Labor and Delivery - May 30, 2008

As this blog is supposed to be about Desi, I was waiting to retrieve the few pictures we have of Desi right after she was born before I started blogging. However, I know have come to terms with the fact that if I continue to wait for them, I'll never have a blog. So here goes... (you'll soon understand why those pictures are so hard to come by).

I began feeling some sort of "labor pains" at 7pm on Thursday, May 29th. I was working from home that day, so I continued to work and go along with my evening as normal. Around 11pm the contractions starting coming regularly, but the Doula, Uncle Merlyn, the Dr., and Colin all thought that they could be Braxton Hicks contractions, so I was advised to stay in bed and rest through them until they got worse. Around 1am Colin decided it was a good time to start packing the hospital bags even though he still said that they were false labor pains. Colin finally came to bed around 2am and that's when the fun began for me. The contractions became very powerful and came in short spurts. By 3:30 am (after squatting, crawling on the floor, bending over the bedhead, etc. and timing the contractions about 2-3 mins long every 3 mins) I decided that it was time to call the Doula again. Doula Debra suggested we head to the hospital (so did Uncle Merlyn, but advised Colin that we didn't need to rush it being my first child and all). And so did my mother-in-law, Kay, who woke up from my moaning and groaning. She softly encouraged us to go to the hospital. Colin first suggested that we take a shower as the hot water might ease my pain. This is when the fun began. Before entering into the shower I decided that it was a good idea to sit on the toilet and push. That's right... it was time to push. But did we think that we needed to head to the hospital? Oh no... we still had to take that shower of course. Kay and Debra didn't think we had time and Kay proceed to bang on the bathroom door and yell at us to get out of the shower and go the hospital. By the time we were out of the shower and Colin had the car packed it was just after 5am. My water broke on the way to the hospital right in front Dadeland South Metro station. We got to the hospital. Doula Debra was there waiting, but we realized oops... we forgot to call the Dr! Luckily he had just left the hospital, so they caught him before he went back to sleep. I was fully dilated, fully effaced and +1. Desi was on her way. We had to wait for the Dr for about 20 minutes. It's hard not to push when that's all you want to do. And for the last craziness of the morning, Colin had to go move the truck from the emergency room parking area before we had Desi. He entered back through the front of the hospital at 4:48, ran upstairs and after 2 and a half pushes Desi was born at 5:53am. What an entrance! Desi weighed 7lbs 5.64oz and was 19.69 inches long.

A big thank you to Daddy Colin who was my advocate and helped me through my first labor with no pain medicine (and almost no doctor). We did it! : )

Back to the story about the pictures... In our rush to the hospital, we didn't take the bags we packed out of the car when we got there so no camera! We took a few pictures on our cell phones. But now I can't figure out how to get them off my cell phone. Gotta love technology.