Wow, I can't believe a month has come and gone since we welcomed our little boy into our family! He sure has grown a lot in the last month! He went down to 7 lbs. 13 oz from his birth weight of 8 lbs. 2 oz in the first two days, but after a week, he was back up to his birth weight and by two weeks he was 9 lbs. 3 oz. By week three, he was already 10 lbs. 1 oz! This boy eats A LOT!!! He is solid! He has filled out so much already it's hard to believe.
By three weeks he was in some 3 months sized clothes already. His sister didn't wear size 3 months until she was 6 weeks. He's almost outgrown size 1 diapers already too. Slow down little man, slow down!
He thinks he's super strong already too. Always trying to hold his head up and look around, and he succeeds a lot of the time... for about half a minute or so when his neck gets all wobbly again. He's starting to focus more too, and hold our gaze for longer periods of time. His smile is adorable as well. He isn't smiling at anything in particular yet, but he gives us random smiles and it just melts my heart!
It was around 3:30 am on Tuesday, June 21 and I was having an incredibly difficult time getting comfortable in bed. No matter how I lay, I had extreme discomfort in my lower abdomen and the pressure was ridiculous! I was in the bathroom every 15-20 minutes just to get a few minutes of relief from the pressure. After making countless trips to the bathroom in an hour and a half, I was starting to wonder if maybe this was just the very beginning of labor. I called the hospital at 5 am to ask if that's what this was, and the nurse told me that it sounded like labor would start soon, but that she didn't think it was actually labor I was feeling. Well, no sooner had I gotten off the phone with her and crawled back into bed did I feel my first contraction. I waited for the next one, exactly 8 minutes later. I got up and started packing the last few items for my hospital bag, and then crawled back into bed to see if there would be more. Yep, another one and another one, 8 minutes later.
I woke up Russell and told him it was time to head to the hospital and that I'd already phoned the hospital. We got up, got dressed and got ready to go. After informing my in-laws that it was time, and that we were headed to the hospital, we were off. It was 6:22 am when we pulled away from the house. After a stop at Tim Hortons (hmmm, deja vu! lol) and another stop at Russell's work to drop off the on-call phone, we made it to the hospital about 6:45 am. I got placed into a delivery room and hooked up to all the monitors and stuff. And then we just waited... when my doctor came to check me at around 7:30 I was 3-4 cms dilated. My contractions started getting stronger at around 8 when I met my l & d nurse. They started coming every 5 minutes and that's when I requested the morphine shot. Once the morphine had taken effect we started to "tour" the hospital to get things moving along faster. We even got to sit out in the gazebo! It was a beautiful day! First gorgeous day we'd had in weeks and I was stuck in a hospital, in labor :(. So we took advantage of the little bit of time we had while the morphine was still doing it's job and sat out there. Russell and I took bets on when we figured baby would come that day. He thought 4:30 that afternoon, but I thought forsure by 2:30 baby would be here :D.
From 8-12, we paced, and talked and paced. When my doctor came back at 12:15 to check me, I was at 5 cms and she broke my water. That was when the morphine was no longer effective :(. I wasn't allowed another shot but my doctor ordered fentenol for me, and I could have as many doses as I needed until baby came. It did nothing at all for the pain but it made me extremely drowsy. After about half an hour, my nurse gave me another dose of the useless stuff and then told me that she needed me to get up and walk around some more. I was now at 8 cms. So after the second dose, I stood up to try to get those last two cms to come quicker, and all I had to do was stand up! I said "I need to pee", so I went to the toilet. Nothing. I realized I did not need to pee, I needed to push! It was now 1:30 pm. Russell came and helped me back to bed, and I told the nurse I had to push. She told me that she would phone my doctor, and Russell said "You better phone her now then!". She told me that while she had delivered babies before, she would rather not deliver mine and that I shouldn't push yet. Yeah right! I felt like I was going to die and here she was telling me not to push! All I could say was "I have to push, I have to push so bad!" Finally she said "ok, push" and she ran off to phone my doctor. I pushed just enough to give in to the urge, but held off on the real pushing until my doctor arrived. When Dr. Fischer walked in the room at about 1:55, I pushed with all I had. At 2:00 pm exactly, our beautiful son was born!
We welcomed Cohen Foster John into this world on an absolutely gorgeous Tuesday afternoon! And I won the bet, baby came before 2:30 that day ;). He was born right on his due date, and that's something that doesn't happen often. Good timing little man, good timing!
