The Birth of Elliette Kay

First I must apologize to all three of my avid blog readers. You have definitely dropped a notch since the birth of Miss Elliette who likes to be held all the time and severely limits my typing ability. I'll try to catch up.

I'm going to try to remember the details of Elliette's birth, but feel free to correct me if you were there and remember a completely different scenario. This will be a long, boring, detailed post because I want to remember this stuff.

When I passed my due date, Chad started to insist that I not stay home alone with the kids all weekend. My parents were kind enough to volunteer to come up and stay with me. The Friday morning they were set to come up, I awoke with very consistent and strong contractions and some bleeding. I thought we were finally going to have this baby. My midwife agreed that we were probably going to have a baby that day. Chad called in to work and we decided to head to San Antonio to hang out and see what happened. I timed contractions all morning while we got ready, ran an errand, and cleaned house a little (actually Chad did those things and I mainly laid in bed). Finally we got on I-10 and started the trip to San Antonio and I stopped having contractions. I felt like an idiot. My parents decided to get hotel rooms for all of us just in case. I walked alot. I walked the mall. I walked the treadmill at the hotel. I had alot of contractions, but still nothing consistent. I ran by my midwife's office and had a membrane sweep. She said I was between 2 and 3 cm dilated. I felt like an idiot.
That night we all went to bed hoping something would happen, but nothing did. The next day, Sunday, January 23, Chad went to work and I stayed in San Antonio with my parents. We went to my grandparents and my dad and I walked the neighborhood. I started having pretty strong contractions. This time they stayed consistent. We went shopping. The contractions continued. We decided not to go back to Kerrville and my parents again got a hotel room. The contractions continued. I called my midwife around 8pm and she said to come on over to the hospital and tell Chad to come (he was over an hour away at work at this point). Once I was checked in to the hospital, they came and checked me and I was still only dilated to 3cm. I felt like an idiot, but I felt like a tired idiot that wasn't going to leave that hospital without a fight. Luckily my midwife agreed. I got an iv at 9:50 and they started a little pitocin at 10:20p to push things along. I had another wonderful labor and delivery nurse (I have always been very lucky in this department) named Jule. Around midnight I asked for my epidural. That was ROUGH. My past experiences have been perfect. This one was not perfect. It took forever. It hurt. It caused weird sensations on half my body. I cried. It made me nauseous, but it worked. Around 2:45a I was at 5cm and they upped the pitocin again. At 3:45a I was at 6cm. Around 4:30a I started to feel alot of pain and pressure. I told the nurse and she checked me and sure enough I was ready to go. My midwife had me sit up for 30 minutes to let gravity pull Ellie down a little further. Did you know that sitting up will take away the numbness of an epidural? I learned that. By 5:25a when my water broke during a pelvic exam, I could feel everything. Chad started to panic, but this turned out to be a blessing. As I started to push, I could feel everything. I knew when I needed to push (in the past I have been too numb to know what I was doing). I could feel her coming out. It hurt like hell, but it was very good motivation. It is a pain that you know will only end if you can do this one huge thing, and so you don't stop trying. She arrived at 5:52am and took a big gulp as she came out (not a good thing).

They put her on my chest and everyone started rubbing and suctioning her. She was breathing, but she wasn't wailing. She had kind of a chirpy cry. Chad got to cut her very short cord (this is his first cord to cut - Will was yanked out and whisked aside as I turned in to an emergency and Landry's cord was cut off her neck as she was arriving to prevent strangulation).

After working on her on my chest for what seemed like a really long time, they finally took her over to the little baby warmer and gave her some oxygen.After lots of suctioning and a little oxygen they weighed her. She weighed 8 pounds and was 18.5 inches long. She is our runt ;-)They finished cleaning her up. Then they gave her back to me and let me nurse a little before taking her to the nursery for a pediatrician to check out. Chad said by the time they got to the elevator, she already sounded normal.About an hour or two later, they moved me to my room and brought Ellie back to us. My mom and dad then brought William and Landry to meet Elliette. William had insisted that he would be the first to hold her and so we had made everyone else wait. Then William arrived, looked at her, and announced that he might wait until she was five to hold her.
Landry said, "my baby" and wanted to hold her immediately. This brought out the competitiveness in Will and he held her next (and hasn't stopped wanting to hold her since then).

A nurse came in and brought William and Landry big brother and big sister hospital bracelets.Elliette nursed like a champ from the beginning and she is still going strong. The morning after Ellie's birth, we were ready to go, but we had to wait for the pediatrician who took FOREVER. Finally around 3p on Monday, January 24 we were released to go home.

We pulled out of St. Luke's Baptist hospital at 3:20p and took our sweet baby girl home.

I left the hospital feeling great. This was by far my easiest recovery and I think it was because I could feel what I was doing during delivery. Who knew that I would be thankful for a worn off epidural!

We are so happy to have our sweet baby girl home and in our arms - even if that is the only place she ever wants to be.