Welcome to the World Evelyn Leia!

Oy, it's been a really, really, REALLY long time since we've written any updates for this blog! However, we figure that it's a better way to keep all of our family and friends up to date with Evelyn Leia than on Facebook. Or at least a way to give more details :-)

So Evelyn Leia is a week old already! I figure that  means it's time for me to actually sit down and write her birth story- but don't worry I won't go into too much detail. So Wednesday May 11th we went to bed as usual, but around 1:15 am I woke up, feeling slightly weird and it turns out that labor had begun! I started timing my contractions so that we knew when to call the doctor. I thought my water had broken around 1:30 am, called the doctor around 2:30 am. While on the phone with the doctor my water actually DID break. Boy, am I glad that didn't happen at work (which was one of my biggest fears). So we got up, I took a shower, Scott started packing stuff up that we were saving for last minute (computer, DVDs, etc) and off we went to the hospital. We were officially admitted around 3:30 I think- but to be honest that part is a little hazy. When admitted I was having contractions every 2-4 minutes but while I was still about 50% effaced with no dilation.

I had been planning on trying to labor without the epidural, but after my doctor came and checked me-- and it hurt-- I decided I was going to get that epidural. After that labor wasn't so bad since I couldn't feel the contractions, but the contractions also were not progressing me at all so they gave me medicine to try to make the contractions more productive. However, the problem proved to be that the medicine caused stronger contractions- which made Evelyn's heart rate drop. Not to the point of panic, but enough that Evelyn and I had to be consistently monitored.Every 30-60 minutes the nurses came in and had me move positions to try to get Evelyn to move into the correct position to progress labor. At around 2pm the doctor came by and I hadn't progressed at all, so they took me off the medicine to increase contractions and instead decided to see if my body would progress on it's own. However, it didn't. Instead I started getting a shooting pain through my left hip that would not go away-- and the epidural did NOTHING for the pain.

Finally, the doctor came back around 6pm and told us that we were going to have to go for a c-section because Evelyn decided to come down, as the nurse said, "cattywampus". She was sort of diagonal/sideways, and the contractions instead of pushing her down, were pushing her into my hip. They prepped me for my c-section- and Scott did a great job keeping me calm because even though I was ok with the c-section part of me was freaking out.  Finally, we were back in the OR, I was numb from the chest down, and Evelyn was brought into our world!

Evelyn immediately demonstrated that she has a good set of lungs and that she has no problem with her plumbing as she peed all over the table as they tried to clean her up. While in the hospital Evelyn also demonstrated she has a great capacity for pooping when she had her first poopy diaper explosion that first night. She remains a good pooper. Scott and I have (mostly) figured out a schedule that doesn't leave us both exhausted and cranky, so overall, we'd have to say, we've got this.