Owen was born on Friday, April 7! He sure took his time though – he was 8 days late!
At my appointment on Tuesday, April 4, we made a plan to induce on the following Monday if he hadn’t made his arrival. I really didn’t want to induce, but at 41 weeks pregnant, I was getting really ready for him to make his appearance. On Thursday, I had Braxton Hicks contractions all day about 5 minutes apart. I was convinced we’d be waiting until Monday, because even though they were regular, they were painless. About midnight that night, I called Labor & Delivery to make sure, since my doctor had told me to come in when the contractions were 5 minutes apart for more than an hour. They told me to hold off until they were 2-3 minutes apart for more than a hour. So we went to bed.
I woke up about 2am actually feeling contractions. They still didn’t really hurt, just some discomfort, but I was definitely feeling more than I had been during the day. I also noticed they were about 2.5 minutes apart. I called Labor & Delivery and they said we should head in. So I woke Lee up about 2:45am, and we gathered our stuff and got in the car about 3am. Looking back, it was probably pretty entertaining. It was the middle of the night and we were completely silent the whole ride. We were both privately thinking that they were going to send us home, since I was still walking and talking through the contractions, etc.
It wasn’t until the L&D nurse got down to the ER to bring us up that I had what I’d consider my first strong contraction. I stood up to follow her and it hit me. Things flew at lightning speed for a while there. We got to the hospital about 3:10, we were in our room and hooked up to monitors by 3:30, and I had an epidural by about 4:10. Because it was the middle of the night, and I was experiencing some pretty severe nausea, they went ahead and gave me a painkiller and anti-nausea medicine through the IV thinking it may be a little while before the anesthesiologist arrived. It was not. The IV meds had just started to kick in when he arrived, so I did not feel the epidural being placed at all. In fact, Lee had to hold me up and on the bed because I couldn’t hold myself still. Or upright. It was magical! That is definitely the way to do that!
Anyway, I don’t remember most of that morning because I slept a lot (as I said, magical), but I do know they had to reposition me a lot because Owen was having heart decelerations depending on how they positioned me.
Skipping past all the super fun stuff…
I had a fever while laboring, so the first thing they did when Owen was born was take his temperature. Because he also had a fever, they took him pretty much immediately to the nursery so they could start antibiotics. We had to stay at the hospital for 48 hrs for a full course of antibiotics for both of us, but his fever was gone within a couple hours and he was otherwise very heathy.
Most of our family filtered through over the next couple days, but everyone but my mom left when we were released from the hospital. I was glad to have her help for a couple days, but then Lee and I had most of the 2 weeks he was off work to ourselves to figure out our new lives as a family of 3.
It was only 3 months ago but he’s grown so much since then that – looking back now – it seems like a blur of snuggles and sleepiness.
