Maxwell Fitzwilliam is here!

aravis121 · June 2014

I'm a bit more active on the photography page, but since my baby is very much a June baby, hopefully you guys don't mind me posting here! I know I love reading everyone's birth stories.

I chose to induce at 40w2d so that we could have my MIL fly out to watch our two-year-old. I was 1cm dilated, 50% effaced, and zero station. We got the Cytotech going early Tuesday morning, around 1am, and after three pills - nothing. They started the pitocin around 9am, and I progressed fairly quickly at that point. Luckily I had time to get an epidural about an hour after the pitocin. At 1:10pm, I was fully dilated and effaced, but the baby was still pretty far up. I started pushing, and pushing, and pushing. Somewhere in there, I took a 45 minute break to see if the contractions could work on their own to push him down a bit. At 5pm, I spiked a fever of 101.8, and they told me that my baby would have to go to NICU as soon as he was born, and that we had to get him out pretty quickly. I discussed the options with my doctor (as much as I could through the contractions at that point!), and we decided to try a vacuum. It took only one push to get him out after that, and he was born at 5:22pm. His size had definitely played a part in the hard labor - he weighed 8 lbs and 11 ounces, and was 21 1/2 inches long. We got to see him and hold him for about five minutes, and then he was taken to the NICU.

We were able to visit him about three hours later in the NICU, where he was hooked up to an IV and all kinds of monitors. It was heartbreaking, but we were pretty sure everything was okay (my fever had gone down immediately after I got some Tylenol and hadn't come back). I was able to nurse him once there. After 8 hours in the NICU, he was returned to us, and we got to hold him properly and give him lots of kisses!

We were still waiting on some test results, and while he had lots of poop diapers that day, he didn't have a pee diaper. After 24 hours, he was put back into the NICU. They gave him some formula and waited two hours, but that didn't work. Next they gave him an IV. That finally did the trick! A full 29 hours after he was born, he left the NICU for the last time.

We had to wait for all the test results to come back before we could be discharged, so we spent three days in the hospital, but our first few days back home with our older daughter and our new son have been great! I was even able to get in a little photo session when my husband took DD to the park (it ended pretty quickly with two blankets being covered in poop).