Welcome to the World!

Our sweet baby girl was born January 17, 2011 at 6:20am. That morning was a whirlwind. Here's the story:

I woke up at 4am to go to the bathroom and noticed that something wasn't quite right. I started having little tiny baby "I think these must be contractions" contractions at 4:30. They quickly escalated into "these are definitely contractions and they're coming really fast" contractions. My water broke about 5am so I called the doctor. He said that since she was breech at the last appointment we needed to go to the hospital. It took some time to get our things together (of course that was the day I had planned to finish my shopping and get the hospital bags ready). On the way to the hospital I felt the urge to push. All I could think was, "She's breech, I can't push!" Yeah, try telling that to your pregnant body. It's not something you can stop. Dox drove me to the ER entrance and the nice people there wheeled me up to L&D. When I got there the nurse was checking mine and the baby's vitals. She did a quick ultrasound and saw that her head was still right side up. What she couldn't find was the baby's heart rate. That's not something you want to hear while you're in labor... or ever. While she was looking everywhere for the heartbeat, I'm still trying not to push. But let's face it, I was pushing a little. Not by choice. Then I felt something different. I reached down and felt something solid. Then it hit me. That's a foot and I can count her toes. I looked up at the nurse and calmly said, "There's a foot." She looked at me and then checked. Yes, there was indeed a foot. She called to the other nurses who all ran in. They don't like delivering breech babies vaginally, especially with a first timer like me. They were all rushing to get me in the OR for a c-section. A different nurse finally found her heart rate but it was really low. Because they weren't sure how long it had been so low they ran me (literally. They told me, "keep your hands in while we run you down the hall.") to the operating room. There was no time for an epidural (thank goodness!) so they used a general anesthesia. There also wasn't time to scrub me down so they just dumped a bottle of that orange stuff (I believe that's the technical term for it) all over my belly. The last thing I remember was the anesthesiologist telling me to take deep breaths. Then I woke up back in the room I started in and Doxey was telling me that everything went well and that we had a beautiful baby girl. And yes, for all of you who are keeping track... contractions started at 4:30, got to the hospital about 6:00, she was out at 6:20. That's right, less than 2 hours.

Her Daddy took this picture of her in the nursery while I was getting put back together. Good thing he has a camera on his phone because we didn't have batteries for the camera. They were on my shopping list.