Baby Emily Born!!! -- Part 1

As I sit here at 1:42am and have a pump attached to my left breast and overhear baby waking up, I wonder how long it will take me to finish writing this post!!!
Wow, I've had to rethink everything that is important and reduce my current life down to two goals. Feed baby and Get rest. That has to be it, because that's really all there is time for. So far...

The pregnancy was pretty easy, I didn't throw up at all and my nausea feelings were only for about 5 weeks and merely uncomfortable, not debilitating. I never had to run out of a grocery store or a restaurant from the smells. A few foods began to seem gross to me so I just stopped eating them for a few weeks and then they were fine again.
My stomach got big and stretch marky but not too big and not too stretch marky.
I gained an appropriate amount of weight and am optimistic that with work I can get mostly back to the way I looked before. Hopefully.
And now time was passing and baby was supposed to come into the world, On August 30th.
But she didn't, she hung around and now it was September and the doctor has decided to schedule an induction. This makes me nervous

Break: It is now 2:44am and we have tried unsuccessfully for an hour to get baby to latch onto the breast. Lots of frustrated baby screaming and sad-faced mommy and daddy later. She won't. Alas. After a little collostrum from a previous pumping fed to baby with a spoon and some formula to augment my sad one boob, Fred and baby are back off to bed and I am continuing pumping. The lactation consultant said I must pump every time baby eats so my breast can keep up with what demand would be if we weren't augmenting.

My birth plan was to try to avoid an epidural and work with the body through the birthing process. I read that once you begin the epidural you become a patient instead of a participant in the birth and I wanted to be more attuned to my body, etc... We hired a doula and she was going to help me with relaxation techniques and the process. I knew that getting induced made the epidural much more likely because the contractions would come much closer together and be more intense more quickly than in natural birth. I wasn't sure if I could take the pain.

Turns out I definitely could not take it!!!

The hospital called with a free room on Sunday morning. It was nice to get a full night's sleep before what I knew would be a really long 24-28 hours and then next three months!!! We stopped at the Country Gourmet for breakfast and got to the hospital at 9am. The doctor started the induction medicine that gets repeated every 4 hours until it works. By 8pm it was working. I called in the doula and she got there and helped me walk through and breathe through the contractions as they got stronger and closer together. Fred tried to get some sleep at 11pm on the little fold out chair-bed in the corner. I tried sitting in the shower on the birthing ball and using the hand held shower to relax my back as the contractions came. It was warm and comforting. But by 1:30am, the contractions were 1 and a half minutes long and coming almost every 30 seconds. There were no breaks in between. The nurse did a vaginal exam and there had been no change in my progress!! After almost 4 hours of contractions, my dilation was still only 1cm and I was only 50% effaced. The same as I had been at the doctor's office a week and a half before!!! Since you dilate about a centimeter an hour on average, and I had no idea if my body would go any faster than that I realized that there was no way that I could keep it up without pain medicine.

So, we called in the anesthesiologist. Luckily he was available right then and could come in and hook me up.

Going to save my poor boob for a later pumping time and continue my story later!!!