39 Weeks

Presenting.........Leah May!
Born January 8, 2009
7 pounds, 5 ounces
21 inches

On Wednesday, January 7th, I started having lots of pretty intense contractions late in the afternoon. During the 6:00 hour, the contractions were consistently 10-12 minutes apart, and I started keeping record of when they were coming. By the time Scott got home at around 7:15, the contractions had been 7-8 minutes apart for almost an hour. At around 7:30, they went to 5 minutes apart, so at about 8:30 we called my doctor to tell him that things were happening. He told us to go on to labor and delivery at the hospital, where they would monitor me and call him to tell him what was going on. We headed that way, making phone calls and exchanging excited and nervous glances all the way, and arrived at the hospital at around 9:00.

By the time we got there, though, the contractions had subsided significantly enough that it wasn't long before my doctor and the nurses decided that my labor wasn't active and that I didn't need to be there that night. They told me they'd monitor me for another 15 minutes or so, and then probably send me back home. They said that with contractions like what I had been having, though, that I would probably be back the next day in active labor. By the time those 15 minutes of monitoring were over, though, my contractions had picked up again, enough so that they decided to keep me there. We called everyone back - all of the people who we had just told that we were having a false alarm - and told them to expect a baby sometime the next day. The nurse gave me something to help me sleep, and we spent a very restless, intense, and uncomfortable night there in the hospital.

The next morning around 8 or so, the nurses checked me - I wasn't dilated much more - and started me on pitocin to make my contractions more regular. A couple of hours and a couple of centimeters later, the doctor came and broke my water, and then things started really moving. After a couple of hours of intensifying contractions, I requested the epidural; I was numb and comfortable and pretty doggone blissful by 1:00. (I even took a nap! That is some good stuff.)

By 3:00, my doctor was predicting that we would have a baby before supper time, and by 4:00, he was saying that she would be here definitely before 6:00. I started getting really nervous. It was like a serious case of performance anxiety. I had just been laying in the bed for hours, with people coming and going. All of a sudden, though, I was going to be expected to perform this superhuman feat, and I was really nervous! I knew it was going to be the hardest thing I'd ever done, and quite frankly, I was scared.

There wasn't much time to think about that, though, because before I knew it the nurses said I was at 10 centimeters and that once she called my doctor, she'd come back and we'd start pushing. That was at around 4:30.

Within a matter of minutes, the nurses had turned on the spotlights on the ceiling, raised my bed up, and ushered everyone out of the room. I started pushing at 4:40, and was soon told that although the baby was head down, she wasn't facing the right direction. She was facing the side - toward my leg - so the first order of business was to get her to turn toward the back by laying me on my side. Fortunately, that worked.

At 5:00, as the baby was crowning, my doctor walked into the room. Scott said that my doctor said, "I'm glad I didn't go home! I never expected to need to be back here this soon!" The nurse seemed really shocked that the baby moved down that quickly, and it wasn't until later that Scott told me that no, they weren't just trying to be encouraging. They really did think I was doing some crazy good pushing. The nurse told Scott afterwards that she thought it would take me an hour and a half to get the baby down that far, but I did it in 20 minutes. I feel pretty good about that, if I may say so.

After a few minutes (though I have to say that it felt like a lot longer than that), I heard my doctor say two things that disturbed me at the moment. First, I heard him ask the nurse for some local anesthesia. I knew what that meant and got terrified: episiotomy. (That's what scared me more than anything about the whole birth process.) Second, he told the nurse to have the vacuum ready. I know that's pretty common, and I know it's pretty safe, but I couldn't help but ask my doctor if she would be okay if he had to use the vacuum to get her out. He assured me she would be fine.

Leah May made her debut at 5:19, and I began crying the instant I saw her. As my doctor laid her on my now shrunken belly, I was in awe. All I could say was, "I can't believe you're here. I can't believe it's really you. I love you.......I love you........I can't believe you're here......" All too soon, the nurse whisked her away to the pediatric nurse in the corner, who bathed her and weighed her and measured her and all of those essential first things. Once we were both taken care of and everything was okay, they brought her back to me for my first moments with my daughter. I cried and cried, more so than she did. She was finally here, and I couldn't wrap my mind around the fact that this beautiful baby in my arms was the one I had anticipated meeting for so long.

We didn't find out until later that there had actually been some complications with the birth. Apparently my blood pressure and her heartrate were dropping at an alarming rate, and that's why they brought in the vacuum when I had only been pushing for a half an hour or so. It got pretty urgent that they got her out quickly. Her Apgars were a little low as a result. Later that night, too, we got concerned when the nurses told us that the cute little noises she was making might actually have been a problem as she tried to breathe better. That turned out to be nothing, though, but her adorable little personality.

We're home now, and are loving it. She is so wonderful - so precious - and Scott and I are doing our best to wrap our minds around this. I keep looking at her and thinking, "How can this be? She's still here....she's ours!" This is the most amazing experience of my life.

More pictures to follow......but I have to go feed my little one now!