August 8, 2010 – Mommy was up late on Saturday night reading BabyCenter when her (your) water broke. She was up late a lot while pregnant with you, so it’s not surprising that your birth story begins at 2:20 a.m. Mommy woke Daddy up from his nap on the couch and Daddy woke up Corey (your big brother) and Madelyn (your big sister) to get them ready to go to the hospital. Mommy took a shower while Daddy, brother and sister gathered up everything we wanted to take and away we went. Daddy drove everyone down to Grandma and Papa’s so we could drop off Madelyn and the rest of us went to the hospital. We spent a little while in a tiny room near the nurse’s station and then went to room 146. Since Mommy’s water had broken, she wasn’t allowed to go away from the monitors, so we spent most of our time waiting for you right there in the room. Daddy and Brother did go to the cafeteria for breakfast and to the lobby to make phone calls, but mostly we stayed with Mommy. We listened to music that Mommy had collected for the occasion (once Papa brought it from home – we forgot it when we were gathering things at the house), watched movies (Blind Side in particular), and chatted with Aunt Nancy and later Grammy Judi, who came to the hospital to wait with us. We waited in that room for almost 13 hours. Mommy needed medicine to get her labor moving along, so the nurses gave her Pitocin (Mommy calls it da debbil!). When a woman’s water breaks, the nurses and doctors only give her 24 hours to deliver the baby herself before they go in to get the baby out. Mommy was determined to deliver you herself. At about the same time Mommy was first getting the Pitocin, Daddy was predicting that you would be born at 6:45 in the evening. Mommy was at 2 cm (10 is fully dilated, or ready to deliver) when we first got to the hospital. She reached 4 cm at 1:00 in the afternoon and then 5 cm at 4:00. Things started moving faster then. Mommy worked really hard for the next two hours and at 6:15, she was at nearly 8 cm. She changed her position and was ready to push. After 5 minutes of pushing, we saw you for the first time. You weighed 6 pounds, 8 ounces and measured 19 inches long. Smaller than we expected, but perfectly healthy and completely beautiful.
***I'll be including my side when I have use of two hands for longer than a few minutes.
