The Story
The morning of Aug 12th I went into my DR office because I had been having contractions through out the night. I was only 36 weeks along so they wanted to check me out and see what was happening. I was starting to dialte and efface earlier that week and had made a little more progress that morning, but on my Non-stress test they saw that I was contracting every 2-3 minutes even though they weren't very uncomfortable yet. My blood pressure was up too, so they sent me home on bed rest (but my Dr thought I would probably go into labor soon with in 48 hrs). That afternoon while trying to be on bed rest-so hard with 2 kids, good thing Brent can work from home!-my contractions almost completely stopped. So here I was trying to figure out how I was going to work bed rest for the next week with Aspen's first day of school coming up and the normal demands of having a almost 5 and almost 3 yr old! I got up around 6:30 and had dinner with the family and shortly after my contractions REALLY came back. By 7:30 Brent was online looking up "When to go to the Hospital" and we decided to pack up and go around 8ish (the girls were in bed and stayed the night with Dane and a good friend of mine came and got them that morning till my in-laws got back form Orlando that afternoon) We got into the Hospital OB Triage at 8:30 and hooked me up to the monitors, my blood pressure was getting high, it topped out at 169/96 which is quite high since my normal is 120/60! My dr took about 1-1/2 HOURS to get there to check me. I was about 5cm dilated but definalty in active labor (I could have told him that an hour earlier) I finally got to a room around 10:30ish and they started my IV, broke my water, and gave me some Stadol (sp?) I went from almost 6 to fully dilated in less then 20 min and then had to WAIT AGAIN because my Dr had left the hospital. After pushing for another 15 min or so I delivered Adelene Rae at 11:33 pm (just 27 minutes shy of her Great Grandpa Grassman's bday and the day after her Great Grandpa Smith's bday!) She was 6lbs 8 oz and 19 3/4 in long making her my biggest baby. Because she was 36 weeks-or late preterm they said they would have to keep her in the NICU over night for observation. Well....they DIDN'T, she did so well and even ate within 1 hr of birth that they didn't feel the need to take her to the NICU. We ran into some other issuse with her being 'preterm' that all had to do with Hospital/Doctor bureaucratics-they wouldn't discharge the baby till 48 hrs so we didn't get home from the hospital till 12 AM that day-but she is a completely healthy normal new born.
The Photos
Just after delivery (I was still very loopy since I'd had Stadol less then 45 min earlier!)



About 12 hrs old

Meeting the Big Sisters


Our first full day home.
Ella loves her Baby Addy and always wants to be holding/loving on her.

Morning awake time.
I will have more pictures from her 1st week when I get them from my parents. They were on my moms camera and I forgot to download them before she left!
We are doing great now, I can't believe it has been 4 weeks today! Addy is a very good baby that has already started settling into a good routine. She usually (there have been a few off nights) gets up between 1:30am-2:30 am and then again 5:30-6:00am. She is then up (and cranky) for about an hr then sleeps most of the afternoon eating every 2-3 hrs. She is up again at about 6pm (dinner time of course) and has a cranky time from about 6:30-9:00pm then it's off to bed at 10 pm! When we took her in to the Dr at 1 week old she was already back up to her birth weight of 6lbs 8 oz which is REALLY good for a breast fed baby. She is continuing to eat well and grow. We go in for her 1 month check up on Monday so I'll have some more 'stats' to share then.