Living on Love: Paige's Birth Story

Paige's due date was September 19th and luckily I didn't have to wait that long to finally meet her. The last few weeks of my pregnancy, the doctors kept telling me that she was going to be a big baby if we waited until she was 40 weeks. She was measuring in the 90% percentile and would be 9 pounds or more at birth. I for one didn't want to give birth naturally to a big baby because I was scared to death to tear.
My doctors really wanted me to schedule a c-section for both of our sakes and I was all for it. Some people thought I was crazy to agree to this but I know too many people that had big babies and had complications. So we scheduled the c-section for Thursday, September 13 at 7:30.

So the big day arrived. Neither Wes nor I could sleep a wink the night before. Wes said he had horrible heartburn, but I think he was just as anxious as I was. We arrived at the hospital and 5:15 and then it was go time! The worst part of my entire day was getting the IV. Almost 2 weeks later I still have a HUGE bruise on my arm. They tried three times before they were successful...main was it rough! Both of our parents came to my room before it was time to go to the operating room. They took me back and prepped me for surgery and the part I was so scared about...the epidural. I had a great nurse there to rub my back and arms and it was over in no time! Wes was then able to come in and sit with me. I had a weird side effect from the epidural and my arms would not stop shaking! Very strange.

They took me to the room at 7:30 and called Wes in at 7:34 and my sweet baby was born at 7:39! SOOO much better than labor!! Right when the doctor was ready to pull Paige they told me that it would feel like a 300 pound person standing on my chest...wow were they right! But it only lasted a few seconds :). Once she was out she started screaming..what a wonderful sound! They brought her over and let us see her for a second and then took her to the side to clean her off. After that, her and Wes went to our recovery room and waited while I was stitched up. I was back in recovery at 7:58...the whole birthing process was less than 30 minutes!!

Paige was perfect..she was all clean and resting. They did all the test on her and we had to wait in there for 2 hours for recovery. I breastfed for the first time. Since she was a bigger baby, they had to check her sugar and it was low. So they had to check it every thirty minutes and after a feeding. It was going up but not as high as they wanted so we had to supplement her with formula and it was back to normal. Once it was in the range they wanted, they had to check 3 more times to make sure and it was perfect..so no need to worry about that anymore.

It was about 10:15 and it was finally time to head to our hospital room, oh by the way by hands were finally calm and not shaking any more! They rolled us to the room and Wes walked with us so proudly! (Later that day he told me that there was a huge weight lifted off his chest when leaving the recovery room...apparently the last few weeks he was stressing about this procedure a whole lot more than he led on!) Both sets up grandparents and Jodi were at the room to great us.

It was a great day, we had family and a few friends come visit us throughout the day. I was breastfeeding the whole time and we had a very healthy and happy baby girl. Here are a few pictures we took on her birthday...I will have another update about her first week and the rest of our hospital stay later today hopefully. :)

(By the way, the c-section was the way to go! It was a great experience and recovery is not bad at all!!)