Monito has landed!

Sorry for the delay - I literally keep falling asleep on my keyboard. I gave birth to a baby boy via c-section at 4:21 am this morning, June 14th. Monito is 9 pounds and 5 ounces - a large baby! I had a wonderful labor according to the OB, ahead of the average schedule, good control of contractions, great progress, etc. This all ended at about 8 - 9 cm dilation around 11pm on Wednesday night. I wasn't dilating the final centimeter despite adding pitocin (and an intrathecal block to cope with it). After another few hours, I had regressed to 8 cm due to cervical swelling. I was exhausted, not having slept for more than 7 minutes straight in 28 hours, and in a huge amount of pain with each contraction. Also, the doc had ruptured my membranes a couple hours earlier and there had been a small amount of meconium present, not the greatest sign. The decision was made to deliver via c-section, and after that things happend pretty quickly. A good surgery, Homestead Mama was there with her camera & support. I spent an hour in recovery, and thenI was returned to my hospital room and had to wait almost 2 hours until I could see the baby because he aspirated some fluid during birth. Finally, my dad tracked down a wheelchair and escorted me down to the nursery to meet my son.

I'm working on a birth story, and will try to post that in the next day or two. In summation, Homestead Mama and I are blissed out, grateful as heck to have a second healthy baby, and so happy to have my parents here to help out. Pequita spent the past 30 hours with her grandma, who even slept in our bed next to Pequita to keep her feeding schedule on track. I would never have been able to relax into labor had my mother not been here caring for Pequita and the house.

Now all I have to do is master breastfeeding and get sprung from the hospital in less that the 3 required days after a c-section. Shouldn't be too hard, as I'm already up and moving about. This is far from the worst surgery I've endured.