Most of the pictures I have of me with Hannah are of us nursing for the whole first hour while I was being stitched up...so you get the Daddy instead, he did so good!

Craziness...
So...I took the castor oil at about 3:30 yesterday...and it definitely went to work on my insides...but I fully expected to need a few more doses over the weekend. We went to bed at around 11:30, which is late for us...but hey, it was a Friday night, and we're crazy party animals! I woke up around midnight with more cramping....I thought it was just the oil doing its thing, and spent about half an hour on the toilet....and felt awful...spent the next half hour in the shower. The shower helped a lot..for a while...so I did a little bit of blog and message board reading until I felt awful again, and spent more time on the toilet...followed by another shower, by this time I was in a lot of pain. Partway through the shower I kinda started thinking, "you know, this is REALLY painful...what if I'm actually having contractions??!"

After my shower, about 3am I got back online...REALLY starting to feel the contractions at this point, and went to one of those contraction timer websites. I was pretty sure that I was in labor now, and the contractions seemed to be 2-3 minutes apart and lasting about a minute each. The pain started to get to the pint where I has to get on my knees and sway my hips back and forth...so at 3:30 I woke Jason up saying "I think we need to go to the hospital!" I just didn't think I would be able to take the car ride if I waited any longer.

We packed things up and got to the hospital at about 4AM. They checked my cervix right away and I was 8cm dialated. I labored another hour waiting for the Dr. to arrive...it was REALLY painful, but since I wanted SO badly to have a natural birth instead of Monday's induction, I just kept telling myself, "This is what I wanted, I get to do it the way that I wanted!" and any thought of pain meds stayed far from my mind. I just felt so blessed that I was getting to do it the way that I wanted to. :)

At 5AM the Dr. arrived, and she checked me again, I was at 10cm. She broke by water and I got to start pushing. The pushing part was really intense for me...for whatever reason I just couldn't wrap my head around the idea that I was pushing a human being out of my body, it felt really crazy. At 5:38 that baby came out! She was so so beautiful...she wasn't cheesy at all...just all slippery and bloody and beautiful! I was just so so excited she was here!! I got to hold her for a while, and when the cord stopped pulsing, they clamped it and Jason got to cut it.

The worst part was that since everything did go SO fast, my body didn't have proper time to adjust and all my woman parts were torn apart. I has to lay there being sewed back together for an entire hour. :( BUT Hannah was awesome and latched right on and nursed the whole time. :)

Jason was SO good through all of this! As a guy that can't even handle an episode of CSI, I was totally impressed by his ability to watch oll of this gross bloody stuff! He can probably tell you all the yucky details that I missed.