She’s here! Born on her due date of July 13th too! 7lbs 7oz and 20 inches long.

We were busy busy busy the week leading up to her birth. We’re always doing house stuff, but in order for her to have a nursery we needed to rearrange a few rooms. Andy’s lair moved to the second bedroom downstairs and we decided to move our bedroom downstairs too and have a master suite/adult area. That left one of the bedrooms upstairs open for Miss Cassidy. Admittedly she has the most ghetto nursery ever (she’s in the pack n play, we didn’t paint and there are boxes and boxes of baby clothes everywhere). But she’s here and she’s healthy :)

So we’d been working on rearranging rooms all week. We painted Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. The carpet for the two downstairs bedrooms and hallway was installed Friday. The installation guy asked when I was due and I said “Tomorrow” with a smile. He looked at me wide eyed and joked that he’d better hit the road before something happened. I was going to work this baby out though, no sitting around waiting for things to happen. Friday afternoon I was painting during Ben’s nap and I had a few contractions. I hadn’t really felt any before then. I figured something might happen by the end of the weekend or Monday, but really just went about my day.

Friday night I went to bed around 11, only having had a few more contractions. I woke up around midnight and they were starting to get rather painful and closer together (but still like 20 minutes apart). Finally around 1am I went into the living room where Andy was working on a project and said “Well, this might be happening tonight.” He looked at me and said “Seriously?” I was just as surprised as he was :) I called my neighbor across the street and she came over to be with Benjamin while we grabbed our bags and the carseat and headed to the hospital.

We arrived at the hospital around 2am and headed to triage where they checked me over. Amazingly I was 7cm dilated already! I won’t say I wasn’t in pain, but it was definitely still manageable at that point. The doctor looked at me quizzically and said “I can’t even feel your cervix it’s so thin. How are you so calm?” We were officially admitted at that point and headed to our hospital room.

The use of pain meds was brought up and I told the doctor I’d had a really bad experience with the epidural with my first baby, an awful spinal headache that took two blood patches to fix. I was totally out of it for the first week or two of Ben’s life and it sucked! I decided to try and do it this time without any pain meds…I had progressed so quickly that I figured why not just suck it up and go for broke?

The nurse put an IV in my hand but didn’t hook me up to anything so I was allowed to walk around the room. I would walk for a few minutes then a contraction would hit and I’d lean on a chair or Andy until it passed. I sat on a birthing ball (giant exercise ball) for a bit too. Rocking back and forth on that helped tremendously. I had to sit in bed a few times so they could strap the fetal monitor to my belly and just check that baby was doing alright. This was followed by more and more walking. With Ben’s labor I would tense up into a ball on the bed and fight the pain of each contraction. This time I allowed the pain to come over me and tried to take deep breaths through it, knowing it was only temporary. Obviously, we all try to avoid pain but I kept it in the back of my mind that this kind had a purpose and if I fought it things would be much worse. I think being in my head and mentally working through it helped more than anything else.

At one point I headed to the bathroom and knew afterwards that it was time to push. I pushed for 20 minutes and she was born at 3:59am (just two hours after we’d gotten to the hospital!) It was insanely painful but insanely quick! I am glad that what happens in the birth room, stays in the birth room though :) I know I sounded so primitive with groaning, grunting and moaning, haha, but hey, whatever gets the baby out! Believe me, no one is more surprised than me that I did this whole thing “naturally.”

They put her on my chest for a few minutes then took her across the room to check her over. She got a 9/10 Apgar score and was perfectly healthy. The doctor jokingly requested an Apgar score for dad and asked “What’s his color? Is he still standing?” Andy did great though, he stayed up by my head and held my hand and one of my legs while the nurse held the other.

Cassidy took to nursing great and would wake up every 2-3 hours asking for food, then fall asleep again. We did end up staying in the hospital two extra days because my blood pressure spiked after delivery. Crazy scary numbers like 160s/100s. Cassidy developed a little bit of jaundice too, so it was just better for everyone to stay put and be monitored (even though the only thing I wanted to do was go home.) I was put on meds and the jaundice started clearing up so we were released Tuesday afternoon.

Since then my blood pressure has dropped and they halved my medicine. I go to the doctor’s again in a few days for another check. Cassidy is still sleeping and eating great, and she doesn’t even seem to mind her ghetto bedroom.

What does Ben think? How has the transition to two been? Pictures???

I have a ton more to share, but I wanted to get this written and up before I forgot any details. More coming soon! Thank you to everyone who prayed for us, watched Ben, visited at the hospital and those who are showing us love with meals and helping out. Our little family of four is so thankful :)

ps – If you’re wondering why we didn’t just paint her room (and instead put all the effort into the two downstairs bedrooms) it’s because the two rooms upstairs need a TON of work themselves. New windows, insulation, new drywall in the one and better closet solutions. So, those are some day projects…but for now, we’re a little busy :)