As Promised

Here is one final shot before this little guy comes. As you can see, it's in the hospital because I'M IN LABOR!!! I woke up around 7:30 and my water was breaking. I went into the bathroom and had a strong contraction. So we called our midwife at 8:00-ish to let her know. Because we suspected my water had broken, it's our hospital's policy to admit expecting moms right away, instead of waiting for contractions to be 4 minutes apart, lasting a minute, for at least an hour.

Before we headed here, I made his birthday cake. I'll have to frost it when we get home, because we didn't wait around for it to cool down enough to decorate there.

Anyway, we're here now. We get monitoring done for 20 minutes every hour to check out his heart rate and to monitor my contractions. Since my water's broken, they haven't done an internal exam to see how far dilated I am (there's no need to check yet, and they don't want to risk infection if it can be prevented).

Dan and I went to our midwife's house last night to talk to her about our induction options. She gave us a lot of information, but said that there's a reason he's still in there so maybe we give him the benefit of the doubt and let him come when he's ready. So last night, we decided that as our first act of being patient parents, we'd let him come out when he wanted. And then he chose this morning to get things started!

We have a long day/night ahead of us, especially if my contractions don't pick up soon, but it's nice to know that we've started the labor process. I'm hesitant to think that things will move quickly enough to have him today, but early tomorrow is fine with me.

I have so many emotions flooding me right now. We've waited for this for so long, and we're less than a day away from meeting him, seeing him, holding him. As uncomfortable as these contractions are, they're so so so worth it. And according to these monitors I'm on right now, my contractions are about 4-5 minutes apart and lasting a little over a minute. I think we're heading in the right direction!

We'll post pictures and a full birth story soon!