Labor

3 out of 3 are sleeping, so I'm going to try and get some updates in quick. (This is a lot of details and probably boring... it's more for me so I can remember)


I had been having contractions every afternoon for DAYS and they would always stop around the time I went to bed. They felt a little stronger on Thursday so I timed them for a little while. 6 minutes apart for most of the afternoon... still not very painful though. Our friends Clint, Kristin and Maddy came over that night.. as they normally do on Thursdays. :) They left at 8 or 9?? Around 10:15 I was still having semi-regular contractions (sometimes 4 minutes apart.. sometimes 15 minutes), so I called my sister to come over and spend the night just in case we had to leave in the middle of the night. When she got here I laid on the couch and her and Jeff timed my contractions while trying to convince me I was actually in labor and should go to the hospital. My doctor had told me to wait until they were 3-5 minutes apart for 3 hours... so the irregular, yet very painful, contractions were unconvincing to me. At around midnight we all went to bed.. contractions had slowed to 20 minutes apart. At 2am I got up again and paced around for a while.. still waiting for the contractions to be regular. At 3am Jeff declared we were going to the hospital whether I wanted to or not. We woke up my sister.. I told her we would probably be back (she didn't look like she believed me), and we left. Got to the hospital at 3:30am... triage at 3:45. I was 5 cm and 90% effaced! (I don't know what effaced means... but 90% sounded good.) I think the nurse was as surprised as we were. Then we waited a ridiculously long time for the anesthesiologist.. he came in around 4:45 and gave me the worst epidural... did I mention he looked like he was 15? It took him so long I had 3 terrible contractions while he was doing it and had to sit very still in an uncomfortable hunched over position. I think I probably left fingernail marks in Jeff's hands. He was finally done at 5am and the nurse checked me again... 9.5 cm. About 15 minutes after that the doctor came in... fully dilated. ** Back to it being a terrible epidural, he gave me such a heavy dose my legs were COMPLETELY dead and my blood pressure would drop every time I sat up or rolled off of my side. Not to mention I was throwing up during all of this. So the doctor had me start pushing... I pushed 6 times and then got very sick. My blood pressure dropped to 89/45 and I thought I was about to pass out. They put me on oxygen, rolled me on my side and gave me some kind of drug in my IV. Doctor said we needed to wait until my blood pressure stabilized to try again so we "rested". I felt terrible the entire time.. really the worst I have ever felt in labor. At around 7am, after 2 hours of being fully dilated, the nurses shift changed and we got a new nurse... very aggressive.. I liked her. She said I wasn't going to feel better until the baby came out so we were going to "get it over with". She turned off the epidural to help with the blood pressure situation and then we waited a bit for the doctor. When she got there we all decided it would be best to get the baby out as fast as possible, so they sat me up... blood pressure dropped, I started throwing up again... pushed 5 times.. and at 7:25am we had us a baby GIRL! I still can't believe it. The doctor held her up to face us and I just

remember being so surprised and thrilled! I kept saying I couldn't believe it and crying my eyes out. They put her up on my belly (another first for me... the boys were both meconium babies and had to be rushed off to be checked out by a respiratory team.) and I looked up at Jeff and he had tears rolling down his face... very un-Jeff like. We were both just so excited to finally have a girl!! Lyla is one lucky girl to have a daddy like Jeff.

And the nurse was right... I immediately felt better after she was born. Although I was so excited I probably wouldn't have noticed if I wasn't!