Violet's Birth Story

Well, Grandma (my mother in law) has taken the girls on a walk so I thought I'd write up a quick birth story post.  We woke up on May 6th around 4:45 am (after a super restful night of sleep - NOT) to get ready to go into the hospital.  My friend Holly came to stay at the house until Lily woke up and then took her back with her to her house to play for the day.  We had a lovely drive in the rain and got to the hospital around 6:15 am.  They checked me in and got the antibiotics going as I was positive for group B strep.

That process took a while and they didn't really do much else until the doctor came in  to check me (I was at a 6, 50% and Violet was still way up: -2 station for anyone who knows what that means).  The doc slightly broke my water - meaning it would leak for a while instead of gushing out all at once - to get things going.  (That was fun).  I can't remember when that was but around 8:30 am they started the pitocin to get the contractions I was already having a little closer together and more intense.  I labored for a while and when they started getting really bad I let my nurse know I wanted my epidural.  Well, that took forever for the anesthesiologist to come in and do it and when she did finally do it I think it was more painful than some of the contractions.  It worked for a while - maybe an hour - and then I started to feel all the contractions in my pelvis.  I tried using the button to add more medicine and it worked a little bit but it was still hurting quite a lot.  I told my nurse I was feeling tons of pressure and she thought it just might be a full bladder (I'll skip the next part but it ends with me having a much emptier bladder).

I was still feeling the pressure after that so she checked me and I was at an 8 dilated and still 80% effaced but Violet had come down a lot.  She said the doctor was in the room next to mine so she'd go get him and see what he thought.  20 minutes later (just after 2 pm) they both came in and the nurse checked me and told the doctor that she thought it was time for me to have the baby.  He wasn't sure and was going to go back to his office that is right next to the hospital and have the nurse give him a call when I was really ready.  After some prodding from the nurse, though, she had me push once and see what happened.  Well, in the 20 minutes she was gone to the doc, I apparently dilated the rest of the way and Violet was ready to come out. It all happened so quickly that I can't really remember all of the specifics but it basically happened like that. After some crazy intense pushing  for about 15 minutes(of which I could feel most of it - dang epidural!) Violet was born at 2:32 pm after about 6 hrs of active labor - not too shabby!  They put her right on my chest, all goopy, and she was amazing.  Barely cried at all.  Just hung out on me while the nurse cleared her out and wiped her off with some towels.  They let her stay with me for about an hour and then they came in to weigh and measure her.  She was 8 lbs 1.8 oz and 22 inches long!  That's a pound lighter than Lily was an 1.5 inches longer.  So she is our tall and skinny girl!  The new born clothes we've put on her are short in the arms but super baggy everywhere else.

I felt bad for Brady because once Violet was born, they put her on my chest and I was surrounded by the doctor and nurses so he couldn't really see her for a while after she was born.  He was just off standing in the corner trying to look over at us.  But he got to hold her soon enough and held her a ton in the hospital.  We had to stay a full 48 hours because of the group B strep thing and I was not enjoying it.  They were actually really good about only checking on us when they had to but I just wanted to be home.  When we had Lily, I never wanted to leave the hospital but with Violet, I wanted to get out of there!  Hospitals are super uncomfortable.  Why is that not more known?  My bed and all the seating available in the whole room was awful.  But now we're home and much more comfortable!  Most of my good pictures of the events have been posted on FB already but here's one of our sweet girl:

And one of our girls together for the first time:

So far Lily is doing ok with the new person in our house.  She is acting out a little more than usual and gets pretty jealous especially when I'm feeding the baby.  I'm sure it'll just take some getting used to and it's only been on day of us all being home together so I'm not too worried.  I think the hardest part so far has been making sure I'm giving Lily enough attention.  It's hard to explain to a 2 year old why mommy has to take care of the baby so much.  My parents get here tomorrow and we are very excited for that!  We haven't seen them since Christmas so I'm sure Lily will have a great time.  That's all for now.  We are so glad to be all together at home!