On July 31st I left work early because my feet were sooo swollen. Chris was home that afternoon so we went swimming and I took a long nap (thank goodness). He left for work at 5, and at 7:15 while I was relaxing and getting ready to watch a movie my water broke! I called Chris right away and he came home. Then I called the doctor and he said to get to the hospital in the next couple of hours but told us we could take our time since I wasn’t having very many contractions yet and since I was a first time mom. As we were getting ready to leave (about 8:30) my contractions kept getting closer together and more intense. The 45-minute drive to the hospital was torture! Every bump and turn was crazy with all the contractions. Plus we had to stop at Wal-Mart for Chris to pick up a prescription – good timing huh? We finally made it to the hospital and up the elevators with all of our junk in tow (I brought WAY too much stuff!) and got checked in. At about 10:00 we were all settled in our room working through the contractions together while they monitored the baby’s heart rate. We ended up having to stay on the monitor because she was having some decelerations, but things were moving so fast that I didn’t want to walk around anyway! They got more and more worried about the baby’s heartbeat though, and lots of people started coming in the room. They hooked up an internal monitor (poor baby) to keep a close watch on her heart and they gave me an oxygen mask to help make sure we were both getting enough air. I was having a hard time breathing. At about 11:50 I was ready to push. Now there were even more people in the room cause the doctor wasn’t there yet. He came in looking like he just got out of bed, which I’m pretty sure was the case J He probably thought I wouldn’t have her till the morning. I pushed for 16 minutes and our beautiful Evelyn was born at 12:08 am on August 1st. She was able to stay with us and I gave her her first bath and Chris put on her first diaper! She weighed 6lbs 1oz and was 18.5 in long. As an accomplishment, I went through my labor and birth with absolutely no drugs. No epidural, hooray! The only drug’s I had were after the birth, they gave me some Advil to help with swelling and headache/backache. It was lots of hard work but so worth it. We both are healthy and wonderful. Our beautiful daughter is doing great, we went home at 6:00 p.m. on August 2nd.
