The Crawdad Chronicles: August 18, 2010

August 18, 2010 will be a date always inscribed in our minds. That was the day our lives changed forever, and James Thomas Holland decided to make his grand entrance. Anyone who knows me knows that I have quite the type A personality. I need things to be organized and thought out. The day I get to buy my new planner for the next year is always an anticipated event and takes much thought as to which planner to buy in order to best meet my needs for the upcoming year. After hitting 38 weeks pregnant my doctor informed me that I was allowed to schedule an induction anytime after 39 weeks. Now prior to being pregnant I would have been appalled to think about inducing without “medical cause”. How selfish for a mother to pick her child’s due date based on convenience… Well things started to look a little different. For starters it was 110 degrees in the deep south. I was quite miserable and far away from all of my family and friends. It was going to be hard for the grandparents to just hop on a plane and get there very fast. Even more important, the daddy-to-be had a call schedule that favored a delivery for the following week. Surely it wasn’t selfish for me to want Ryan to be around the first few nights that the baby was born, right? The icing on the cake was that the doctor reassured me that the baby was ready to go, it didn’t increase my chances of a c-section, etc. etc. I went home and that night talked it over with Ryan. We have a standing family rule that he gets the ultimate say on most medical decisions and he said, “Go for it”. The next day I called the nurse, scheduled the induction for August 19 (so Ryan would have a long weekend off) and put the date on my trusty day planner. Well I fully believe God has a sense of humor. That Tuesday we were starting to get excited about the induction. Ryan was on call but we decided to go out for one final dinner just the two of us since Jim and Debbie were arriving the next day. They were coming the day before the induction to spend a little time with us and were staying at the hotel next to the hospital. We headed to Chili's (ironic since this is where we went to celebrate the day we found out I was pregnant) for dinner. While there Ryan got paged 5 or 6 times so it was not the most relaxing dinner. He informed me that he needed to drop me off and then he was headed to the OR for a surgery. I went home and went to bed and Ryan finally got home around 1:30 am. At 2:30 I woke up and thought maybe my water had broke. I hated to wake up Ryan since he just got home and was still on call so I decided I would just wait to see if I started having contractions. I had read every book/website about labor and when to go the hospital. I had heard story after story of people arriving too early and their contractions only being 15 minutes apart, and I was determined not to make a fool of myself and get there too early. Well, first contraction hit. Then three minutes later another. Then two minutes later another. I started thinking, maybe I should wake Ryan up after all. I woke Ryan up and called the night number for the doctor. By then the contractions were coming quick and they hurt BAD. Ryan of course had not even packed his bag so he was running around trying to do it. When he saw what kind of shape I was in he stepped it up a notch and started moving faster. We said a quick prayer and got in the car to drive to the hospital and arrived around 4:00 am. All I remember thinking was, please give me the epidural. Well we got there and my soon to be nurse was outside taking a smoke break. Random but she saw us and hustled us on in. Then I got the awful news. The doctor on call said I had to wait an hour to make sure I was in “active” labor before I could get the epidural. I thought to myself, any idiot could look at the monitor and see I was in active labor. Over the next hour I made a fool of myself and begged Ryan to please get me that epidural. I have never felt pain like that! My ob had said I could get that epidural as soon as I wanted it so I was NOT mentally prepared. The contractions were back to back, and I was delirious with pain. Poor Ryan. I put him through a lot. I was totally blown away. I kept thinking, where are those supposed contractions that are 5 minutes apart at? How come mine are already so close together? He finally convinced the nurse to check me and I had major jumped forward in the labor process. Praise the Lord! I could get the meds and the nurse was SHOCKED that I had gone so fast as a first time mother. The funny thing is I had stressed about that epidural from the time I got pregnant. I was NOT excited about someone sticking one of those long needles into my spine. I don’t even like to get my finger pricked! Well let me tell you. I could have kissed the anesthesiologist when he finally walked in. It felt like an eternity for him to get there, and if he had told me he needed to stick me in the eye with that needle I would have said “yes please”. All that worry and I didn’t hardly feel a thing and afterwards it was AWESOME! I was so thankful and figured now I could take a break and rest but….the nurse checked me again and called the doctor and said that she better get on over to the hospital quick. By 7:30 am I was ready to go but thankfully the doctor gave me thirty minutes to just chill. At 8:33 am James Thomas Holland made his grand debut. He came out hollering and honestly he has not stopped yelling for much of these past few months (hence why I am behind with the blog!) He weighed 7 lbs 10 oz, 20 ½ inches long and was absolutely beautiful. James had a head full of hair and was the cutest baby ever. It was a whirlwind, FAST labor, and I am so thankful that it went smoothly. It just goes to show that you can’t “plan” how things are going to go with a baby. They are completely uncontrollable! The doctor and nurses left us right after he was born to be alone for an hour or so to spend time as a family. Ryan and I couldn’t believe how blessed we were to have a healthy, beautiful son. And so the adventure begins!!!

Post epidural bliss