It has been a while since I blogged, which I was never very good at anyway! But I have some great friends that keep up with amazing blogs, and I wish I could do that! So I am going to try to do better. We always have so much going on in our lives and I often feel overwhelmed when I think about where to start. For now, I will start with the birth of our newest beautiful addition to our family - little Katelyn Elaine.
This little sweetie was born on her due date, December 11, 2010, at 4:10 p.m. Because Kelsey's exams began on Monday, December 13th, we decided to induce on the due date. My doctor is great and she was on call that weekend anyway. This was the first time that one of our babies was going to be born by a schedule! Even our twins were spontaneous when I went into labor at 36 1/2 weeks. Needless to say, I didn't sleep much that last night! I kept hoping to go into labor on my own to avoid being induced, but we knew it would be better having her born before exams started and risk Kelsey not being home! I was not looking forward to using Pitocin, and still hope to someday have a child all on my own. I don't have anything to compare it to, but I've read and heard that Pitocin makes the contractions much more painful. More on that later....
We checked in that morning at 6 am. I wasn't sure if we had taken any pictures of me pregnant (I didn't want any of course) and wanted Katelyn to see herself in Mom's tummy later, so we took a quick photo before heading to hospital.
I had been toying with the idea of not getting an epidural this time. This was my 4th child, yet I felt as though I really had no experience or at least nothing to give me any trends of what to expect and prepare for. The girls were born via C-section after I went into labor (they were both laying transverse), then with Drew my water broke first before I was even feeling any real contractions. Then when my labor wasn't progressing they started pitocin and I had an epidural shortly after that. I gained 50 pounds with my first and second pregnancies (yes, the same amount with one baby as with the twins :) and then only 30 with Katelyn, which I am still pretty proud of myself for that. Anyway, I thought that maybe I would like to feel what regular labor is like. And since I was dilated to a 3 already, I was hoping that maybe they would break my water and see how it went before adding the pitocin. But no. They started the pitocin immediately around 7 a.m. and didn't break my water until noon. Then things started happening really quickly! I got an epidural around 2 pm and it never really went into affect. All the medicine must have gone to my right leg, because it was numb for almost a day! And my right arm felt like it was asleep. And even more strange, I felt like I was slurring my words. Extremely uncomfortalbe. I still wonder if it would have felt better to not have the epidural at all. So ironically, I was able to get my fix of what natural childbirth feels like! It was pretty bad! But of course now, 4 months later, I hardly remember the intensity of the pain. Then came our gorgeous little princess. She was very purple when she came out, which was a little scary, but she was fine. Drew had spoiled us because he was a fairly easy labor and birth, and scored a perfect 10 on the apgar scale, which is very rare! Kate scored a 6 at first, then they bumped her up to a 9 after five minutes.
She weighed 7 pounds, 13 ounces, and was 20 inches long. Since it was scheduled, we were very prepared, and my sister Emily came friday night to stay with the kids. Then my mom came down and brought everyone up to see us Saturday night. Drew was so sweet with her!
And so were the girls of course. We didn't get any pictures of them holding her at the hospital, so these are right when we got home on Monday evening. Ella is in the red shirt.
1 comment:
Yea for baby Kate! Good job blogging, Ann!
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