My delivery

Baby B made his appearance
This has to be post-epidural. Pre-epidural... I was on my side, in fetal position, hanging onto the rails!
Hi Dad! Matt says I look like an alien here. ET phone home!
Oh my!
The happy family! Nice hair Aleyna!

I'll try to keep things slightly modified as to not make those who are queasy totally grossed out. So, Monday morning ~5:30 in the morning, I "lost" it with a "gush". If you don't know what that means, it's okay it's kind of gross. So, I called my doctor's office that day to see if I had broken my water. By the description I was giving them, they said probably not. So, okay, I figure it could still be up to 5 days or so. Well, midnight rolls around and I am awoken by contractions... felt like severe menstrual cramps. When I started timing, they were 8-10 minutes apart. So, I continue timing them. By Tuesday, 11:30 am they are still ranging from 4-10 minutes apart. I call my doctor office again to update them and they say that I probably won't get admitted until they are more regular at 5 minutes apart. So I wait another hour or so and tell Matt we should probably go to the hospital soon. He's finishing things up at home and in the meantime I decide to get nauseated and throw up with freaks Matt out and we proceed to the hospital. So, on the way there, I'm hoping I am at least 4 cm dilated so that I can get admitted. We arrive at the hospital at around 1:30 pm. My contractions in triage are about 4-5 minutes apart so they decide to check me for dilation. I am 7-8 cm and can't feel my water. So they freak out. I tell them I am Group B strep positive so they hang penicillin right away and squeeze it in. So I am thinking... well, now I can't get any drugs I am way too close. I get rushed into a labor and delivery room. They give me some IV pain medicine which allows me to relax in between contractions, but does not touch the contraction pain. By ~3:30pm, I am 10 cm dilated and almost 100% effaced and I feel like I have to push with the contractions. So they let me but Baby B is still too high up in my pelvis. After about 15 minutes of pushing, they ask me if I want an epidural because it's going to still be at least 2 hours of pushing. So I am disappointed because I wanted to try to do it naturally but knew I couldn't do it for 2 more hours! I have to wait 30 minutes for the epidural because of anesthesia back-up. I get the epidural and wait for another 30 or so minutes. They come in and say I can push. So I start pushing for 15-20 minutes but then my contractions slow down. So, then they add pitocin and wait again. During one of my big contractions (by the machine measurements), the heartrate decels (drops) down to the 60s which freaks me out. But since it recovers after the contraction, they say it's okay. In the meantime they are checking me out and discover he is not faced down (the desirable delivery position), think he is faced up (the bad position which oftentimes leads to c-sections), and has the cord wrapped around his neck. So, the uh oh comes in. So I start pushing again and progress nicely now with the pitocin so they can see the baby's head which reassures everyone. Once I get the baby's head down far enough, they put the vacuum on to get him out quickly. Once they deliver his head they see the cord is wrapped around THREE times, so we push him out quickly, let Matt take a look to tell us it's a boy or a girl... IT'S A BOY and gave him over to the NICU doc. He checks out fine with strong apgar scores (delivery scores with 10 being the best). He is an 8 and 9 at 1 and 5 minutes. So Baby Besmer was delivered at 7:48pm, only 6 hours after arriving at the hospital. I have to say, once I got the epidural I felt so disappointed but once I knew he was all wrapped up in his umbilical cord, it was difficult to get him down and out. And really, it was a pleasant delivery after the epidural. I could joke with the docs while delivery and they could do all the examinations they needed. So, thanks to my anesthesiologist, Dr. Tan/Tran... you'll have to forgive me I was in labor dilated to 10 cm!