Delivery Details..for those of you who are interested

And for those of you who aren't....just stop reading here and look at the pretty pictures that I posted.

As most of you know, I have been wanting Finn to arrive early as I just couldn't stand being pregnant any longer and I was really worried about delivering another large baby. I was doing pretty much everything possible to induce myself, but it wasn't working. I was walking a lot (mostly from chasing after M), eating spicy foods, and pretty much every other wives tale that you hear. Well, on Sunday night we had dinner with some of our friends and it turns out that Brad BBQ ribs did the trick! I started having some contractions around 9 pm, and they were somewhat painful (nothing like what you see on TV) and I wasn't sure if they were just muscle aches or real contractions. So, Z decided to download an iphone app that helps you time your contractions and it maps out the intervals...very fancy stuff. So I recorded my first contraction, started to read a book, and about 20 minutes later recorded my second contraction, read some more of my book and at about 10:30 pm my water broke. This was a new experience for me as I was induced my first pregnancy, so I wasn't really sure what happened. I woke Z up told him and he got a huge smile on his face and started furiously getting ready to whisk me off to the hospital.

Our friend Suzanne came over to watch M, and ended up spending the night with her while we were at the hospital. At first I was triaged in the pregnancy center and had the wonderful experience of working with a medical student and three residents. That just means I had to give my history to four different people, which got a bit annoying. Especially because they all asked me if I had been taking my prenatal vitamins and foolishly told them the truth...no. They confirmed that I had 'ruptured' and they admitted me to the hospital, and at the time I was 3 cm dilated and I wasn't having any contractions of significance.

So, we settled in and actually got a bit of sleep, when I started feeling some more contractions, not extremely painful, but definitely there. I hadn't progressed much in dilation (I was 4 cm at 3 am) so they started pitocin. I knew I wanted an epidural, so I asked when I should get that and the nurse told me there was about a 15 min lead time for the anesthesiologist and that it was a slow night, so we decided to wait a couple of hours. Well, the pitocin kicked in and I really started to feel the pain. The contractions were taking my breath away and were about 3 min apart, so I asked for the epidural. I had to wait nearly an hour for the epidural because the team was in another room at that point ( very difficult placement) and I was freaking out a bit that I would miss the window of opportunity for the epidural. These were seriously painful contractions, and I can see how women in labor scream profanities and really life. Well, they came in and placed the epidural at about 6:30 am and I felt SO much better. I even got some more sleep, anticipating at least 4 more hours until I would be fully dilated. The MD's checked me again around 8:30 am and concluded I had fully dilated, and was ready to go. It was so fast, and so awesome. She asked for a practice push and had to tell me to stop because he was crowning. After two contractions/pushes we had our baby boy at 9:13 in the am!

It took the doctors a little bit of time afterwards to take care of some bleeding that I had, which was unexpected. After about 45 minutes, things were all taken of and a little later we headed up to our room.

The recovery process is a bit difficult, but I am feeling much better now than I did earlier today. My iron levels are a bit low, so Z brought me an O'Connell's burger for dinner, and even snuck me in a pint of Guinness to celebrate our lucky Irishman, F.