Recounting... Summer's On The Way

For those of you not interesting in the details of labor and delivery, go ahead and skip this entry, but I want to go ahead and get the details of Summer's birth down for my own journaling purposes. (Why is there suddenly no one reading my blog?!) :) 

Well, the day was Saturday, January 10, 2009, and I was laying peacefully in my bed at around 4:00 in the morning when I started to have some contractions. Now, these were the same types of contractions that had been waking me up for the previous two or three nights, so I didn't think much of it. They kept coming every 5-6 minutes or so (same as other nights), but I was so tired that I kept falling back asleep and forgetting to write times of contractions down, etc. Finally around 5:00 a.m., they had woken me up enough that I figured I better get up and see if walking around made them go away. So I got up, went to the kitchen, got a drink and then came and sat at the computer and started reading everyone's blogs. (Yes... that's what pregnant people do at 5 o'clock in the morning... read your blogs. So make 'em interesting!) :) The contractions were still coming, so I started writing down the times they started. They were coming regularly at every 5 minutes, but I still was not thinking much of it until I realized I'd been sitting here at the computer for just about an hour and I'd been having regular contractions before that as well. I thought "hmm... I'm SURE this isn't the real thing, but I better go wake Jim and just let him know what's going on anyway." By this time it's just after 6 AM, so I'm not feeling too bad if I wake Jim up... plus he was supposed to get up in a half hour anyway to go work out with his buddy at the gym. So I put my hands on the arm rests of the chair to stand up, and just as a start to stand... GOOSH! My water broke! And this is not one of those light little breaks where you just start leaking water. No... this is a 'had I been in the middle of Wal-Mart and this happened I never would be able to show my face in public again' type of water breaking. The amount of water was astounding! It was downright comical! The only non-comical part about it was that I was nowhere near a towel. :) Well, I hustled as quickly as my pregnant body would let me to the bathroom for a towel and then went to my room, flipped the lights on and said softly "Jim...", "Jim..." and when he didn't hear me the first time or two I finally just said "JIM. Get up." He bolted up in bed, looked at me, and funny enough, as I'm standing there with a towel between my legs and staring at him, I think he thought he was late for working out. :) Ah yes, the things that go through your mind when you're still not really awake. :) So anyway, I told him that my water had broken and we needed to go to the hospital. Then he was REALLY confused about what to do. It was so cute. He just jumped out of bed and was like, "um... okay. What do I need to do?" So I put him in charge of calling Steve and Ashley (our friends that were going to come over to stay with Dixie in the event that anything like this happened before my mom was here), and I jumped in the shower (no way was I going anywhere after having been soaked like that without a shower!). Jim couldn't get in touch with Steve OR Ashley (neither had their phones on or with them) and when I tried calling my doc, I ended up sitting on hold! HELLO PEOPLE! I'm trying to have a BABY here! :) So I finally had to call Steve's parents, who went and woke them up for us, and when I got in touch with the dr's office they said the dr would meet us at the hospital in a little while. So we got everything ready, Steve and Ashley showed up, we gave them last minute instructions, and we were out the door and on our way to the hospital. I called my mom to let her know the situation, and talk about bummer timing... her flight was for that very day, but didn't get in until early evening, by which time we were sure to have had the baby. But oh well... at least she was going to be there that day! So anyway, we got to the hospital without any drama, got signed in, got a nice cozy hospital room, and I donned the fabulous, oh-so-stylish hospital gown and got settled into the bed for the duration. My contractions had slowed down a little bit since my water breaking, and strangely enough, when they checked my progress (I was dilated to a 4!), the nurse said she still saw a water sac in there. Odd. I told her I was pretty darn positive that it was my water that had broken because there's no way I just peed myself like that. :) She checked the fluid coming out and sure enough it was amniotic fluid. Anyway, they eventually had the dr rupture the other sac in there and I'm still to this day not sure if that was a different sac or the same one or what the deal was with all that-- I just know I had a TON of water exit my body that morning. :) Well, with all the water sacs broken and with a little bit of pitocin to help bring the contractions back more steadily, labor was officially in progress... as well as was the pain. The contractions were starting to get pretty intense and I knew I had no desire to find out just how tough I could be, so I told the nurse to go ahead and order the epidural. She went to get that all started and when she came back, she told me the anesthesiologist was in a procedure he couldn't get out of for about another half hour. Oh, how my heart sunk. I had already waited to the point where I was struggling to get through the contractions before I asked for the epidural, and now I was going to have to wait a half hour more??! Ugh!! So they gave me an IV drug to help take the edge off the pain, but I think all that did was make me sleepy and dizzy. Fortunately the drug doc got there sooner than anticipated and with a quick poke here, a little pressure there, I was in happy bliss with my epidural. :) (I KNOW the number one reason I was born in this day and age was for the epidurals!) :) Well, from that point on, life was good. Labor progressed and within about 2 hours I was ready to push. The nurse called my dr and then was going to have me try pushing a little, but Jim told her I only had to push for about 15 minutes with Dixie, so the nurse decided maybe she'd have me wait till the doctor was there. Well, good thing because by the time the doc got in the room and they had me start pushing... it was one contraction, three pushes, and Summer was officially a part of our family! 

And she was absolutely perfect! Such a beautiful little baby girl. It was funny, because my first thought after she was born and I saw her for the first time was, "Did I just give birth to Dixie again?" It was like de ja vu! She looked pretty much exactly the same. It was weird. But from that moment on she has been such a blessing to us. We love how calm and quiet she is. Sometimes I practically forget I've got a second child in the house!... she just doesn't make much noise! She's started coming into her own look now, but she's our precious little girl and we absolutely love and adore her. Thanks for all the love and support. We sure do love you all!