He’s Here!!

Well Dylan has finally decided to join the family!  Here is the story of his birth:

It was Saturday, January 15th, Dan and I spent the day relaxing and doing some things around the house.  The hot water in the upstairs bathroom wasn’t working in the shower so we spend some time fixing that.  We also talked a lot about Dylan and when he would come – so we decided to watch some funny YouTube videos on how to induce labor and some funny situations when some pregnant ladies’ water broke.  In fact while chilling around the house, I decided to take a picture of me. So here I am the day before I delivered Dylan:

Not thinking too much about it though, I finally showered and we went to bed around 10:30 pm.  Dan was tired and had to get up for church meetings in the morning so we conked out in bed while I took a shower.

Once I finally crawled in bed, I couldn’t really sleep because I started having some contractions.  They were about 7-10 minutes apart, but they felt different than any contractions I had in the past.  Dan woke up ~ midnight/1 am and we started really timing the contractions.  We talked a lot about going to the hospital but couldn’t really make up our mind.  Dan decided to get up and take a shower and I straightened my hair (I had gone to bed with my hair wet!).  Once Dan was out of the shower the contractions seemed to slow down/stop and I was finally getting tired around 4/4:30 am.  So we decided that we would try to get some sleep and go from there.  However while lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, all of a sudden I feel a burst of water. . . I jump out of bed and get to the tile in the bathroom and a whole lot of water (well I guess it’s not really just water – but you know what I mean) gushes to the floor.  Pretty loudly I inform Dan that my water has broken and so he too jumps out of bed.

I felt a little lost once my water had broken and wasn’t quite sure what to do.  Dan was a big help and informed me that I had better get dressed because we for sure were now going to the hospital.  So I put some dry clothes on, grabbed a towel for the car seat, and headed to the car.  So my water broke around 4:45 am and we were in the car driving on the freeway by 5:00 am.  My contractions then started about every 6 minutes and were getting stronger with each contraction.  We arrived at the emergency department and I was wheeled to the Labor and Delivery Triage. 

We got to the triage bed and I again leaked a whole bunch of fluid all over my clothes and was given a hospital gown.  I was dilated to a 3/4, so they placed an IV line  and was soon taken to my LDR room (labor, delivery, and recovery room).  Because my blood pressure had been slowly increasing over the previous couple of weeks, they would not give me an epidural until my blood work returned normal.  So I labored until about 9 am when I finally was given my epidural.  Let me just say that I was really ready for the epidural when it finally came!!  Up until the epidural, they had given me a total of 3 mg of Stadol but I didn’t really like it (it made my head spin and I didn’t make a lot of sense when I tried to talk). 

I finally got my epidural and I was very happy when that finally kicked in:

Once the epidural was placed the nurse put my foley in and checked me again – I was now a 9 and pretty much immediately dilated to a 10.  Next they decided to just wait and see if his head would drop on its own before they started having me push.  So we waited . . . the contractions started to slow down to about every 10 minutes so they gave me a little oxytocin and we started the pushing.  The umbilical cord was wrapped around his body twice and so h wasn’t dropping very well.  Once the doctor was able to unwrap the cord, he came right out!

So here he is:  7 lbs 7.4 oz     19 in long

Lots of people came to visit us on the 16th at the hospital and thank you to everyone!! It is fun showing off our super cute little boy but we were very tired by then end of that night.  But despite the exhaustion, we still didn’t sleep that well.

Here are a few more pictures from the hospital:

Here are two very proud Grandpas!!

All the new grandparents together:

Here’s Dan, who did such a great job helping me through labor. He is going to be a super awesome Dad!!

On Monday night we decided that we really didn’t want to spend another night at the hospital and so we headed home around 6:30 that night.  Dan was very grateful not to stay another night as his bed was not very comfortable!

Here is Dylan just before we left the hospital: