mollie's birth day

this will be my last pregnancy post...sad since i really enjoy being pregnant, but so excited because we welcomed our sweet baby girl.

i made it to june 3rd, my due date. so 40 weeks pregnant, the most pregnant i've ever been. at the advice of my midwife, i had an induction scheduled for that morning at 7:30am. since it was later in the morning, we spent the night at home and just drove down early on thursday.

we arrived at the hospital and got settled right away in a room. it was pretty calm and quiet and i got settled in my gown and bed soon after and answered the millions of admission questions from the nurse. my midwife came to check on me and gave me the plan for the day. i was given a pill that would help to start the process and then had to lay down for an hour. we tried to find something on tv...not much, but i settled on some good gossip tv on e and tried to relax for a bit.

after the first hour i hadn't really made any progress, so the nurse told me i could walk around if i felt okay to see if that would help move things along. i walked around the room and made some rounds in the hall.

my mom and sister arrived a little before lunch time, they had stayed home in the morning to make sure the boys got to the babysitter okay. lance went off in search of food and some magazines to keep us occupied since it was taking longer than i thought it would. with miles i had packed a ton of stuff and never used it since it happened pretty quickly, so this time i didn't bring anything really except one magazine to read, so we were not prepared for a long day.

i started having more regular contractions, but they weren't very strong or painful yet. heather decided to start me on pitocin at this point (i was 3cm and for reference i began that morning at 1.5cm) to help move things along.

lance arrived back at the room and brought some magazines and games for us to play. since i was STARVING by this time (hadn't had anything to eat since about 9PM the night before) my sister snuck in some of the flavored syrup that you put in your coffee so i could have it on my ice chips and make them seem a little bit more edible.

i still wasn't progressing that quickly (still at 3cm), so around 3:20pm they came in and upped my dose of pitocin. heather determined that anytime after 4cm i could get my epidural and i just needed to let them know. around 4:15 she came in and told me that she was going to break my water, but wanted me to have my epidural before that since it could get very painful right after doing that and things might move too quickly. so we started getting ready for the anethesiologist to come in. she checked and i was at 5cm right before getting the epidural.

after getting the epidural heather checked me again and my water ended up breaking on its own right before she was about to break it at 5:07pm. i decided to try to take a nap before things got crazy!

i was about 8 cm around 6:30 so i knew things were getting close. since i'd been crazy taking pics all day, decided to take a few more calm ones before it got too late. oh and i was freezing by this point (i guess from the epidural) and had about a million blankets on me.

right after we took these pictures heather came in and i had made it to 9cm, so they started getting everything ready for delivery. lance packed up his computer and headed to the waiting area. i started pushing at 7:00 and she arrived at 7:10pm.

heather had been coaching me to push very quickly and by that point i was ready to get things done so i was really trying to do it as fast as i could. i later found out that the reason she was pushing to get it done so quickly was because mollie's heartrate was going down due to the fact that she was coming out with both shoulders at the same time and her cord was pressed up around her neck. thankfully all was well and she was fine once she was delivered. they put her right on my chest and i got to hold her for a while before my mom cut her cord and they took her to be cleaned up.

happy birth day, mollie!

mollie katherine * 7:10pm * 6lbs, 11oz * 20" long

she ended up being my biggest baby...how funny for our girl to be the biggest of the bunch. she started nursing right away. lance came in and met his daughter for the first time. and soon we were on our way to our recovery room. but only after i had some french toast from ihop. yay! at 9PM, i finally got my first food of the day. :)