Of Highs and Lows

First some pictures of me being pampered before our baby made her entrance into the world.

Ray giving me a much needed manicure.

My sweet, sweet hubby painting my toenails, so I would feel pretty in the hospital.

Getting a massage.

Last week I woke up with very irregular contractions and very, very emotional. Eventually, we started timing them. I was pretty sure this would turn into real labor, but just had to wait. After a couple hours, Jared and I decided to go for a walk (we spent a lot of the past weeks walking). Our hospital was in Ogden, so we drove past temple that is almost done being rebuilt. Then we got some lunch. While we were eating we decided to go to the hospital to see what they would recommend. The contractions were still very irregular in time and intensity.

 We checked in and waited for a room to be ready. They had had a crazy week and there were 4 of us ladies waiting. When they got me into my room they told me that I might need a c-section because of some previous history and since I hadn't been to the dr. since I was 7 weeks pregnant. Luckily, my dr was the one on call. When she walked in she smiled at me and told me she wanted to strangle me.

 While I was settling into my room Jared was talking to his mom on the phone. She told us that a couple hours after we left Rays right side went numb. It sounded to us like a stroke. Eventually, Rike came up, took care of our kids while Beate took Ray to the hospital. They ended up in the ER of the hospital we were in. Turns out he had a stroke caused by a hemoraeging (sp?) in the brain.

 The nurse said that since this was my 5th baby it was normal for the contractions to be irregular even though I was almost dialated to a 6. I am glad we went in when we did. We had to choose whether to do a c-section or normal. Since I had a previous c-section with Katie there was a 1-2% chance of my uterus rupturing. If that happened there is a 50% fatality rate for mother and baby. If we decided to do it normal then my dr recommended I get an epidural in case anything went wrong. I had to do some quick evaluating of what I felt I should do. I felt at peace with doing it normal, so they ordered an epidural.

 At this point I was at about a 7. Once I got the epidural things slowed down a bit, but I was relaxed and enjoyed watching the olympics with Jared. This whole time Jared was just worried about his dad. He went down to see how things were going. I am so grateful we were in the same hospital, it relieved some of the stress from the whole situation. It was such a strange experience having such different emotions at the same time.

After about 2 hours, they broke my water and within a half hour I was pushing. 2 pushes to get her in position, and 3 to get her out. Even I was amazed, and all my babies have come fast. She was beautiful and screamed right away. (By the way, one of the first things I noticed were her long, long feet...thanks Dautels) They kept saying how beautiful her head was, no cone-head. She was big, but the dr was relieved she wasn't too big like some of my others, since we hadn't done the c- section. I had more bleeding than normal, so she had to work on fixing that for quite a while. But once it was in order, all was well.

 After I was settled and so was she, Jared said good-bye and went down to check on his parents. I spent 2 nights in the hospital.

I had many visitors.  My kiddies got to come. Hyrum even got to come with Daddy to take me home.  I finally got to share one of my babies with my parents. They hadn't seen any of them as babies except Annie.  I had missed that.

 David took Anne and Alicia to a daddy-daughter dance at the school then they had a sleep-over at their house. Rike stayed with Hyrum and Katie. Robby came the next day and was a big help. After school my parents took Annie and Alicia down to their house until Sunday afternoon. They got stay up way too late and had a great time. The RS has been sending meals and we have been so blessed.

Ray got to see his new granddaughter for the first time when he got out of the hospital a day after us.

Ray has made a miraculous recovery and was out of the hospital by Sunday afternoon. He need some minor physical therapy and speech therapy, but is doing awesome. He just needs to remember to take it slowly.