Delivery Recap

OK, I had intended to post this a week or more ago, but better late than never (which seems particularly appropriate).

We checked into the hospital at midnight on Saturday night and Jen was put on an IV drip of Pitocin about 1am. We then attempted to sleep for a few hours, however the typical hospital parade of nurses came through every few minutes, so that was somewhat pointless.

Around 8am Jen finally began to feel contractions enough to actually ask for some pain killing drugs. Then around 11am the pain become consistent enough that between Jen and the midwife, they decided to ask for an epidural to be administered. Which did kill the pain, but meant Jen could no longer get out of bed and needed help to move around in the bed.

The rest of Sunday dragged on endlessly. We watched 3 full games of football, which we could very well have been doing if we were at home, but being hospital kind of sucked the fun out of it.

Late on Sunday the pain level got a point where Jen had to get a "top up" on the epidural. Apparently epidurals are not fool proof and do not always kill all the pain - they don't mention that in the brochures!

Starting at around 11pm the midwife began checking Jen every 2 hours and unfortunately she was making pretty slow progress. So we had a couple rounds of 2 hours of waiting and extra pain killers for Jen. The pain killers would only last about 90 minutes so Jen had to work through some pretty serious contractions for the last 30 minutes a couple of times.

It was touch and go for a while there early on Monday morning. The midwife was definitely showing signs of concern in terms of whether the baby was making enough progress to continue on or if we would have to stop and go with a Cesarean instead. Luckily at the 5:30am check the midwife was finally happy that Jen was ready to try pushing, which was a great relief for Jen as she was very much done with dealing with the pain.

It took until about 6:10am for the midwife and nurses to get the room ready and get Jen into position before she made her first push. Jen pushed like a champ and barely flinched at all. The baby was officially born on 6:52am, just 42 minutes after she started pushing.

So it took almost 31 hours from the time we checked in until the time the kid was born. We are told that while this was a long induction process, we were by far no where near the longest.

To recap the official stats:

Born
6:52am on Monday November 26th, 2007 (Los Angeles time)
1:22am on Tuesday November 27th, 2007 (Adelaide time)

Weight
9lb 8oz or 4.082kg

Length
20.5 inches or 52.07 cm

Because the birth certificate says November 26th, we are going to recognize that as the official birthday, but if any Australians want to acknowledge the 27th instead, that is cool with us! :)

Anyway, just wanted to say that even when the pain was really bad in those last few hours, Jen powered through like a real trooper and was nice to me at all times!