Week One in Review

So as I am sure most of you celebrated, yesterday was Brooklyn's one week birthday party. I have created a quick collage of some pictures I have taken over the past few days. (click on the picture to blow it up)

Brooklyn is doing great! She is such a good baby. She sleeps well, eats well, and even poops well. Ashley is still in recovery mode, but is getting better.

Most of you have heard the delivery story but for those of you who haven't I will share that now. Sorry it's long, for those of you with ADD look at the collage.

Last Thursday we went in for our over due Dr.'s appointment. We were hoping for some good improvement from the previous week and were bummed when there had been none. In fact the Dr. basically laid out the fact that Ashley would most likely need to be induced the following Wednesday.

On Friday morning I went to work and then school to study for the last of my 3 mid-terms I had to take that week. I was planning on taking the test around 3pm so we could go to the BYU basketball game that night. Ashley had called several times throughout the day complaining of cramping and contractions. We both thought that it was after effects of her Dr.'s appointment the day before and thought nothing of it. I went to take my test and Ashley went to go save seats for the game. Around 5:30 she started timing her contractions and noticed they were coming 2-3 minutes and lasting 45 seconds.

I got out of my test around the same time and as I called her to meet up with her for the game she told me how her contractions progressed. I hurried to the Marriott Center and found Ashley sitting contently reserving 5 seats while contracting haha. After much debate and googling of birthing Web sites we decided to leave 10 minutes before the game started.

As we got home I quickly created a contraction log for Ashley to enter her contractions into. (I wanted to make sure we had good evidence to support a trip to the hospital if that was what we decided to do. Nobody likes the "walk of shame" after being rejected admittance to labor and delivery. Ashley started keeping good track of her contractions and they still were coming every 2-3 minutes and lasting 45 seconds and what at the time Ashley thought was kind of painful.

After consulting more birthing Web sites, our moms, and others, we decided to pack up and head to the hospital around 11 pm. When we got there, they strapped Ashley up to a baby/contraction monitoring computer and checked her for progress. She made some progress from the day before but not what we were expecting based on her contraction rate and length. After an hour the nurse came back and checked again and had found no progress. We had to make the "walk of shame" for the second time. (see previous blog post). The nurse gave Ashley the advice to come back when A) her water broke B) she was in so much pain she couldn't walk or talk.

They gave her some medicine to take the edge off. This allowed for about an hour two's worth of sleep, before she just laid on the couch in pain. Around 4:30 am she was nice enough to come into the bedroom and wake me up so I could join in on the fun. We basically laid in bed for the next two hours while I tried somehow to ease Ashley's pain. Finally Ashley was at option B) referenced above and we packed up for a second time and headed to the hospital at 6:45 am.

When we got there and the nurse check her Ashley and jumped from a 1 to a 3 and was calling our Dr. to approve her admittance. This was great news, except our moms her boarding a flight in an hour from Sacramento to Salt Lake with a transfer in Portland (got to love Southwest). We figured that we would be there for a while and so we weren't to worried about them missing much. Ashley was admitted and thankfully opted for an epidural. Once she was on that, life was great.... until the nurse checked her for the 2nd time and Ashley jumped to a 6!! This was the same time our moms were transferring plans in Portland.

We were pretty surprised at her progress. The nurse left to call the Dr. who she advised would most likely want to break Ashley's water to move things along. Of course we weren't to excited about that as our mom's still had a flight from Portland and drive from Salt Lake. Luckily the Dr. was at the hospital in the next town delivering a baby.

We hung out for another two hours and around 11 am the nurse came back to check Ashley. As she lifted up Ashley's gown, she said, "Oh wow, your water broke." Then she checked Ashley and said, "oh wow, your're at a 9 1/2." This is when I replied, "Saaaaaaaayyyy What!?!"

The nurse went to go call the Dr. who was luckily still at the other hospital. Ashley and I hung out for about 30 minutes trying to get everyone the update (expect our mom's who where approaching their decent into SLC). When the nurse came back she said told us that the Dr. wants us to start pushing. At this point there wasn't much we could do so we started pushing (I include we in there, because everytime Ashley was to hold her breath and push for 10 seconds, I found myself doing the exact same thing as if somehow my pushing would transfer over to her).

Our mom's landed early and were being picked up by my brother Andrew. If any of you have driven with Andrew you know he is the best person to escort a mother and mother-in-law to the hospital where their daughter is pushing their granddaughter out at.

Around 12:30 the Dr. was back from the hospital and he came in to see how the pushing was coming. Unfortunately for Ashley but fortunately for our mom's, we hadn't made much progress.

We continued to push for about another 45 minutes when we heard a knock at the door and our moms walked in. I don't think I have seen three happier/emotional women ever. There wasn't much time for tears though as we had to keep pushing through the contractions.

The Dr. came back and checked Ashley again after 2 hours of pushing, and we found out that Brooklyn's head was sideways rather than facing down. He informed us that it wasn't likely she was going to turn down and didn't want to keep Ashley pushing much longer. He gave us two options 1) c section 2) Forceps a.k.a. GINORMOUS salad tongs. He also noted that the sideways salad tongs move is the toughest to perfom. But luckily for us our Dr. did a PHENOMENAL job explaining the pro's and con's to us.

After what I might consider the toughest game time decision of our lives to date, we decided to put our faith and trust in the Dr. with the salad tongs. They prepped the room for delivery and we prepped ourselves for birth.

Without going into to much detail or creating another collage, I will just say that both our Dr. and Anesthesiologist could not have performed better during that birth. We had some rough experiences with the OB, mainly the nursing and admin staff, but now I know why we were supposed to go there, so this Dr. could delivery Brooklyn safely to us.

Brooklyn Rae Waddell was born at 2:15pm, weighing 8.5 lbs, and was 20 inches long. While they had her in the baby incubator cleaning her off, they noticed she was having a tough time breathing. She had a lot of gunk in her lungs and was trying to get it all out. They called the respiratory team in to have a look. They were able to get some gunk out but wanted to take her to the NICU to monitor her for an hour.

They cleaned her up, let Ashley hold her for about 10 seconds, and then Brooklyn and I took a field trip to the NICU. The nurses there were great. They put a tube down her throat and sucked up a ton of liquid. Then put her on a darth vader sleep apnea breathing machine for an hour. Once they took her off, and checked her out they gave her the green light to head down to mom.

But first we had to make a stop in the nursery to get a bath and some other stuff done. Ashley was separated from Brooklyn for almost 3 hours!!! (minus the two minute stop she made in the NICU as they wheeled her to the recovery room). They finally brought Brooklyn into Ashley's room and I was able to eat two hour old Wendy's, which I can't verify, but assume tasted like placenta soup.

After that we had a great day and a half in the hospital. The nurses were great and the food was pretty good. The husband got one free meal, where you order one main entree and as many sides as you want.... yeah I order 17 items, Ashley wouldn't let me order one of everything.

Well If you managed to stick it out this far, go ahead and treat yourself to a dessert of some sort. As I was writing this I was complaining to Ashley about it's length, because honestly if any of you wrote something this long, there is about a 99.9% chance I stopped after the pictures. But if you stuck it out, I respect your attention span. Leave a comment :)

Love,

Ryan, Ashley, and Brooklyn