Bailey Elisabeth Carroll was born on June 22nd and weighed in at 8 lbs 14 oz, 21 3/4 inches long. Long story short we went into labor at home around 3:00 am and stuck it out there until around 9:30. I was six centimeters dilated when we got to the hospital but stalled out some after that and was only at 8 cm by 4:30 that afternoon. At that point my water hadn't broken yet so we decided to have the doctor break it for me to hopefully speed things along. It turned out to be super effective, I was pushing by 5:30 and our (not so) little girl was born at 6:05. The only major drama of the day (aside from the slow progress at the hospital) was that I discovered I am one of a very few women (my OB said she'd seen it once before in her whole career) who responds to labor with continuous vomiting - every 15 minutes from the start of labor until we got to the hospital and they gave me an anti-nausea medication. The Lord's grace was apparent throughout the whole experience. We had hoped to have a natural childbirth and it turned out that every person involved in our labor and delivery had had a natural childbirth themselves (which is practically unheard of) so we couldn't have had more support and encouragement. In addition Bailey was born on a Sunday and there were only three other women having babies on the floor that day. Our nurse told us during the week they usually schedule 14 c-sections and inductions in addition to the people who just come in in labor on their own and had we been in on a weekday they would not have been able to give us the attention and support that they were able to on the weekend. As it was we had the same nurse for our entire labor and she spent almost the entire day helping Andrew coach me through the whole thing. It was a blessing I wouldn't have even known to ask for. After almost three weeks home things are sort of settling down a bit, we are definitely still getting used to life with an infant who has a mind and schedule of her own but the process of getting to know each other has been priceless...it doesn't hurt that she is SUPER cute! :)
