The Vranes Domain: September 2012

He's here! We had Caleb on September 24th. Some people have been asking about his birth story so here it is. If you don't want a TMI, here's the short version:
Contractions, hospital, almost turned away but my doctor came up and said no your good, antibiotics, epidural, more antibiotics, break water, wait a little bit, try and push out a baby, taking a long time, eventually have baby at 5:36. Yeah! The end.

Now, the long version:

Sunday night, I went to bed but he started moving around like crazy at 10:45. I couldn't sleep at all with him moving so much so I got up and just hung out in the loft while I waited for him to stop moving so much so I could go to bed. At 12:45 he stopped moving and I went to bed. However, almost immediately when I laid down, I starting having some cramping. I had this with Landon and I knew this wasn't real labor so I thought it'd either go away or last a really long time. I'm trying to fall asleep during them but wasn't able to sleep at all. 3:30 rolls around and I have my first "real" contraction. I noticed a difference in this contraction. By 4:00 I start timing them. They're about 2 minutes apart but only 30 seconds long. John wakes up for work at 4:45. He starts getting ready and I let him know that I haven't slept at all. He's thinking, well that sucks! Then I tell him not to be alarmed but I've been having contractions all night. He's like, do we need to go to the hospital? I tell him to go to work real quick (he had something he had to finish up) and I was going to finally pack my hospital bag. So he goes to work and I start packing a bag, take a shower, and cleaning up a couple things. At 6, I start calling people to set up the kids for the day. My mom and dad show up at 7 and we leave a little after for the hospital. At this point, my contractions were still going as long as I was moving around. When I sat down though, they'd stop. So I'm worried at this point that maybe I'll get turned away when we get there.

We get to the hospital and go to the triage room to check and see if I'm really in labor or not. The nurse checks things out and says I'm only at a 3 so there are 2 options. 1, I can walk around for a while to get the contractions good and going hopefully or 2, I can go back home. We decide that we want to talk to my doctor. He's actually on call (which we were so excited about) so he comes up 20 minutes later. He's happy I'm there because he was thinking of when to set up an induction if we needed one and what day and all that jazz. Because I'd had a c-section before and wanted to do vbac (which was successful with Carly) my doctor likes to be the one to do it, and I have to be monitored a little more closely than normal. Anyways, back to him being happy we're there. So my doctor checks things out and thankfully I was at a 4 and some. So not a 3 but a good 4!! I am getting admitted to the hospital. It could not have been a better day to have had Caleb! It takes a while to fill out all the "paperwork" but finally we get to our room probably around 9-9:30. Meet my nurse, start a round of antibiotics, and get my epidural!! Which is always awesome! My doctor comes in to check on things and notices I have a "bulging bag". I'm like, is that bad? Good? Whaaaat? It just means that when he breaks my water, 1, it's going to be a lot of fluid and 2, labor will go really fast. So, he wants to wait to break my water since I'd only had 1 dose of antibiotics and I need 2 doses. They give me the second dose at 2:30 (a little early) and break my water at 3. My doctor guestimated that we'd have the baby by 3:14 so really quickly. Well, it didn't work exactly as we thought. For some reason, he was sort of stuck? The doctor checked things out a couple times and finally at 5, he wanted me to start pushing. He looked sort of confused while I was pushing and so were some of the nurses. I didn't know why and didn't pay much attention to it. However, I've never had to push as long! I pushed for 36 minutes before he was born. My other kids were between 7 and 15 minutes so I was wondering why I couldn't push this guy out! Well, the answer came while he was coming out. He was forehead first (or as they say in the medical world, brow first. Fancy!). Usually these babies end up c-section babies. My doctor was quiet about it because I was pushing okay and he wanted to see if we'd be able to do this. He came out sunny side up so his cheek got scraped up probably on my pelvic bone. But hey, he did not break it so that was really good! After he came out, I found out I didn't tear at all which makes for a much better recovery and was amazing that I didn't since he came out such a "wide" way.
Anyways, that's the story. And now here are pictures!

This is right after he was born. See how big his forehead was??? Poor guy! Probably had the biggest headache ever! So no cone head but protruding forehead instead.

Landon was VERY excited to start school. He has been asking me most days when he'd be going to school. He was also looking forward to riding the bus. Back in the Springtime, he asked when he was going to go to school. I had told him it's got to get hotter and then when it starts cooling down, it'd be time for school. Well, a couple weeks before school started, I caught him pulling large leaves off a plant. I was upset because there weren't that many leaves on the plant in the first place and it wasn't my plant! I asked him why he would do such a thing to the plant! He told me he was trying to make it colder (because leaves fall off plants during the fall) so that he could go to school. How could you be mad at that? Anyways, finally the first day of school came! He wanted me to take tons of pictures of him doing all the random things from the morning such as eating breakfast, getting in the car, and playing on the playground. He does take the bus now but for the first morning, I drove him. The one and only time that'll happen hopefully!