Chase was born Monday, June 29th at 9:44 am.
He weighed 7 pounds, 12 ounces and was 20.5" long
It was a quick delivery, and he came out perfect. Good color, not even a cone-head!
The Delivery Story:
I am one of the lucky ones...I don't really know when the contractions began. I was a little uncomfortable when I got up to use the bathroom around 5am. If I wasn't so tired or had bothered to turn on the light, I would have thought more of that early-morning bathroom trip. Oh well...
The alarm went off at 630 am as usual. I took my shower and started getting dressed. The plan was to work from home the rest of the week, or as long as I could. Around 7, I told Tim that he might not bother going to work. At 730, I called my OB to tell him my progress. There was a little blood on my last trip to the bathroom, so we figured it was the "plug". He instructed me to come on to the hospital.
So we finished getting dressed. I had some breakfast. We dressed Tate. I packed my bag (I had a list, but I didn't even have the bag out of the basement. We took Tate to school. Tim went inside while I waited in teh car, starting to get truly uncomfortable.
We checked into the hospital around 830. I think the clock said 833 when I sat down on the bed in the labor and delivery room. At that point, I was "between 6 and 7 cm" and my water had already broken...it was just broken very high and so was a slow leak. This is when I realized that my plug had dropped at 5am and the 730 call was prompted by my water breaking...woops!
Things were progressing pretty quickly. They took my blood to get the order for the epidural. I answered a lot of questions and signed a bunch of forms.
Woosh! What was a slow leak overflowed all at once, and then things really started moving! I remember at one point looking at the clock and saying "I've only been here an hour!" And I was continually asking about the epidural. I knew it wasn't going to happen, but I was going to ask, anyway! When the doctor said it was okay to start pushing, they still hadn't finished the lab work.
I won't go into the details, but I can say that I was very lucky to push for such a short time, given the lack of drugs. Chase rocketed out - and I do mean rocketed! - and it was all over.
Chase was perfect from the start. He cried out, but not like Tate did, sparing himself a trip to the NICU. His color was perfect, his head round. Tim counted all the fingers and toes while I watched the nurse clean him up. He ate right away...and hasn't stopped since!!
The hospital was totally unprepared for us and we didn't get a room until after 1pm. So we just hung out in Labor and Delivery for awhile.
We did have a little hiccup the second night; they noticed that he was grunting a little bit and tested his O2 and glucose, both low. They took him to the NICU about 4am to watch him, but brought him back to me about 9am with a clean bill of health. This sort of thing isn't uncommon for babies born very quickly; apparently it's important to have time to transition to the oxygen-breathing world!
