On This Day Four Years Ago...

Four years ago today, I was 39 weeks pregnant with Sammie. I went to my 39 week check up with my doctor who informed me that although I had been having sporadic contractions for a couple of days, nothing was going on. He said he’d see me the following week for my next appointment and we would discuss induction options at that time. I was ok with that. I really wanted to go into labor on my own with her, and had such a great pregnancy that I wasn’t in a big hurry.


I came home, shared the news with Nathan, we had dinner and sat out on the deck enjoying the extremely nice weather. We were talking about her coming soon and Nathan said “I feel like this is the calm before the storm”. After a while I was tired and headed up to bed. An hour later Nathan came up to join me and surprise! My water broke, at 10:30 that night.

After a quick shower and calls to our families, we headed to the hospital. In the car my contractions were about seven minutes apart and once they got me hooked up to the monitors, they were three minutes apart. They decided to give me Pitocin as things were not progressing as they would have liked. Pitocin is the devil, for anyone who doesn’t know. It took them seven horrible attempts to get my IV started, but finally, they did, around 3 a.m. Then the party really got started, or the pain, whichever way you want to look at it.


We waited patiently…

Our parents and sisters waited patiently…

Somewhere around 7:30, I FINALLY got my epidural, which was wonderful! Within ten seconds of them giving it to me, I could sit up and open my eyes again, and the first thing I saw was complete relief on Nathan’s face. We were settled down and I was MUCH more comfortable, so I told him to head down for some food, since the nurse told us it would be a while (I was at 3 ½ before the epidural). He left and our moms came in to keep me company.


At about 8:30 the shift change had occurred and the new nurse came in to check me and asked our moms to step out. Guess what? It was baby time!!! She immediately asked me where “Dad” was, and I said we just sent him down for breakfast! So she called our moms back in and had them get a hold of Nathan while she called my doctor. Nathan thought we were playing a joke on him! But he came up anyway, just to be sure!

I’ll spare you the details of course, but I will say it went way better than I had feared, and then…