A Birth Story

Ellis and I are writing this post together. By that I mean that he's curled up in my arms sleeping as I type. I could probably put him in his bouncy seat, but I really don't want to. I love holding him while he sleeps, which is what he does most of the day.

I find it ironic that my last post expressing my frustration at being "overdue" was on the same day I went into labor. That Sunday I had finally decided to try the eggplant parmesan myth, so Davis and I got all dressed up for our last date night pre-Ellis. On the way to Scalini's I started having contractions that were about 20 minutes apart and lasted through dinner. By the time we got home, I had a feeling that we were finally headed in the right direction. We were both too excited to sleep, so I started bouncing and rolling on the yoga ball as we timed the contractions. My doctor had said to call when they were 5 minutes apart for about 2 hours. I waited 3 just in case (I didn't want to be that crazy lady who went to the hospital and wasn't really in labor). At 3am I called my doctor and we headed to the hospital. (By the way, there's almost NO traffic at 3am!)

**Note: The rest of this post is about labor and delivery. I'm pretty sure I left out the gross parts, but if you don't want to read about labor and delivery, I'd stop now.**

Once we got there, they took us to the "triage"area and told us we were probably staying but that my doctor wanted me to walk around for 2 hours to see if we could get things to progress. So, Davis and I walked around in a big square until 6:15am. They checked me again, and went ahead and admitted us, at which point Davis called our family to let them know. A little after 7am we were brought to our room where we began the boring part of waiting. I tried sitting on the yoga ball some more, but every time I did, the monitor that was monitoring Ellis' heartbeat would slip which made the nurses nervous. So, I ended up alternating between sitting, standing, and walking around the room.

Around 1:30 that afternoon the doctor came in and broke my water, which almost immediately intensified my contractions. Once they got to the point where another contraction started as soon as the previous one stopped I asked for the IV pain medication. That pretty much knocked me out for the rest of the afternoon. Davis says I would wake up with a contraction and fall right back asleep. In retrospect, I wouldn't do the IV pain medicine again because I remained disoriented for the rest of labor, delivery, and the move to our mother/baby room.

At some point that afternoon they started pitocin, and that evening I asked for an epidural. I faded in and out for a few more hours until about 10:50 when we started getting ready to push (which I'd like to say is really difficult when you can't feel anything from the waist down). Ellis finally entered this world at 12:10am on Tuesday, October 8, 2013. He weighed 7 lbs, 13 oz and measured 20 inches long.
It seemed like they took forever to get him cleaned out enough to move him to my chest where they finished cleaning and drying him off.

Over the next couple hours we had our skin-to-skin bonding time, Ellis got his first bath, and I got "unplugged" from the epidural (and started getting feeling back in my legs). Around 3am we were moved to the mother/baby room. Once we got there they told me a bunch of stuff that I don't remember (hey, I hadn't slept in about 40 hours and was still groggy from the IV meds).

Okay, this post is long enough, so I'll post again later about our perfect little boy and his first week home.