Alexis is here!

She was born yesterday at 7:05pm. 8lbs 7 oz. and 21 inches :)

here's the whole, long story:
I woke up at 3:40 am on Thursday, July 24th to go to the bathroom. I got to the bathroom (fortunately) and had a gush of liquid run down my leg. I didn’t really feel the “gush” feeling though, it just came out. I was thinking it was my water breaking, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up!

So I went to the bathroom and it was then that I realized my water had blood in it. So even if it wasn’t my water breaking, I still needed to call my doctor. So I went to another room (didn’t want to wake Andrew) and called the doctor. I got the after hours operator and told her what happened. She paged the on call doctor, who called me back about 2 minutes later. She asked if I was having contractions, which I said I wasn’t sure. But I was pretty sure it was my water breaking because I could still feel it dribbling out (and that I had put a pad on). The dr. told me I needed to go to L&D and they would check me to see if it was my water that broke and if I was having contractions.

I went and woke up Andrew, who of course was a little out of it, since it was 3:50am. He went and took a shower while I got all the last minute stuff together for the hospital. At this point I was getting excited, but I still didn’t really want to get my hopes up too high! After we packed up the last minute stuff in the bags, Andrew got everything in the car while I got food and water full for our cats and dogs (the dogs we later had Andrew's mom take to a boarder, but the cats are roaming around at home). As soon as we were sure we had everything ready, we left for the hospital which is only about 5 minutes away. When we got there we went to the emergency room, and they had someone from L&D come get me. By that time my pad had pretty much soaked through, so the triage nurses could tell that it was my water. But they checked me anyway(it was about 5am at this point), and checked my dilation. I was 1cm and thick (2 days before at my dr’s appointment I was a fingertip). I was admitted and had all the paperwork signed, my IV (fluids) hooked up, and the monitors hooked up. By this time I was having contractions every 2-4 minutes, but they weren’t that bad... 4 ½ hours later I was still having contractions about every 2 minutes and was STILL only 1cm, so they started pitocin. By 11:20am I had gone to 2cm and got some stadol to help with the contractions, that were starting to get stronger. The stadol didn’t help that much with the contractions, but it helped me relax more in between… kinda made me a little drunk feeling.

By the time 3:20pm came around, the contractions were getting terrible and I was practically begging for an epidural! Being a ftm I can’t say for sure, but I think the pitocin was making the contractions just terrible… I could hardly stand it. And in 4 hours I had only progressed 1 cm, even on pitocin. So at 3:20 the guy came in to do my epi, which was great because it let me relax and let the pitocin do its job. However, it wasn’t what I expected because there was a “hotspot” that it didn’t work in, so there was a spot that I felt everything, and that still hurt really really bad.

But, like I said the epi helped the pitocin work… by 4:35 (a little over an hour later) I was already at 6cm. And by 6:15pm I just had a little lip left. I started pushing at 6:45pm and pushed for 50 minutes. Pushing was hard… I could feel when to push because I could still feel the contractions in the “hot spot”, but I didn’t feel that pressure that I’ve heard people talk about. About ½ way through pushing they gave me an oxygen mask to help me breath after pushing… it’s a lot of work! Haha

I had a little tear and a small episiotomy… I didn’t really want one, but by that point I didn’t care, I just wanted her out! When she was born, she had some fluid in her lungs, so that had to be suctioned out, but other than that she was great… scored a 7.9 on her apgars. I was glad she decided to come early though, she would’ve been a BIG baby is she went over her due date!