Happy Birthday, Baby Girl!

I can’t believe my baby is ONE YEAR OLD!

She was born at 9:48 am on November 16, 2008. 6 pounds, 11 1/2 ounces 18 1/2 inches long. Beautiful.

What a difference a year makes! We celebrated her big day today with iced Banana Muffins for breakfast.

Happy Birthday, Baby Girl! I love you very much and am so lucky to be your mama.

Want to hear the birth story?

Of course you do, so here it is. So I was 38 weeks pregnant and we had friends in town for the weekend.  Saturday afternoon we went to the mall and did a lot of walking and I remember having a contraction that literally stopped me in my tracks. But, I wasn’t that surprised as I’d been having contractions – at least one every hour or two – for 3 days. Saturday night (the 15th), we got a babysitter and went to dinner with our friends and then stopped by a party. Baby Girl was going nuts in my belly and moving and squirming all over the place. I got really discouraged thinking there was no way she was coming soon if she was still moving around that much. We went home and went to bed.

Around 3:30 in the morning I woke up to go to the bathroom and had a contraction. Again, I really didn’t think much of it because it was not unusual. I got back in bed and could.not.fall.asleep.  It was awful. I was just laying there. I started daydreaming, thinking “Maybe I can’t fall asleep because I’m going to have a baby.” And then I’d remember I wasn’t having contractions.

After tossing and turning and resorting to reading a boring magazine to try and fall asleep I heard some strange noises coming from the monitor in my son’s room. I went to check on him and as soon as I opened his bedroom door I was hit with the stench of vomit. Yep, he’d thrown up all over himself and his bed. I brought him to the bathroom in our bedroom to clean him off because I didn’t want to wake our house guests. I”m pretty sure the minute I started bathing him I started having regular contractions. I told my husband to get out his trusty iPhone and start timing the contractions using the Labor App we’d been so excited to buy.

I continued contracting and Toddler Boy continued getting sick. It was comical, actually. I was hunched over on the floor having contractions, helping my son hunch over a barf bowl. I wanted to take a walk to see if the contractions were really labor if it was from the stress of my son getting sick. I was really trying to talk my husband into going on a walk to the grocery store, but luckily by the time I got my shoes on I looked at my husband and said, “I’m not going ANYWHERE!”

I don’t remember much, but at some point we had to wake our friends and say, “Um, we’re going to the hospital. Can you watch our kid? And, oh yea, he’s been barfing all morning.” By the time we got in the car it was 6:30 and my contractions were every 4 minutes. We checked in to the hospital at 6:58 am and I was 5 cm dilated.

I had high hopes of giving birth naturally without an epidural, but I just couldn’t tough it out. I got an epidural around 9 am. (I still blame Nurse Judy who at one point said, “She’s gonna need an epidural.” Bitch.) At 9:24 the doctor checked and I was 10 cm and ready to push.

Baby Girl’s heart rate wasn’t reacting well to the contractions and when my water broke there was meconium so on the 3rd pushing contraction the doctor used a vacuum to help bring my little one to the world at 9:48 am.