6 DAYS EARLY?!?!?

 

You are reading this right...Miss Charlotte decided to bless us with her beautiful self on October 29, 2013!!!  I woke up at 2:00am to my water breaking!  I wanted to make sure it was my water and not just that I had peed myself...so I went through three pairs of pants, two pairs of underwear and one whole roll of toilet paper in a half hour.  So I woke Dave up and said we had better head to the hospital to check things out.  We both took showers, loaded up the car with our overnight bags and headed to Progress West in O'Fallon.  I told my story to the nurse when we arrived on the second floor and they put me in room 207 right away.  I was dilated at this point between 2-3cm at 4:00am.

 

 

So the waiting game started.  Everyone we talked to at the hospital said they don't want you go past 24 hours once your water breaks and delivery because there is a high rate of infection setting in.  The contractions got semi painful so I got my Epidural around 7:00am.  I figured I better get it now before the pain gets unbearable.  The doctor that gave me the Epidural missed the first time and struck a vein which made me feel really weird so he had to start all over.  It took the second time.  At 9:00am the nurses started me on Pitocin due to me not progressing very fast.  By early afternoon I had progressed to 5cm dilated and my body was starting to react to the effects of the pain.  I was shaking uncontrollably and it felt like I need to poop every time a contraction came on.  I developed a fever and had to be given more drugs on top of the Epidural by the doctor to stop the shaking/pain.  I started to feel much better.  By 3:30pm I had progressed to between 8-9cm dilated and started pushing at 4:05pm.  Pushing became exhausting but by 5:24pm Charlotte Fay Nieters entered this world and has now forever changed our lives!  Here are some pics of the before and after.

 

 

The below picture is Charlotte's heart rate on the top and my contractions on the bottom.  Every time you see a huge spike, that is a contraction.

 

I did fail to mention in my last post that I went to the Chiropractor the day before Charlotte was born at 11:00am and he did some acupuncture on pressure points to hopefully get things moving along and low and behold 15 hours later my water broke.  The nurses also said that whenever a storm front moves in and the barometer changes that can help move things along too.  A big storm moved in the morning my water broke and it rained for three days.  Not sure what got it going but either way, we were glad to welcome Charlotte early!!