Lily

Our family grew by ten fingers and ten toes on the cutest baby girl on January 10th, 2018. We are so in love and cannot express how lucky we are to be her parents. It has now been one entire year since she joined the family and we could not be happier.

Lily's birth was pretty straightforward, but the week and a half before was very eventful.

January 1, 2018

I am 8 1/2 months pregnant and we decided to sleep instead of ringing in the New Year. Just after midnight, Alex asked me to take him to the hospital because he was in intense pain. After many hours and tests, we are sent home with the doctor saying 'it may be your gallbladder but I cannot see any stones so come back if it happens again.'

January 5, 2018

I go in for my 38 week check up with my OB. Everything looks normal, the baby was growing well. Although I was dilated, the doctor did not expect an early delivery. We plan on an induction date of January 23rd if needed.

January 7, 2018

Alex is in pain again, so we load into the car and head back to the hospital. After more testing, the doctor still suspects the gallbladder. The on call surgeon requires a closer look, so we leave with a prescription for pain medicine and a consultation appointment.

January 9, 2018

I am officially 39 weeks and it is time for the surgery consultation. I waddle into the appointment with Alex hobbling beside me, barely able to stand from the pain.

The surgeon tells Alex the pain may be from his gallbladder but there is no indication there are stones. It can be removed, but the surgeon warns that it may not fix the problem. Alex agrees to additional testing the next day, followed by surgery in two days. We are told to have a plan for surgery day just in case I go into labor. Even though I didn't expect to go into labor, we enlist Alex's mom to come stay with him, and my parents to take me to the hospital for delivery.

Both exhausted, we get into bed pretty early. Around 10 pm, I started having pains in my back that seemed to dull with a heating pad. I got up to use the restroom and noticed some other signs of labor (avoiding that TMI 😉). I tell Alex 'we might have a problem' and download a labor monitoring app.

After just half an hour, the contractions started getting more intense and closer together (less than 5 minutes apart, lasting for a minute each). I paced our bedroom and hallway while Alex put our bags in the car. At 11:30, I vomit from the pain and we knew it was time to go.

We pull up to the hospital just before midnight. I have another contraction in the parking lot and at this point they are less than 3 minutes apart. We roll into Labor & Delivery and start the check-in process. By then, another contraction hits hard so a nurse sloooooowly wheels me into a room.

The nurse very casually tells me to change into a gown. When I am settled and in between contractions, she checks my progress. You could see her face change: "You are dilated to a 7" (She clearly thought I was being dramatic 🙄). She quickly leaves the room to get another nurse to hook up my IV and pages the anesthesiologist.

While getting my IV, I have another contraction. Alex is trying to help me the best he can and even lets me punch him in the chest. The anesthesiologist comes in and gives me an epidural. Sitting still during a contraction was both the easiest and hardest thing to do.

Once the epidural kicked in, things slowed down. We knew Alex wasn't going to make his surgery appointment so he tries to call his surgeon's office to leave a message. Alex and I get in some rest while we waited until it was time to push.

January 10, 2018

After we woke up, we realized that this baby was really coming so Alex enlists his mom to call and cancel the surgery. And I text my boss letting him know I am starting my maternity leave a few weeks early.

At about 8 am, the nurse talked us through how things would go once my doctor arrived and we did a few practice pushes. When my doctor arrived, he broke my water and noticed meconium in the amniotic fluid. We tried pushing but things needed to go faster, so we helped things along with an episiotomy.

At 8:50 AM, shortly after I started pushing, our little Lily made her debut. 

Right after she was born, Lily was placed on my chest for a moment so we could meet our baby girl. She was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen and we were immediately in love. Lily weighed 7 pounds 8 ounces and was 15 inches long. She was born with a head full of dark hair and was perfectly healthy.

The next few days were full of love and newborn bliss, with a little bit of pain for me and Alex. We rescheduled his surgery for the week after Lily was born and it turns out, his gallbladder was full of stones! He was even a little bit of a celebrity when he was finally able to get surgery because he was 'the one who had to postpone because his wife had a baby.' It sounds like it is the plot to a tv episode, oh wait, it sort of is.

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