 | As you know over the past year we have been awaiting the arrival of a baby girl. So here it is the official blog post! As I sit here typing our sweet little Grace Anne is sleeping in a little bouncy seat in front of me only 25 days old and more beautiful than we ever could have imagined. |
Many have asked us how the labor was and I won’t lie, it wasn’t fun and was not what I expected. It was long and exhausting, pushing was not easy like with the boys and I felt a lot like Rachel from Friends. At least 5 women came in after we were admitted and had their babies before us-not exactly encouraging. In addition my labor would randomly stall out and by the 12 hour mark considering my water had broken already and after a talking with our midwife I was put on antibiotics to keep any chance of infection at bay and was also started on pitocin to get me in to hard labor. At one point I was hooked up to at least 8 different things and so frustrated that were I an unruly patient I would have yanked everything off and/or out. Not only that but I kept watching the minutes wind down hoping that Grace would hurry and make her entrance on March 31. I just didn’t want her to be born on April fools. So she had made up her mind, after all, it certainly wasn’t up to me…
Grace Anne came into this world with a full head of dark wavy hair, 7 pounds, 15 ounces and 20 ¼ inches long. Despite the frustrating labor I am still blessed to have been able to birth all of my children naturally. every child is a blessing no matter how they enter the world and it is certainly no failure to deliver a child via Cesarean. I was a c-section baby myself, in fact my mother said once she's one of those that probably would have died on the plains during childbirth had she lived a couple hundred years ago. We are blessed to have the access to skilled doctors and their expertise, no doubt, just as much as I feel so blessed to have had a wonderfully caring and calm midwife to encourage me through all of the challenges of natural childbirth.
Though many of our friends remark at how little she is, she is my biggest baby, being a whole pound bigger than our first child Joseph. I certainly gained more weight with her than with our three boys-I’m not going to tell you how much-but I’ve never felt more like a whale…At first glimpse, after she was delivered, Grace even looked chubby to me!
I had discussed the possibility of an April fools baby with a friend earlier in the week and it almost made sense. Perhaps it was the most fitting birth day for the first little girl born in 4 generations. Babies come when they come and she had decided to come into our family April 1, which my mother later reminded me, was also Palm Sunday this year. I can live with that-a Palm Sunday baby, just in time to celebrate Jesus with her family.
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