Nolan Allen and Dean Lee

Alright... the birth story.  I want to write this down before I forget too much of what happened.  Also I'm sure there are at least a few people out there who are like me who enjoy reading birth stories.

For starters, I was ready to be done with the pregnancy when I was about 35 weeks along.  Couldn't sit comfortably anywhere for longer than five minutes, didn't have motivation to do anything... the works.  So when Thanksgiving FINALLY rolled around, I was stoked; probably didn't seem that way, but any nervousness I thought I would have just didn't exist at all.  I was just so done.

I slept ok Thanksgiving night, surprisingly enough; had to be up to call the hospital at 630am to make sure they had room for me to come in for my induction (when we had to do this with Nettie's induction we had to wait about five hours before we could go in) at 730.  Lucky for us, there was no wait!  So we got everything loaded into the car and headed to the hospital. (My brother and sister-in-law were in town for Thanksgiving so they were kind enough to watch Nettie when she woke up until Sam and Jess could get her for the day.)  We registered at the hospital, blah, blah, blah, and made our way up to Labor and Delivery.

Once we got to our room, I changed into one of those super attractive hospital gowns (which I couldn't tie closed in the back btw) and the nurse got me hooked up to the heart rate monitors.  We sat and waited for a little while, assuming that a doctor would be in soon to check how dilated I was, but unfortunately, they got called away first to a delivery and then to a c-section, so we were bumped a few times.  The doctor didn't make it in until noon; so during that time we just monitored the babies and I slept a bit.  My poor nurse, though, baby B (Dean) did not want to stay on the monitors for the life of him.  She was in and out of our room constantly, spending about 20 minutes each time trying to find his heart rate.

Anyways, noon rolled around and we were finally seen by the doctors.  They did a quick ultrasound to make sure that both babies were head down (or at least A, which he most definitely was).  Even though both babies were head down, they told me that if it came to it, they would allow me to try for a breech extraction of baby B if he somehow flipped because of the fact that I had already had one baby who was of a pretty good size (Nettie was 8lbs 2oz).  That was awesome news to me, as I was definitely hoping to avoid a c-section at all costs.

Once they confirmed that the babies were head down, they checked to see how far dilated I was.  Now, I was hoping for a couple centimeters at best since I hadn't really been having any real contractions or anything like that.  When she checked me, I was about four and a half centimeters dilated!  Best.  News.  Ever.  But really, I was that far along probably because of the fact that Nolan had been head down and extremely low for a couple weeks (remember how uncomfortable sitting was for me).  We were given the go ahead to start pitocin (finally) and I think it was around 1pm that that began.

At first it definitely wasn't bad at all.  Mildly uncomfortable at worst, and I remember it being like that with Nettie too.  I was able to take a nap at some point during this, because my epidural request came at about 430ish pm.  I wasn't super uncomfortable then, either, but I wanted to be prepared cause I could feel things getting worse, and on top of that, the nurses had talked about breaking my water, and I remember how painful it was for me after they did that with Nettie.

So the anesthesiologist came in and "attempted" to place the epidural... three times.  I don't blame him for it being so hard, I'm almost certain it's cause I couldn't hunch forward very much, but hey, I had two people inside of me.  What matters is that I got one.  It did take awhile for it to take affect on the right side of my stomach though, which was annoying, but oh well.

After the epidural, the doctor came back in to check my progress and we were up to just about six centimeters.  We decided that it was a good time to break my water, so they did that, and Tucker told our nurse quite a few times that after they broke my water with Nettie, everything sped up a lot with the labor.  It seemed kind of like she just acknowledged what he said, but didn't really believe him. 

Well, it definitely picked up.  They broke my water just right around six o'clock.  I could feel the contractions get worse (cause the epidural took awhile to affect the right side of my stomach), and the unmistakeable feeling of pressure started to get reeeeeeeeally strong, like hard to ignore strong.  I kept telling my nurse this, and I asked her when they would check me again to see how far I was dilated and she said something like two hours after breaking my water.  Nope.  NOPE.  That wasn't gonna happen.  I told her to check me.  She did and said I was something like an 8.  The pressure just kept building and I was seriously struggling with not pushing.

So another fifteen minutes goes by (I think) and the nurses shift change starts to happen.  My original nurse started to catch the new one up on what was going on, and with each contraction I kept telling them the pressure was just about overwhelming.  So the original nurse suggested the new nurse check me again just to be safe.  10 centimeters. 

Things moved really quick from here.  Because of the fact that we were having twins, we had to be moved to an operating room to deliver; the reasons being there were two teams of pediatricians that needed to be present (one for each baby in case of problems) and they wanted to be able to have the option of an emergency c-section if something started to really go wrong.  Tucker had to get some scrubs from them to wear into the OR, and so they got those for him, but got him a set of medium sized ones.  He came out of the bathroom where he was going to change and said something along the lines of, "Someone will have to get me scrubs that are substantially bigger than these."  If I wasn't so focused on not pushing I would have laughed.  It did make me really nervous that he wasn't going to get into the room before the boys were born though.

They made him follow (scrubless) as they started to move me to the OR.  I'm not exactly sure where he changed, but he came in shortly after they made me scoot from my bed to the operating table (which was really hard to do between contractions and numb legs).

Legs went up into the stirrups and they told me I could push whenever, which was good cause my body was already pushing without me doing anything.  I think I pushed three times and there was a big release of pressure.  Nolan was out!  They swept him to the other side of the room to start checking him, then they broke Dean's water and told me I could keep pushing if I felt like it.  It took a little bit before I felt like my body actually could push again, but once I did, it was only two pushes.  Tucker said that with each baby that came out of me, my stomach dropped about six inches.

I can't even begin to describe how much lighter I felt after they were both out.  It was a very weird feeling.  They checked out the babies while the doctor stitched me up (which was painful, by the way).  Both of the boys checked out well and so once they were done with me, they shifted me back to my first bed and handed me the boys for transport back to our room.

So yeah, I went from a six to a ten in about an hour and super quick pushed those boys out.  It went fast.

Since then, everything has been great.  Both boys are nursing well, though Nolan hasn't quite started to gain weight yet (we're going back to the pediatrician on Friday to see if he's made any progress).  Dean was measuring high for his jaundice levels while we were still in the hospital and he still looked a bit yellow today when he got checked out at their first appointment, so we have to go get blood tests for him for the next five days to monitor that.

But really, the boys are great.  And coming home with them was fairly easy cause Nettie went to stay with Tucker's sister Barbi for a little while.  She still hasn't really been introduced to her brothers yet, and I really miss her.  It'll be nice when she comes home.

That's all for now.  I'll sit down to write another post hopefully not too far in the future.