He loves sucking his thumb... when he can find it!

Elliott's birth story

Let my first say that I was convinced I would deliver after my due date. I was due December 8 and the latest my doctor would let me go was December 15 before inducing. I just knew that I would go past December 8.

I woke up on Monday, November 30 at 5:30am with discomfort that resembled menstrual cramps. It didn’t last very long, and I was sleeping again in a few short minutes. This cycle – wake with pain, pain ends, fall back asleep - happened several more times before the alarm went off for Matt to get up and get ready for work. By this time I had decided that I was having contractions and that my body was beginning the preparation for labor. Labor that, for me, would be in about two weeks. Several of my pregnant friends had gone through bouts of ‘false labor’ and several of them had even gone to the hospital only to be sent home to have the baby days or weeks later. I didn’t even bother to tell Matt about the contractions—why get his hopes up and make him all anxious when nothing was going to happen?

Matt left for work at 8 and I got out of the bed because the pains weren’t allowing me to sleep anymore. For fun, I pulled up a website called Contraction Master that helps you time and keep track of the frequency of your contractions. To my surprise, my pains were coming every 6-8 minutes and lasting anywhere from 20-60 seconds. I searched the internet for ‘false labor’ and gave myself a refresher course on how to stop it. Just what I thought – walk walk walk, drink a large glass of water, and lay on your left side for 30 minutes to an hour. I called Matt and told him about my plan to stop the false labor pains, glanced in the mirror to make sure I wasn’t going to scare any of my neighbors, and headed out to follow the internet’s first instruction.

Walking wasn’t the most fun thing to do at 9 months pregnant. In fact, I’ll just call it what it was—waddling. I waddled my heart out. I took very short breaks to come inside and drink water, then waddled back out the door and around my neighborhood. Imagine looking out your window and seeing a pregnant lady who looked like she just rolled out of bed and was struggling with every step. That was me. By the time I was ready to come back into the house, I had started pausing every time a pain would hit. Now imagine that same hair tasseled pregnant lady trying to play it off like she wasn’t standing outside your house having a contraction. Poor lady.

I made it to the living room and started timing the pains again—just for fun. While drinking a few glasses of water, l got out all the ingredients for Vegetable Beef Soup and put it in the crock pot. We were going to need something to eat that night for dinner. Then I went and laid on the sofa on my left side.

I talked to Matt on Skype chat, and decided to call my OB’s office. My 39 week appointment was scheduled for 4pm that day and I wanted to make sure I didn’t need to do something else to stop these pains before seeing the doctor. The nurse on the phone told me I would need to move my appointment up to 2pm just in case the doctor wanted to send me on to the hospital. By now you can probably guess what I thought…”That’s not going to happen.”

Matt and I headed to the doctor’s office at 2, and by then my contractions were 4-5 minutes apart and about 30-60 seconds long. I could still talk through them, but they were definitely getting worse.

My appointment was with Dr. McKenzie –this white haired, fatherly, jovial man. He was so excited for me, which was nice because I have to think he sees women every day that are about to have babies. I was dilated to 3cm - 2 cm more than I had been the week before. He told me to go home and wait until the contractions got worse, then go to the hospital. He was going to phone the on-call doctor and tell her to expect us. We left the office at 3pm and I still had this thought that I would go home and the pains would go away.

Matthew went to class and called me around 4:30. I told him that the pains weren’t going away-they were getting worse-and that he needed to come pick me up because I thought we needed to go to the hospital. I hung up, went to the kitchen, unplugged the crock pot, and put the soup in the refrigerator.

It had been a good thought, but we wouldn’t be eating soup that night.

We got to the hospital around 5:45 and the contractions had gotten so bad that I couldn’t talk through them. I was taken to Labor & Delivery Triage and hooked up to the fetal monitor. Dr. Privette came in and checked me, and I was still 3cm. She told me that because I hadn’t dilated any further in the past three hours, she was going to send me home to wait. At this point I was having to focus on something and breathe through my contractions. I told the doctor I wasn’t sure when I would need to come back to the hospital. First, it would take 30 minutes to drive home. I was already in pretty bad pain and didn't know how bad it needed to get before it was "time". So, she agreed to let me stay for another hour while she went on rounds and said that she would come back and check to see if I had dilated any more. That hour turned into an hour and a half because she had to deliver another baby. By the time she came back in to check me, 7:45pm, I was at 4-5cm and really ready for some pain medication. My nurse told me that I had to drain a whole bag of fluids in my IV before I could get my epidural, so she set me up with that and also gave me a shot of some kind of wonder-meds that took the edge off.


Around 8pm my nurse was doing the paperwork to get me admitted to the hospital and I decided to call my family and tell them that I was having the baby. Both my dad and Matt's mom asked, "Is this a joke?" To which I replied, "NO. This pain is real!"


Before changing into the hospital gown:

Hooked up to the fetal monitors: Me on the phone telling my dad that the baby was on his way:

So, I get checked in to my birthing room and wait (not so patiently) for my bag of liquids to drain so that I can get my epidural. FINALLY they called the anesthesiologist and have him come in to give me the epi. By that time, I was 8cm dilated and in so much pain. Pain bad enough that my memory is pretty blurry except for lots of tossing and turning on the bed and moaning/screaming. The epidural took on the left side, but not fully on the right side. I also stalled at 8cm for about 2 hours. Little did I know that my son was face up and his head was pressing the wrong way and not allowing me to dilate the final two centimeters. I was given pitocin to help move things along, and boy did I feel the contractions more on my right side than ever before. Around 1:15am my nurse checked -- I was fully dilated and she went to get the doctor. By 1:25am I started pushing and at 2:42am the most precious baby boy ever on the face of the earth was born. Matt was able to cut the cord and end the baby's 9 month long dependency on mommy through the womb for a new type of relying on mommy. It was very emotional to watch him experience life outside the womb for the first time. My first words to him were "I love you so much!" And I did. I didn't know where it came from, but the love that I thought I had for my son up until that point was but a mere shadow of the love gushing from my heart the first moment I saw him. His little bitty scream was the most delicate sound I had ever heard. Even though we had never met, his face was so familiar to me. I can't remember a time when I didn't know what he looked like; his face, his hands, every roll of head-to-toe chunkiness. The nurse took him over to my right side and cleaned him up. I tore pretty badly during the birth, so my doctor had to take a while and stitch me up. After Elliott was weighed (8lbs, 10oz), measured (19.75in), and bathed, we were taken to a postpartum room. [Hospitals now have bracelets they put on babies to help prevent them from being stolen. They make alarms go off if the baby gets too close to an exit, leaves the floor, or if they are near an elevator when the doors open. Well, the nurses were trying to push us around to our new room and the elevator opened right as we rolled by... setting off an alarm that both mine and Matt's family heard from the waiting room... and making the security guard mad! oops!] The nice middle-of-the-night nurse offered to take our picture when we got to our room. Our first family photo:

We took a little while to just be a family of three before we invited our families back to meet the little guy. I don't remember talking too much--we both just stared at our son! It was 4:45am before he got to meet his grandparents and aunt. As if it wasn't exciting enough to introduce everyone to our son, we also got to introduce him by name for the first time. It had been a long 8 months since we told our families that we were going to have a baby, and we had kept his name a secret the whole time. [Which everyone complained about, but I was so happy that we got to introduce Elliott by name the night he was born.]

Since Elliott was born earrrly on a Tuesday morning and we were both doing so well, we got to check out of the hospital around 11am on Wednesday. It was a cold and rainy drive back home to Wake Forest, but it sure felt good to walk through the door with Elliott in our arms!!!