On July 7 we welcomed our sweet baby girl, Paige Abigail Holm. Here's the story of how it all went....
July 6 we (I made Ben go with me to this one) had a doctors appointment. We had previously discussed the option of inducing me on the 7th (I was due the 8th), but nothing was set. As I got weighed in (the worst part of every doctors appointment), the nurse said, "You ready?", I felt a little confused, then she said, "To get induced tonight, that's what's on your chart". What?! I felt a little panicked. The doctor checked me and I still wasn't dilated at all. She said she wanted us to go in that night to start Cervidil, or as she called it, "soap on a rope". It would apparently get my cervix ready for pitocin that she would start the following morning. She said I would most likely just sleep through the night and not even notice anything.
I had a couple of hours to frantically get every last thing done, like packing toiletries and mopping the floors (I didn't want the baby to come home to a dirty house), and then we headed to the airport to get my mom. We had one last pregnant meal at Cheesecake Factory, dropped my mom off at my brothers, took one last belly picture, and then headed to the hospital.
We checked in around 9:45 pm. They started the Cervidil at 10:30pm. About an hour later I started feeling contractions. By 1:30 am I was in "active labor". They gave me a drug to make me drowsy, but it didn't help with the pain much. It was a very long night. I would fall asleep for maybe 10 minutes but then would wake up from contractions. I finally was dilated to a 2. Soon I was gripping the side rail on the bed and watching the line on the monitor hit the top. My contractions were so close together I felt like I could barely catch my breath before the next one. I tried to just keep focusing on my breathing, which helped a little, but was feeling overwhelmed because they originally said they couldn't give me an epidural until 10:00 am. Luckily, they checked me and I was dilated to a 4, so they took pity on me, and around 6:00 am the anesthesiologist came in. By this point I was shaking really bad, but the nurse had me sit up on the bed and lean on her. I had been really nervous before about the epidural, but at this point I didn't really care what it took to make the pain go away. The epidural went really smoothly and within minutes it felt like pure bliss.
We called my mom and she quickly headed over, along with my brother who made a quick visit before heading to work. Around 8:30 we were sitting around chatting and all sudden heard a "pop" on the monitor and I felt a little gush. Sure enough, my water had broken on its own! They checked me and I was already to an 8! This was all very shocking, considering the doctor hadn't even planned on starting pitocin until 10:00 that morning. All the nurses kept saying how surprised they were at how fast things had progressed. About 9:20 they checked me again and said "You're ready to push". I couldn't believe it was already that time! I immediately had Ben bring me my make-up bag and quickly tried to touch up so I didn't look too scary in any pictures.
Then the pushing began. My epidural had partly worn off, or just wasn't working as well in certain areas, because I could feel each contraction. The nurses wanted to leave it like that so I would know when to push. I guess it was helpful to know, but didn't make for the most pleasant feeling. I was also so tired from being up the entire night, and was starting to feel really exhausted from pushing. When my doctor came in she told me "No sad face, you can do this". Soon Ben could see her head and was shocked that our baby had a full head of brown hair. After about 40 minutes of pushing she was finally here. I think my first comment was, "It's a girl, right?" (I had a little fear of a surprise boy) They immediately put her on my chest. I felt so exhausted it felt hard to even hold her. Ben cut the umbilical cord and my mom took pictures of everything. Then they weighed and measured her, gave her her shot and eye drops. She was 8 lbs 2 oz and 21 1/2 in long, much bigger than anyone (including my doctor) anticipated. She was perfect. Then Ben and I took turns holding and snuggling our sweet little girl. We immediately knew her name was Paige (we had decided on that before we were even pregnant and it always felt right), but it took us until the next day to decide on her middle name. We thought we had a name, but Ben decided that week he wanted to change it so we decided we both liked Abigail and it sounded cute with her name. So now we had our little Paige Abigail Holm.
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| Can't wait for these two to be little friends |
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| Skyping with my dad and my sister's family |
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| My mom who got to be there for her arrival |
