Welcome Madeline!

So our new addition finally arrived almost 2 weeks ago. Madeline Gail was born on Thursday, September 24th at 7:25 am. (Yes, that means I had an overnight labor again :) She weighed 7 lbs. 12 oz. and was 20 1/2 inches long.

So, for those who are interested in more details about labor delivery, and time in the hospital, here goes... For several weeks before she came, we started wondering if I would ever go into labor. Every doctor's appointment was the same story--no progress. Finally, the day after my due date (Tuesday, Sept 22) I was dilated to a 1. Yay! At least that was something. Still, we weren't too hopeful that anything would happen soon. But that night I started having more regular contractions. They weren't very painful at all, but they started coming every 5 minutes or so. So we called my parents and my mom picked Ethan up. We thought it was safer to have him go down to their house that night, to avoid a potential middle of the night phone call. As the night went on, the contractions kept coming, but more sporadically. They were bad enough that I couldn't sleep very well through them, but definitely not progressing very fast. Wednesday we just hung around waiting and hoping they would get more serious. It was so strange to not have Ethan around. I didn't know what to do with myself. We finally went to bed again that night around 11:00. I figured I would have a night similar to the previous one, but around midnight things really picked up and by 3:00 am we were headed to the hospital. I had already dilated to a 4 (thankfully) and the anesthesiologist was in a C-section (which had happened with Ethan as well) so I waited it out for another hour or so. by the time I got an epidural--which I am a huge fan of by the way :)--I was already a 7 and a couple hours later we were ready to push. My nurse and my doctor were due to go home about 7:00 but they both said they had to stick around to see if the baby would be a red head. I pushed for about 40 minutes. As she was crowning they said "she's got dark hair...woa! That's a lot of dark hair. I haven't seen that much hair on a newborn in a long time." We fell in love with her immediately of course. She did great and even nursed really well right after birth.



They took her up to the nursery for more tests about an hour or so after she was born. They said it would take about 30 minutes, but at an hour I started to wonder what had happened to my husband and baby. It turned out that her oxygen levels were a little low. They would put her on a little oxygen and they would come right back up, but whenever they took her off she would go down again. They finally decided she had to go to the NICU. She ended up spending 4 days there, but tests kept coming back showing nothing to be too concerned about. She was eating well and doing great, so it wasn't a very scary thing. We missed being able to have her right with us, but we could spend as much time as we wanted by her bed in the NICU. The hospital even let us do a hotel stay after my discharge on Saturday morning, so we could stay in our same room and still be with Madeline until she was released Monday morning. She was a little jaundiced, so she was under lights for a couple of days, but when she was taken off the lights she continued to improve. They also gave her some antibiotics mostly as a precaution, but in the end they think she probably either had just a little more maturing to do in her lungs, or she had aspirated a little amniotic fluid at birth. At any rate, everything went well, and we all came home on Monday, September 28th.




I would say the hardest part about being in the hospital so long, was that we weren't with Ethan for almost a week. It was so fun to have him come home Monday night as well--and he finally got to see his little sister! The age limit for the NICU was 3. When he came with my family, he would say "I need see Madeline!" Here is the proud big brother holding his little sister.


Madeline with Aunt Emy

And with Uncle Matt...
And Grandma...



Her first bath at home.

I'm sure we will be posting more pictures soon.