39 Weeks - Welcome Oliver!!

Welcome to the world, Oliver Jensen Sanders! We had our beautiful baby BOY on October 30, 2012 at 12:40pm - weight: 7lbs, length: 19.5in. He decided to come a little early, which was just fine with us :) Thankfully he waited until after Hurricane/SuperStorm Sandy passed through! Most of you have already heard his birth announcement but I thought I'd share the birth story on here so everyone is up to speed on how our little man made his grand entrance :)

Before I start, I just want to say a HUGE thank you to all of you who were praying with us for a healthy little baby and a safe deliver; God gave us a precious gift and we are so thankful :)

2:30am - contractions start at about 3-5min apart, each one lasting about 45-60sec. These weren't super intense contractions and weren't real consistent in their length and timing, but were definitely a lot stronger than any Braxton-Hicks I'd felt earlier in the pregnancy. I decided to just kind of monitor them on my own for about an hour to see if they stuck around before I woke Tyler up (I didn't want to give him a false alarm and then make him go to work in the morning!). I contacted my friend Danielle (don't worry - she was already awake either at work or nursing her little girl!) and asked her what she thought about them so she was my early labor coach...thanks Danielle!

3:30am - Tyler wakes up and realizes I'm not in bed so he comes out to the living room to investigate. I told him what was going on so we monitored them together for a bit before calling our doula (birthing coach) Renea to let her know what was going on and get her opinion. She told us to have me get in the bathtub and see how that affected my contractions. If they were real, they would persist; if not, the warm water would relax me enough to make the contractions stop. Well, they slowed down a little but stayed pretty painful and persisted so we decided it was time to call the midwife on call. She talked to me through 2 contractions and determined I was in enough pain to come in so we packed up and headed out to DePaul.

5:30am - We get to the hospital and are placed in a room in the Midwifery Center, which just happened to be the ONLY room open on the entire labor and delivery unit...guess the storm really scared out a lot of babies!! They checked me and determined that I had made no progress (still 2cm dilated and 80% effaced) and wasn't in active labor. They weren't able to admit me at this time because of this so they told us we had two options: 1) stay in the hospital and walk around for a few hours to see if anything changed or 2) go home and come back in when we had a definite sign we were in active labor. We decided to head home and come back later as our plan all along had been to labor at home as much as possible before going in. Renea had met us there and told us to keep in contact with her and she would come over and labor with us when we were ready for her.

7:30am - Back home, in bed resting through contractions...we had no idea if it would be 2hrs or 24hrs until we got our "sign." Feeling pretty frustrated at this point and poor Tyler had no idea if this was "it" or if he was supposed to be going to work...thankfully God gave us our sign!

8:30am - My water broke! I was laying in bed and I felt it break - let me tell you, I was out of that bed so fast! Even though this spared our sheets, it brought the nausea I had been feeling to a full peak and I started dry-heaving and throwing up stomach acid (sorry, tmi...just wanted you all to know the full story!) because I hadn't eaten anything since 12hrs before. I wasn't sure what to think of the color of the fluid - it just didn't look right, but I wasn't sure if something else (I won't elaborate....) had happened at the same time. During all of this, Tyler was talking to Renea and she told him to have me get back in the bathtub because the contractions were going to get a lot stronger and we should think about heading to the hospital soon.

9:00am - Contractions are much more intense than they had been, even in the bathtub. I also lost there rest of my mucus plug (again, eww...if you haven't figured out by now that it's going to be a little gross you should probably stop reading now!). We tried Renea and phoned the midwife but weren't able to get in touch with them as quickly as we wanted. Tyler, using his best judgement, determined it was time to get me to the hospital because it was going to be impossible to move me anywhere once these contractions started getting worse.

9:30am - We get to the hospital and are placed in the exam room at the Midwifery Center as there are literally NO beds anywhere other than this to be examined. They had me go to the bathroom and I saw my fluid for the first time, knowing it was only amniotic fluid I was seeing - and it was definitely brown/yellow/green - not good! I mentioned this and the midwife came in and confirmed that I had thick meconium in my fluid. What does this mean? It means poor Oliver was in some type of distress in-utero and passed his first stool/poop. This can be dangerous because they can breathe in the meconium as it's in the fluid and it can go into their lungs, possibly causing pneumonia. Because of this, I risked out of the midwifery center :( and was taken to labor and delivery. Prior to moving me, the midwife checked me - I was 3cm and 90-100% effaced, which means all I needed to do was dilate to 10cm and Baby could come out. Thankfully a room had opened up; they got me into bed, started an IV with some fluids (I was getting dehydrated), drew some labs and got me hooked up to the monitors. Let me preface the rest of the story with this - I was not in a good mood at this point. I really hope the nice nurses didn't feel the hatred I had for them, only because I was so uncomfortable and really didn't want anyone to touch me.

11:00am - We are moved to a different room :( Not good. Very unhappy at this point. You see, every movement I made put me into a contraction so walking across the hallway seemed like a really bad idea. Especially since I'd just made the difficult decision to get up and go to the bathroom about 15min prior and had just gotten settled back into bed (after experiencing about 5 contractions in that little journey itself). So, needless to say, I was pretty upset about needing to move to a different room. However, my fetal monitors weren't working and they really needed to keep an eye on Oliver and also on my contractions. So, across the hall we went. Got re-situated in bed and they put the monitors back on me; thankfully, these worked!

12:00pm - Yes, I did it - I started telling Renea (and Tyler) that I was going to need some pain medicine; I just couldn't do this anymore. The contractions felt like they were ripping me in half. Renea tried to talk some sense into me and encouraged me to try different positions (ie: birthing ball, walking, hands/knees, etc) but I told her I was in too much pain to move and only wanted to lay on my side in bed; I physically felt like I couldn't move. This frustrated me, as I knew this was why we hired her and I really hadn't wanted to get pain medicine yet I wasn't willing to try other positions - what?! Anyways, about 12:15 she went to go talk to the nurse about pain medicine options. About this time, unbeknownst to anyone but me, my body started involuntarily pushing with the contractions - uh oh! Of course, I decide to tell Tyler this when Renea is out of the room, causing panic in my poor husband; we both knew you were NOT supposed to push until they tell you. So he's running out in the hallway, pushing the call button, trying anything he can to get someone's attention - hello, she's pushing in here!! Thankfully, Renea, the nurse, and the midwife were headed back to my room just in time.

12:30pm - I told the midwife what was happening and she decided it was a good idea to check me (it also needed to be done if I was going to be getting an epidural). I was fully expecting her to tell me that I was about 5cm and still had a long way to go; to my surprise she says: "Well, you're completely dilated and Baby is at station 2 - you're ready to have this baby!" HALLELUJAH!! They started to get things in the room for delivery and had me get into position to push. I started pushing and Oliver started dropping his heart rate so they put some oxygen on me and told me to breathe to get the oxygen in and get his heart rate up. At this point, it's like an exorcism is going on in the room and being "calm" and breathing just seemed ridiculous. Somehow, I was able to do it and his heart rate came back up and they told me I could push again.

12:40pm - Oliver is born! Yep, after only 10min of pushing - woohoo!! Tyler was a bundle of emotions next to me through the whole pushing process (laughing/crying at the same time - I mean, it probably was pretty hilarious to see his normally calm wife moaning and screaming; not hilarious that I was in pain, but I'm pretty sure it was straight out of a movie...so embarrassing!!) Unfortunately because of the meconium, Tyler wasn't able to cut the cord - the midwife did it and the nurse and OB took Oliver over to the bed to start cleaning him up/suctioning him out. Poor little guy - swallowed a bunch of meconium into his stomach so they had to suctioning his stomach out a few times. His color was great and boy, was he screaming! But he still appeared to be in a little bit of respiratory distress so they put an ET tube down him to suction him below the vocal chords - praise God, nothing down there! His "respiratory distress" was simply anger at being so rudely pulled from his nice warm home :) Once they put him on me and let Tyler hold him, he calmed down and started breathing better.

1:30pm - Oliver is put on my chest and allowed to breastfeed for the first time - what a champ! He did so great :) They let us hold him and cuddle with him for about an hour and then took him and Tyler to the nursery so he could have his first bath. They checked his blood sugar and it was a little low so they wanted me to feed him when he got back to the room; he very happily obliged and his blood sugar came up :) We had a few more episodes of lower blood sugar but eventually after a few feedings, it came up and they were satisfied.

We've been home now for 2.5 days and everything is going very well. We had our first doctor appointment yesterday and everything looks great - the jaundice has gone down (it wasn't ever too bad to begin with) and all of his organs look/sound like they should :) He's lost about 1/2lb since birth, which isn't unexpected; they just want to start seeing it go up now that he's eating better. Our next appointment is next Wednesday, praying for another good appointment!

Thanks again for everything you've all done; we're so grateful! We will be keeping you updated periodically (aka whenever I remember) and be sure to look for pictures on Facebook (for those of you who don't have FB, I'll try to remember to post more pics on here!) Love to you all!