9.30.09 - Little Johnson is Born!

The morning of September 30, which also happens to be my dad's birthday, was a normal morning juts like any other. My alarm went off at 5:45 am and like normal I laid around in bed until 6:00 when I finally decided I should start getting myself ready for work. I sat at the edge of the bed for a few minutes before getting up and experienced a strange contraction - a lot shorter and little more intense than the Braxton-Hicks I had been having for quite some time. I didn't think too much of it, but when I got up from the bed, I felt a little gush and thought too that was a little odd, but still didn't think too much of it. I stood there for a minute thinking to myself, "Is this it?" "Should I wake Dustin up?" then quickly decided to go eat some breakfast just in case this was the real thing, I wanted to make sure I was well fed! Through breakfast, I kept having regular little contractions which were less than 5 minutes apart. I started timing them, jotting down the times on the back of a random receipt I found on my bedside. I woke Dustin and told him he should probably get up and tsrat getting ready to take me to the hospital to get checked out. I finished getting ready, and we left the house about 7:00 am and arrived at Baylor Frisco at 7:15 am. They took me to labor and delivery and confirmed I had already dialated to 3 1/2 and my water had ruptured. It was for real!! I couldn't beleive it...
I was only 36 weeks and 6 days, scheduled for a doctor's appointment the very next day. Guess we wouldn't have to go to that checkup!

Labor was pretty intense the entire time. I received an epidural as soon as they could get one to me, but I had already dilated to a 5 by that time, roughly around 9:30 am. All the nurses were suprised by how fast I was progressing. The epidural was a great relief, but lasted only about an hour, when Liam finally dropped so low the pelvic pressure was so great I could feel everything again and there was not much the epidural could do for me at that point. They tried stronger pain medication, which helped for a brief time, but quickly wore off as the little one pressed harder down, just wanting to get out! Dustin in the meantime was a great coach, probably not expecting to have to coax me through the pain like he did, but he was SO helpful to get me to focus! I reached 9 by about 1:00 pm, and finally a 10 around 1:30 pm - Finally time to push!

My mom made a comment since he was already so far down, it probably wouldn't take much to get him out of there. Well, two HOURS later and with the help of the vaccuum (SOOO grateful for that little invention), Liam was finally born at 3:51 pm, weighing 7 lbs. 2 oz. and measuring 19 1/2 inches.

Because Liam was born one day premature and the fact the he is a boy (boy' have a harder time developing there lungs than girls do) the NICU was standing by just in case he had problems with breathing. Liam was crying pretty good when he came out, so things were looking pretty good in that department. However, upon observation, the NICU team noticed he was not breathing quite as strong as they wanted so they were needing to take him back to the NICU for more observations and to get him more stable. They let me hold him for about a minute and then had to take him right away.

They finally moved me back to my postpartum room about 6:00 pm. We shortly received an update from the NICU on Liam, telling us that he was on oxygen, he had a small amount of fluid in his lungs and that they also noticed he had a heart murmur. They reassured us that these were all normal things that a lot a babies are born with that just need to be monitored for a bit. I was not too concerned at this point since they seemed to think in his case, this would be nothing more than a blip on the radar and we would soon have him in our room with us.