Tidbit

Since we don't seem to be uploading our pictures and video as soon as we had imagined, I'll just go ahead and give the details of Blake's b-day for people who are wondering. So here are the details:

5:45am on Valentine's day, I woke up to a bigger contraction and felt like my water may have broken, stood up to walk around for a minute and realized it definitely broke. I woke Matt up and told him I thought we should maybe call the doctor to see what we should do. The hospital let us know we should have some breakfast, take a shower, etc. then come on in. So an hour and a half later we were on our way.

Side note: Had I known that would be my last meal for over 24 hours I definitely would have picked something more satisfying than a bowl of cereal.

We got to the hospital and went into the triage room where they checked to make sure my water had actually broken and monitored me for a bit. I had had contractions ever since my water broke... until we got in the car to the hospital. The nurse checked my progress and found my contractions really had pretty much stopped and I wasn't progressed very much at all. But since my water had broken, they admitted me and put me on pitocin to get things moving along. Our doctor that we usually see had gone on vacation for the weekend, so we had to have the doctor on call. And of course, that doctor was the ONE doctor that I had really not liked in our office visits but at that point, I didn't even really care.

The contractions with pitocin started out pretty normal and got pretty severe quickly. I got an epidural around 2pm. Then the waiting game started... So several hours later, I wasn't progressing very much and the baby's heartrate started to drop with each contraction on the pitocin. As a result they had to start taking me off pitocin, which made me progress even less. We were getting closer to the cut off time for when they like to have the baby out so the dr. mentioned we may start thinking about a c-section. That was definitely NOT what I wanted to hear. But after some prayers and a little temper tantrum, we decided that the c-section was probably our best option. After letting the dr. know what we had decided, Blake was out 20 minutes later. The doctor ended up being absolutely amazing through the whole process and totally changed my opinion of him. He really made Matt and I feel like we had some control over the process and valued our opinions.

One of my biggest concerns about having the c-section was the fact that I wouldn't be able to hold my baby right away. But, the nurses were amazing and got the baby out, cleaned him up for a second, and brought him right over to me and had Matt help me hold him. That way, we kind of both shared who got to hold our little guy first.

Hearing our little guy cry for the first time was such an amazing experience, and definitely made us very emotional. My mom and Matt were both able to come into the operating room, along with my superstar nurse aunt, who stuck with us through the whole day. We entered the hospital at about 9am, and Blake was born at 10:32pm. We stayed in the hospital another couple of days to recover and were so excited when we got to come home. Blake is a great nurser, sleeps for 4 hour stretches at night, and such a funny sweet little guy. I couldn't ask for a more perfect baby. He made the whole thing worth it.