Kate Emily Gill

She's here!! It took a little while and we changed courses a few times, but we ended up at the most wonderful destination- The birth of Kate Emily Gill!

We were scheduled to induce labor on Friday morning, October 2, 2009. The day before, we went for one last check-up and were told, "Go the hospital right now. Your blood pressure is high and we don't want to take any chances." So, we induced Thursday evening. I was confined to my left side trying to bring my blood pressure down and had an IV attached to one arm and a blood pressure cuff on the other that took readings every 30 minutes. At 9:00 pm, I was given an epidural and at 12:45 am, my doctor broke my water. We made it through the night with very little sleep. I was uncomfortable and had no way to move by myself because of the epidural and all the monitors. Poor Michael was on guard and every little sound brought him upright.

At 7:00 am I was checked and had dialated to only 4 cm. The doctor had wanted 6 cm by this time and they played some tricks with the meds to get progress jumpstarted once again. At 8:30, my doctor came in and gave us the news that we would probably have to have a c-section because I was just not progressing. After I told her about this new pain I was experiencing, she checked me and I was at 8cm! She said never mind about the c-section, we'll wait for her to drop some more and then we will push.

At 12:00pm we started pushing. I discovered that all those extra ab muscles from singing come in really handy during labor. I was pretty good at this pushing thing! At 12:30 we ran into a problem. Katie was looking sideways and not downwards. This makes it kinda of like trying to put a square peg in a round hole. The doctor tried to turn her with the next contraction, but to no avail. We had to have a c-section.

The surgery started at 1:03 pm and Katie came into the world at 1:16 pm, weighing 7.6 oz and measuring 19 in long. She was having problems breating around all the mucus and amniotic fluid, so she went to the NICU for a brief period of time, but was released very soon after. She was fine!