Every Day's a Holliday: June 8 = Kayleigh's Birth Day!

This morning, we were not aware that today would be Kayleigh's birthday. When I was pregnant with Malia, we took Liam to the Baltimore Aquarium as a treat, celebrating his last few days of being an only child. So today, we took a trip to Kinder Farm Park to celebrate our last weekend as a family of four!

We took Rosie with us and as you can tell- she had fun!

When we got home, I laid down and took a nap- I had fun walking around but it took a little bit out of me. I woke up and thought I had had dreams about having contractions. I had a bowl of cereal and was contemplating how happy I'd be if I was actually having contractions and then it hit me, oh these are real. So I started timing them... and regretting that I had had that bowl of cereal.

Between contractions, I took this picture of Rosie being tied to the door. Malia walked her over to the door and put her leash on the door knob. I thought it was so funny because Zachary does that quite often and now Malia's catching on.

Eventually, I called the OB office and read off the times between contractions and how long they were lasting and they told me to go to the hospital so we did! We knocked on some neighbors doors but no one was answering so we took the kids with us- they did much better than we expected.

Eventually, Zachary called Miriam (a lady he knows through MAG) and she eagerly agreed to watch the kids for us so he took them home and she watched them until our respite care provider, Q, was able to relieve her. Here they are saying bye to me and Kayleigh:

The next several hours... I don't have one word to summarize them. The nurse had looked at my contractions on the machine and said I was in active labor. She told me we'd probably do the c-section tonight. I let her know that my parents were going to be coming in from North Carolina so I would really appreciate knowing for sure if we were doing it. She paged the doctor several times and after a couple of hours we got word that the doctor agreed we would do it tonight. Because I had had that bowl of cereal we had to wait for 8 hours if possible. So eventually I got moved to a room and the doctor came in to check me. I had had an OB appointment the day before and was 2 cm dilated. When the doctor checked me, she said I was one cm dilated and that meant I wasn't in active labor and that they were going to send me home. I looked at Zachary helplessly and he went into protective husband mode and took care of that- we were staying and the c-section was happening tonight.

Soon after this the contractions got really intense. I was in a lot of pain and was howling like a dying animal. They kept giving me shots to stop the contractions because we wanted to wait but the shots weren't working- as painful as they were. The anesthesiologist came in and asked me a lot of questions- I explained epidurals don't work on me- and we went through all the warnings and paperwork. He told me as soon as the doctor was ready, we'd all be ready to go- he wasn't going anywhere. An hour later, the doctor was ready and guess what! The anesthesiologist was nowhere to be found. So a new one came in and went over everything we had already gone through. I was really impatient and out of it at this point but I survived... got rolled back to the OR, had the spinal tap, and from there- the doctors did their work and this was the result: