The Story . . . finally

So, Juliet is now three weeks old and as cute as ever! I thought it's about time I share her birth story/my labor experience. We are so happy to have her! Here it is:

The Saturday and Sunday before Juliet was born I was itching really bad. I had been itching for the past three weeks and just thought is was one of those weird pregnancy symptoms. I was itching pretty much all over, but my feet were the worst. Anyway, I ended up calling the midwife Sunday because it just was weird and was really bad. She told me to get an appointment on Monday even though I had one Tuesday. To make a long story shorter, I was dilated 4 cm on Monday and 85% effaced, but wasn't having any contractions that I could tell. I had blood work done to see if I had a rare liver condition that has an increase in stillbirths, but they told me they wouldn't get the results for 2-3 days. The next day, Tuesday, I was called by the other midwife and she told me that they did get one out of the two blood tests back and that I did in fact have the rare liver condition called Intraheptic Cholestasis of pregnancy. She said that they wanted to start me on Pitocin the next morning. I was really wanting to at least try a natural birth and knew that it would be very difficult if I was started on Pitocin. I decided to go in that day, Tuesday, and get my membranes stripped and see if that would help. Afterword, Justin and I went on a big long walk to see if things would get going. We started getting a little bit worried because we knew she was okay at that point, and we didn't want to be awake all night worrying whether she was okay or not and feeling for fetal movements. We just figured that it was better to have her here as soon as possible, so I called the midwife and asked if I could get started that night. She suggested we do a non-stress test and if there was anything even slightly wrong we would start me, but if not we would wait until morning. So I had the non-stress test, everything looked good, and I went home for the night. I started having contractions around 12 midnight and went to the hospital around 3am in labor. Around noon on Wednesday, the 25th they checked me and I was dilated 7 cm. It wasn't by any means comfortable, but I still felt like I could do it. An hour and a half later of super hard and strong contractions, I was feeling like "Okay, I am going to feel like I need to push soon. I have got to be dilated to a 9 or 10." The midwife checked me and I was still at 7 cm. At that point, I had had a few contractions that were so strong I even was worried about my heart giving out. I said "I need an epidural." And like my friend Adele said in her blog about her labor story, "bless that man!" He really was amazing. I am not just saying that because of the epidural, but I was extra hard because of my scoliosis, and if I ever need something done with an anesthiologist, I would want him to be the one to do it. I still felt the 4-5 contractions after having the epidural, because I was so far advanced into my contractions, but it did help my body relax a ton and I progressed really fast, pushed for only about 20 minutes and Juliet was born at 2:22 pm. So that's it. That was my story. What an experience! Juliet was worth every moment!

Here are some cute pictures of the little sweetheart :).