It's about time!

It's about time for a lot of things! First of all, COOPER! Nine months is a flipping long time! Second, time for this blog (Caci's been nudging me along for quite a while now, guess it's time to present our little family to the web for all to see). Third, family, after all - isn't it about...Time?

I really want to just gush about how much we love Cooper and how cute and perfect he is, but I guess first things first - I better set the story straight about how he got here.

On Saturday the 6th of May, me and Jesse went shopping to gather up the last few things that we needed to get Cooper's room complete. We spent the whole day washing clothes and setting up a bed, hanging up cute froggy decorations and cleaning or house. We knew that Cooper was going to be here soon. We even packed a few things in the car just in case my water broke. That night Annie and Dave came over to set up our new computer so we would have somewhere to download all of our cute baby pictures once Cooper came.

Jesse and Dave ran to the store to pick up a few miscellaneous items and me and Annie stayed and watched Top Chef (Love that show!). We started timing my contractions just for fun (they had been coming all week basically) and they started getting stronger and coming about 15 minutes apart. When Jesse and Dave got back I told Annie she might get a call in the middle of the night, so be prepared! Me and Jesse stayed up timing contractions and they started getting pretty serious around 10:30ish and about 7 minutes apart.

We had previously decided that we were going to try to handle them at home for as long as we could so we wouldn't just be sitting at the hospital for hours (riiiiight). So for the next 7 hours till about 5:oo AM Sunday morning we took walks around our apartments and I had 3 baths (hey, they helped with the pain), sat on the couch, then the bed, then the couch, then bed, just trying to get through contractions and relax.

At 5:00 I decided that if they got any worse I wouldn't want to be driving in a car, so we better head off to the hospital. When we got there they checked me and I was only dialated to 2 cm (10 is the goal). They kept me for an hour for observation to see how far I would progress and at the end of that I was at about 3+ cm. So we settled into our delivery room and met our new nurse Lynette (an angel I swear). The next 2 hours took me to 4 cm (I was completely efaced at this time... must have been all the walking!) and that's when the trouble began.

At 4 cm my contractions started to decline in intensity and come less frequently. So, we started walking the halls, Lynette ran me a bath (and picked me flowers!) and they broke my water. After about 2 hours we were about to head out on an hour long walk to take us around the whole hospital to try and get things going, so Lynette was doing routine check on the baby's heartbeat and it plummeted pretty low. She said "I wish I wouldn't have seen that, now I have to keep you in bed." With me in bed, my contractions petering off, and the baby's heartbeat unstable, we had one alternative: Pitocin.

Pitocin is a drug that speeds up contractions and makes them unnaturally painful, but it does bring the baby quicker, which was our goal at this point so we decided to start the drip. *usually this is when you would also begin an epidural to avoid the painful effects of Pitocin, but since we were trying to go naturally, we decided to see how far we could go with the added "boost"*.

I did surprisingly well, I have to say, I am quite proud of myself and my wonderful coach Jesse. The pain got pretty intense, but we had practiced long and hard and it paid off for several hours. In the space of about 3 or 4 hours I progressed from 4 cm to 7cm - we were doing awesome! Even with Pitocin I was handling the pain relatively well. That is the point where we hit yet another road block (somewhere between 12:00 and 2:00 in the afternoon).

Up to that point, the pain had been almost unbearable, but we had been progressing smoothly, so it made it seem worth it. It was then that the progression stopped and I stayed at 7 cm for 3 or 4 hours. To be going through so much pain, only to be told after hours of this you are no closer to your goal than before is pretty depressing. I started losing my grip mentally and crying through contractions, yelling at Jesse and starting to be unreasonable ( I think I bit him a couple of times too). My mom and Annie kicked it in high gear at that point and their sweet voices are really the only things that kept me going just a little while longer (after all, you can't bite your mom).

Annie, and my mom decided me and Jesse had some decisions to make about pain medication so they left the room so we could decide what to do. Jesse had been wonderfully trained to handle my unreasonable state, so it was in that manner, just us two, that we made it through one more painful hour. Jesse crying and pleading just as much as I was that this would be over. At the end of that we decided to take a drug, I can't quite remember the name ( could ya blame me?) that took the edge off and made me kind of loopy. We made this decision in hopes that it would relax my body enough to help it progress and dilate further. It worked! An hour later I was at 8 cm! But that's as far as that pain medication could take me.

At the same time I hit 8cm is where the medication started wearing off. I had a dilemma, 2 more cm to go, and the pain was worse than it had ever been. Also a problem was that even though I was at an 8, the baby wasn't dropping into the birth canal. Jesse tried coaching me through one more hour, but it turned out I just bawled and pleaded for about half the hour and then the nurse came in and said she had spoken with the doctor, and he decided that after 20 hours of labor, and the baby's heartbeat unstable as it was, the only thing to do was an epidural because the baby wasn't dropping. Which either meant he was too big, or my body wasn't relaxing and opening up enough for him to drop. It was then that she scared the crap out of me and mentioned a c-section in the case that the baby didn't drop in next little while.

We readily agreed to an epidural and in 5 minutes the guy was there and prepping me. After all those hours of pain a needle in my back was NOTHING! and a few minutes after that, I was pain free! For the next 2 hours me and Jesse dozed in and out of sleep and at the end of 2 hours the baby was right there! ready for me to push! I pushed through about 5 contractions and Cooper was here! All 7lbs. 11oz., 20 3/4 inches long. We couldn't be any happier, we love this little guy to death.