Pictures and Story

I have been meaning to post all week, but as you all can guess- things are finally a little busy around here :) I thought I would share a little bit of how things went for us on Monday. For a little preface, I had been having really bad "Braxton Hicks" contractions for about 5 days. We had already taken one trip to the hospital on Saturday night because the baby failed her kick count. When we went in on Saturday, I was still not dilated at all. So Monday morning I woke up at about 5:00 having bad contractions again. I woke Charles up about 45 minutes later because I was feeling them really close together and a lot more intense. We timed them for a couple of hours and they were consistently about 2-3 minutes apart, but occasionally there would be 5-7 minutes between. By about 8 o'clock, I was in a lot of pain and doubled over the toilet so we rounded up the troops and headed for the hospital- and I was NOT coming home without a baby.
When we got to the hospital, I was at a 2 1/2, so they had me walk around the hospital for an hour and see if my cervix changed at all. I was a little more effaced after the hour, so they admitted me and planned on getting some pitocin going to speed things up. By about 1:30 my doctor came to check me, and I was only at a 3. He broke my water then and told me when I got to a 4, I could have my epidural. My contractions were really close together, and really intense, giving me only about 15-20 seconds to recover from some of them. Around 2, the nurses switched shifts and my new nurse came in. About this time, a friend of the Himmer's and anesthesiologist who was on at the hospital came to check on us. After the nurse saw me go through one contraction, she said- he's here now, if you aren't at a 4, we are calling it a 4- lets get this taken care of. So I got the epidural then and it was like a magic potion. 6 hours later we had our Abigail. The epidural started wearing off towards the end of transition, which was really fun. They tried giving me a higher dosage, but the doctor came back in to check our progress and was shocked at how close we were and told me to get ready to push. She was in a posterior position which was not exciting to hear. My doctor told me, ok Heather, the girl in the room next to you just had the same thing and pushed for 3 hours and ended in a c-section, you have to do better than that. So I was determined :) I started pushing, and things happened fast. The nurse had to have me stop pushing 2 times before the doctor came because she was afraid he wouldn't get there in time. She turned right around into the position she needed to be in and things went great from there.
What an incredible experience it is to have a baby. Its definitely a challenge adjusting to things and getting enough rest, but I think I'll get the hang of all of that soon enough. She is a GREAT baby. She has been really easy and mellow so far, so I hope it continues. Here are some more pictures from our first few days at home.