Anna Grace is Here!!

Our little miracle arrived at 7:32pm on April 25, 2010 weighing 6 pounds 3.4 ounces and measuring 20 inches long. Her debut into this world came after a long, hard labor for me but she is well worth all of it.

I went into labor Saturday afternoon during a game of Scrabble with my wonderful husband. My contractions became more regular by 5- just in time to go to church and I breathed through them every 20 minutes until it was time to go home. We ate some dinner (which happened to be a terrible idea on my part.) and got ready to go to the hospital. A little after midnight when I threw up my entire dinner, we decided it was time to go to the Birth Place at St. Mary's Hospital. With my contractions coming every 5 minutes we were sure that I had made some progress but was disappointed to find out that I was still only 1 cm dilated after the nurses had set up a room for me. They weren't sure if they were going to keep me but I'm so glad they eventually registered me as an in-patient the next morning- after a long night of contractions and no sleep for Daniel or me.

I was still only about 3 cm after lots of walking up and down, up and down the halls as well as laboring in the whirlpool tub they had in the room. With the contractions getting more painful and me getting more tired, I decided to get an epidural. After 16 hours of unmedicated labor, it was the right choice. Unfortunately, even with the epidural and some pitocin, I wasn't making much progress. To make matters worse the nurses had rolled me onto my right side to try to get the baby's heartbeat doing what it was supposed to be and none of the epidural was going to my left side- I felt everything for about 15 minutes (felt like an eternity) before the anesthesiologist came in to fix it. Shortly after that was corrected, Tonnya, one of my nurses, came in and told us that the doctor (not my doctor since he wasn't on call) had made the call to do a c-section. It was an extremely disappointing moment for us since I had labored more than 24 hours at this point. However, it was the best thing for the baby and we knew that a regular delivery was no longer an option. Dan called both sets of our parents to let them know and then changed into scrubs while they got me ready for surgery. Once I was all numbed up and scrubbed down, they started the surgery and after a few minutes, our little baby was born. Daniel saw her before I did since I was behind the big blue screen but after she was all cleaned up, he introduced me to our beautiful daughter. This is very fitting since he was the one who told me that the pregnancy test I took in August was positive.

We received excellent care while at the hospital and came home Wednesday afternoon. It's been wonderful having my mom, great-aunt and little sister here. They've taken good care of us and eating my mother's cooking has been fabulous! (She made us chicken parm last night. It was so yummy!) My Aunt B left for Pittsburgh this morning and my Dad is coming on Wednesday.
Thanks for all your prayers and well wishes. We are so happy to finally have our little angel.