Little Seth's Birth Story

If you have been reading my blog at all, you know that we have spent 8 or so months preparing the kids and the nursery and ourselves for having a baby Maggie. Well, we are very excited (after much crying on Natalie's part...I think she's over it now) to welcome little Seth Isaiah into our family. Here's the story... I went to the doctor on Tuesday and decided to be induced on Thursday. I was tired of being pregnant and having so much false labor that I decided "she" was ready to come (with a little help). The doctor estimated 8-8.5 pounds.

Thursday morning, my mom came to be with the kids and we headed off. We got there and requested the whirlpool room. It was being cleaned so they said we could walk the halls until it was ready. We walked for 40 minutes or so. Some good contractions, but nothing was sticking. We got into the room around 9am and the nurse said I couldn't use the whirlpool because I was scheduled to have Pitocin (isn't that how all inductions work? Why didn't they tell us that before?) and needed to have the monitor on the baby all the time. So sad, no whirlpool for me.

They started Pitocin around 9:15 and I was at a generous 4 cm. She started the Pit really slow hoping I was far enough a long that I would just need a little jump start. Well, "Maggie" did not want to come:) Finally, at about 1pm, I was having regular but wimpy contractions, so when my OB came in, she broke my water. Her words were, "In about a half-hour, you should start feeling some good contractions." I don't think she was out the door before I had 2 right in a row that HURT!

I tried to just breathe through them and George asked me if I wanted my MP3 player. This is how I made it through! I blasted the music on the MP3 player (so loud I couldn't hear George talking right next to me). As each contraction came, I just thought, "This contraction will be over before this song is over." This was my focal point and it worked. The only bad times were if the song ended during a contraction and when George switched sides of the bed (I was supposed to be turning over as well but the contraction happened too soon). George's hand had to be on the bed rail, under mine but not squeezing mine or on top of mine in any way. As he is reading over my shoulder, he says he wishes I had told him that instead of the indiscernible grunting that he endured as he moved his hand around to try and please me.

After 1.5 hours of hard labor, I started feeling pushy... you know, the contractions where you finally get to DO something. They called the doctor right away and about 5 contractions later, I was pushing out baby "Maggie". "She" was really quiet after birth and I kept asking, "Is the baby ok?" They had to detangle the cord from baby's neck and finally I got to push the rest of the baby out (the baby comes in 2 pushes... head first, then body). About a minute later, the doctor looks down and said, "This is a BOY!" We were sooo surprised, along with all of our nurses and the doctor who had been talking about Maggie all day. So we had no name for our big, 10 pound baby boy. But he was healthy and scored really high on his Apgar:) He had low blood sugar, but we gave him a Snickers bar and it came right up... just kidding, but he did get to nurse right away and that helped and he didn't have anymore problems (unlike Sam who had to spend the night in the NICU).

The name game was rough, he just couldn't be a Maggie, but we couldn't figure out what else fit. George and I are very planned when it comes to these things. We have never come to the hospital without a full name chosen. So, we pretty much just decided to steal all of Becca's ideas for boy names for her future children and we decided that he was a Seth Isaiah.

It was a wonderful experience, and it was done without any pain meds at all!!!! Yippee!! Just the way we wanted it. The rest of the hospital stay was uneventful and sooo nice! I mean, where else do people wait on you hand and foot, take the baby so you can get some sleep and bring you room service 24 hours a day? It was great:)

Life at home with 4 is quite the adjustment. Let's just say I am SO glad that I will have help for 2 solid weeks. Hopefully, we'll all get used to Seth and get a bit more sleep than we did last night (1.5 hours). He's a sweet boy and we love him! Yea for new babies!!!