Posts From The Potters...: Merry Christmas to us!!

After many long walks and many false alarms...my water broke around 2:30am on the night of Christmas Eve. Todd and I had gone to the Christmas Eve service at our church and then we went out for dinner. I was feeling a little homesick so I ordered some fried oysters and we had an eggplant appetizer because someone at work had told me that eating eggplant will send you into labor. Maybe it worked! After I realized that my water had broken, I woke Todd up and we called the doctor. He said since my water broke and I was having contractions to go ahead and get to the hospital so we packed everything up and got to the hospital around 4am. They got me into a room and we were ready to go!

At 7am the nurses switched shifts and Miriam came in. She was absolutely wonderful! Everyone there had the best attitude especially for having to work on Christmas Day. The only downside to it being Christmas Day is that there was no food :( The cafeteria was closed and poor Todd was starving. We had packed some granola bars and some crackers in the bag but those didn't last long.

They asked me when we got there if I wanted an epidural but at that point my contractions weren't too bad so I decided to wait it out. I was only about 3cm dilated at this point. When I said I wanted to wait it out, the nurses gave each other knowing looks and told me not to wait too long because the anesthesiologist was on call but he was at his house and it would take him a few mins to get there. About an hour later I hit btw. 4 and 5 and I figured out what those knowing looks were all about! Luckily it didn't end up taking him longer than 15 mins after I asked for it. After that things slowed down quite a bit and I ended up being in labor for about 12 hours. With the epi, the pain was not bad at all. I actually ended up taking a few naps during the day. The only problem was everytime I tried to move off of my left side his heart rate would drop dramatically so I pretty much had to lay there in the same position the entire time. He ended up being born at 2:52 pm on Christmas Day after about an hour of pushing!

This is my favorite. Poor thing, he does NOT look happy about being on the outside.

He was 7lbs 12 oz and scored a 9 on the APGAR. (Not a 10 because his hands and feet were pretty purple for awhile). We decided to name him Brooks (after Todd's middle name) and Douglas after mine and Todd's maternal grandfathers. We hope he likes it...it took us a loooooooooong time to pick it out :)

My mom made it down for the big event and my sister surprised me by coming down a few hours later so they both got to see him the night he was born which was really neat. Every single restaurant was closed but my mom somehow found us some Chinese food to eat that night, thank goodness. After 13 hours of labor, I really didn't care what I ate! We had some fun the next day with the whole Christmas baby thing and dressed him up in a Santa outfit for a little photo shoot.