one week old + the delivery

rowan is one week old today. she is such a good baby. everyone asks how she is sleeping at night, and she's really pretty good. justin and i are your picture perfect first parents though...we get up to make sure she's breathing just about every other minute, and jump up the second she stirs. i'm sure that will change though. we love her to death and are so glad she's here and healthy.

as for the delivery, i feel very lucky to have had such a considerably short first labor. i apologize in advance for the rest of the post (it's very long and kind of graphic), but i want to get it down for journal purposes.

my mom got into town on wednesday the 23rd, and that night i started having my first regular contractions, about 10-12 minutes apart. the next morning the contractions had sort of faded, and at my doctor's appointment she just said to hang in there and that they'd induce me on the 29th if i hadn't had her by then. so i went home and hung out all day, with contractions coming and going. by around 4 pm they started getting regular and more painful, so we decided to go to the hospital. justin came home from work and we went, but they told me that the contractions weren't changing my cervix at all. they continued to monitor me and at about 7 pm (i don't really remember the exact time) the doctor decided to admit me since i was dilated 5 cm.

at about 8:15 pm the doctor came in and broke my water, and immediately my contractions started coming about every minute, and they were very, very painful. i asked for the epidural right away, but the anesthesiologist took forever to get there. once he came and it kicked in, though, i was sitting pretty. after a while i started to feel the pressure, so they had me start pushing. it was going well for the first little while, but the baby's heart rate would drop every time i pushed, and i just couldn't get her past the pelvic bone. so the doc came in and told me he needed to use forceps and that he was going to give me a small episiotomy (with my permission of course) to make sure the baby came out safe and sound, with as little pain for me as possible (he thought i'd tear pretty bad if he didn't cut). we were pretty freaked out, because we'd seen/heard horror stories about injuries to babies that had forceps used on them. but the doctor was great and the forceps were only used to get the baby's head past the bone. they got her out pretty quickly after that. so it was a little over 5 hours from the time they broke my water to the time rowan was born.

once she was out, they put her on my belly but only for a few seconds because she stopped crying. they took her away because her heart rate was really high, and i had a little bit of a fever, so i didn't see her for like two hours. i was pretty bummed, but they kept me distracted--i won't go into detail but i was bleeding worse than i should've been. finally, though, they took me down to my recovery room and brought in my sweet little girl, and the rest is just a blur.

so there you go. i can't believe that justin and i are parents, but i am so happy that rowan is in our lives. she is perfect and i love her more than i could've ever imagined.