Our Precious Little One

It's early Sunday morning and I am sitting in the hospital bed with our little angel beside me sleeping. We've been here since Wednesday afternoon when they kept us after our 40 week checkup and we are hoping we will get to go home sometime this afternoon. It has been an exhausting 4+ days, but our little girl is perfect and we are amazed every second by God's gift to us. Thank you all for the sweet comments. I didn't realize Phil was posting updates (I think I was a little out of it at the time!), but I'm so glad he did and glad Brant posted some pictures of her first few hours. I know this is shocking for those of you who know me, but I have not really been taking pictures yet! I have big plans for when we get home, but we just haven't had an opportunity yet between nursing and visiting with sweet friends who have come to the hospital to see us. If you have called and I haven't called you back, I apologize! It has been a whirlwind!

I won't go into all the gory details, but here is a brief version of the last few days.

Wednesday we came in for our appointment and still had not made any progress. They put me on the monitor for about 45 minutes and were a little concerned that her heart rate dropped after contractions (which I was having about 7 minutes apart). They also did an ultrasound to check her fluid and a contraction stress test, and while they did not see any signs of danger, she was looking like she weighed close to 9 lbs on the ultrasound and they decided to induce. We were admitted Wednesday evening and started the pitocin Thursday morning. It was a very long and difficult day with contractions coming about 1-2 minutes apart, but no progress.

Thursday night, we decided since I had made very little progress to stop the pitocin drip, let me eat, and start it again early Friday morning.

4am Friday morning I got up, took a shower and we started the pitocin at 5. After only about 10 minutes the contractions became pretty intense. Then we got a surprise around 7am when our regular doctor came in (at this point we had seen 3 different doctors because our doctor was not on call, but she happened to be in the office on Friday morning). She made the decision to start an epidural and break my water. After this, I progressed pretty quickly and we were ready to push when she was finishing her morning appointments.

We were so thankful that our doctor was able to be there, and after pushing for an hour, Emma Cate arrived. We had a slight scare because the cord was wrapped around her neck twice and they had to call in extra help to get her going, but she soon was fine and is now perfectly healthy.

Thank you all so much for your thoughts and prayers. I will hope to post some pictures tomorrow after we are home and settled in.