My 100th Post!

Wow, I can't believe I have posted 100 times on this blog! I guess now would be as good of a time as any to take a break. I will not be able to connect to the internet from my computer for a while. . . I will try to be creative and find ways to still update occasionally.

I hope you all have a fabulous summer!!!

Photography 103

Newport Beach Temple and an afternoon at the beach. If you look really closely you will see a dolphin jumping to the left of the sailboat in the last picture.

2 and 3 days old

The Story . . .

I'm back!

Ok, many of you have been asking about how the birth went. I'll try not to go into too much detail, but give a quick rundown of how things went.

Four weeks before the due date I was dilated 3cm. The next week, 3.5cm and the next week 4cm. We thought the baby would come early for sure! Well, he didn't. (Our due date was moved up three days) My midwife scheduled me to be induced the morning of the due date since I was progressing so well, but my contractions just weren't kicking in.

My Mom flew in on Monday and by the time we got home that evening I was having regular contractions about 10 minutes apart. We decided to go in to the hospital at about 11pm. By the time they put the monitors on me my contractions were about 6-8 minutes apart. They had me walk around for an hour and then checked me again. My contractions hadn't picked up much and I was only dilated 5cm. It was about 1:30am at this point and I informed them that I was scheduled to come in at 7:30am to be induced so they kept me. We waited for about four more hours, but didn't make any progress, so they gave me some pitocen (sp?) to get things going. My contractions started to pick up and after about an hour and a half I was ready for the epidural. It felt great! I was able to sleep for quite a few hours. I think around 8:30am or so the Dr. came in and woke me up to break my water and then I fell back asleep. Finally at 12:30pm they had me start pushing, but decided to wait a half hour for things to progress a little farther. The nurse turned down the epidural a bit so that I could feel the contractions better. Around 1:15pm I started pushing again and continued until 2:35pm. Paul was an excellent coach! It was great having him and my Mom there encouraging and helping me! The epidural ran out before E was born so I felt a lot more than I was expecting. The last half hour or so of pushing was hard, but amazing at the same time. Giving birth was more of a spiritual experience for me than I expected. It is wonderful to be part of such a miracle!

The thing that I was not prepared for was the recovery. I have recovered really well and they even let us leave the hospital early, but that "hit by a truck" feeling was more than I had expected.

It is crazy to think that was almost three weeks ago. The time goes so fast! We went out for our first walk this week and E went to church for the first time today.

Wow, that still ended up being a pretty long story!