Well, Kara is one week old today and she's been doing a great job figuring out how to live in this world. She has had her good days and nights and her not so good days and nights, but overall she's a fantastic baby. Getting her here wasn't too difficult. Here's how it happened.
Friday morning was a typical morning for me. I made dinner for that night, went to Walmart to get some more food for the week (we always seem to run out of food on my week on), watered the plants in the backyard and emptied the dishwasher. Nothing seemed too out of the ordinary. My back ached just a very little bit, but it had felt like that for the past few mornings and the pain always went away so I didn't think much of it. At 11:30 I hopped in the car and went to work. I saw no obvious reason not to. Well, once I got to work and stepped out of the car I realized my back hurt pretty bad. That was at 12:30. By 1:00 I was starting to feel really uncomfortable and called my Dr. At this point my back really hurt and the lower part of my abdomen also hurt, but not all over. The Dr. said that if I was having contractions every 5-7 minutes that I should come in to be checked. Yeah, I was feeling the pain every 5 or 6 minutes at that point and when I saw the "bloody show" when I went to the bathroom I decided that I needed to leave. I was out of there by 1:30. But being the stubborn person that I am I refused to let someone drive me down. I was thinking "then I'll have to come back up and get the car and that'll just be annoying". So I drove from Murray to Provo in labor. Silly me. The last 10 minutes was pretty rough and all the cars around me were driving way too slow for me. Thankfully I had Trevor on the phone to help keep me calm.
Trevor met me at the hospital and by that point I could barely stand. That was just after 2:00. I got checked in and measured at 5 cm shortly thereafter. At this point I was really feeling the pain. The contractions were coming every 2 or 3 minutes and they HURT. I was definitely ready for the epidural and was happy to see the anesthesiologist when he came in just after 3:00. Getting the epidural was a little difficult because I had to hold still through each contraction while he was putting the catheter in my back. What made it even worse was that he had to do it twice. He saw a little blood on the first try and wanted to be absolutely certain he was in the right space so he did it again. And I swear that the worst contraction I had had up to that point decided to come right when he told me I had to hold perfectly still. But I'd do all that again because once the epidural kicked in I was feeling great.
Around 4:00 they came in and measured me at 8 cm and then at 5:00 the Dr. measured my at 9 cm. He said that he'd come back soon and break my water if it hadn't broken on it's own. Around 5:45 the nurse came in and asked if Dr. Wolsey had come in to break my water and I said that he had not so she checked me and said "Oh my. Her head is right here. We need to get Dr. Wolsey in here." Then she told me to keep that baby in there. They paged the Dr. and found out he was in surgery but thankfully Dr. Drewes was about ready to start his shift and had been at the hospital. He came in, they set me up, and we started pushing just barely after 6:00. It's such a weird sensation trying to push and "bear down" like they tell you to when you can't feel hardly anything. Anyway. I pushed and pushed and the Dr. kept saying that she had a big head for my little body. But he didn't want to do an episiotomy so he kind of just let me stretch out. Trevor was right there by my side helping hold my leg and hand every time I had to push and then at 6:36 she came into this world. I only had to push for 30 minutes! BOOOYAHH. That was awesome. It was also awesome to see my little baby for the first time. One of the first things I thought was "Wow, she already has a double chin. She's going to be a chunky monkey when she fills out". Then they put her on my tummy and she peed and pooped all over me. She was perfect. Just perfect. And still is.
