed. But the rules may be different if your water has already broken.

I tried so hard to be a trooper and go au naturale. But I finally admitted defeat and got the epidural. I wasn't able to relax through the contractions and I think that was making them worse. In hind sight, I don't think I could have made through the next 12 hours without it anyway.

Truth be told, I was still in a lot of pain. Apparently, the epidural was positioned so that it was feeding most of the medication to the left side of my body. Within a couple of hours, my left leg was completely numb but I could still feel the contractions in my lower right back. However, it was still better than before the epidural. Full relief finally came after the next shift change at 7 a.m. The anesthesiologist gave me a "blast" of medication that knocked the rest of the pain out.

The whole thing is becoming more and more of a blur - must be my coping mechanism kicking in. Though overall, it wasn't all that bad. Just uncomfortable. And I definitely couldn't have made it through without my husband. There were several times during the last hour-and-a-half of pushing that I wanted to give up completely. But he wouldn't let me.

For the longest time I was at 9.5cm with not much progress. And she didn't decide to rotate until the last minute - unfortunately she decided to rotate the wrong way. On top of trying to push out an almost 10 lb. baby, she was sunny-side up. The doctor's comment once the baby "popped" her head out was, "No wonder the delivery was so difficult!"

Oh, and it would be nice if they could develop some silent scissors for these situations, because all the snipping was very disturbing. I'm still not sure what "stage 3" means but all the nurses had to comment.

Anyway, the only other complication was that sometime between my water breaking and the delivery, the ended up being meconium in the ambiotic fluid. So they whisked her away pretty quickly to make sure everything was working right. All was/is good. And no signs of diabetes, which is apparently a concern with big babies.

And would you believe that my in-laws and dad and step-mom were there in the waiting room for the whole thing?

I'll leave you with our first family picture. And more pictures can be found here.