She's Here!

We watched a movie at the Greens' on Saturday night. We got home around 11:30 pm and my water broke the minute I walked in the house. I don't even think I'd taken my shoes off yet. I called the hospital and they told me to go ahead and come in. I wasn't having very bad contractions so I was a little nervous about how long this process could take.

Eric's mom came over to stay with Kaylin and we arrived at the hospital around 12:45 am on Sunday.

The nurse got me all situated in my room. I was still feeling pretty good and I wasn't having any major contractions.

Last picture of me pregnant!

At 2:00 am I was almost 4 cm dilated and 90% effaced. The test about whether or not my water broke came back negative, but we knew it was wrong. The nurse said she could feel that it was broken and I definitely knew that I was leaking fluid :-). Later it was much more obvious, I won't gross you out, though :-). So then they decided to get me on my medications and fluids. By this point I was shaking uncontrollably. The nurse said it was because I was going into labor quickly and my hormones were going crazy.

At 2:30 am the poor nurses blew three blood veins trying to get my IV in. Not fun.

At 3:45 my midwife and I decided that I should have an epidural. My contractions were coming faster and stronger, but the main reason was to try to lower my blood pressure. It had been really high all night.

The epidural worked, but not for the blood pressure. I had to go on magnesium sulfate for preeclampsia. That stuff is nasty and makes me sick. I had to be on it for 24 hours after delivery.

By 5 am I was 5 cm dilated, 100% effaced, and feeling NOTHING. It was fabulous. I was feeling sick so they gave me some medicine to help with that which also put me to sleep.

At 8:45 they basically woke me up to say it was time to go. I was so tired. The epidural worked so well that I didn't know where/how/when to push. The other drug had me totally drowsy. We went on that way for 45 minutes.

We decided to stop the epidural and to put me on pitocin to make the contractions closer together, they were coming around 4 or 5 minutes apart and the pitocin would bring them to 2-3 minutes.

At 10:20 am I started pushing again. This time I could tell what needed to be done, and our baby girl was born 14 minutes later.

Lauren Frances was born on 12/6/09 (all divisible by 3, how cool is that? ha, that's the math nerd in me :-)) at 10:34 am. She weighed 7 pounds and was 18.5 inches long. Her middle name is in honor of Eric's grandma.

Nana (my mom) made Lauren this adorable hat!

We're all doing really well. Lauren has mostly been sleeping, no surprise there. Eric got a lot of rest last night which I am happy about. Me on the other hand, not so much sleep. They took me off the magnesium a little early (YEA!) so I am starting to feel a lot better.