Brynlee's Birth Story

Wednesday, December 8th:
 40 weeks pregnant exactly- as of Monday I had not made any more progress towards having our baby! James decided to come home around lunch to just hang out for the afternoon. So we headed off to lunch. While eating I started having mild contractions that were anywhere from 5-7 minutes apart. These continued throughout the afternoon. Sometime around five, they started getting more regular at five minutes and a little more intense. Even though they still didn't hurt that bad, we decided to go to the hospital just to check things out.

We arrive at the hospital at 6:30. The nurse checks everything and hooks me up to the monitor to watch contractions for an hour. After an hour I was still dilated the same as when we came in {4cm}. Since we only live two miles from the hospital the doctor said we could go home- but the nurse told us we would be back that night {her guess was around midnight}.

Leaving for the hospital the first time.

So we leave the hospital and immediately the contractions are much more intense and closer together. By the time we got home at 9:00, I could not talk through the contractions and the pain had at least doubled. I tried to relax like the nurse said to, but that wasn't happening. So at about 10:30 we headed back to the hospital.

Once again the nurse checked everything and I was now 5cm dilated- so we were staying. We moved rooms and an hour later had progressed to 7cm dilated. The nurse called the anesthesiologist {who was 35 minutes away in South Tulsa} hoping he would get there in time. {They did give me "pain" medicine in the meantime. It didn't really take away any pain but allowed me to at least breath through the contractions.} Within the next hour I was 9 cm dilated. The anesthesiologist arrived to give me the epidural- which let me say, was not nearly as scary as I had imagined, and was even more wonderful than I had imagined.

Apparently I kept the room super cold- James decided to warm up while waiting for Brynlee

Just hanging- post epidural!

Although labor had been moving along very quickly, at this point everything kind of changed. Sometime in between being checked the previous time and getting the epidural, Brynlee had flipped and was now face up. Since this happened, she basically stopped making any more progress. So now we were waiting.

The nurses had me do a couple of things to try to get her to flip or at least labor down so that I could still push her out. So this whole time we had the on-call doctor. By this time, it was about 4:00 in the morning. The doctor was scheduled to have his own surgery that morning at 7:00, so he had to leave. This meant he could call my doctor in for the actual delivery! I was pretty excited to hear this... the whole time I was pretty nervous about not being able to deliver with my doctor. So yea. By 5:30 the nurses and my doctor felt like Brynlee was finally in the position that I could push. So I did- and Brynlee was born at 5:59 A.M. December 9th.

first family photo

I can't say enough about the nurses that we had. One nurse was even the mom of one of our good friends from church. They were all wonderful and really worked for us. {Later we found out that the had the on-call doctor stayed through the morning, he probably would have made us do a C-section} Overall, it really was a good experience!