Little Foot's birth story

Now that it's been a year since we brought home our little angel I thought it was high time I wrote up her birth story. I knew going into this that I wanted to document that day and the Mr. was my own personal secretary (among other things). It's funny that I still remember most of it like it was yesterday but the first month after she was born is a haze. Selective amnesia, I suppose.

That Wednesday started out like any other day. My alarm went off way too early and I rolled shimmied out of bed to get ready for work. After my morning routine I headed to work and pulled into my normal parking spot around 5:45am. When I got out of my car I felt a... heavy leak? Not a gush, but I obviously wasn't losing control of my bladder if you know what I mean. I sat back down. Nope, that didn't fix it. I waddled to my trunk, pulled out the blankets I kept back there for an instance like this, and threw them on my car seat, ready to head back home.

As I left my parking garage I called the Mr. and let him know my water broke. I don't know who was more shocked at this point, but he was apparently much more excited since he later told me he was dancing around the house after we got off the phone.

Once I got home we started timing my contractions. They were consistently five minutes apart so we called my OB around 8am and she told me to head to the hospital. We threw together the last of our hospital bag and slowly made our way to the maternity ward. Around 10am they confirmed that my water had in fact broken (no, I'm just taking the world's largest pee), hooked me up to a monitor, and admitted me to the hospital.

We sat around for a couple hours with very little happening (I was still only 1cm dilated) so they decided to start me on Pitocin around 12:30pm. Apparently Little Foot was having a dance party inside and they couldn't keep an eye on her so they had to do an internal monitor for her. My mom came by to hang out and sent the Mr. off for some lunch while I struggled through ROUGH contractions for the next couple hours. Those people that say Pitocin causes rolling contractions are not lying. I had maybe 15-20 seconds between them and it was trying.

After battling that pain for over three hours, I asked for a check on my progress. 3cm. How is it possible that I was dealing with that much pain and it was doing NOTHING. Ugh. I finally gave in and asked for an epidural around 3:30pm, right when the Mr.'s mom made it in from West Virginia.

I was happy to be resting in relative comfort (I could still feel every contraction) until I started feeling a lot of pressure down there. The only way I can describe it is a desire to want to push. My OB checked me around 5:30pm- just two hours after my epidural- and told me I was 9.5cm and pretty much ready to push. Woohoo!

I started pushing around 6pm and at 6:51pm our sweet baby made her way into this world just 13 hours after the process started. They immediately put her on my chest so I could see her and love her and cuddle her and that was the exact moment that my heart swelled to a whole new size.