After Kristin originally posted that we’d be live-blogging the birth of our new boy, I think I failed to call out which posts were in-fact live blogs. From now on, look for updates by the heading above and the corresponding update #.
It’s 2:30 on Saturday, and here are the updates.
For the past week, we’ve been putting off induction, even at the suggestion of our OB, mostly because of the fear of everything that happened to Kristin in the last delivery. Neither one of us wanted to “force” our child into the world, and as my father mentioned to me, “fully baked is better than half-baked.”
But, in our reluctance to induce, we’ve been anxiously waiting the signs and symptoms of labor. Finally, a week overdue, we saw the first indications that things might be happening last night. So around 11:30, Kristin came to the hospital to verify what was going on, while I stayed with Maddy until the prognosis.
Around 4 a.m., Kristin was admitted into the Labor and Delivery Ward, and I coordinated for one of our AWESOME friends to come and watch the girl. At 7 this morning, we were sitting around 4cm in dilation, with a probable high tear in the bag of waters.
A few hours later, 5cm, and come 2pm, a solid 6cm of dilation. She was on a dose of Pitocin for a while prior to the epidural, but stopped it when she was screaming in pain. Now that the epidural is in, they’ve re-upped the pitocin to get a steady cycle of the contractions.
Currently the baby is turned a little to the side, so they’ve propped her up with some pillows to encourage the baby to roll over, and she’s holding the elephant condom-like spit-up basin in case she tosses her Jello.
One thing to note.
Last time, I spoke about the need to check the hands of the nurses before they go shoving their fingers inside to check dilation. That’s because we had a nurse, who I affectionately called “man hands” who made my catcher’s mitts look like a child’s mittens.
Well, the same can be said of a nurse with tiny hands. Not only does she have to force her hand further back, she might have to go elbow’s-deep to find her target.
More to come…
