We welcomed Owen Micah into our family on Wed April 4th at 4:52pm. He weighed in at a healthy 9 lb 4 oz and measured 21 inches long. Everyone is healthy and we're praising God for a smooth delivery!
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| Dinner of champions! |
Getting plenty of love from his grandparents!
At first Willow was pretty shell-shocked when she came to the hospital. When Gramma told her Owen's name, she teared up and said, "That's not my baby." Owen wasn't a name we'd mentioned to her as a boy name for Cocalynn because it wasn't decided on until after Owen was born! After taking in everything in the delivery room she started to act more like herself and even gave Owen a kiss with a smile. According to the grandparents that night she couldn't get out of her mind that momma didn't have any clothes on. The first thing she asked Nana in the morning was if momma was going to be wearing clothes.
They visited us at the hospital twice today and Willow did great! She held him for the first time, gave him plenty of kisses, shared her toys with him, and gave him a fuzzy monkey blanket as a gift. We've had a good experience in the hospital, but we're all ready to be home together tomorrow!
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| All the gifts Willow shared with Owen. |
Owen's Birth Story:
Owen was due on Thurs April 27th. Leading up to that day I'd been feeling great, but hadn't felt any contractions. For unknown reasons, I was unable to have an official "last day" at school but had told my principal and coworkers that Friday the 28th would be my last day. If I hadn't had the baby by Monday I'd be calling in sick ("sick" of being pregnant!). I also decided that I'd be crossing my legs all day Sunday in order to not have an April Fools baby! =) My mom had flown into town and my in-laws had come down on our due date in anticipation of the second grandchild being born. There was a full house but no baby! Sure enough, Monday came and there was still no baby, so I called in sick and my mom and I went to a large park with lots of hills to start walking. Tuesday I had a scheduled doctors appointment for an ultrasound and stress test to see how the baby was doing. The ultrasound showed a healthy but potentially large baby - estimated to weight 9 lb 10 oz. The ultrasound technician mentioned that the weight estimates get less accurate the later into the pregnancy it is, so the estimate could be a pound off either way. We were hoping it was a pound too high! I was then hooked up to a monitor for the stress test. I was supposed to click a button each time I felt the baby move. Of course that's when the baby decided to not move at all! We tried various things from Chris talking to my belly to listening to different ringtones on his phone and eventually got the 3 kicks they were looking for. The nurse said that the heartrate looked great and asked if I was feeling the contractions. ?!?!? Contractions? I hadn't been feeling anything! She said I was having regular contractions the whole time. After she commented about that I could feel my stomach getting more firm, but didn't feel any pain associated with it. She checked me and I was 3 cm dilated - thanks to all that walking! That definitely boosted my confidence as I'd been laboring 12 hours with Willow before I was 3 cm dilated! The concern, though, was the potential size of the baby. The doctor mentioned that it could possibly make it more difficult to deliver vaginally the longer we waited (and larger the baby got). She had me concerned when she mentioned that often the head of larger babies would come out, but the shoulders could get stuck. Yikes! We discussed various options but decided to go ahead and schedule an induction for the next day. My mom and I headed back to the park and the hills! Lots of walking, but still no contractions!
Wed. April 4th 6:00am: My mom, Chris, and I arrived at the hospital at 6am for the induction. My in-laws stayed at the house with Willow. Since we weren't in labor (still not feeling any contractions) we had plenty of time to fill out gobs of paperwork. When I got hooked up to the heart monitor it, again, showed that I was having contractions, but still couldn't feel them.
7:30am: The doctor came in to check me and I was 5 cm! It was another huge boost for my morale to know that I was half way and still hadn't had any pain! When she asked me to rate my pain I couldn't help but think of our favorite comedian
Brian Regan's joke about being in the ER (jump to 4:30 if you don't want to watch all 8 minutes). I was definitely at a 0 though! Instead of using Pitocin to start labor (I was warned by a friend that Pitocin can make labor get really intense really fast!) she poked a hole, rather than breaking my water. With Willow, when my water was broken (same doctor!) the contractions got pretty intense pretty fast, but this was much more gradual with some of the fluid coming out with each contraction. Since I had Strep B I was given an IV of antibiotics, then we were off to the halls to start walking! Our nurse, Michelle, was great and very accommodating. We walked the halls for 45 minutes, then reported back for 10 minutes of monitoring, then were allowed to walk the halls again for 45 more minutes. Our friends from church had delivered twins the day before and were in a post-partum room on the floor we were walking laps on, so we even got to stop in and say hi to them. Chris and my mom alternated walking with me. After quite a few hours of monotonously walking the short distance between the two sets of double doors, we decided to spice it up a bit by doing squats at one set of double doors and lunges side-to-side at the other set. Like with Willow, we hadn't found out the gender of the baby. We'd agreed on the girl name right away, since it was our 2nd favorite after Willow: Autumn Marie. We hadn't quite agreed on a boy name though. If Willow was a boy she was going to be Logan Micah, but we have friends at church that had since had a Logan and other friends that had a Micah. I like Aidan while Chris liked Lincoln. Neither of us were really budging, so while we walked up and down the halls we started tossing out completely different boy names...Lake? Owen? While walking I was starting to feel very mild contractions, which I was timing on my watch. While walking they would get to 3-5 minutes apart, but when I would sit down to be monitored they slowed down to about 7 minutes apart. It was a busy delivery day at the hospital so we didn't checked again for quite a while.
2:00pm: The doctor came in to check me again and I was 6 cm dilated. It seemed odd that I'd only dilated 1 cm after all that walking, yet I still wasn't in much pain so my morale was still up. Since it'd been so long with not a lot of progression, and my water had been "broken," we talked about some options, including a small dose of Pitocin, but decided to have her "roughed up" my membranes instead. That definitely got things going and fairly immediately the contractions were fairly painful - to the point that I didn't want to walk up and down the halls and have these contractions in front of all the nurses. So, I walked as much as I could in our fairly small room and Chris took cleansing breaths with me through each contraction. The contractions were still about 3-5 minutes apart. Due to the Strep B, I received antibiotics in an IV every 4 hours. I squatted in the bed while receiving this set of antibiotics and Chris was right there breathing with me. After the antibiotics were done I felt like still staying in the bed squatting, so we did.
4:00pm: I remember Chris commenting that we might have this baby by dinnertime and could have Chick-fil-A for dinner again. I remember looking at the clock and thinking it probably wouldn't happen since things had been moving slowly. Even though I would rank my pain as a 7 at that point, I figured it had to get quite a bit worse before the baby actually made an appearance.
4:30pm: Chris and I were still breathing through the contractions together while I squatted in the bed, but my back started to feel a bit more pain and I felt like something needed to change...walking around? shower? possibly close to being ready for an epidural? While I was having contractions my stomach was doing this crazy flipflop thing, which made me worry that I wasn't fully relaxing during the contractions and maybe an epidural would help. We called for Michelle to see if I could get in the shower and she said that she could have the doctor come check me again. The doctor said that I was 8 cm when I wasn't having a contraction, but 10 cm during my contractions! She said that I could get in the shower, but no longer than 15 minutes because it wasn't going to be much longer. Chris and I went to the shower and he sprayed water on my back while I squatted. The shower temperature was kindof funky and by the time the temperature was right I was telling Chris, "I think it's coming....I have to push." Of course Chris was saying "You can't push in here! You have to get to the bed!" and without being able to stop really I said, "I'm pushing!!" Chris yelled for Michelle and I wobbled to the bed. The three-ring circus began with nurses and doctors coming in and getting their gowns on and the bed adjusted for delivery. Oddly enough it was right when the doctors shifts changed so there were 2 doctors in the room. I remember pushing and hearing Chris comment about the baby having a head full of hair. My mind went back to when I was pushing with Willow and seeing her head in the mirror slip back in after every push and I was hoping I wouldn't have to push as long as with her (45 mins). I also remember asking the doctors if I should be pushing since with Willow they were watching the monitor and telling me when I was having a contraction (since I couldn't feel them with the epidural) so I would push with the contractions. No one answered my question, by the way, so I kept pushing. After maybe 2 minutes of pushing the baby was on my chest and they said, "It's a boy!!" Chris and I looked at each other and chuckled because the next question was, "Do you know what his name is?" to which we both said, "No!" After a couple minutes of looking at his sweet face, I asked Chris, "Do you think he's an Owen?" Owen Micah Seth was born at 4:52pm weighing 9lb 4oz and 21 inches long. Chick-fil-A was delivered by my in-laws and Willow when they came to meet Owen about an hour later =)
