CAUTION: this post includes labor and delivery details

Hello friends! I haven't spoken to many of you this week...because we had a baby! So here's all the "gory" details...

My water broke on Sunday morning around the time Ben and the kids left for church. It was perfect timing because I had three and a half hours of undisturbed time to clean, pack a bag, rest and eat. We went into the hospital around four, fully expecting labor to kick in, go quickly and be home by Monday afternoon. Wrong! Just shows that you can't go into labor with any misconceptions from previous labors. I was in labor for seven hours with Kiersley and two hours with Benji. So I definitely expected short and (relatively) easy (is it ever REALLY easy???).

What really happened was this: Cherie (my nurse midwife) wanted to start me on pitocin that evening. I asked to wait and see if I could jumpstart labor without drugs. She was agreeable to wait until four a.m. Monday morning. So there I was at Mercy pacing the floors for about two hours. It did seem to help temporarily because I had a lot of contractions while I was walking, but unfortunately it all came to a standstill as soon as I sat down or rested. So four a.m. came around and we started pitocin. Cherie had an emergency Csection come in at 4:30 and then another scheduled Csection at 7:30 so I was put on a very low dose of pitocin hoping to start labor, but not go too fast. It wasn't until about 8:30 that I started having some really mild contractions. Around 9 Cherie asked if I wanted an epidural. Hmmmm...I had never really had the choice before (because by the time I wanted it...it was too late to get one). So this is how I made my decision: a very hard contraction came and that was enough to convince me that it would be a good idea to try an epidural.

So in came the anesthesiologist who very mundanely explained that there is a chance of various malodies, worst of all death. Hmmm...nope don't care, please just give me the drugs!!! I've heard a lot of negative things about epidurals, but in my personal experience, it was GREAT! I delivered the baby at 1:45 Monday afternoon. I didn't spend very long pushing - well it was actually longer than previous labors, but it felt a lot shorter because it didn't hurt, I just felt a lot of pressure. In fact Cherie purposefully went really slow and had Ben pour castor oil on me as the baby delivered to help stretch out the tissue. With my previous deliveries I had three plus degree tears, inside and outside, front and back which made recovery very difficult. But with this one I just had a few stitches. WOW! That makes a huge difference.

I felt like I was able to fully participate in this labor because I wasn't out of my mind in pain. I've heard that baby's who's mother had an epidural are really lethargic, but that wasn't the case with Acacia! She cried and fussed for a good 45 minutes before she calmed down and nursed. Other than her gassy/colicky times at night she's very content to sleep and eat and poop. Isn't that the life?