Baby Eli is finally here!

brandoonie · January 2011

After three weeks of contractions and basically early labor my doctor took pity on me and induced me!

I went to my 38 week appointment on Wednesday and my doctor came in the room and asked if I wanted to go ahead and have the baby. I couldn't say yes fast enough. I was already dilated to a 4 and had been having contractions for about 3 weeks. My other two children were both born at 37 weeks and weighed 7lbs 6oz and 7lbs 8 ozs and this baby had been measuring about 2 weeks ahead at every u/s. So she set up my induction for Friday morning!

I got to the hospital at 6 am Friday, January 28th and got checked in and set up. at 7:00 they started the pitocin and at 8:00 my doctor broke my water. Everything was progressing along and since it took a little while to get the epidural once it was ordered I went ahead and asked for it around 9ish.

This was the worst part of the whole day. It took two CRNAs almost 2 hours and 5 tries before they finally called the anesthesiologist to come and do it. It was terrible! I never had any trouble getting an epidural with the other two. Once it was finally working everything was great, but it was pretty tough while they were trying to figure out what they were doing!

At one point his heart rate dropped pretty quick and they were turning me from side to side trying to get him to cooperate. They finally called the doctor and she came in to check me. Turns out, he didn't much care for the increased pitocin and I was dilating a bunch all of a sudden! I went from a 3-4 to a 7-8 in about 20 minutes! I continued to labor with no problems. At about 1:00 she came into check me again and I was almost a 10. She had me push during a contraction to finish getting "the lip" out of the way. I pushed pretty hard for about 30 minutes and at 1:29 Eli Garrett was born! Everyone was making guesses to how much he would weigh because he was so big! I'm very petite so they couldn't believe it! Finally a scale was brought in and he weighed 8lbs 6 ozs and was 21 3/4 inches long!

He latched right on when I tried to nurse him and has been eating like a champ ever since! We're home after just one night at the hospital and although I'm pretty tired and my back is store from all the epidural attempts I feel great!

I hope everyone else has easy births the rest of this month and on into February!