On Monday, June 24 at about 8:00 pm, Don and I went to the hospital. Contractions were about 5 minutes apart and getting pretty painful. They monitored me for about an hour and a half until they decided that I wasn't "progressing" and was likely to be in labor for a long time. They gave me a shot of morphine for the pain and told me to go home, get as much sleep as I could and come back when I could no longer "talk through" the contractions. They expected that the morphine would wear off in about four hours. I guess I'm more susceptible to drugs than most people, because I slept all that night and most of the next day. After that, I was lucky to have a contraction every hour. Basically, labor had stopped Wednesday was my due date, and I kept hoping that something would happen. Thursday I felt like I would be pregnant FOREVAR and that this kid would never decide to come out and play. My doctor scheduled an induction for Friday morning at seven am.

We got to the hospital around 8 (not our fault...the hospital called at 7 and said to come in and it took us about 45 minutes to get there.) and they hooked me up to a couple of monitors. They had to monitor me and baby for about twenty minutes before they could give me the medication to start labor. About an hour after getting the drugs, they told me I could have the epidural anytime I wanted it, and since I am very anti pain, I said "now would be good." So most of the rest of the labor was pain free. The only problem was that I still wasn't progressing. They said if this was still the case at five o'clock or five thirty, they would have to talk options, since they had also already broken my water, there was no going back. Their other option was basically a c section, with I really really didn't want to have to go through, (of course, who does want to go through that?) Fortunately, at 5:30 the doctor said I was finally progressing, having gone from 2-3 cm to 4 (this is after 8 hours of labor)They said that 1 cm an hour was normal labor for a first time mom, so we figured we'd be there for awhile.

My parents had shown up and decided to go to Chuck-a-rama for dinner, taking Don with them (at my insistence... he really didn't want to go.) They had been gone about an hour when the nurse came in to check me again. I was now at 8 cm! I called Don and asked him what his ETA to the hospital was. I told him he might want to hurry up, because I was almost ready to get this kid into the world. My mother claims that the most expensive salad she's ever eaten. Anyway, they hightailed it out of there and got back to the hospital about 10 minutes later. By this time I was at 10 cm and ready to go! This kid was done messing around! About 6 contractions, and an eternity of pushes later, (as a side note, they had told me that I could look forward to about 2-3 hours of pushing, this took about 20 minutes) our baby was in my arms. I cannot even begin to describe all of the emotions that were involved here, but all of them were very good.)

The baby cried a bit after the birth, but stopped after a minute and mostly just looked around, very curious as to what was going on. The nurses gave shots, took temps, cleaned up, and poked and prodded the poor thing for awhile. The baby, though, hardly made a sound.

So, basically, that is the story of my baby's birth. We were in the hospital until Sunday afternoon, and spent most of Sunday resting and fending off visitors. I am very sore, tired, happy, excited, and wishing, at times, that I could call the nursery to come and get the baby so I can get some sleep. But, we made it through the first night at home and all is quiet at the moment...

Ti'and that's about all.'cia