Sascha's arrival

On the evening of December 5th I started feeling some contractions, but I thought that they were just Braxton hicks. After 11:00 pm I decided to start timing them and they were about 15 minutes apart. I tried to sleep but of course that was impossible, so around 2:00am I decided to get up and take a shower... just in case, after a long shower I felt a lot better and thought it was probably false labor and went back to bed. At 3:05 am, I ran to the bathroom and told Jeromey "My water just broke". By then there was no doubt, this was the real thing, she was really coming.  To back track to my time spent before that, I had enjoyed a very long walk on Torrey Pines beach, made it all the way to Flat rock area and back in about hour and a half. Then we went out to eat to our favorite Thai restaurant - "Taste of Thai" and I ordered Spicy Noodles, Jeromey's favorite spicy dish... just not quite as spicy as he gets it. So I think those two combined probably helped our little girl come a bit early. :)

By 4:45 pm we were at Scripps Memorial Hospital and I was getting hooked up to all sorts of monitors. My contractions started being a lot closer together, 4 to 2 minutes apart, but I was only 2 cm dilated.  At 6:00 am I was 3 cm, and I got an epidural and felt so much better. In another hour I was 4 cm, then Dr. Marshall came to see me and said that she would be back in the afternoon in hopes that I would be closer to 10cm by then. Well things progressed a little quicker than that. By 10:00 am I was 7 cm dilated and when they checked at 11:30 I was already 10 cm, so they paged her to come deliver sooner. The nurse said to get ready to push even though Dr. Marshall hasn't come, she said that since it was my first baby it will take some time to get the baby all the way down. When I started to push, she said she already saw the head and that we need to stop pushing and wait for the doctor. She said I was a very good pusher. haha

The doctor came at 12:15 and we started pushing once again, I pushed through 3 contractions and the baby came right out. She had the cord wrapped around her neck, but in just a matter of seconds we heard her first cry. She was born on December 6th, at 12:35pm weighing 6lbs and 1 oz and 19 and 1/2 inches long. Healthy and Happy we are now a family of 3.