Our Past Week

Obviously we've been pretty busy around here, so I thought I'd catch everybody up on our lives at the moment. It's a long one...

Last Wednesday, I was having the same contractions that I'd been having for weeks, except this time, I had a dull pain in my lower back. Since Darren was going to be called out of town after midnight, we decided to go the hospital to see whether the contractions were actual contractions or the "fake" ones. They hooked me up to the monitor and couldn't tell if what was registering were contractions or the baby's movement. So they did an exam and I was dilated to a 3. The nurses decided to keep me until the doctor could check me a few hours later.

In the meantime, Darren had taken Reece home to pee since he won't go in a "big potty" (and he actually held it until they got home)! By this time, I was sure my contractions were real. They were coming every six minutes and getting stronger.

At five o'clock, the doctor came in and checked me- I was dilated to a 5. She said, "Looks like we're doing a c-section tonight. I'm shooting for 5:30." So I call Darren and of course the first call is dropped because I barely have signal. I called back and said, "We're having a baby!" They wasted no time prepping me for surgery and as soon as Darren and Reece got there, they had me walk back to the operating room. Reece was yelling "Mommy" and crying so of course I started crying...it was so sad.

At 6:08, Caroline was born. The nurse said she had a lot of hair, and the first thing I asked was, "Is it red?"(not that there would be anything wrong with that). They let me look at her for a minute then took her to see Darren and Reece. Reece kept saying, "Look Dad, my baby sister." And when we were all in the room together Reece said, "She's so 'beaufiful', she's so pretty, and she's so tiny and I so big." It was too cute. I got to feed her before they took her to assess and bathe her. We finally named her the next morning.

She's now five days old, and (I hope I'm not jinxing myself) such a good baby. She's had no problem nursing (it took me almost two months to get comfortable with Reece). She's not in the least bit fussy. Of course, she sleeps a lot, but when she's awake, she's perfectly happy just looking around. She looks almost identical to Reece when he was a baby except she has a little more hair and it's darker (I'll post both of their hospital pictures as soon as we get hers). And Reece is doing better than I could have ever imagined. He wants to read her stories, touch her, and is more than willing to help out. He's a great big brother.