New Year's Day - Will Ashlynn Make Her Debut?

We slept in late on New Year's day...me because I had a headache, Michael, well, because he just likes to sleep! Little did we know this would be the last time we would have that opportunity for probably 18 years! When we finally got up around 11:30, Michael said to me, "I want you to go ahead and push this baby out today, but after the Panthers game (at 1 pm)." I laughed at him and said I would do my best. Well...

At 12:55 pm we were pretty sure my water broke. Looking back, my first reaction should have been to eat something because I hadn't eaten since dinner the night before. I decided to take a shower, while I was in there, Michael did research on how to know if your water broke for sure. We were 95% sure that was what happened, and it looked like there was meconium (Ashlynn's first poop...yuck!) in the water. I called Michael's Aunt Carol because she is a nurse, she agreed it was probably my water breaking. I decided to still call the doctor's office on-call nurse to make sure I was supposed to go to the hospital. It took a while for her to call me back and told me I needed to get to the hospital IMMEDIATELY. This kind of freaked me out, so I didn't have us stop to eat...big mistake. I did grab a protein bar on my way running out the door. It was really warm that day and I got to wear flip flops to the hospital! I was definitely not the wardrobe I would have expected when I found out our due date was in January.

On the way to the hospital, we called mom & Lee, dad & Lorie and Tim & Terri. They all decided to come to the hospital as my contractions got closer. At this point, I really wasn't having many contractions, but it was obvious that my water had broken. We had a very uneventful check-in and had a very nice nurse. This was around 3 pm. My contractions were about 15 minutes apart at this point and were a little bit painful. The nurse asked lots of questions and even said she hoped we had the baby during her shift which ended at 7 pm. I wasn't that unrealistic, but did agree that would be great.

Me before changing into my hospital gown. Goodbye to my big belly. :( I forgot to measure my belly at it's final size! I also forgot to weigh myself, but I'm not as sad about that!

I got an epidural around 7 pm, that was pretty rough, but then it was like heaven!! I was 4 cm at 9:30 pm and Dr. S thought it would take about an hour per centimeter (so 6 hours). She was very wrong!! At some point, they stopped giving me estimates on how long things were going to take because everything was taking me so much longer. I was not making much progress and my contractions were not consistent, so they put me on pitocin to speed things up. From my perspective, it definitely didn't do that! I won't give you all the details, but Ashlynn wasn't ready for the final pushing stage until 11 am on January 2! By this point, Dr. S had left and Dr. B was there to deliver. I was totally exhausted by this point and Dr. B said it would take 30 minutes to about 3 hours to push. I ended up pushing for an hour and a half, so I finally accomplished something in the time they expected!