She's here!!

Oh hi. Remember me? I used to blog here about crafts I did. But then I got pregnant, moved, started a new job, and then had a baby! So things have been crazy. You know how they say, "sleep when the baby sleeps?" Yeah, you don't have to tell me twice, I'm doing that involuntarily!

Our precious baby girl arrived on October 25, 2012 at 9:01 pm. She weighed 7lbs3oz and was 19 inches long. After much deliberation we decided to name her Lily, despite is rapidly rising popularity. We tried and tried to settle on a different name, but in the end she's just always been Lily. And we just love her to pieces!

In case you're interested in the birth story, here it is! If you're not, skip it over and look at all the pictures of her. :)

I do have to include a small backstory though, because it's just too ironic to leave out!

Last year, I met a follow blogger, {Meg}. She won a giveaway I hosted, and when I went to ship her her prize, it turned out that we lived only 15 minutes away from each other! We met up to craft and became real life friends! We ended up getting pregnant right around the same time, our due dates were just a few weeks apart. It's been so funny going through the pregnancy together, and, as fate would have it, we ended up having our babies on the same day. Yeah, really. It's like something out of a movie!

Ok, onto the real story. The aforementioned bloggy friend, Meg, texted me that she had finally gone into labor (she was 42 weeks pregnant! Poor girl!) I drove over to the hospital to keep her company while she walked the halls to get her labor going. I had done a few things myself to "stir up some trouble" and get my own labor going, but I was still surprised to notice that while I was walking the halls with her...my own contractions were starting to pick up! The nurses kept eyeing me, asking me if they needed to get me a gown too! We walked for a couple hours and I finally called my doctor and he told me to come in. We both laughed when I told him I was already there. ;)

They moved me to a room and hooked me up to monitor my contractions. It was determined that I was still in early labor, but they wanted to keep me overnight anyway because the baby's heartbeat was a little sporadic. I sent David home to grab our bags and we prepared ourselves for a rough night.

But it never happened. My contractions stopped in the middle of the night and never came back. When morning came, the nurse came in, looked at my charts, and told me that I wasn't in labor. What I had experienced the night before was false labor.

I cried. This was the fourth time I'd been to the hospital in the last three weeks (mostly for high blood pressure scares) and I was going to be sent home baby-less again!? The nurse grabbed the doctor who looked over my charts and history and told me that she recommended an induction. The baby's heartbeat kept dipping, and she thought it was better to get the baby out rather than keep her in for a few more days. I had already made excellent progress on my own (I was 5cm dilated and 80% effaced and the baby's head was very low) so all I needed was a little "push" to get the true labor started. She started the pitocin.

After about 4 or 5 hours later the contractions had REALLY picked up. I handled them just fine until I hit 12 on the pitocin, aaand then I wanted to die. Did I mention it was all back labor?? Horrifying! The labor wouldn't progress because I was so stressed and anxious the contractions weren't moving the baby at all. I asked for the epidural. Holy crap. How anyone goes through childbirth without one of those glorious shots is beyond me. I was able to relax, calm down, and let the labor progress for a few more hours. I tried to nap, but I was too anxious.

Around 6pm the nurse came in to check me and discovered I was 10cm, 100% effaced, and ready to push. I was a little shocked, I thought I would have a few more hours to mentally prep. LOL NOPE! She quickly gathered her supplies and got me ready to push while I totally freaked out. It was all happening to quickly! Everyone told me induced labors took forever and were just awful, but it hadn't even been 12 hours yet and everything has progressed so smoothly! I guess the doctor was right when she told me all I needed was a little bit of help. And so the pushing began.

For two and a half hours. Augh! Lily had turned herself all crooked (sunny side up anyone?) and gotten stuck, and this being my first baby made it even more difficult. I was utterly exhausted, the pitocin was cranked up too high so I was literally pushing every minute with only a 30 second rest in between. I hadn't eaten in over 24 hours, I had barely slept the night before. My pushes had become completely ineffective. Boo. The doctor came in and suggested an intervention via vacuum. I was very hesitant, I asked if I could try a little longer before any kind of intervention. So I tried and tried, and failed. She was just too stuck and I was too exhausted. The doctor told me I really just needed a tiny bit of help because she was so dang close to try and reassure me. I felt like such a failure, but I didn't want to risk putting her into distress by dragging out the pushing, so I reluctantly accepted the intervention.

There needed to be a whole team of NICU nurses in case something went wrong, so once they were assembled I tried again. Two gigantic pushes later she was out!

She was a little cone headed, and had a little bump where the vacuum was on her head, but she was here! I cried when the put her slimy body on my chest.

Her birth has created two parents, four grandparents, five aunts, two uncles, and two great grandparents. Needless to say, she is going to be one spoiled little munchkin. :)

We just love having her. :) Hopefully I can get back into the swing of blogging again! I don't know how you moms do it!