Susanna Grace

We made it home yesterday after a few days in the hospital with our new baby girl! Drew is being such a good big brother already. We are all doing great, my parents are here for a few days and sweet friends have come to visit and bring meals ;) which is always great!
Our Sue-Sue girl is such a good baby, she rarely cries and she eats A LOT! We love her so much and can't believe she is here!

Now, if you care about her birth story, keep reading. If not, you've seen all the cute pictures so you won't hurt my feelings...

Wednesday night at 10:00, I thought my water broke. It was nothing like I had heard it would be so I wasn't sure if that was actually what had happened but after about 30 minutes of walking around the house/going back and forth to the potty, looking it up online, talking to Ashley (& Ben), and calling the doctor on call, we were pretty sure, so we went to the hospital. Brandon came to stay with Drew for the night, we love him! We checked in at the hospital around 11:00 pm, I was still only 1 cm dilated but my contractions were feeling much stronger. They brought me to the delivery room and the doctor was going to start pitocin at 5:00 so we just waited, thinking this might take a while. Luckily, I started progressing quickly. At 3 cm, I got my epidural. The contractions were about 2 minutes apart and very painful. Thank goodness for modern medicine because epidurals are heaven. I knew that already but this time it was even more so! By 3:30, I was dilated to 10, feeling good because of the awesome drugs. When I started to push, they found that she was posterior, which would make it difficult to actually deliver so after about 1 hour of pushing, the doctor was called. It took him a little while to get to the hospital so I took a "nap". Even after he turned her around, I had to push for about another 30-40 minutes. I have to say, this was the absolute worst part. I was so tired, going on 24 hours since I had gotten up the day before for work (in fact, my wake-up alarm went off on my phone right after I had her...), they had given me some kind of pain medicine in my drip which had made me a little loopy, and the nurse was pushing on my stomach every time I pushed to help get her to move down. I really wanted to tell her to stop because it was awful. She kept poking me with two fingers on the top of my belly to feel for when contractions started so she could push down really hard! It sucked! The doctor didn't think I'd last so he had the nurse get the forceps, which totally freaked me out, I started crying, it was so frustrating. I was determined we would NOT need to use them so I kept trying to work up more energy to push this kid out myself, I even made Mike help give me leverage! 10 minutes later, she was here! It was 5:17 am...we had her before the scheduled pitocin and didn't need any at all, yay!! I know 7 hours from the time your water breaks til the time you deliver isn't bad at all, but this experience was much worse and painful. My labor for Drew was a breeze, which I realize even more now that I've been through one so much more difficult. I really didn't know how good I had it the first time! And I'm sure some of you can say this time I had it really good too but everyone's labor stories are different and difficult in their own ways. I'm just glad she is here, and she is healthy, and she is beautiful and Drew is a big brother, and we are now a family of 4! This is one happy girl, right here!