Hollin’s Arrival

 

When I got home from work on Saturday night, I told Matt that I had mixed feelings. I knew that it would be bad timing for us to have a baby right then (he was scheduled to be on call all week and we didn’t have any family here yet), but at least I was 37 weeks (term baby) and I was miserable and wanted this baby out of me! Little did I know….

I went to work on Saturday, telling myself that I just had to make it through four more shifts. We were pretty busy and I hurt all day, which was really nothing new. Once I got in my car, I realized that these were a little more painful than normal, so I downloaded a contraction timer app for my phone and started timing them.

Matt had made vegetable soup for dinner and it was yuuummmy! I ate dinner and (secretly) kept timing. After about two hours I realized that they actually were pretty regular, at six minutes apart. I showed Matt my app and he said we needed to go to the hospital. I was worried about ‘crying wolf’ but he talked me into having the doctor paged and she thought it was best if we met her at the hospital just to check things out.

One of our friends, Kirsten, saved the day and came to the house to stay with Zane while we went to the hospital. I was pretty confident that I would be monitored for a little while and then we’d be back home. Zane was already in bed, watching TV and when we got ready to leave he said, “No, You make me weally weally sad! Don’t weave me!” Matt told him he could watch TV as long as he wanted. Z looked at me and said, “Dada say I can watch tt!” Kirsten said he was asleep about 30 minutes later.

Once we were hooked up to the monitors at the hospital, my contractions went from 6 minutes apart to 3 minutes apart, and I went from 1cm to 3cm, all in about an hour. And, just as I remembered, contractions are painful, annoying, and don’t stop. By a stroke of luck, my doctor was on call that night and let me know that they were going to start preparing the OR for the c-section. I got a little upset then, just thinking about how we had a waiting room full of about 40 people when Zane was born and this time it was just me and Matt. Even though that wasn’t the ideal situation, I feel like it brought us even closer together because we only had each other. I was also relieved because I wasn’t going to have to be pregnant any longer, excited to meet the baby, scared to have surgery, guilty for leaving Zane…so many things.

At 12:34am on Sunday, October 16th, 2011 we welcomed our precious baby girl! Hollin Elizabeth weighed 6 lb, 14 ounces and was 20 inches long. (Zane was 6 lb, 15 ounces and 20.25 inches. Almost exactly the same size!) We feel very blessed to have her!