Ben promised a post about Maddy’s birth and our hospital experience so here it is!  This update is coming about 4 months late, but as we are using this blog to record our experiences for Maddy, we are going to post it anyway.  We are each going to give an account of Maddy’s birth from our respective viewpoints since we each experienced it so differently.

Here is Katie’s tale:

During the last trimester of my pregnancy, I was going in twice a week for checkups and ultrasound scans because my fluid levels were low and Maddy was so small.  When I went in for an ultrasound on September 30th my fluid levels were a three when they should have been in the nine to twelve range so they decided to induce labor the next morning.  Ben and I spent the rest of the day running around trying to get things done, since we’d been planning on having another month to finish everything.  We bought some preemie clothes, set up the bassinet, packed a labor bag and bought an ipod nano (probably the last item wasn’t absolutely necessary).   Then we spent a sleepless night until we finally gave up on sleeping in the early hours.  Early that morning, I looked up October first on the History Channel’s “This Day in History” section.  It turns out it’s a pretty good day to be born.  Madeleine shares a birthday with Julie Andrews, NASA, and Yellowstone Park!  Somehow that gave me a little bit better feeling about everything.  We got to the hospital at the ungodly hour of 5:30 A.M. and I was in the room and hooked up to Pitocin by about 6:00.  Then we sat around for 6 hours.  I had some contractions, but just little painless ones, things didn’t progress much.  My mom came at about 8:30 AM and we watched Cash Cab and felt bad about how stupid we are (although most of the contestants were not any better).  Mom bought me some Certs mints (which I still refer to as labor mints) and got Ben one of these: They kept giving me more and more Pitocin but I wasn’t progressing well so at  noon my doctor came and broke my waters and then things started speeding up.  The next 5 hours are pretty much a blur.  The contractions got pretty darn painful and at 4:00 or so my doctor checked me and said I had at least 2 more hours of labor to go at which point I said, “I think I want an epidural then”.  When the nurse came to give me an epidural she checked me and said, “Well, I hope you don’t mind going the natural route because your 8 centimeters dilated and you’re having this baby now” , at which point I was very relieved, since I hadn’t really wanted to get an epidural to begin with.  The nurse then left the room and I told my mom, “I feel like I need to push”, then “never mind, maybe not”.  My mom was like, “No, if you feel like you need to push then you need to” and she promptly got the nurse back in the room who, after checking me, said, “yeah, this baby is coming now, but your doctor just left so it will take at least 10 minutes for her to get back here.”  And thus started the worst 10 minutes of  my life, trying not to have a baby when my body desperately wanted to.  Once the doctor got in the room it was only about 20 minutes later that Maddy was born at 5:27 pm.  Ben immediately said, “She has so much hair!” and the doctor told me that she looked very healthy for being born a month early.  She weighed 5 pounds 8 ounces but she was pretty chubby and beautiful!!! At least we thought so! I felt so exhilarated after giving birth, and I also felt famished.  I ordered fish and chips from the hospital menu and it was the best meal that I’ve ever tasted (which shows how hungry I was).  Both of our immediate families came to visit her just after she was born and I felt so happy and energetic and great.  We stayed up that whole first night just staring at her and watching her hiccup and yawn and sneeze. Everything she did was amazing to us.

Two days later, and almost a pound lighter, she came home with us, and the last four months have been a scary, wonderful, awe inspiring, tiring blur.  And that is the story of the best day of my life.

Ben’s Tale

Because of the low fluid scare we had gotten quite used to going to the doctor for check ups. It was great to get to see Maddy on ultrasound all the time and I started to get used to it. Then one day the specialist brought us into his office and said “do you want to have your baby today?” At first I thought to myself “yeah that would be sweet, we’ve been waiting so long and I wouldn’t have to go back to work…….wait, what?” It was a very strange feeling as I slowly realized how serious he was and that we were indeed going to have our baby. And soon. After a very hectic, strange, and long morning figuring out how the birth would happen we left the doctor’s office shocked. I made one of the best phone calls to my office I’ve ever made “I’m not coming in, I’m having my baby”. Then we rushed around, bought all the things we were missing, and had lunch at Panda Express. I still think of that day every time we have Panda Express. Anyway, it was a very long afternoon, evening, night, early morning. If we weren’t in a daze yet, we were definitely in a daze when we finally got to the hospital at 5:30am. They plopped us in the room and stuck Katie with an IV and then we sat. For the longest time it seemed like nothing was going to happen. Katie’s mom Cindy came to join us and we watched tv together. Around lunch time Katie’s doctor came and broke her water. She wanted to get things moving because she wanted to be there to deliver but her shift was ending right around the time she thought it would happen. After that things slowly started to ramp up. Katie’s contractions started getting painful and she started shifting positions and Cindy and I took turns rubbing her back. It seemed like we did that forever and whenever the nurses would come to check the progression they would say we still had quite a ways to go. I focused on helping Katie stay comfortable and watching the contraction monitor to see what was up and then I lost all sense of time. Before I knew it the contractions were increasing greatly in pain but the nurses still said we had a while to go. Katie started to get tired and we were a bit disheartened at the looks of how long it was going to be. This whole time the nurses kept saying that Katie was doing a great job and that she was handling everything well. And she was too, she was awesome. We could hear several women screaming down the halls and all kinds of commotion. When nurses would come to check on Katie they looked relieved “what? you’re not going to bite my head off and scream till my ears hurt?” Finally a nurse came and checked the dilation and announced that she was around 6 or 7 so “2 or 3 more hours”. We were a bit discouraged to hear that and Katie requested an epidural to get through it. The nurse said ok and ran off to get everything in order. At this point everyone was settling in and getting prepared for more hours of waiting and contractions. Katie’s doc came and checked on her and said she was leaving for the day but that she might be able to come back. We had several reports that the epidural was coming but that the person who did them had quite a list already so it might be a while. When it was finally our turn a nurse came to check dilation one more time and get everything ready. She checked and said “whoa, you’re at an 8 already!” She told us that things were coming fast now and that an epidural might just slow everything down at this point. She rushed off to tell someone and call off the epidural while all of a sudden Katie felt the urge to push. Cindy went to tell the nurses of this and they were like “no way, really?” Yet another nurse rushed in to check dialation and she said she was complete, no cervix to be found, this baby is ready to go. Katie’s doctor had just left the hospital so they called her and told her to come back. She said she could be there in 15 minutes so the nurses asked Katie to try not to push till she got there. I don’t know how she did it, but she did it. It was amazing. All the birthing crew came in the room and set up all their equipment. The doctor finally arrived and Katie could finally push. It was all quite crazy. The first I saw of Maddy was her furry furry head. She had so much hair I can’t even believe it. Finally she emerged and let out a wail right away.

She was so beautiful and healthy. I followed her around the room as they cleaned her off and put her under the warmer and checked everything. All the staff were very nice and let me touch her and talk to her and pointed out all the “this always makes a good picture” moments. After they were done they promptly left the room and we had a few quiet moments to gaze at her. I got to escort her to the nursery to get her first bath and get her final check ups. It was hard not to feel very proud of my baby while strolling down the hall with her. She did not like getting cleaned at all but she did have one very serence moment when she got a dunk in a tub. After she was clean I brought her to our room and got to show her off to all our family. That day was the proudest day of my life.