He's Here

We are so excited to announce that our Nathan James has arrived. He was born February 12, 2009 at 5:26pm. He weighed in at 9lbs. 11oz. and was 20 3/4" long; however, when we took him to his first doctor's visit he was 22" long, so that is what his height should be recorded as. We don't want him to think he was the shortest baby.

It was quite exciting and scary getting him here. We went to Chandler Regional Hospital at 4:00 on Thursday morning to be induced. Things started off pretty slow because they were trying to thin out my cervix. They insert this gel stuff to do so and after doing that twice, my contractions began getting closer and harder together. At around 4:00pm the nurse wanted me to go and walk around so Todd, my mom and myself set off to walk around the hospital. I was in too much pain to walk for very long and only lasted around 5 minutes. After I got back to my room and sat down, I was feeling pretty good and not in a horrible amount of pain, but my contractions were definetly getting harder. At around 4:20, they hooked me back up to the monitor and within 10 minutes of doing that my water broke!! I immediately asked for an epidural, but they still had to start the IV so the nurse arranged to get that going and called for an epidural. At that time, my contractions were getting beyond comfortable and I was in a lot of pain. Unfortunately, the IV has to be all the way in you before you can get an epidural and my contractions were coming way too close. To add to the pain, the anestisialogist was in with another patient doing a c-section. So our little Nathan was delivered without any pain medication. My water broke around 4:30 and he was born an hour later. Everything was very fast. Todd and my mom did so well coaching me through the whole episode. We were very thankful that my mom was there, because Todd was a little pale and woosy seeing me in that much pain. But we are happy to say that we have a very healthy and cute little boy. He looks exactly like his brothers and especially like Jacob.