Zizah - Birth Story and Some New Pics

Since I can't play Diablo 3 while eating lunch, I decided to blog instead. :) So here's all the details about Zizah's birth and first few days (in case anyone cares). I won't be offended if you skip straight to the end for some pictures.

At my last OB appointment, I was 3cm dilated and I had already made my decision that if I was at least 3cm, I wanted to schedule an induction. So I'm impatient, so what. The doctor had no problem with me being induced, so we went ahead and scheduled it. At first, we were scheduled for a standby induction, which meant that I just had to wait for the hospital to call me and if they were too busy, it wouldn't be the day we picked anyway. Then they called back and said they'd made an actual appointment, so I was almost certainly guaranteed to go in on Tuesday, which I was grateful for. So we got all of our stuff ready on Monday night and went to bed (sorta) early since I had to call the hospital at 6am to make sure 7am was still the plan. I wanted to wake up a little early so I set an alarm, which I didn't end up needing because I woke up at 4:30 because I was so excited. :) One shower, one phone call, and one quick breakfast later, we had the kids in the car to go to their aunts house and we were off.

We got to the hospital right at 7 and only had to wait about 20 minutes before we were filling out paperwork and getting into the labor and delivery room. After an uneventful IV and a VERY bad blood draw (I look like someone hit me in the arm with a baseball bat), we were starting the pitocin around 8am. By about 8:45, my doctor came in and checked me over and then broke my water. We were better prepared this time, so no one got a shower. (When she broke my water with Speed, she had to change her clothes afterward.)

After an hour of increasingly hard contractions, the nurse (who already knew I wanted an epidural) came in to ask if I was ready for my epidural. I told her I was ok to go a little while longer, but not much. Then she told me that the anesthesiologist had to go do a C-section so it was now or in almost 90 minutes. Yeah, not a hard decision - I had the epidural by 10:30. The epidural was quick and only bad when I had a contraction when he was putting the tube in. But since they were only about 2 minutes apart, it's not like he could avoid doing that. It was by far the best epidural I've ever had. I could still mostly move my legs but I couldn't feel any pain. It was so lovely that I decided to take a nap. :)

Somewhere in there (yeah, I was starting to get loopy so I can't remember the exact order of some things), they had me use what they call the peanut ball, which is this weirdly inflated exercise ball you hold between your legs to spread your hips. It got me from 6cm to 8cm pretty quick, so I guess it worked? Then sometime after my nap, the nurse had me sit straight up (which I hadn't done in my previous labors, so I thought it was weird). About 5 minutes after that I had about 5 CRAZY strong contractions that I could feel like there was no epidural in place at all. Just before we called the nurse in, she came in to check and had me lay back down and then exclaimed "Oh, look - there's the head. Can you not push for a sec while I call the doctor?"

We only waited about 10 minutes for the doctor to show up, and then it was time to push. I pushed through 3 contractions and at 1:40pm, we had a baby!! It was a little weird to have everyone go "It's a girl!" not because I didn't think it would be but because as soon as they said it, it just felt kinda, "Duh - of course it's a girl" like I'd known all along. Which I didn't. I swear.

The afterbirth took a bit longer for some reason, but I didn't feel it so I really didn't care that much. I was just happy that Zizah was here and healthy and the induction had gone so quickly and well. The only other slightly awkward thing about the delivery was that it was apparently a teaching day at our hospital, so we had double the people we would normally have had in the delivery room and half of them were students. So Zizah had some extra witnesses to her birth - go her.

After that, everything was pretty relaxed and easy. We hung out for a while in that room while they cleaned her up and got me ready to move to my postpartum room. Once we moved to the other room, we fell into the normal routine of nurses in and out, feed baby, watch baby sleep and then try to sleep ourselves. She was really quick to sleep and was a really good eater. She's still a good sleeper and a pretty good eater, so I think the first is slightly interfering with the second. :) But we're working on it and nursing is already going really, really well. And hopefully I didn't just jinx myself by saying that.

The family that lives in town came the next day to visit and it was fun to see everyone. Both our older kids were really excited to see baby Zizah and were both really cute about it. I think the nurses really enjoyed all of Hazel's exclamations like "Hi, Baby Zizah. It's me - Hazel. That's your mommy. You came out of her tummy."
Coming home was good. I've had my emotional times (not surprising) but we're doing well and taking it day by day. Zizah is such a good girl. For the most part, she eats and then sleeps for a couple of hours and then wakes up for about 10 minutes and then is ready to repeat. I do have to wake her up to eat sometimes, but it's more for my comfort level than her's. She's a very sweet girl and she's already smiled at me 3 times. Ok, so it was probably gas, but don't rain on my parade. So here's some pictures, since like Jacob said, that's really all anyone cares about. :)