Today is 11/2/12 and we have been home with our little Emmry for about 5 hours. While I was at the hospital the last time I took the time to read back through Jackson's Story and it brought back a lot of memories that I had forgotten. Oh how many wonderful memories I have with my son that I can no longer remember. I thought that at the very least I wanted to write the hospital story of Emmry so I wouldn't forget.
If Jackson's story was a nightmare, then Emmry's was a dream. Whereas everything went wrong the first time this delivery happened the way we wanted it to...almost.
10/30/12 - Amy went to the doctor to do her final check up and schedule an induction for 11/3/12. We did not want to go to full term since Jackson was so big. We figured 1 week early would be soon enough. While Amy was being examined, Dr. Falk stripped her membrane. Amy had not asked him to, and when he started she told him to stop because she didn't want to have a baby on Halloween, but what was done was done. That night Amy began feeling contractions.
10/31/12 - Luckily this day Jackson had already been to 3 Halloween parties, because he was not going to make it to one on Halloween day this year. When I woke up Amy told me she had been feeling contractions all night. Luckily her mom was here to help out in the morning. At around 9:00 Paula went home to get a bag ready for the hospital because it was becoming pretty apparent that Emmry would be coming sooner than we thought.
I was at work all day and kept checking in every hour or so. Amy was having contractions about every 10 minutes all day. She stayed off her feet and tried to relax. If she had been up and moving around I think Emmry would have definitely been here on Halloween. I came home and Amy was still in the same state. I helped back bags for Amy, myself and Jackson and we tried to take it easy in case we did not end up going to the hospital. However, by 9:30 PM we knew that we needed to go down.
We dropped a sleeping Jackson off at my mom's house and headed down. For the next 90 minutes we had to fill out paper work and they examined Amy. All the while she was having contractions every 3-5 minutes and they were getting intense. About 11:30 we finally were in our room and they had the epidural administered. Finally Amy was able to relax.
11/1/12 - Emmry's birthday. Paula showed up about midnight and her an Amy chatted while I drifted off for a few hours. At about 2:30 Amy's water broke...well, it didn't break, the sac actually came out. The nurse told us that this was a sign of being 'born into greatness.' she called it being born en-caul. And apparently Julius Caesar was born under the same condition. the head is actually delivered into the water sac.
The nurses took great care not to break the sac. The started getting Amy ready for her delivery. We did a few trial pushes and everything looked like it was going good. At about 3:45 Dr. Hazelrigg came in, because again Dr. Falk ended up not delivering our child, and took charge. He immediately popped the water sack that we were trying to preserve and told Amy to start pushing. The head showed very quickly and I couldn't believe how fast everything was going. I stood by to help, but didn't feel as needed as with Jackson's delivery when I was the coach during the whole event.
Amy said that she never really felt the urge to push. The nurse just told her to push when the machine said she was having a contraction. That was a much more pleasant experience for her than the first delivery.
Emmry's long hair is the first thing I remember seeing. It was noticeably dark and long before I could see anything else. Then the Dr. made two incisions in Amy which seemed unnecessary until we saw that the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck. Amy pushed her the rest of the way out and they removed the cord on our healthy new baby girl, 9 lbs 6 oz and 21 3/4" long.
After she was born we took a few hours getting her cleaned up, fed and had to have some time holding and loving her. The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. We spent most of the day trying to figure out how we wanted to spell Emmry. We had a whole dry-erase wall filled with different ways of spelling it, but finally ended up with Emmry Autumn Petersen. Hopefully she likes it as much as we do.
My favorite visitor of the day was Jackson who came in and was so excited to see his baby sister. He was so good with her and he was also good with my mom during the whole experience.
That night we sent Emmry to the nursery so Amy and I could try and get some sleep, which is not easy to do in a hospital.
11/2/12 - I was ready to leave by about 8:00, but with all the paperwork and check ups and everything else we ended up being at the hospital until 3:15...ridiculous. They were somewhat concerned about her jaundice levels. They said we could wait at the hospital another day or take a billy blanket home for her. We opted for the blanket. We have experience with it from Jackson and I was going stir crazy in the hospital.
So here we are about 8:30 at night, she is in her billy blanket and Jackson just fell asleep on the couch. I am a lucky guy to have such a perfect little family. It's amazing how quickly you can fall in love with a child. After seeing her for only 30 seconds and realizing that I will be her daddy for the rest of my life I immediately fell in love with my new little princess.
Amy is still in a lot of pain, but it's not as bad as it was with Jackson, and Emmry will be in her blanket at least until Monday, but things are going quite well overall.
