Emmalene Cynthia's birth story

Yesterday, July 18th 2009, Emmalene Cynthia made her debut into the world 3 weeks ahead of schedule. I had a regularly scheduled OB aapointment yesterday afternoon at 1:45. Leila and I went in expecting a short routine visit! The doctor did all the measurements that she normally does; heartrate, blood pressure, all that good suff was fine, but when she got to measuring my stomach it had fallen hehind where it needed to be. I was 37 weeks pregnant, so my uterus should have been measuring +/- 37 centimeters, it was measuring 34 and the week before it had been meausring 34. The doctor decided to get an ultrasound just to check on the baby. All of the measurments of little Emmie showed that she was barely in the 10th percentile for size, some right under, which is the boarderline of where the doctor would want to induce. She started to tell me that I'd come back in a week to recheck the size and we would think about inducing, then she said there was one more thing she needed to check. She took a measurement of the fluid around the baby and noticed it was small as well and decided that was enough to make up her mind, it was time to induce...tonight! I was speechless! She wanted me to go right over to the hospital and get started immediately, but I had Leila with me so I needed to wait for Justin. I really needed to get my thoughts straight and all my stuff together but waiting for Justin sounded like the best excuse! I called my sister Melissa and told her to haul booty up to Austin so she could watch Leila for us and headed home to get my stuff ready.

It took us a little while to get our act together, by the time we made it back up to the hospital, checked in and got my first IV of pitocin it was 7:15 pm. I had expected things to move really quickly with the pitocin helping out and guessed our baby would be here right after 1 in the morning, boy was I wrong! For the first hour I did not feel any contractions. Then they finally started but were still very tolerable, but they hurt so I figured they were doing something and I was making progress. That was not the case, after 2 hours of regular contracting I was still only dilated to 1 and 1/2 (the same that I was that afternoon at the doctor's office). That continued on throughout the night, lots of contractions, lots of pain, not a lot of progress. Finally at 4 am I was dilated to 2 cm! 9 hours to move 1/2 a cm! That was very disappointing. That was when my contractions started to get really painful! I was trying to hold out as long as possible from getting pain medication because I'd heard before that epidurals can slow down the progression of labor and I really didn't want anything slowing me down. I was already going slow enough! At 5 am the pain won the battle and I asked for an epidural, by the time I got it and it started working it's magic it was 6. After that I started getting regular contractions every 1 and 1/2 minutes. I was happy I couldn't feel them and tried getting in a little rest. The nurse checked me again at 7 am and I had my fingers crossed for something to have changed, and it did! I was 4 cm! I went back to sleep for an hour and a half and woke up feeling my contractions again. I complained about it to the nurse and she checked me again and to all our surprise, I was fully dilated and ready to get this show on the road! I went from 4 cm to 10 cm in an hour and a half!I started pushing at 9:45 am and Emmalene made her appearance at 10:18 am. Short and sweet!

Emmalene Cynthia weighed in at 5 pounds 7 ounces and is 18 inches long. She is perfect from head to giant feet! (she has huge feet like her sister) Justin and I couldn't be happier.