Jaxson Wayne Danger is one week old!

Here's my little guy's birth story - a tale of how everything went completely differently than I thought.

The most I had progressed during my office visits was "1cm-ish" so we scheduled an induction for 41 weeks. We arrived to be induced, starting with Cervadil, at 10 pm on Wednesday, Jan 18. Once I was hooked up to monitors, they found that I was already having contractions (but I felt absolutely nothing) and my little guy's heart rate was incredibly high. After an hour of monitoring, my doctor decided that it was too late for cervadil (because it would have to be in for 12 hours), and that, since I was already contracting and the heart rate was higher than ideal, we wait it out until 5:00 am and see how I progress.

When I was checked at 5, it was determined that I was 2 cm dilated and 50% thinned without any drug interaction. My contractions were now 3-4 minutes apart, and getting stronger, but I still wasn't feeling anything. The doc decided it was best to go ahead and induce with pitocin at the lowest level to increase the contractions because they were worried about the stress on the baby if things didn't get moving properly. I still felt nothing, although I could see the contrx getting stronger on the monitor.

At 6:00 am, the resident on call came in to break my water and increase the pitocin one step, and everything really got moving! Around 11:00, the pain of the contrx was almost blinding (to the point that I was talking completely stupidly to my husband) and I reluctantly called for the epidural. I was worried that it was too early because I didn't feel like I had been laboring that long, and that I was only going to slow labor by getting it. The nurse and I were shocked when she measured me at 5 cm. The epidural took no time at all to kick in and the nurse said to expect to progress 1 cm per hour and we would have that baby around dinner time.

At the next internal check, about an hour later, I was at 7 cm, and around 1:00, I was at 9. At 2:00, they determined I was at 10cm. They called my doctor and began working with me on how to push. My doc arrived around 2:30 and Jaxson's head was already crowning. Unfortunately, his little head needed help and the ONE thing I absolutely did not want happened (not including c-section): the doc had to use the forceps to guide the head to the appropriate position. And 3 pushes later, our little boy was in my arms.

We really wanted to delay the cord cutting. However, the cord was SO short (DH says he thought it was about a foot long) that in the final push, I delivered both the baby and the placenta. As it was not anticipated, the docs and nurses had to immediately separate the placenta so that they could tend to the baby.

Ultimately, we didn't get everything that we wanted, but I also didn't have to have a c-section (which my doc kind of kept threatening because he thought the baby was going to be huge). And we have our perfect little boy to show for it.

Jaxson Wayne Danger McW - 8 lbs, 7 oz, and 21" - was born January 19, 2012 at 3:05pm.

Yes, his legal second middle name is Danger. And, we were the second "Danger is my middle name" of the day at the hospital where I gave birth.