3.5

Well, baby Jude is one week old today!  I thought I'd take the opportunity to write about his birth story while both boys (who I now affectionately refer to as the Stinky Bottom Boys) are napping.  Wow, no one told me what a sense of accomplishment you feel when you get both of your kids to sleep at the same time!  So here goes...I promise I won't go into graphic detail!

When Jude decided to make his entrance, he decided to make an entrance!  He had apparently had just about enough and said, "Let's get this show on the road!" and at 39 weeks and 2 days he was born! The whole labor, start to finish, was 3 1/2 hours!  Luckily, I live about 3 minutes from the hospital, so we didn't have to waste those precious minutes driving.

Spicy Chinese food.  I'm pretty sure that's what did the trick!  After a very eventful day (taking Cam to his first day of daycare and joining the ladies ministry group at church), my cousin and her daughter came over to play with Cam for a little while.  Then they invited us to go eat Chinese food with them.  We got home around 6:30, and I went to bed around 9:00.  About 9:30 I felt a little bit of pain with a contraction, but I didn't think anything of it because that had been happening for a few weeks.  Then at 10:00 my water broke!  I called my mom and told her we better get ready, so we called the midwife and headed to the hospital.  We had to go in through the ER entrance since it was so late...I wasn't having any real painful contractions yet, so we sat and chatted with the ER admittance lady while I got checked in and waited for them to bring a wheelchair to take me up to labor and delivery.  That took about 20 minutes.  So I got upstairs into the delivery room and the contractions, the real contractions started...about every 4-5 minutes :/  It took for. ev. er. for the nurse to do everything she was supposed to do (check my progress, put in an IV, call the anesthesiologist!!, etc.). I kept telling her my contractions were getting very close together, like 1 minute or less, and much stronger, but she didn't seem very concerned.  I was more than a little upset with her throughout this entire experience...outraged might be an appropriate word.  Anyway, the anesthesiologist finally got there around 1:00am and started prepping me for the epidural (by the way, no one has checked my progress since the nurse did at about 11:30, at which point I was 5cm.).  While he was giving me the epidural I told them the baby was coming, to which the nurse replied, "Oh, you're just feeling some pressure because you're sitting on the edge of the bed." Is that so, nurse?  Well, I laid back down, the midwife came in, and said, "Umm, you can start pushing any time you're ready." Mmm hmm...thought so.  Anyway, three good pushes and our little man was here!!  It was a little scary because the cord was wrapped around his neck about three times, but she quickly unwrapped it and we heard his first little cry :}

So, basically I went through the entire labor without meds...thank goodness it was short, because, sheesh! That sh...tuff hurts!!  But, as a friend of mine said the other day, babies have some kind of magical power that makes you forget the aches and discomfort of pregnancy and the horrible pain of labor the second they're born :} 

The awesome thing is that Josh got to see Jude being born on Skype!  How lucky are we?!  It really felt like he was there because I could hear his voice the whole time...and my mom was there for support too, which was great.  I really can't believe it worked out, but I'm so glad it did!

It' s still a little surreal that Jude is here!  He's looking more and more like Cam every day, which is also pretty weird!  But both he and I are doing great...Cam is having some adjustment issues, which is sad, but I know we'll get them worked out soon.  I'm so blessed and grateful to have two such beautiful sons!  Welcome to our family sweet boy!