My sweet girl

If you didn’t see on Facebook or Twitter or somewhere… I had my baby!

Alexis Olivia joined our family on Friday August 24, 2012 at 9:21pm.
She was 7 lbs 10 oz and 19 inches long.

As scared as I was, I am very much in love with this little girl.

What I should have been more scared of was delivery/recovery. Delivery was more of a nightmare than I imagined and recovery is hard.

I do not intend to write a flowery-multi-post birth story here on my site, but I think I should write it down for her to have someday. I have had so many little questions about how my mom’s delivery went and how I came into the world, I think it would be nice to have my recollections written down for Alex to have someday if she decides to have kids.

But for the blog world, here’s the basic gist of what happened.

• I went in for the balloon induction on Thursday at 3:30 PM. I was still barely dilated to a 1, so there hadn’t been much change in the days leading up to it.
• By 5:00 I was contracting pretty hard.
• By 6:00 I said we should go to the hospital.
• They told me that I was dilated to a 2 but only because of the balloon thus far, if they took that out I would be right back to a 1. So they gave me an Ambien and sent me home to sleep. They said if they’re REAL labor contractions I wouldn’t be able to sleep through them despite the pill.
• So I slept a few hours, but by midnight I was awake with pretty strong contractions. I didn’t want to go to the hospital again, since we were just supposed to check in at 6 AM anyway. And I felt like I was so noisy, trying to breath through each one… yet my husband snored away. I think maybe he got an Ambien too!
• I tried for force some breakfast in around 5 AM, taking bites between contractions. At 6 AM we checked into the hospital. They hooked me up to a bunch of different tubes and needles as I tried to power through these pretty strong contractions, but I was already tired from them.
• By 8 AM I gave up on the idea that I would go natural and got an epidural. So glad I did this.
• For the next 11 hours it was a game of seeing if I’d dilated (I did but it was sloooooow.) and seeing the baby’s position. The baby was posterior, meaning her head was facing up toward my stomach instead of toward my back which makes for a more difficult delivery. She was also at -1 station for much of the day/night. Every time they had me change positions in attempts to get the baby to move or turn, her heart rate plummeted. I even had to do some stints of hard pushing just to try to get the baby to move down to a place where people would still not be pushing quite yet.
  

  Baby head positions/stations in labor

• During this time, the baby had her first poop – while  inside me. Which sounds kind of funny at first, but it’s not all humor. Now the fluid inside was contaminated and she could potentially breathe the meconium in and cause more serious issues requiring NICU time.
• Another ob/gyn doctor came in at the last-minute to see if the baby could be vacuumed out of me, but she was still way to far up. So my midwife told me that she just didn’t think the way I was progressing was going to do much. If we kept trying to push and maneuver for hours longer there was still no guarantee the baby would make it out vaginally, but both of us would be super stressed and in more harm.
• A team was assembled and within about 20 minutes I was on the operating table, getting my abdomen cut open. The pressure release when they took the baby out was pretty amazing.
• They whisked her away so all the specialists on hand for her due to previous troubles throughout the day could check her out. Fortunately, she’s a strong one and all systems were go.
• Kevin was trying to peek over at them to see what we had. And when he figured it out he whispered to me “You got your baby girl.” And I started to cry… never imagining I would be so happy.

Apparently I am doing better than a lot of people they’ve seen at the hospital post c-section, but it doesn’t make it easier for me mentally. I prepared myself mentally to be tired, I knew that was part of the game. But I wasn’t equipped to feel so… in need of recovery. I imagined I’d be out pushing her in the stroller now (since she’s a whopping 3 days old and 11 hours old!) and that moving around would be easier.

Alexis is a beautiful little girl, she’s strong-willed and cuddly. I am very happy to be her mommy, I just wish that I felt more physically capable of being a good mommy right now. But I can still cuddle and feed and love her… and I guess that’s more important than going on walks and being able to pick something up off the floor!