born May 10, 2010 at 5:13pm
7lbs 5oz 19" long
Amelia was scheduled to be delivered due to my diabetes. She was induced at 38 weeks and 5 days.
Joe likes to tell people that labor was easy; what does he know!! I prefer to say that it was relatively uneventful. I went into the hospital at about 10:30 in the morning on Monday. Went through about an hour and a half of paper work then a bit of time fighting with the nurse over the birthing plan (she insisted that it was important to break my water prior to an epidural and I refused, again, what does she know?). Finally around noon-ish I got an epidural which created some trouble because it dropped my blood pressure to sickening levels several times. While going through the ups and downs caused by my epidural I remember thinking several times, I think I'm going to die and if I have another baby I will NOT get another epidural. After the problem was finally fixed the resident broke my water and contractions began. About 45 minutes later I was having lots of contractions but they weren't consistent - some were 2 minutes apart some were 8 minutes apart. So, the nurse administered enough Pitocin to normalize my contractions. Just before I was going to start pushing my bolus dose of my epidural wore off and the real pain of delivering a baby began to set in - this is when I realized that I will get another epidural if I have another baby. Thank goodness I could push the button to deliver a bit more pain medicine before I began pushing. At about 5pm my doctor arrived and I pushed several times. Amelia's head poked through and my contraction ended at which point everyone except me was ready to take a break - her head was half out for goodness sakes. So, I pushed her head the rest of the way out to ease the pressure sans a contraction. After the head the body and placenta basically birthed themselves. I walked away with only a small tear - one which I attribute to the beautiful round shape of Amelia's head.
My hospital stay was much better than I was expecting. Fortunately, the nursing staff at Salt Lake Regional is far superior now to my previous stay there. After leaving the hospital, however, I was unprepared for the pain of recovery. I never really felt any pain recovering from birthing Henry so I was shocked at the amount of pain I felt for several days. Mind you, I'm sure my pain was certainly not more than any other new mother experiences, I was just unprepared because of my previous experience.
Today Amelia weighs 6lbs 15oz. At 95% of her birth weight she is nearly perfect. She eats like a champion which is a wonderful blessing. She will probably outweigh Henry any day now, since he still never really eats.
