Our new baby

Hello Everyone!
Now that our baby is a month old, I figure it‘s probably time we get an announcement out, and write down all the gory details before I forget them (but please don’t feel obligated to read them – I just know I don’t have enough RAM in my brain to store all this information for very long – anyone know an easy way to upgrade to a better system?)
So, here’s the short story:
Our little Katelyn Nicole was born on Tuesday, October 20th at 6:52 p.m. She weighed 6 pounds, 9 ounces and was 19 inches long. She has a little bit of dark red peach fuzz on her head, and newborn blue-gray eyes. She is doing well.
Here’s the long story, if you want the details:
October began in a crazy rush, with the new carpet installation I had been both putting off and looking forward to since we first moved into this house and realized what an awful choice green carpet is if you have kids and don’t want to vacuum multiple times every day. That nesting instinct kicks in during the last six weeks or so of a pregnancy, especially when you’ve gone through it once or twice and you know that your newborn will be dictating most of your schedule for the next six to nine months, from how much sleep you will get to what time you will finally get to take that much needed shower. So I had been spending as much time as I could sorting and getting rid of things and repainting baseboards while I could do it without worrying about dripping paint on the carpet. We were also just finishing up soccer season with the six older kids. I was achy and not sleeping well – waking up every 1-2 hours during the night. At the same time, it was quickly becoming apparent that my role of “overseeing” Red Ribbon Week at the kids’ school was changing to that of organizing Red Ribbon Week as I could find no one to step up and take over. About this same time, my blood pressure readings were starting to creep up at my weekly doctor’s appointments. By the time Fall Break came in mid-October, my readings were high enough that I would either need to be induced or put on bed rest. Struggling with trying to balance conflicting desires – wanting to make sure this baby was really ready to be born, wanting to keep Daniel’s birthday his alone (October 18), not wanting to disappoint the kids by cancelling our Fall break get-away plans, and wanting to get a few more things checked off my “to do list” before the baby arrived – I was hoping to put off the impending birth. We ended up taking the kids to the hotel, zoo, aquarium that Friday and Saturday as we had planned, and the following Monday I went to my doctor appointment, when the doctor decided that I would be induced the next day. After having tried to get the H1N1 (Swine flu) shots on Monday afternoon unsuccessfully, we woke up early Tuesday morning and went to the Health Department before school, and after more than an hour of waiting in line were able to get all of us (and my sister, Jeannie) the immunization. We ran the kids to school, I packed my bags and tidied up the house, and we left for the hospital (with the youngest two in my sisters’ care.)
We checked in and the admitting nurse at the hospital promptly forgot about us for a full hour and a half while we waited not-so-patiently. I was finally put in a room, hooked up to monitors and an IV with a Pitocin drip at about 3:15. Everything seemed to be going fine; the contractions were becoming stronger and more frequent, though I was not dilating as much as the contractions led me to think, even after I got an epidural. At one point, the baby moved and the monitor lost her heartbeat. The nurse came in to reposition the monitor. After she tried unsuccessfully to locate the heartbeat, she called in a couple more nurses to try. At first I wasn’t worried, but after about ten minutes, I was beginning to think something more was going on. The nurses called the doctor, and fortunately he had decided to stay at the hospital after having broken my water, so it took him just a couple minutes to come in the room. Though the nurses and doctor were very professional, it soon became apparent that the situation was not perfectly routine as the nurses tried to put a scalp lead on the baby’s head to monitor her heartbeat, and finding that it was down in the 80’s rather than 130 to 180. At the same time, the doctor checked and found that I was dilated only to a 5. His comment, “It’s okay if you do this when you’re dilated to a 10, but not so good when you’re at a 5,” quickly brought me to the realization that this little baby was in distress, and things might not turn out just fine. Miraculously, within five minutes of the time the doctor arrived, I had dilated to a 10, pushed once, and the baby was born. That was also the moment blood gushed out and one reason for the baby’s distress was discovered: the placenta had detached from the uterine wall at some point, depriving the baby of her source of oxygen. She was fairly pink when she came out, which was a good indication that she hadn’t been without oxygen for too long, but she had also inhaled a lot of blood. When the nurses cleaned her up and brought her over to me so they I could see her before they took her up to the NICU, there was blood bubbling out of her mouth. They whisked her away to put her on a CPAP machine, which would inflate her lungs to ensure that they would not collapse while the blood and fluid was being cleared out. After having watched her for an hour on the machine, the nurses were satisfied that the baby was okay. Three hours after she was born, I finally got to hold my little baby. The next day when the doctor came to check on me, he said, “Someone was definitely watching out for you. I couldn’t have gotten you back and ready for a C-section as quickly as you dilated and pushed her out.” So we are especially grateful that everything turned out well, that our little baby is here safe and sound, and that I am healthy and strong, too. We are all enjoying her very much and are so glad she is here and part of our family.