She's Here, She's Here!

On May 9th, Baby Sister made it into this world safely.

I am so lucky.   She's just amazing.

First, the obvious.  Childbirth sucks.

The story, if you're interested:

I was induced at 6pm on Sunday with a cervical foley catheter (balloon).  It dilated me to 3cm by the next morning.   The next day (Monday) , I arrived at the hospital at 8am and began receiving medications for induction.  Things progressed very slowly, but the baby was happy.  I followed my birth plan and took all the drugs.   When they would wear off every once and a while, I was reminded of just how awesome drugs are.

Just after midnight on Tuesday, I had dilated to 9cm and was 90% effaced.  The induction drugs kept flowing through out the night but my cervix didn't want to budge.  At 5am, the doctor gave my pitocin one last crank up to try to make my contractions stronger, and dilate me the last little bit.  At 6am, they told me I could push.

I tried to push for 1.5 hours.  I was exhausted.  I was 22 hours into labour at that point.  My doctor came in, and he said he could still feel a small amount of my cervix.  He said I could try to push for a couple more hours if I wanted because baby was happy, but he thought maybe baby was too big to fit because all of my pushing had not made baby any closer to the exit.   Shortly after, I decided to have a c-section.  I just wanted it to be over and was exhausted and feeling overwhelmed.

At 9:05am our beautiful little girl made it into this world.  She cried right away, and so did I.  I'm crying as I type this.  I still can't believe we got this lucky.  Hubs got brave and even saw her right after she emerged.  I can't believe he looked!

The next few days of recovery were a blur.  The baby is jaundiced, but is recovering well.  We decided to supplement her with formula to help things along.

Breast feeding has been very difficult.  This is a whole other story in itself.  However the nutshell version is that she has a very strong latch, which has resulted in some very sore bleeding breasts.  After a rest from breast feeding we're getting back on track.  We're almost a week in, I think we are turning a corner.   She is currently receiving formula about  50% of the time.   I think some form of supplementation might be the right solution for us going forward, but we'll see.  We're taking it day by day.

She had a slightly abnormal heart rhythm (a long QT which is the contraction phase of the heart rhythm from what I understand), so she had to have some extra tests.  The doctors think it is already resolving on its own.  Because of hubby's history with a minor congenital heart defect, they are being extra careful and following up on this.   This resulted in a lot of extra traffic in our hospital room.   Our hospital is a teaching hospital and there were a ton of people in our room everyday.  We were really glad to get to go home.

Big brother has been amazing.  It melts my heart.  He was sooooo excited to meet her.  We waited until we were home from the hospital, and I'm glad we did that because there were no extra distractions around us.   He held her, and analyzed every little thing about her "look at her little tongue!", "why she no wear socks, Mama?", "look at my trains Baby Sister", and "she has a picky nose" (what he calls it when he has a boogie in his nose).  "I need to be gentle",  were some of the things he said.  He held her patiently and gently for 20 minutes (a record for his 2.5 yr old attention span), while wiggling his feet excitedly the whole time.   It was one of the best moments of my life.   It was beyond adorable.  There weren't a lot of dry eyes around watching.

I'm so, so grateful.