Welcome to the world PittBaby!

It's a BOY!!

Pittbaby has finally made his entrance into the world, two weeks before his due date and not a day too late for mom!

Wednesday afternoon, the girls I work for threw a wonderful baby shower for me and I believe that was the catalyst for sending me into labor! After this shower, there was nothing else I "needed" to do before baby. I was up most of the night Wednesday extremely nauseous, and then finally got up at 6 am seriously sick- vomiting, the works. I felt horrible all day and had the Dr. call in some phenegren for me to control the nausea and vomiting. Around 5 pm, I went to use the bathroom and low-and-behold, my water broke! Evidently, what I thought was a stomach virus was actually pre-labor!

I talked to the nurse on call and she told me to head on into the hospital as I was GBS+ and would need to start antibiotics right away since my water broke. So, we took our time and cleaned up, finished packing the bags with essentials and said goodbye to Skylar. And of course, took a family picture on the way to the hospital!.

We got to the hospital and signed in- only to find out that they were so busy there were no open rooms. We spent about 4 hours in the waiting area of the lobby/triage area. Needless to say- not the best place for a laboring woman to be! However, at this point I still had not started having regular contractions- just occasional ones. We moved up to a labor/delivery room and my mom, granny and cousin Nikki came up with us. I spent the next several hours (15 to be exact...) walking the halls of the hospital, getting hooked up to the baby monitor, bouncing on the ball, and walking some more. What I truly expected to be a short labor turned out to be a marathon!

Since my plan was to go all natural (i.e. no pain medicine) I did not want to take any medicine to help speed up the delivery either. So, instead of taking Pitocin, I decided to keep walking, take showers, bounce on the ball, anything to help progress my labor without taking medicine. However, by 12:30 pm, it was obvious that I was not progressing fast enough for the baby's/my health since I was nearing the 24-hour mark since my water had broken and the risk of infection was increasing. So, we decided to start Pitocin. The devil drug!

Within minutes, I was contracting strongly every few minutes apart. I went from 4-5 cm dilated at 12:30, to 8 cm dilated at 2:40. Basically, hell on earth. By 2:40, I was telling Ken and Nikki that I couldn't make it, I needed the meds; I really didn't know if I could handle it any longer. By 2:50, I was pushing and the nurses were running into the room to help me get on the bed in time to catch the baby that was already crowning. Pittbaby was born by 3:00 pm! It's a good thing it went by so fast, or else I don't think I would have made it without meds!

Pittbaby weighed in at 7.9 lbs, and 20 inches long! Although he is a healthy baby boy, he had an irregular heartbeat and extreme tremors at first that sent him back to the nursery before I really had a chance to hold him. They checked him out and found that his blood sugar was low (due to my taking Gliburide for diabetes) and they had to give him a bottle to help bring his sugars back up. He came back to our room once he was stable and nursed pretty well. He kept falling asleep, but latched on well! He has already had 4 stinky diapers, so he is doing well!

We'll post more pics over the next few days!!