What a Week!

I didn't know it was possible for a week to go by with such great speed. I realized that I should probably write down Stella's birth story before I forget the details. I could, and HAVE, just spent hours on end holding and snuggling her without any regard to time. I do wish it would slow down just a little bit (I guess that makes up for all the times I wished time would speed up).


Wednesday night, April 14th, my water broke on its own a little after 10pm. I was lying in bed but on blankets because I had just been feeling "off" the whole day. I had spent the last 2 weeks with off and on contractions that would be around 5 minutes apart but after 6 hours or so, they would peter out. But on the 14th, emotionally I just felt different too. It was actually a bit of a depressive state which was odd. Anyway, after my water broke I came straight downstairs and Jim was headed up. He said that he heard me jump off the bed and knew that something was up. So, we gathered our things, I called my friend Jamie who had so graciously offered to take Karleigh and Rylan regardless of the hour. I called my mom and let her know. Turns out that she would be able to get a sub for her class but only if she needed her on Thursday, Friday or Monday. That worked out well! Then we called the hospital to let them know we'd be heading in. Jim woke the kids. Karleigh sprung out of bed totally excited. Rylan looked at him said "OK", rolled over and went back to sleep. :) We walked out to the van, Karleigh holding my hand and telling me I could squeeze it if I had a contraction. And that's when I had my first one. Since we didn't lolly gag around like I did when my water broke with Rylan, the ride to the hospital was actually not all that uncomfortable for once! They were probably about 5-6 minutes apart but not too terribly strong yet. We got the kids to Jamie's house and she had set up a whole area in the living room for them to try to sleep.

We checked into L&D at 11:15pm. Everything was ready for us. My nurse commented that she would need to do a pH test just to make sure it was my water and then she laughed and said "yah, I'm not going to need that" as she checked me out a bit more. I KNEW there was a reason I was so uncomfortably huge those last couple weeks! We sat on the monitor a bit, got checked out and I was around 4 cm so I decided to walk the halls for a while. Believe it or not, this type A, have everything planned out, person did not go into this delivery with a single plan in place. I had a few thoughts in the back of my head but my birth plan merely consisted of "get her here, alive". Anyway, I labored for a while on my own, with tons of kudos from the nurses, but ultimately I opted for the epidural. I wanted everything in place in case of an emergency. It is a bit sad how history played a part in how it went but my ONLY goal was Stella's safe arrival. I got my epidural around 2am and my mom showed up just as he was finishing up. My contraction pattern was great on its own so I didn't need any pitocin which was nice. For the next few hours, Jim cat-napped and mom and I chatted and tried to rest a bit (yah, right!).

Around 6:45 I decided it was baby time. Pushing though my first contraction felt a bit useless. I could feel it all in my face and I knew that wasn't where I needed to be pushing. We let a second contraction pass and then I pushed through the next three contractions. Between the second and the third, I could hear the nurse on my right side, talking to a nursing student about heart rate decels, I turned and looked at the heart rate tracing and my head went to "that place". Needless to say, Stella was born at 7:00am with the next contraction. :) She was beautiful, and cheesy, and had a ton (speaking from a baldy) of almost black hair.

And she was perfect...

(don't forget to pause the music at the bottom before you click play and sorry about the format difference between the way I created it and the way Blogger publishes it... good gravy! it took me way. too. long. to figure the video portion out!)