J2 is here! He's little and perfect and so much easier to like than Little Miss J, but we can get to that in a minute.
The whole labor thing got off to a bad start. Let me preface that by saying that for Little Miss J we went to the hospital when my water broke so I have no idea what non-Pitocin induced contractions actually feel like. That being said, we had a couple of false alarms since I had no idea what I was expected to experience.
After a full day of work on 9/26, where I was timing contractions for the entire afternoon. Not an easy task when trying to finish a legal research memo. If you check the app, I may or may not have had several contractions that lasted for more than 12 minutes. Then after work, we headed to after school night at the preschool where I was joking with most of the parents that Gus was going to have to throw a three year-old birthday party on his own, while surreptiously trying to continue timing contractions.
Basically, I suck at timing contractions and so finally Gus took over and we just sat on the couch to focus and I would tell him when they started and stopped. The hospital's advice was to come in when they were 3-5 minutes for two hours so when they got to 4 minutes apart for an hour we headed to the hospital because I was really not going to be precluded from the option of an epidural.
I got to the hospital measuring a whopping 3.0 cm. I waddled the hallways for an hour and a half with frequent breaks to ride out the contractions - the entire time I was wishing that I was sleeping. All that waddling bought me another 0.5 cm. Apparently, 4 cm is the magic number that buys you an admission ticket to the hospital. The nurse suggested that we might go labor at home and I was thinking ... SERIOUSLY? NO. SERIOUSLY? I mean with contractions 2-3 minutes apart what other indication was I going to have to know to come back to the hospital? Was I going to shove my own arm up there and see if I was at 4 cm? Or was I just supposed to waddle back in with a baby head hanging out of my crotch? I mean really. Both Gus and I told them that we were not leaving the hospital until we had a baby.
About 2:00 a.m., I got admitted to the hospital and immediately got the epidural. I was exhausted and just wanted some sleep. Seeing how slowly I was progressing, I was pretty sure I was going to be there for two weeks until my actual due date and I was going to need some drugs to get some rest. By 6:30 or so, I had only moved another cm despite having Pitocin.
And then all of sudden ... wham! I went from 4.5 cm to 6.0 cm in an hour. My doctor finally showed up and she broke my water and less than an hour later, we were ready to push. The pushing thing was a piece of cake after the 2 hour nightmare with Little Miss J. There was really only one way to go after that - I mean it couldn't be worse. I pushed for less than a half hour ... definitely more than a 4 pusher but significantly less than previously.
J2 was born on September 27 at 9:07 a.m.! His head and face were so perfect that the nurse who examined him later asked if he was a c-section baby.
I can't get over how handsome he is ...
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