the day (or days, ha!) Tripp arrived...part 1

I have been wanting to get this down for oh, the last 3 months, but have been crazy busy figuring out this whole baby thing. Now that things have slowed down and we are getting into some kind of a routine I am excited to take the time to look back at how Tripp came into the world. The whole process was such a life "moment" for both me and DT. No matter how many birth stories you hear, it will never prepare you for what your own personal experience will be like. I am so terrible at remembering small details unless I write them down as soon after as I can. I am sad that it's taken me this long to do it, because I know I will leave out some of it, but this is my effort to capture one of the most incredible days of our lives :) I'm going to do it over the course of a few posts, because it will get long I'm sure. Hopefully the pictures of this cute baby will make you want to keep reading...in fact, I'll stick one in now!

August 11th, 2010 - DT and I were spending a few nights with our great friends, the Butlers in Durham, NC because we were in staff training. I was only about a week out from my due date, but had no signs of this little guy arriving so we thought we would be pretty safe. We had just gone through a crazy ordeal just the week before as DT contracted at staph infection on his face and ended up having surgery and staying the hospital for a few days. That put us pretty behind in preparing for the baby. Just in case anything happened I packed up all that I could think of to take to the hospital. We threw the car seat in the car, still uninstalled, but we were certain we weren't going to need it. I had to twist DT's arm to even get him to do that because he was SO SURE nothing would happen. Boy were we wrong...

Around 10pm on August 11th my water broke at the Butler's house. We were really  both shocked because we were fully anticipating a late arrival from Baby House. But here we were 5 days early and the ball was rolling. After I finally convinced DT that this was in fact the "real thing," we called the doctor and she confirmed that we needed to head on over to the hospital. I surprised myself by being pretty calm and actually decided to take a few minutes alone to kind of get my thoughts and heart together. DT on the other hand immediately went into adrenaline mode (he loves adventure and excitement, so this was right up his alley) and started flying around trying to get us ready to go. We had to repack bags and try to make sure we had the essentials...there wasn't much time for anything else. We were about to get in the car to drive to the hospital and Bowe came running out of the door with DT's shoes! Ha! Needless to say, Daddy was very excited!

We arrived at the hospital a little after 11pm and they took us directly back to a room. The hooked me up to the monitor and we began the waiting game. We were sure we'd have a baby by early morning. It's so funny looking back on all the things we were "sure" of, because the Lord certainly had a story for us that was way outside of what we could have predicted. I contracted all night, sleeping intermittently between the monitoring. At 7:30am  the doctor came in for my first real check. We learned that I was only 50% effaced and had not dilated at all. This was our first glimpse of what a long journey this was going to be. I had hoped to avoid Pitocin, but the doctor convinced me that it would be wise to begin it at this point because of the risk of infection. Within the next hour the contractions really started rolling and I was in full labor. I continued to labor without meds until 1 that afternoon. I was in pretty good pain, but mostly was overwhelmingly exhausted from being awake so long. After a second check, we found I had only dilated to 2cm and realized that we still had a long way to go. We decided I would get an epidural so I would have strength for the delivery when it came time to push...

Part 2 tomorrow....