Sleepyhead

<3

Chris' first birthday as a Poppa...

Aside from Dr. appointments for Maddi, this was her first outing.  She was 6 days old.  We took the brand new daddy to Gohan, one of our favorite Japanese restaurants, for sushi.  It was a nice dinner.  We were both clearly tired. Having a newborn is definitely a lot of work. It's well worth it though. 

She's here and she's beautiful!!!

I started pushing at 8pm. I know that because COPS was just starting =]

The nurse had me push a couple times just to see how I'd do. Apparently I'm quite the pusher. She had me stop pretty quickly because she and Chris could already see her head and my midwife hadn't even been called yet. As soon as my midwife arrived we were ready to roll. They let me know that because of the Meconium previously found I wouldn't be able to hold Maddi right away. Nonetheless, it was time to push…

At 9:55pm on Saturday April 26th, 2008 Madison Mae was born.

She weighed 8lbs. 15oz. and was 20 and a half inches long.

She is perfectly healthy and completely unaffected by the Meconium scare.

We are so deeply in love that there are no words to even begin to express our adoration.

It's TIME!!

At my last appointment I was told to be at the hospital on Thursday April 24th to begin the induction process. Little did we know what was in store for us.

Here we go…

We get to the hospital and get all checked into our private room.  So far so good. I was started on Pitocin in order to increase contractions and help me dilate. After hours and hours not much progress was made. The idea was I’d have Ms. Madison Mae in my arms on the 25th (my actual due date). She had other plans.

Friday morning comes and goes with still not much of a change. I still wasn’t dilating and all I had to show were harder, stronger contractions. I was pretty tired and not to mention starving. Toward the end of the day they decided to take me off Pitocin. I was able to finally eat something and was told we’d try a different method to help move things along. They inserted Cervidil and we waited some more. Hours came and went and I had dialted to 3. The nurses weren’t impressed and my midwife thought it a good idea to put be BACK on Pitocin. While little was happening as far as dilating was concerned, my contractions were making their presence very well known. I was exhausted.

Shouldn’t I have a baby now? It’s SATURDAY!

My midwife came in to check me out and decided it was time to break my water. She did so and found Meconium in the fluid. They hooked me up to another IV in an attempt to flush out all the Meconium to make sure baby was safe upon arrival. Being that my contractions were so intense and I was not advancing like they would have preferred she mentioned the “E” word. Epidural. As tired as I was, I still wanted to try and avoid going that route. She mentioned another pain reducing method that would alleviate some of the discomfort, for a few hours at least. I opted to try it. It seemed to help, but the contractions were still pretty bad. I think the intent was to allow me to get some rest if I was really going to have to push a baby out in the next few hours.

2 o’clock. 3 o’clock…Then some action. I jumped to 6 centimeters. We were finally getting somewhere and I‘m too exhausted to think straight. On that note, so much for my epidural-less delivery. As much as I wanted to make it happen without the epidural, once I got it all I could think was “Why did I wait this long?!?!” It was just about instant relief. I am officially ready to have a baby.