PB & J

On April 15, 2012 our beautiful baby boy was born so I wanted to write a post about my pregnancy journey. Brace yourself because this might be a bit lengthy. At the beginning of last year Jeremy and I had started talking about how we both felt it was finally time to start trying to have a baby. I was going to be graduating from nursing school that year and we both knew that it was the right time to expand our little family. Every month I got very anxious and excited wondering if this would be the month that I would find out I was pregnant, but every month I was disappointed by either a negative pregnancy test or an unwanted visit from aunt flow. When July rolled around I was convinced that I was never going to be able to get pregnant and that we should probably start looking into adoption...needless to say, I was being a bit dramatic. Then August rolled around and I started having the usual cramping and so forth that comes when I'm expecting a visit from aunt flow. I was T.O.'d because I knew that this meant that once again I was not pregnant. A couple of days passed and I still had not gotten my period so without any hope or expectations I decided to take a pregnancy test. To my surprise this is what I saw....

I was shocked, excited, nervous, because I knew that life was no longer going to be the same, it was about to get so much better. I was finally going to be a mother. Pregnancy for me was definitely interesting to say the least. In May, 2011 Jeremy got transferred to Massachusetts for work so we bought a home and moved to the East Coast. I became pregnant in July and in August I had to head back to Louisiana to finish up my last semester of nursing school. I lived in a motel that smelled like cigarette smoke, which kicked the nausea up about ten notches, and made it hard to keep any food down. Because of this I ended up losing about 5 pounds in the first trimester but luckily I had no problem gaining weight after that. This is a picture of the ultrasound that was done my first 12 week OB appointment.

Here is another image that was take at 16 weeks. It's not very common to have an ultrasound done at that point in pregnancy but they were having a difficult time finding a heartbeat with the doppler so they wanted to make sure everything was OK.

At 24 weeks I was finished with school and back in Massachusetts. They did an extensive ultrasound at this point to identify the sex of the baby (I was sure he was a girl...so much for mother's instinct) and to check all of his internal organs to make sure everything was developing properly.

Here are some pictures of my growing baby bump.

24 weeks prego

26 weeks prego

28 weeks prego

30 weeks prego

38 weeks prego and ready to pop At 38 weeks pregnant I am starting to feel like pregnancy will never end. The last month of pregnancy is definitely the longest. It was getting harder to sleep at this point and even walking, aka waddling, was difficult. I was pretty miserable by this point so I started trying everything I had ever read about to move things along and induce labor. I tried eating spicy foods, pineapple, black licorice, I tried walking, taking evening primrose oil pills, but nothing seemed to work. Our little baby was still cooking in there and was not ready to come out I guess. Then on Saturday night, April 14th, when I was 40 weeks and 4 days, at about 6pm I started to have contractions that were different then the usual Braxton Hicks that I had been having occasionally. These contractions hurt!! I still was not convinced I was in labor but I decided to start timing the contractions anyway. I was told by my midwife to call when the contractions were 5 minutes apart, at least 1 minute long each and lasting for 1 hour. Slowly throughout the night they started getting closer and closer together so I told Jeremy he had better go to bed and get some sleep before we had to go to the hospital. I tried sleeping but the contractions were too uncomfortable so I just decided to hang out until it was time to go. Finally at around 11:30pm I called my midwife and told her I thought it was time. She tried to convince me to hang out at home a little longer but I told her I needed the epidural a-sap. She said OK and told us we could come in and that they would check me to make sure I was really in labor. When we got to the hospital they examined me and determined that I was 2.5cm dilated and almost 100% effaced so they decided it was OK to admit me...woo hoo!! Once we were in our room and settled for some reason I was trying to be brave and hold out as long as I could before asking for the epidural, but by about 4am on Sunday morning I could not take it anymore and I called the nurse to have them give me the goods. I can't even explain how amazing it felt to feel complete and total relief when the meds kicked in...it was heavenly. Several hours passed but unfortunately, labor was not progressing like they wanted it to so at about 8am they started me on Pitocin so that I would start dilating quicker. At 9am they bumped up the Pitocin and I went from being dilated to 3cm to 7cm in less then an hour. Jeremy was out getting some breakfast and checking on PeeWee and Homer so I quickly called him and told him to come back to the hospital because this baby was coming soon. At around 11am I started to feel a very strong urge to push so they called in my midwife and it was show time! I had an awesome nurse to assist me while I was pushing and an EMT student in the room who asked for permission to watch. I'm pretty sure he was completely grossed out by the end...along with Jeremy. Jeremy wanted to stay on the upper half of me during the delivery since he was pretty sure he would pass out if he had to see everything that goes on below, so my nurse put him in charge of placing cool wash cloths on my forehead and he did great. Finally, after about an hour of pushing our little guy was born. The NICU team was called in at the end of the delivery because baby had the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and he was clenching it with one fist. Because of this he became somewhat distressed inside my belly and had what they call meconium, which is a baby's first bowel movement inside of me. Thankfully though, everything turned out fine and our baby was perfect in every way.