Judah's Birth 7/21/2010

I was once again induced. I was going to let everything happen naturally, but my doctor said he wouldn't be available on my due date (23rd) and that he had to be in surgery the day before that, so he said we could induce 2 days early on the 21st, which was just fine with me.

We arrived at the hospital at 7am and I had to go through the random annoying questions. By 8am, they started me on meds to get my contractions going. I started contracting right away and quickly got to 3 centimeters. Around noon my contractions were hurting and I asked for my wonderful epidural.

After while, my epidural started to wear off in my right leg, but my left leg was extremely tingly. So the nurse told me to lay on my right side to make it drain in to my leg more. After she left the room, she and another nurse came rushing in about 5 minutes later and told me to lay on my back again. They said his heart rate had dropped from 130 to 80 and we needed to get it back up. So they had me lay on my left side then and checked me again and actually were able to turn his head a little, which seemed to make things better. I also had to put on an oxygen mask for the remainder of the delivery to get more oxygen to Judah. It was a bit scary for a little bit, cuz they told me if his heart rate didn't go back up, we would have to do a c-section. But soon things were going good again.

Pretty soon it was 5pm. My doctor who had checked on me at 7:30am was getting ancy and said that my contractions were too spread apart and not hard enough, so he said to get me big doses of pitocin. They really sped things up because between 5:35pm and 5:40pm I went from 5 centimeters to 10 in just 5 minutes!

I pushed for 10 minutes and Judah's heart rate started to drop again. So my doctor decided to use the vacuum. That's all it took and he was out.

My precious Judah Nikolaus was born at 5:51pm, weighing 7 lbs 11 oz, 19.5 inches long (which a week later we measured him at the pediatrician and he ended up being 20.5 inches long). He surprised us all by being born with not only a full head of hair, but it was almost black as well. Lots of people said he looked like Jordan. He is such a beautiful miracle. Our family is complete.