Baby Bear's Birthday

So here's the story of my sweet little man's debut into this world. (and there's a million pictures too!)

It started on Thanksgiving at 12:30 am. I woke up because I was sure my water had broken (I still have really good bladder control, so I was certain I had not just wet the bed. However, it was definitely what they call "a slow leak") I had also started having more intense and regular contractions than I'd had before. I timed the contractions for a couple of hours and since they were only between 2 and 7 minutes apart and really painful, I woke Neil up to go to the hospital just in case.

We checked in at about 3:45 and they got all the monitors hooked up to me. I was still contracting regularly, but there was still basically no dilation. We stayed there for about 6 hours, but when I had still only dilated to a 1 and because they couldn't ever confirm that my water had actually broken, they sent us home. That was super disappointing and frustrating!
Here we are sometime between 3:45 and 9:30 am on Thanksgiving Day. We went home after this and I tried to get some sleep, had a couple of nice baths, and Neil went a picked up some Thanksgiving dinner for us from Grandma CC's.
We went back to the hospital around 4 or 5 the same day for all the same reasons we went in the first time, but mostly because I KNEW my water had broken. They hooked me up to the monitors again and just waited and watched. Around 6pm the baby's heart rate dropped a lot and 6 or 7 nurses rushed in to start IVs, take blood, give me oxygen, get consent for an emergency C Section, and give me a shot of medication to stop my contractions. Luckily, all these things helped and the baby's heart rate went back up quite quickly.

We watched Harry Potter and The Simpsons for several hours while we waited to see if the baby's heart would drop again and waited to see if I would ever dilate.

At 11:30ish, my doctor came in and inserted a foley catheter to make me start to dilate, I got my epidural, and they started me on pitocin.

They took me off pitocin after only an hour or two (I don't know why) and by about 4:30 in the morning I was dilated to a 4. Unfortunately at about the same time, the baby was not doing well with my contractions. His heart would drop a little during a contraction and he didn't have enough time in between contractions to recover. Luckily, his heart never dropped as much as it did the very first time, but the labor was not easy on him.

At that point, we had to decide whether we wanted to keep going with this route and just wait and see whether the baby could handle it or not OR just go with a C section while the baby was still relatively safe and happy.

We decided to have a C Section. This is right before we went back to the operating room.


This is Barrett's very first picture although he's pretty well hidden.

You can see him a little better in this one.

After he'd gotten cleaned up a little bit.

When we first got back to our room.


None of these pictures really need an explanation- they're all just me, Neil and Barrett. I wanted to do a collage since there are so many pictures, but I couldn't remember how. Maybe next time.