Elijah's Birthday Story

Elijah's birth day (the actual day of his birth, I mean) came at the end of a long, long night of nothing much happening. Patrick and my mom got several hours of sleep. I tried to rest for a while, but when I did, my contractions stopped. So I got up and sat in a chair and watched the monitors. In the morning, I was ready to give up and go home and wait until Elijah was really ready to come. But the doctors came in to check on us, and I was a lot more dilated, so they decided (finally!) to break my water. I was hoping that would get everything going, and so they took me off the Pitocin to see how it would go. No one expected it to get going quite so quickly! I went immediately into transition (hey! what happened to hours and hours of active labor?) and before they had the room ready, I felt the need to push. The next 20 minutes were crazy. They lost Elijah's heart rate on the external monitor, then attached the scalp monitor, then lost his heart rate on that one, and decided he had to come out, right now. They used foreceps and out he came! I (thankfully) did not see him immediately, but Patrick says that he was blue and very limp. Elijah was born a few minutes after the hospital's day shift came, and we had the extra help of both shifts - two sets of baby nurses and mom nurses, and three doctors. Elijah was whisked away by his nurses, who gave him CPR to resuscitate him. He came around very quickly, and by the time I saw him he was pink and crying. I remember being so glad that his head was so nice and not all squished from the foreceps (by the time I saw him anyway), and I noticed right away that he had Patrick's chin. Elijah, you were such a cute little man! The nurses monitored and checked him over for a while, gave him a bath, and put him under the warming lights while I got stitched back up. It wasn't a long time, but I was feeling much more like a person again by the time I got to hold Elijah. I was glad to be able to pay attention to him and appreciate how wonderful he is when we met. Elijah, we love you so much! What a wonderful day.