She's here!

Grace Anne was born on 8/18/11. Here is her story!

I was scheduled to be induced at 39w4d because of the issues I was having with the pregnancy. Most concerning was that my Crohn's Disease was beginning to flare. I was feeling so uncomfortable at best and in a lit of pain at worst. 

The morning of 39w3d I woke up at 4:30am to what I thought were the ongoing BH contractions I'd been having for months. I did notice a little bit more cramping in my lower back but nothing too noteworthy. I went to empty my bladder and noticed I'd just lost a lot of bloody mucous. I called my OB and she told me that it was probably false labor but to get in the shower and start timing my contractions. After about 30 minutes I realized they were getting painful and were 5 mins apart exactly. I called my OB back and she said to head to L&D.

We grabbed our bags and were in the car by 5:15am. We live about 40 mins from the hospital. Just after we'd left the house I began to feel gushes and realized my water had broken. We arrived at the hospital just before 6:00am, and I had to walk to L&D, amniotic fluid dripping down my leg! Once I informed the nurses of this they got my straight into bed to be checked. I was 5cm dilated, 100% effaced and baby was at a 0 station. Things got really frantic from there as everyone started flying around the room trying to get set up and get my IV started. I was GBS positive so I had to have antibiotics before the baby entered the birth canal. After 4 tries they got the IV in.

Soon after this my contractions really began to kick up and I was feeling a ton of pressure. I wanted to give birth without pain meds or an epidural, but I was starting to freak out from the pain and asked if I could have a very small amount of something to take the edge off, but still allow me to feel what was happening. They gave me a small amount of stadol and I labored another hour. They checked me again and in that hour i had gotten to almost 9cm, and the baby was entering the birth canal.

They set everything up and unfortunately by this time the effects of the stadol had worn off. I could feel soooo much pressure and pain and I knew it was time to push. I was freaking out about going through it without an epidural and thought I'd made a huge mistake in not just getting one when I arrived. The pushing was incredibly painful for me. I screamed and yelled and cried, and then kept apologizing because I couldn't believe the way I was acting! Unfortunately Grace had turned to the side and got stuck for a while. Her heart rate dropped very low and they had to put an oxygen mask on me.  We tried moving me onto my side, and eventually onto all fours, which is how I delivered her. My Midwife ended up having to cut a labial episiotomy because her head came out sideways as opposed to head-down. 

After 45 minutes of pushing, at 8:49am, just about 4 hours after my labor started, I heard "Look down! Here's your baby!" and I saw Grace flailing around underneath me. It didn't feel real. Mr. E cut the cord. He was so awesome during the whole thing. I felt like an absolute crazy person and he really helped me not to lose my mind or give up when I swore I couldn't push any harder.

After that, they took Grace to clean her up and I delivered the placenta and got stitches. The placenta didn't want to come out in one piece so the Midwife had to go in after it and that was unpleasant.  

Even though her delivery was fast, painful and kind of traumatic, I would do it 1000 times over just to hold this precious girl in my arms. I am so in love with her, it astonishes me. She's such a sweet and happy baby. She loves to snuggle, nurse and sleep and only cries when hungry. She is the light of our lives and I cannot believe she's ours forever. 

I'll post some pictures when I can get to a computer. Im posting from my phone.