Jedidiah Has Arrived!

It's been a whirlwind week, and sorry for just now posting about our newest little guy.  Jedidiah Robert arrived at 1:09 a.m. on June 13th.  He weighed in at 8 lbs 6 oz, and was 20.5 inches long.  He has beautiful ash blonde hair and has everyone wrapped around his little finger.

The morning of the 12th started off with us making a trip to the hospital in Virginia because I thought my water had broken and was leaking.  Of course, that turned out to be a false alarm, but since I was so close to my due date, my doctor wanted me to walk around the hospital grounds for an hour and see if we could get my sporadic contractions even and productive.

So close to 1 p.m. they checked me again and I hadn't made any progress before.  I already had a doctor's appointment scheduled for that afternoon at 4, and she wanted to see me back in a few hours for that check up.  Jesse and I went to eat some Mexican food (yum) and shop a little to kill the time, then returned to the clinic for more prodding in sensitive private areas.

I had dilated a centimeter more by then, and the doc thought it a good idea to go ahead and "augment" my labor.  I had a month of intense pelvic pain prior to this appointment and was all for the idea of meeting our new son that day.  Jesse had some reservations, but interrogating questioning the doc about all the risks involved put his mind to ease.

So up to Labor & Delivery we went.  I measured a bit more dilated by then anyway, and my contractions were evening out to be about 3-5 minutes apart on their own.

Couple hours passed, a little pitocin given, three hours of stalled cervix, a bag of waters broken, an intrathecal on board, and then BAM!  Time to push.  About twenty minutes later, our little Jed entered the world.  I screamed him into this world seven hours after labor officially started.

By the way, an intrathecal works great for contractions, but really sucks on the delivery end ... no pain block at all!  I had no idea how spoiled I was with the epidural on the previous four kids.  As close to natural delivery as I'll ever get, and man, Eve was getting some strong reprimanding in my head for a while there.

Now it's nearly a week later.  We've had our challenges in learning how to be a family of seven, but we're hanging in there with much prayer.  For now, the baby Jedi is the apple of everyone's eye.