Charlie's Birth Story

My little man is finally here! Charles William was born on November 26th at 11:29am. He weighed in at 8 lbs 2 oz and 20 inches long. (Before pushing Andrew and I both made guesses on his weight. He guess 8 lbs 4 oz and I guessed 8 lbs 2 oz. I was dead on.)

I was scheduled for an induction, for a couple reasons, for Tuesday the 26th. The week before I was only dilated to 1 cm, so I was a little worried that my body wouldn't cooperate and I'd end up with a c-section. I have no issues with c-sections, but knew recovery would be much harder and now that we live in a house that is on a hill, with stairs, and a wild pre-schooler, it made me even more nervous.

Luckily when I got to the hospital to get all set up I was already dilated to 3 cm and having contractions every 10 minutes. My Doctor came by to check on me first thing and to break my water. They started pitocin and let me know that when I was ready I could request pain medication or go straight to the epidural.

My labor with Colin was long (13 hours, which I didn't think was long until people recently kept saying to me that it was...) and I pushed for 2 hours before having to use the vacuum to get him out. I got my epidural around 5 cm with Colin. I wanted to wait as long as possible on the epidural because I was afraid it might stall my labor and I wanted to avoid a c-section.

About 1 1/2 hours into labor I requested to have my progress checked as the contractions were getting stronger and closer. They weren't intolerable, but I wanted to get an idea of how far I had come. I was about 4.5 cm dilated. I decided to just do some pain meds as I really wanted to get past 5 cm on my own before getting the epi.

To make a long story short, I ended up getting an epi, but waited so long that I was 9 or 10 cm by the time they placed it. Not really sure because she decided to wait and check my progress after the epi was placed so I would be more comfortable (I was pretty miserable at that point). When she checked me right after the epi was started I was complete and ready to push!

I am not sure how long I pushed for, but not long at all and they made me stop pushing because there was no one there but my one nurse. =P I felt like a rock start and was so proud of what my body did so easily.

This labor was so different from my labor with Colin. My Dr told me this morning that she couldn't believe it went so fast. She had expected and planned to be around until 8 that night for my delivery. No one expected him to arrive before lunch.

He spent a few days in the NICU for some monitoring of his heart. We've know about a heart issue with Charlie since about 28 weeks or so. We only told a few people who kept him in their prayers and it look like, although the heart defect still exists, it may be on the minor side and something we just have to watch. We go back to the pediatric cardiologist on Thursday to look at his heart again (outside of my body this time!) to see what exactly he has going on now that the murmur is closed. He seems to be doing well and the NICU doctor didn't seem overly concerned so I am not as worried as I was before he was born. =) But I'd still appreciate prayers for when we go Thursday to check on the little guys ticker.

I have pictures to post but the card in my camera decided it needed to be reformatted. So Andrew is trying to find all the photos on that memory card before reformatting it. Hopefully he finds them all and I will post some pictures soon!