Bert's here!

And he does have a name! Well, we're 99% set on the name :) We've dubbed him Samuel Robert. Sammy for now.

Sorry, we forgot the camera cord, but I'll try to get some pictures up tomorrow cuz that's all that matters, right! He is a cutie--red hair, big round cheeks, beautiful skin. He measures in at a whopping 9 lbs, 1 oz and 21 inches. He looks kind of like a 3-wk old :) He was born at 3:40 am Monday morning by emergency section.

And now, time for Too Much Information again! If you don't want the gory details, stop now and go to the "Horror Stories" post, and take about half of my worst expectations and add a little drama, and that's basically it. Which sounds bad, but surprisingly, wasn't actually that bad at the time.

I'll try to keep this brief, kudos to you if you make it through the whole story!

So, I woke up at 4 am Sunday having some contractions that didn't just feel like Braxton-Hicks. I thought, "Today's the day!" Throughout the day Sunday, I had contractions sporadically, some really intense, others, not really. They weren't happening all that often, mostly 10-20 minutes apart. Finally we decided to take the girls to stay with our wonderful friends for the night, hoping we'd end up at the hospital. Around 10:30, contractions got a little more regular and more intense. At 11:30, we went to the hospital even though I wasn't sure it was really time. By midnight, the triage nurse informed me I was dilated to a 7. This surprised everyone, because I wasn't in that much pain. They took me back to the delivery room, and the nurse convinced me that if I had made it to this point so easily, I did not need an epidural. She said I had reached the peak of the pain, and the pain of pushing is different and isn't really numbed by the epidural, and that I'd push a lot more efficiently without it. So I decided to see if I could do it. Go me.

The doc came and broke my water, which had mecomium, so that was some cause for concern. The nurse was like, "you kind of seem like you're having back labor." And she was right, my back did hurt. She was an awesome nurse, and she did the counter-pressure thing for me and really helped me through the contractions. I went on like that for a couple of hours, at one point the baby's heart rate dipped, but changing my position brought it back up. Then suddenly my uterus went berzerk. I started having off the chart contractions one on top of the other. Um, ouch. Baby's heart dipped again. Changed position, got a shot to relax the uterus, and it went back up. I asked for an epidural. The anesthesiologist took FOREVER to get to my room, and the contractions didn't relent the whole time. Ouch. Thought I was going to die. Finally got the epidural and started to feel I could relax, when baby's heart dipped yet again, and my own heartrate went sky-high. Next thing I knew, I was being whisked off to the operating room, on my hands and knees on the bed since that was the position that kept his heart rate up. When we got in there, his heart had dipped again, and words like "Stat" and "crash" were being thrown around which scared me a bit. By the time they let Rob in, they had already sliced down to my uterus--I thought he was going to miss the whole thing. But, out came the baby, and he went straight to the NICU team for evaluation to see if he had breathed in any meconium. Just as they were about to intubate him, he started to cry, thank goodness. Whew. End of drama.

The pediatrician kept a close eye on him for the morning, and he was fine. I got sewed up and drugged up, and I'm fine, too! Once the baby came out, the OB saw the size of his head and his general hugeness, and said she didn't think he would have made it out any other way than a c-section. So, even though things were a little scary, I actually felt very calm throughout, and I'm glad that I didn't have to push and push for hours before we figured out that he was just not going to make it out. AND, he had been completely face-up, so it was full-on back labor, and that would have made pushing harder.

I am so very grateful to have a healthy, beautiful baby boy! We are so blessed!