Hump Day… Birthday!

Who would have thought that at the same time our Hump Day Bump Day: Week 38 post went live on the blog that we would be in the hospital anxiously anticipating the arrival of our Miss M!?  I’m sure some of you are curious as to the details of her arrival so we thought we would celebrate her 1 week birthday by telling you how she arrived… and maybe have a little bit of cake too!

So grab a piece of cake, a glass of milk or cup of coffee and settle in for the story…

Early in the morning on Wednesday July 17th, {by early I mean around 4am} I woke up for one of my umpteenth nightly bathroom trips. I was doing my business when I felt something… different… happen down there. I went back to the bedroom to wake up the hubs and tell him I thought that my water had just broken.  He asked me something similar to “did you have a big sploosh all over the floor?!” To which I said no and he assumed I was just overreacting.  I went back to bed but got up about a half hour later and felt another small gush.  After about an hour of debating with the hubs and internet researching if it could be that my waters had broken, we decided we should head to the hospital and find out for sure.  So we got dressed and threw the last minute items in the hospital bags just in case and off we went!

We arrived at the hospital, and were directed to the birthing center where I was hooked up to monitors.  I had a contraction here and there but nothing too regular or serious.  I only had a couple that made me pause and start the deep breathing.  The nurse checked me and said she didn’t think my water had broken based on the little amniotic fluid swab test. The doctor came in and did the same test and got the same result but he also checked to see what my dilation was. He said I was at a 3-4 dilation {yay progress!} and then I had another gushing sensation. He said, “looks like you aren’t going home after all!” and then said we would be starting Pitocin because my contractions hadn’t picked up and it had been almost 3hrs since I had felt the initial break.

I was not happy.  Well… happy {and excited!} to know we would finally be meeting our sweet baby sometime soon, but not happy to be starting out with Pitocin.  Since I knew it wasn’t common for waters to break before labor started, this was a scenario I hadn’t even thought through! Also, I had heard contractions that come with Pitocin are especially horrible.  But… I knew there were risks if we kept waiting for labor to start on its own and so we proceeded and moved to our birthing room… with a view!

Once the Pitocin was started, things got going pretty quickly.  At first I was able to breathe through the contractions and rest between them, but they soon went from bearable to coming at me hard every couple of minutes and lasting what seemed like forever. This was around 11am and I hadn’t been checked for dilation progress since about 7am so we thought we still had hours of labor ahead of us and I told my husband I needed the epidural.

Shortly after, I was contracting through the epidural insertion process and begging the nurse to turn off the Pitocin. {she said no btw}  As soon as it took effect I was feeling much better and the nurse came in to check my progress again.  Her eyes got really big and she said “I think she’s complete! Hang on let me check again… ok, now Christina push a little I want to see if I can feel the head… oh.. STOP pushing and don’t do that again! This never happens that fast with a first baby!”  Apparently what none of us suspected was that when I was in the midst of the contractions that wouldn’t stop, I was actually in the transition stage of labor.  If I had known, would I have stuck to our original plan and not gotten the epidural? I can’t honestly say, but it might have been easier to hold off a little longer knowing we were almost there.

Then the nurse told us that the doctor was in a c-section and we had to wait until they were done or close to it to start pushing. Now if I hadn’t had an epidural at this point I think I would have been one furious laboring pregnant lady, but since I had it and was no longer feeling the contractions at all I said ok!  We waited around for about an hour and a half before the nurse came in and said we were going to start pushing.  I pushed for about an hour and our Little Miss was welcomed into the world at 2:03pm. 

From waters breaking to her birth we had about 10 hours and just 7 hours from the start of actual Pit induced contractions. What a whirlwind of a day!  In the end we got to meet this sweet little face… and I wouldn’t change a minute of the experience for the world.

Happy one week birthday Miss Madeline!