Emily Ruth Boling

Emily Ruth Boling was born two weeks ago, on Friday, January 16, 2009, at 6:10PM. She weighed 9 pounds 9 ounces and was 21 inches long. She is our big, beautiful baby girl!

I went into labor Wednesday night, with irregular contractions. Around 3:30 the next morning I started timing how far apart they were. After about an hour of regular contractions, I thought, I woke up Dan and Vickie. We left the apartment about an hour later for the hospital. I got to recline on a little bed (it was short) with monitors strapped to my stomach. One monitor showed the baby's heart beat, and one showed (theoretically) when I was having a contraction. By mid-morning the staff had decided that I since I wasn't actually progressing, they would send me home. After a miserable day at home, during which I took a nap and so did Dan, my contractions started to get regular and close around diner time. We hit a hour of five minute contractions during Jeopardy, but Dan suggested we wait so I could finish the show. We headed off to the hopsital, but discovered that our door lock wasn't working, probably because of the extreme cold (this was during one of the coldest times Indiana has seen in a while). Dan called our home teacher to come over and house sit while we drove to the hospital. I did not want to wait.

At the hospital they hooked me up to the monitors like that morning. After a while the doctor came in and checked me, and said I'd only dialated to a three and they usually didn't admit women until they were at a four. This was bad news. I did not want to go home again. Most of my labor pain was in my back and hips, and I was very uncomfortable. The doctor came back shortly, and said since I had progressed from that morning, I would be admitted.

O happy day! It looked like I was going to have the baby soon. It was also about this time that I decided I wanted pain medication. I still didn't want an epidural, but they had something else that would last for a while. After we got to the birthing room they gave it to me. I was able to sleep a couple hours, and thrn I drfted in and out of sleep while Vickie read to me. But the contractions were still pretty bad. When it came time to get the next dose, I decided that I wanted an epidural instead. Epiudurals are pretty scary. If they mess up, it could be very bad. But I felt like it would be alright to get one.

The time it took to get the epidural seemed to drag on forever. And once I got it, the pain relief was not instant. But once it had kicked in completely, I was a happy camper. By mid morning Friday I was getting close to being ready to push. The baby wasn't down far enough, so they had me weight. At one point we strated pushing, but then the doctors were all needed elsewhere, so I had to wait. By early afternoon I had started pushing again. We pushed for a long time. At one point a bunch of doctors came in to discuss if the baby was facing the right way. They talked about using forceps. I started to hope that we would be done very soon. But then all the doctors went away. I wasn't thinking much about where the doctors were and why they weren't with me. Mostly I wanted to push out my baby, to be done and be able to hold her. Everyone said they could see her hair. So she was close. She had to be.

Eventually we got a call. It was a doctor, who said that after I'd pushed for three hours they would do a c-section. He was informed it had been over three hours already, and I got bumped to the frount of the c-section line. My epidural had worn off around noon (they gave me a new dose, but not a booster because of the lapse, so it didn't do much), and I'd been able to move around while pushing. Pushing helped with the pain. I was able to focus on that instead of how much it hurt. I was still pushing when they put me on the operating table. Then they gave me more epidural drugs and all the pain went away. I could still tell they were doing things to my tummy sometimes, but it wasn't strictly painful.

And after they tugged Emily out of the birth canal (I had gotten her pretty stuck with all that pushing), she came out into the world, my very own baby girl!

 I could see her, over my left shoulder, as they cleaned her up. And her Daddy held her, and brought her over to me. I was shaking so bad I couldn't hold her right away. They took her to the nursery and brought her to me around nine that night. Finally I was able to hold my own little Emily.