Welcome, Rowan Joseph

So, hours after writing a nice long winded post about communicating with the world during and after birth, I found myself completely unprepared to do so because I went into labor at 35 1/2 weeks without having finished making such arrangements.  We ended up announcing baby's birth on facebook after all, and it worked surprisingly well.

So here's my attempt at a short version of Rowan's birth story.  My sugar levels were crazy low (I had GD) Wednesday and that evening the mildly painful contractions I'd been having off and on for a couple of days started feeling fairly regular.  DH started tracking them while kicking into high gear nesting, and got the car seat installed, crib assembled and hospital bag mostly packed in three hours while I relaxed and cross-stitched and shouted out every time I felt one.  They had been consistently 10 minutes apart that whole time, so I called my doc and they sent me in to L&D. 

I was fully expecting to have them give me something to stop contractions and send me home, but I was at 3cm and rapidly effacing so they decided to just observe me for a while.  Next thing you know I am at 5, then at 7, and my doc pops her head in before going into the office for her morning appointments.  The nurse tells her I've been stuck at 7 for an hour or so in active labor (no meds - my choice) and she offers to break my water to get me past that hump, which was exactly what I wanted to hear at that point.

As soon as the next contraction ended, they tipped me onto my back, broke my water, and I immediately had a contraction 10 times more painful than all the others put together.  By the end of that contraction - say a full minute, I was fully dialated and they were telling me to push.  I wasn't quite feeling the urge to push yet, so that next contraction was hellish.  My DH says it was the classic hollywood woman screaming her head off in pain delivery for the next minute and a half and I scared him because he could tell I had completely lost my grip on the world for a minute there. 

But when that one ended, I was finally feeling like pushing.  My Dr. was trying to calm me down and assure me that baby was ready to come, but I had to get a grip and push.  DH got my focus and I was able to catch my breath and push for real and out came baby Rowan.

Baby is in wonderful shape.  His sugar was low, so after I did a token nursing in the delivery room, they wisked him off to the NICU, gave him a few ounces of formula and got his sugar back on track.  By the time I was being moved to my recovery room, he was doing great and they said he would probably be ready to be sent to my room in a couple of hours if I didn't mind him having another formula feeding.  I decided I needed some rest, so we went to my recovery room and slept until he got the all clear to leave the NICU.

He's been nursing like a champ ever since.  Ped today said no reason he couldn't go home Saturday morning unless the GBS test comes back positive (No one ever had a chance to check me and he was born before the antibiotics they gave me had been in my system long enough for any effect) He's got a little IV line on his hand for antibiotics twice daily and bruises on his face from decending so quickly, but is otherwise in perfect healthy shape, despite being 4 1/2 weeks early.