She's here!! (part 1)

At 11:48pm on March 21st, we were able to welcome our second little girl into this world! She was a little less than a month earlier than planned, but she came out looking and acting perfect! She didn't need any respiratory assistance or anything, and was nursing like a champ shortly after birth. For those of you who want to read it, here is her story.

For the past few weeks, I had been getting more and more anxious to get Amelia out! I was miserable. My back hurt, my legs hurt, my knees hurt... I was feeling things in places I didn't even know existed. This past week, I had noticed my body was going through a sort of "cleansing" process... and I just assumed it was from something I ate. Nope, it was my body getting ready. When I got pregnant with Ellie, she would ask me when the baby would be here. To keep things simple, I would tell her when it was spring. First official day of spring? March 20th. Earlier this week, I was telling people I know longer cared about my schedule, I was ready to have her. She could come out whenever she felt ready... She took that a little too literally.

I was having my weekly coffee with my dear friend yesterday morning. I was having what I thought were my normal braxton hicks contractions, which I had been getting a little more frequently as her due date was nearing. Only difference with these were that they were immediately followed by really low, menstrual like cramps. Nothing was timeable, so I just let it go as nothing. In my head, I knew I still have a few more weeks to go because Ellie was 39 weeks and that was WITHOUT labor. Anyway, we decide to go look at stores for little things and decide to take one car instead of two. As soon as I sat down in her car, I felt a lot wetter than I had before. I mean, A LOT wetter. We were heading to Babies R Us, so I told her I needed to check things out before we really went shopping. Sure enough, my water had broken, at roughly 10am and I was also having the start of my bloody show. I felt like crying right then and there. I knew that having her before my 37th week might mean a trip to the hospital instead of a homebirth like we had been planning for so long.

I called Salli, my midwife, and since I already had my regular appt scheduled for that day, I would go in as normal and she would check things out. I called Tom right after and let him know what was going on. He was able to get off work and come to the appt with me. Salli confirmed that my water had in fact broken, but told me that it could still be a couple of days before anything really started happening. She also told me that if I was comfortable with it, she was more than willing to follow through with our original plan of a homebirth.

We left thinking, holy shit, we're not ready. And we weren't. We didn't have any of the stuff on the birthing list for a home. I had all sorts of papers to write for school. Her co-sleeper still needed to be cleaned. The house needed to be cleaned. The list went on and on in my head. So, the first thing we did was got Tom's boss's approval for him to stay out the rest of the day and help me get things in order for the impending birth. Then, a trip to walmart and costco. While we were walking around I noticed that the braxton hicks contraction feeling wasn't coming anymore, but the menstrual cramp feeling was, and was getting stronger. I still kept thinking we had time to get things in order, at least somewhat.

After the shopping, Tom went to pick up Ellie and I headed home to start cleaning and getting ready. This was around 4:30pm... At around 5:15, labor started picking up...