Liam Jon
This fella joined us 5 days late, but in perfect timing! Here is a brief highlight of how things progressed that sunny, spring day:
My mom had been with us for the week in anticipation of Liam's arrival. Much to her dismay, the time had come for her to head back home and sweet baby was still not showing any real signs of joining us. Randomly, mom mentioned castor oil and that I should talk it over with her brother-in-law who is a midwife in a major city and has been practicing for decades. So, after filling him in on my stats, I felt comfortable giving it a shot. However, it did take some hours to work up the nerve to ACTUALLY drink the castor oil and I drank less than recommended as I was leery of what was likely to happen (look it up online if you don't know and are that curious)!
I drank the castor oil at 11:40am, and I began having strong contractions about 1pm just after Jon had left to take a short drive. After about 10 minutes I called him and asked him to quickly make his way home, and by 1:30pm we were on our way to the hospital.
We arrived about 2:30pm and I honestly did NOT think I was going to make it. My contractions were about 3 min apart by the time we got there and we were a scene out of the movie in terms of the pain if you could have peeked into our car! Jon dropped me at the door as I had called ahead to ask for a wheel chair (seriously didn't think think I could walk in because of the pain and a very full bladder!), and he went to park the car. Much to my surprise, there was no person or chair waiting to whisk me away to labor & delivery so I quickly hurried down the hall by myself!
Jon quickly caught up to me and we were shown our room. As I promptly changed into the hospital gown and went to wash my hands, the faucet in the bathroom blew off spraying water everywhere! It was a much needed bit of humor and we all had a good laugh! Things progressed quickly, but much differently than with Kincaid. When we got to the hospital I was 6 cm dilated and 100% effaced. I kept expecting my water to break soon after as it had with Kincaid, but my body had other plans. After a couple hours of contractions, I was progressed to an 8 and still no water breaking! Finally, I insisted on having an epidural, which was amazing (though I do sort of regret it now!) as I was becoming very discouraged and worried about the baby as he'd shown signs of being stressed throughout the labor. about 15-20 min after the epi kicked in, my water broke and Liam arrived. 9 lbs and 22 inches of perfection. What a miracle and what joy to finally hold this sweet little guy! Praise God for His protection of us both and for the addition to our family! We love him to pieces!
More to come on these first few weeks at home!
