Our Birth Experience

Hey everyone, pull up a seat and grab a cup of hot cocoa. We're gonna tell you about our birth experience!

On Wednesday at exactly 10:05 pm, just after Project Runway, Christine started feeling contractions. Apparently Hannah was disturbed by Jerell winning and she started to express her disappointment. Okay, maybe I'm just projecting. Why was Blayne given the boot? And what's up with Kenley's defensive attitude? Anyway, I digress. Back to our story...

Christine was unable to get any sleep because the contractions lasted all night long. At about 8:30am Thursday, we went to Cedars-Sinai and discovered Christine was only 2cm dilated. The doctor recommended we take a walk around the hospital and return in an hour to see if the dilation increased. It did not. They did offer to induce Christine, but since we were scheduled to be induced on Sunday, we decided to see if the delivery would happen naturally. And there's that whole 9/11 thing. We were discharged at about 3:00pm that day.

It turns out we did not have long to wait. As soon as we got home, Christine's contractions became more intense. Again, we were hoping to get some rest, but at about 10pm the pain became too unbearable. We returned to Cedars at 11:00 pm.

After all that time, we were hoping Christine would be dilated even further. Unfortunately, she was still only at 2cm. Sometime during this period, Christine's water broke, but it was just a trickle. At about 2:30 am Friday, Christine and I finally requested an epidural. It was smooth sailing ever since.

The epidural caused Christine to dilate rapidly. Unfortunately the epidural also caused the contractions to weaken. The doctors administered a small amount Pitocin (+2 out of a possible +40, I think) at about 4:30am to get the contractions back on track. At about 9:00am, Christine was finally at 10cm. The nurses stopped the epidural so Christine would be able to push better. At that time, we called our good friend Jenny to help us out with the birth.

The epidural did not run out but Dr. A (see earlier post) arrived in her Olympic Delivery Scrubs and we all started anyway. Because there was little amniotic fluid when Christine's water broke, there was a huge flood after Hannah came out, not unlike the elevator visions from the Shining. Christine did an awesome job -- the birth process lasted only 40 min and Hannah was born at 10:31 am. And no, Christine did not take a poo during the process. I almost did though. Hooray for Hannah and Christine!