Ellie's debut

On September 4, 2011 at 4:41 pm our baby girl finally decided to make her debut. Ellie Kai is beautiful. We are completely obsessed with her and I can now officially say that all my struggles with pregnancy and labor were worth it.

I was getting very impatient waiting for my due date and was extremely disappointed when that day came and went without anything happening. I know its really common for women to go past their due date with their first child but I was just done with pregnancy, I had not felt like myself since December 2010 and I needed to have this baby. The day after I was due Scotty and I decided that for our own sanity we weren't going to talk about the baby or me going into labor. We were just going to try and have fun and forget my frustrations. So we met up with our good friends the Steeles and Owsleys for a day at the beach. We laid out, got tan, the boys surfed and we just had fun. I almost forgot that I was super pregnant. That night Scotty and I made dinner and laid down to relax, around 7:45 I got a really bad contraction. I stood up to walk it off and my water broke. Scotty immediately jumped up and started frantically getting the bags and everything together. I cleaned up as best I could and we jumped into the car. I could tell Scotty was a little nervous but I was weirdly calm and just excited to get this process started. When we got to the hospital they examined me and checked me in, unfortunately I was barely dilated and they told us we would have a long wait ahead of us. We got settled in our room and tried to sleep but once my contractions started there wasn't much sleeping for me. At 5am, I still hadn't progressed very much so my doctor gave me pitocin to speed things up. The rest of the day is kind of a blur for me. I had horrible back labor and got an epidural to deal with the pain and it was so helpful. I am very impressed by women who do this completely natural! After a few hours the epidural had worn off on one side and I was in a lot of pain again. They upped my dosage so I could get a few more hours of relief before starting to push. Then the nausea hit, I threw up a few times before they finally told me I was ready to start pushing. Even though I had just thrown up and I had a fever of 102 I put everything I had into those pushes. I wanted nothing more than to get that baby out. But almost two hours later there was still no baby and I had very little left in me to push. I was so tired and started to doubt if I could really do this. Scotty would go back and forth between putting a cold wash cloth on my head and giving me ice chips. He kept telling me that she was right there and I just needed to do it a little bit longer. My nurses were amazing and with their encouraging words and Scotty's excited look every time he would see her head I finally got in that last push. It was the best feeling ever. Scotty cut her cord and they put her on my chest. Ellie didn't make any noise, she just looked up at us with those big blue eyes and smiled. They took her to clean her up and I just laid back in complete exhaustion and happiness. My family came in shortly after and my mom and dad got immediately emotional and Scotty followed close behind them. My emotions hit me a few days later when I realized that we finally had our little girl. Having her here is amazing and even though being parents is a constant learning process we couldn't have asked for a better baby. She looks just like her daddy and has his mellow personality too. We are so lucky and I can't believe there is actually three of us now.