December 22 around 1:30am contractions began, slow at first and progressed to two minutes apart around 4:30. I called the hospital and they told me to come in. When we arrived they hooked me up to monitors to monitor my contractions and her heart rate. While monitoring her heart rate they noticed that it took longer than they wanted for her heart rate to return to normal and even though my contractions were still early labor contractions and normally they would have sent us home to wait longer, we were admitted and so was the beginning of the birth of our beautiful baby girl.
We were put in a labor and delivery room around 6am and they hooked me up to monitors to monitor her heart and my contractions. A few hours later I was allowed to get up and walk around to hopefully get my labor going more efficiently. My mom arrived around 1pm to support and help me through labor. Around 4pm, after ten hours later of walking around and waiting, I was put on Pitocin to help move labor along. Contractions got harder and I was progressing slowly. Around 9pm they broke my water and contractions intensified tremendously to about a minute apart, a minute long, after 4 ½ excruciating hours I got an epidural. This made contractions much more bearable and labor less overwhelming. Jessica arrived around this time, little did she know it would still be several hours till we would meet baby Amelia.
Into the early hours of the morning we went on, trying to sleep, but having little success. Michelle arrived around 10:30am, just in time to take pictures. Then, finally, the time I didn’t think was ever going to come, came, it was time to push. An hour and a half and 9lbs 11.8oz later, we got to meet our beautiful little girl. Amelia Rose born December 23 at 12:23pm. Daddy got to cut the umbilical cord and took lots of pictures as she was being weighed and measured. We all received medical bracelets to ensure that we would go home with the right baby, every shift change they would check and recheck our bracelets. Sure enough, she’s ours! :)
After a couple hours of bonding, skin to skin time and nursing training, we discovered she had a tight frenulum, (or tongue tied) our beautiful baby had a lizard tongue… We were moved to our post partum room which we fortunately had to ourselves. We were visited by a pediatrician and a lactation consultant who clipped the frenulum to the right length and nursing became much easier. In the room, she was given her first bath, which she did not like, as well as tested for all sorts of things.
Later that day, we were visited by Brad’s family to meet the new addition and love on her. We wanted to leave on the 24th in the afternoon but after talking to a nurse midwife about my healing and how she was nursing, they thought it would be better for us to stay another day. Reluctantly we agreed and I’m so glad we did because I wasn’t really ready to go home. We filled out her birth certificate and they did her footprints, our baby girl was now official! My dad and brother came to visit on the 24th. After more rest and another visit from the lactation consultant we were allowed to leave on December 25, we left around noon and began our lives as a family on Christmas day, what a wonderful gift! After we settled in, my sister Jessica and her family stopped by to visit our baby girl and my mom brought us Christmas dinner.
Welcome to the World my darling baby girl!
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