1.3.13

Otherwise now known as Emerson's birthday. And this is otherwise known as her birth story, so boys who don't like this stuff....skip this post. And ladies (like myself) who LOVE a fellow mom's recap of labor and delivery, this is for you.
I could barely sleep the Wednesday night before our planned induction, at 4am I went downstairs for a snack, played online and then climbed back into bed at 4:30am repeatedly telling myself not to get my hopes up for an early call from the hospital.   Not 15 minutes later they called.  So we had the best 4:45am wake up call.  Thankfully we had taken the girls out to my folks the night before so we were able to grab a quick bite, drink some coffee, freak out a bit and then hit the road.  By the time we got checked in, settled, gone through all the questions with the nurse, etc...it was about 7:30am.  They started me out on pitocin and Grant and I caught up on all our morning news shows.  I will spare you the long version but basically between 7:30am and 11:30am, not much was really happening.  As they increased the pitocin, my contractions would pick up but they were still pretty irregular and I found that once they started to get slightly painful and I switched to laying on my side, they would slow down again.   That was frustrating as it wasn't really true labor if this was the case.  My doctor came in around 12:00pm and decided to break my water.   Shortly after that the contractions started coming pretty strong and fast.  I was told I could get my epidural whenever I wanted but seeing as they had just broken my water I thought maybe it was a bit premature because I did not want to slow anything down.  No sooner had I told the nurse I would wait just a bit, I started getting insanely painful contractions every 2 minutes.  I rode out 4 of those in a row and then sent Grant to track down the nurse and 'get me some drugs!'.  We had to wait about 15 minutes (which is an ETERNITY in laboring minutes, kind of like dog years) when my sweet savior Dr. Something-or-other came in with his cart full of fun.   It took awhile to get all setup and he had to work around my 2 minute contractions but eventually I started feeling some relief.  I was basking in my pain-free glory and celebrated with a Popsicle for all of about 15 minutes....
I'd say it was probably 1:00/1:15pm by now and out of nowhere I felt that drop and crazy pressure (thankfully it didn't hurt but you knew something was happening and it was the same feeling I experienced with both girls). I had Grant find our nurse again and when she got in I asked her to check me (the only other time I had been checked was back before they broke my water when I was a 3cm-4cm). She gave me a look like she thought I was kind of nuts for wanting to be checked so fast but she obviously obliged and gave me a shocked look when she said 'well, you're at a 9 - let's call the doctor'. We had to wait a bit for my doctor to get there while all the nurses prepared the room for delivery, meanwhile the pressure was crazy and all I wanted to do was start pushing. My doctor arrived around 1:30pm and we got started.....about 20 minutes of pushing later out came our sweet little Emerson. She was the smoothest delivery of the three and came out nice and pink with that sweet little cry you so anxiously wait to hear.
I only started this post about 4 hours ago......101 distractions and interruptions later, we'll call it a day.   Next time I get a breather (sometime in 2015 I'm sure), I will post more pics of the girls meeting their sister for the first time and how the first few days have been going.