Birth Story!

Ms. Laurel Mackenzie was born on 1/12/09 at 12:34 pm weighing in at 7lbs 6oz. and 21 inches long. I went in to be induced on 1/11 and arrived around 5pm on Sunday evening. When i got hooked up to the monitors it showed that i was already contracting relatively regularly, but i didn't feel much of anything at all. They put cervadil in around 7pm or so and left that in for 5 or 6 hours i think. Once that was in though my contractions got pretty serious so i was put on an IV drip of pain meds. I don't even remember the name because they worked so well. I do know that i got really silly and really snappy at the same time and rambled on about things in my sleep. LOL. Around 5am on 1/12 they started me on pitocin to speed things along since i was only at about 5-6 cm. At that time i got an epidural too because the IV meds were gone and i was feeling really really strong contractions. I apparently was blessed with long contractions so they were lasting 30secs.-1 min. The epi was soooooooo wonderful and i had no bad side affects whatsoever so i was happy about that. It was still really weird though to touch your legs and feel absolutely nothing. Odd sensation. At 11:30 I was dialted and ready to start pushing. I pushed for an hour all said and done and it was ROUGH. Baby girl had her foot in my rib cage so i had to put my hand between her foot and my rib cage during each push to stop the immense pressure. It was so bad that i could hardly take a breath between pushes. Eventually though with her help from pushing off of my ribs she came out! Man was it a relief! She was so perfect and beautiful and WHAT a head of hair! Her Apgar scores were 8/9 so she was great. Word of warning though (Hettie)...after all the difficulty of pushing....the doctor squeezing out your placenta and extra stuff hurt as much as my worst contraction so be prepared. I was totally not ready for that so just a heads up! Everything was so worth it though and now i have a beautiful little girl at home that is doing great. She had slight jaundice for 2 days and had to sleep under the lights but all is well now. Breast feeding was rough and she had trouble latching on so i have switched to pumping which relieved a LOT of my stress, as well as hers i'm sure.
Well she is sleeping now so i thought i'd rejoin the internet world and post some of the pics from the photo session that we had yesterday done for her newborn shots. They turned out so amazing. I can't help but cry whenever i see them, much less her, because i love her so much and can't believe that she is finally here. We waited so long to welcome our girl into the world that it's just surreal. Joel and i both just sat and watched her in the hospital and thought wow...we get to take her home...she is OURS! So enjoy the preview and i'll post more when we get the full session back.