Finally! Birth Story Part 1

She is finally here!!

Gran holding sweet Mary Margaret

I can't believe that we did it. I say WE because it was a huge team effort.

This is how I looked after a shower and blow drying my hair. Not directly after giving birth

Ok, so this is going to be the birth story and I'm not going to hold anything back. I'm going to tell you all about the mistakes and successes through the whole thing. If you think that may be TMI for you... I would stop reading now. Otherwise, enjoy :)

Let us begin.

We had planned to pry her out on Thursday October 25th (that's right... today). But I then had a Non-Stress Test (NST) on Monday morning and we made the game-time decision to have my membranes swept (look it up if you really wanna know what that is, lets just say it can start labor). Then if that wasn't enough straying from the plan, we pushed the original induction up to Monday night. We had spoken to one of our midwives, Jualeah, told us that she prefers to use a drug called Cytotec... look that one up too. There are some potential issues that we understood, but trusted our midwife team on their decision and went ahead with it. Mistake #1

We called into work and school and instead went home after the appointment. I used the breast pump for about two hours total to emcourage contractions, went to a great lunch at the Flying Biscuit, and picked up some last minute items from Babies-R-Us. We then went home, collected Buckley (the beast) and took him to his grandparent's house where he remains until this weekend possibly. And we had a final meal at Jersey Mikes in Durham before heading to the hospital.

Not what you normal see when people are headed to the have a baby...

7:00pm
We arrived at Durham Regional and although they didn't have a real room ready for us, they put us in a nice-looking coat closet where we got checked in and spoke to Leigh Ann, our midwife on the floor at the time, about my options and to confirm everything that was going to happen.

9:00pm
We decided to proceed with the Cytotec plan and got everything going before we tried to sleep for a while.  Watch some cable since we don't have it at home (How exciting, I know)... and let things take their course.

1:00am
Leigh Ann checked my lady parts and said that there wasn't a ton of progress, maybe 3-cm dilation. So she was going to put in another piece of Cytotec (it was a pill cut into 4 pieces) and some more Ambien for sleeping.

1:30 am
Charlie and I were checked by the nurse Katie and I was shivering, MM's heart-rate is really low (like in the 80 bpm, as opposed to 130-140s) and the contractions are coming way quick. Leigh Ann and Katie rush around getting the oxygen mask on me, take the Cytotec out of my lady parts, hook me up to an IV to flush the Cytotec out of my system, and gave me a shot to slow the contractions down. In passing Leigh Ann mentions the possibility of having to have a c-section, which of course I would have done, if necessary... but I had still planned on having a natural childbirth.

3:00 am
I was feeling "better" and labor had started, but also had back pain. Note: I'm going to have back labor the entire labor. It was excursiating and horrible. This was when real labor began...

Here is a preview of the next post

Welcome to the photogenic McCants family Mary Margaret

Here is Part 2