Maren Elise

Best few days EVER: Maren was born on November 24th, the next day was Thanksgiving (what a perfect day to go home with a new baby!), and the 26th was our 8th anniversary. I love November and Thanksgiving so much! It's been wonderful to celebrate our anniversary around Thanksgiving every year, and now we get to celebrate our daughter then, too. Happy Thanksgiving! So many things to be grateful for.... :-)

In honor of the fact that my due date was this week, and to finally reveal the results of our prediction poll, here's the two-week-old story of Maren's birthday! (Thank HEAVEN she came two weeks ago instead of staying in there clear until now. :))

The Timeline!

5-something in the morning: I get up after a nasty night of bad pregnancy-sleep to get ready for the hospital. It didn't take long, since I was, you know, going to have a baby. Haha! You don't exactly do your makeup for that unless you're the most ridiculous, vain lady in the world. :) (I did tame my bed-hair a bit. And I enjoyed a loooonnnng shower. :)) Matt made me a not-too-big-but-not-too-small breakfast. And then I went to hug Seth in his sleep so I could have a little moment with my boy—the last moment it was just him in our family. Oh, I love that kid. I was glad when he wandered out of his room a few minutes later (oops, I guess I had woken him up.... :-)). He sat on my lap for a while, hugged me and the baby over and over, and told me I'd do great. I could have cuddled with him all morning and then some (even though it kept making me cry). Ah, my sweet boy!

7:00 am: We show up at the hospital for my 7:30 appointment time. By the Grace of God (really...), I wasn't overly nervous. Nervous, yes, but not phobic-nervous. I was so grateful for that relative amount of peace.

They took a couple hours to get me a room.

9:30 am: My day started with a botched IV. The bruise all up the side of my arm is way impressive! My battle scar!! (I was pretty bummed that my day started this way. Great, I thought. So this is how it's gonna go! ;-))

Then on to IV #2. Then on to the first of five—FIVE—liters of saline I got that day. That's 11 pounds.

The nurse was pleased to see that, "hey, you're already having a lot of contractions! You feeling those?" To which I could only say, "uh... Sure.... I pretty much ignore them but, sure...." I mean, hahaha! I had been having them for months. Her enthusiasm was amusing.

10:30 am: The induction begins! Doctor placed a tablet of Cytotec to ripen the cervix, which was hardly dilated at all and still ridiculously posterior. There was a long, long way to go. (Matt had predicted a birth time after 7:00 pm and I had predicted 2:48 pm. I was now laughing about my early time as hard as Matt had always laughed over it.... :))

10:30 am to 11:45 am: I had to lay flat and pretty still so the tablet would stay in the right place and do its job. Contractions were the same ol' same ol'. I started to feel bad for Matt that things were so boring. (I wasn't too chatty. I was listening to Tosca. :))

Sometime in the noon hour: I started to have contractions that were totally new to me! They weren't the uncomfortable-yet-painless Braxton Hicks contractions that I'd had 10 million of, but they weren't the destroy-your-soul contractions that Seth's labor had started with. It was something . . . in between . . . . I'd breathe through the intermittent pain that was progressively getting worse and wonder, huh, is this what normal labor is like? Is this what women are talking about when they sit at home counting contractions and they don't want to die but the pain is manageable? Huh. Huh. ;-)

1:00 pm: Still finding the contractions absolutely fascinating even though they were starting to get extremely unfun. (And starting to wonder.... If these contractions keep getting worse, and I keep listening to Andrea Bocelli sing Recondita Armonia, will I ever be able to listen to that aria again? ;))

1:10 pm: My doctor stopped by to see how things were going. The idea had been to break my water after four hours of nothing really happening. But here we were only 2 1/2 hours after getting the tablet and I was, surprisingly (or NOT ;-)), apparently in active labor. (Cervical-ripening drugs are slow-mechanism stuffs—this is why you can get them and then go home for the night. We always thought if they'd have sent me home, I'd go right back to the hospital in major labor. Ha! We were right!) He mulled it over for a little while, smiled and asked me if we wanted to get on with it, and went ahead and broke my water. Cervix was only 2 cm dilated and still horribly, horribly posterior. (Worst exam EVER.) Long way to go, still. Dr. Awesome had to go to clinic at that point and told me he'd be back late that afternoon. (Hahahaha!!)

2:25-ish pm: I had been suffering through some really bad contractions. The nurses were just checking stuff on the computer and dawdling around when one nurse told the other: "She says she went pretty fast with her first, maybe you should just check her now...?" Uh...ok.

So, rather perfunctorily, she did.

I keep trying to think of an awesome way to express the mood of the room, the thoughts in my head, the look on Matt's face, and the tone of the nurse's voice when she said: "Ohhhhhh.... Yeah, you're 10 centimeters...."

But I can't.

It was hilarious and shocking and action-springing and a relief and validating and, well, I'm back at hilarious.

I wish I could have read all their minds so I could tell you their thoughts—it was obvious they were funny.

My thoughts, all together at once, were:

—Whaaaaaaa...?

—Of course! HAHAHA!! Of course!

—Huh. So THAT'S what that incredible, mind-boggling pressure was that made me feel like the bottom of me was just going to explode in half.... Yes, now that I think about it, I've heard people describe this as "the urge to push." Huh. Maybe I should have said something. Also...that's been going on for at least half an hour. Have I been fully-dilated for half an hour?

—HA! I KNEW I was in PAIN! This proves it! Dilating in an hour? So validating. Thank you, thank you.

—Woo hoo!! Baby's coming!!

—Whoaaaa.... Baby's coming....


And, of course:
—Hey, two minutes ago, who knew my prediction wasn't so off after all?! Laugh at that, Matthew! ;-)

2:35-ish pm: The nurses are happy to find out my doctor is already back at the hospital, but he is headed to the OR for a c-section. I have two options: I can have them get the on-call doctor, or I can try to wait half-an-hour for mine. In the back of my mind, I knew this baby wouldn't last a half-hour. But I really wanted my doctor. He's awesome and amazing, and one of the benefits of the induction was that he'd definitely be the one there. So I said I'd wait (and wondered what kind of craziness might ensue...!). Five minutes later....

2:42 pm: My doctor comes in! Sweet! His other patient was being prepped for the OR and since he's awesome, he rushed over to my room hoping to be able to deliver the baby before his patient was ready for surgery. He seemed pretty confident it would be quick. (What? Do I seem like a quick laborer or something? ;-)) I look at the clock, thinking about my 2:48 prediction. If I really hurry, maybe I can be right on! YES!! (Six minutes, though? I didn't think I could hurry that fast.)

2:43: Doctor sets things up.

2:44: Doctor takes a look and says: "Whoa, look! The head! Look at this, Matt!" Matt says when he heard the doctor say that, he genuinely didn't believe it. He actually thought the doctor was mistaken—because, you know, awesome ob's can just be wrong about that sometimes. ;-) ("But Auburn, I've been to a lot of deliveries. The head doesn't descend that fast unless it's a seventh baby or something. Insane.")

2:45: Beautiful baby Maren was born. It took about 45 seconds and two whole pushes.

She hardly cried. By the time she was back to me, she just laid on my chest and looked around with wide, bright eyes. She seemed so...comfortable. And actually happy...? Can a brand-new baby have joy in being alive? She seemed to.

Matt called Seth to tell him the happy news. Seth's response: "Ah. Welllll.... I'm just going to play on the slide a little more, then I'll come to the hospital." Haha!

Matt texted my parents in the waiting room. (They had knocked on our door just before the surprise 10-cm discovery and been turned away with the promise that we'd invite them in "in about five minutes." Haha! :)) Because he underplays everything, Matt's text just said: "Auburn wins the poll." My mom said: "What was her prediction? Oh noooo.... Does that mean it's gonna be a while...?" My dad said, "No, he said she WINS. I think she's already born! Say what?!" Then my dad texted it to Matt: "Say what?!"

Seth was the first person to come see Maren.... It was beautiful. I'll probably write about that all on its own sometime.

And then Seth got to bring all four of his grandparents in to meet his new sister.

All in all, it went well! A beautiful day. A painful day (yowza...), but a beautiful one. :)

So here she is: Maren Elise Williams. She was a petite 6 pounds even, 19 inches long. She's beautiful and amazing, and the best Thanksgiving/Anniversary present we could have ever waited our whole lives for. We're a happy family!

(Pictures are all from our day in the hospital. We went home the next day—on Thanksgiving! Our more recent pictures still haven't been uploaded from our camera. But I'll post more later.... :))

First moments.

Later that day (or maybe the next), just playing with us for a while....