My new baby girl

I cannot believe she is here! It was all so surreal. Things kept coming out of my mouth and I was like, I said that? Not inappropriate things, but I felt outside of myself somehow for much of the time. Her birth story is pretty simple once we arrived at the hospital. Labor was a total of 28 hours which is an improvement on Leah's 41 hours! Here it is:

We got here at 5pm and I was checked. Totally disappointed to hear I was only 3 cm and 50% effaced after the 2 previous days. (You can read that in other entries). I was thinking about walking a little bit before hooking up to the IV because I wanted to move things along, but the contractions seemed closer together and more painful than they were at home. So they IV'ed me and gave me a shot of Nubain to take the edge off until I was 4cm and could get my epidural. I had 2 nurses at the time, one who was new and training. She did the IV and I was super nervous about that, but no troubles there.

You read the post earlier about being loopy with the drug. That is an understatement. I was having a hard time seeing straight, but I could deal with the contractions. I got a new nurse at the shift change, her name was Joanne. I was her ONLY patient and she was AWESOME! At 7:30, just about when the shot was wearing off and I was pretty much in pain again, the news came that I was 4 cm and ready for the epidural. Mike had gone out to get food, so I had to call him and tell him to get back here and hold my hand for the scary part. Well, the epidural went completely smoothly. Dr. Menk (?) did a fantastic job and I was completely numb. It did worry me that I wouldn't be able to feel to push, but everything felt too good at the time to worry too much.

At 9:30, I was 5-6cm and 75% effaced. (It gets a little confused here because things started happening so fast.) At 10:30, she went to check again and my water had broken. I don't remember the dilation. At 11:15, she checked and said I was complete. The doctor was called and things got prepped. There were 2 issues. One: I could not feel to push and two: every time I turned to lay on my back, I got supine hypotension (technical term for low blood pressure due to laying on back) so I felt like I had to throw up. We tried pushing for a bit on my side before the doc came and it was not really working all that well. With every push though I got more feeling of pressure back and could tell when to push. The epidural was actually wearing off because the syringe of meds if only for four hours. No pain though, only pressure. Finally I decided to suck it up and lay on my back.

I gave one test push and they shouted STOP. Erin was practically flying out and the doc wasn't back yet. So he arrived and we began pushing for real. After maybe 2 pushed her head was out and 2 more after that, she was all the way out at 12:27am on August 13th. As she laid on my chest there was no crying for the longest time and she was getting purpleish. I kept saying she isn't breathing yet and they sand it's okay. Eventually with a little encouragement, she began screaming. Mike got to actually cut the cord this time (he didn't with Leah) but we have no pics of it because he was the photographer and had to put the cameras down to do it. I got a really good look at her before they whisked her off to the warmer. I was so happy that everything went well, but still not convinced that this little girl was mine to keep. Anyway, NO TEARS this time thus no stitches. That was excellent to hear.

After clean-up all around, they brought her to me and we nursed for quite a while on both sides. I was extremely happy about that. She was passed to Mike and then to my mom. I forgot to mention that she made it up right when my nurse paged the doc because I was complete. So just in the nick of time. After I was able to get up ad use the bathroom, Erin had her first bath. We finally were left alone to sleep some at 3am.

Erin has been with us the whole time. She would not wake up to feed when I changed her poopy diaper at 6am so we are going to try again here soon. Lots of tired love to all and thanks for checking on us to often. We are over the moon with this new little life and can't wait to introduce her to Leah later this morning. Pictures of that will follow in the next post.

PS More pictures are on the camera but have not been uploaded to the computer yet. I can add more pics to this post of bathtime and nursing time when they arrive.