Details on the BIG DAY!

Tuesday evening I wasn't feeling quite right and seemed to be having a few more contractions then normal. Adam was suppose to play basketball that night but I told him that maybe he might want to stay home, just in case. Well, I changed my mind and told him to go ahead and go and I would just take it easy. After he left I called my sister, Paula, who is a nurse for an OB/GYN to get her opinion. She asked me all the normal questions, "how far apart are your contractions, how many have you had in an hour?" But of course I didn't know any of the answers to those questions because I was in the wonderful river of denial! Thinking that if I didn't keep track then I wasn't really probably having that many contractions. She thought that I should go in to be on the safe side and so I made a deal with her. I would keep track of how many and how far apart my contractions were while Adam was gone if and depending on how that went I would go in. Needless to say by the time Adam got home it had been about an hour and I had had 11 contractions ranging anywhere between 8 minutes and 4 minutes apart. So I kept my end of the deal and called in to the hospital and they had told me what Paula said, "Come in!"

By the time Adam's mom got to our house to stay with Olivia it was already a little after 11:00pm. When we finally got to the hospital around 11:45pm and checked into Labor & Delivery I was still contracting and my cervix had dilated to 5 cm! So they moved some people around and by 12:45 they were wheeling me back to Operating Room 2 and prepping me for surgery! Adam and I were shocked! We couldn't believe that this was it, this was really happening, and it was happening NOW! We were both thinking that we would come in and maybe after a few hours they would bring us back, but that was obviously not the case!

(Here we are about to go back to the operating room!)

Once they got me back to the OR they immediately started the spinal block, so that I wouldn't feel anything during the surgery. But as soon as that started to kick in I started not to feel so well. My blood pressure really dropped and I thought I was going to die! They gave me something else to help but in the meantime they hadn't brought Adam in yet and Hannah's heart rate dropped into the 70's. It wasn't probably a minute later when my BP was back up and they started the c-section. When they announced that they were cutting into my uterus I was asking were Adam was. They said he was on his way, and right as the nurse was bringing him in they were pulling out Hannah! He just about didn't get there in time. I think things were progressing faster then we all had anticipated due to the sudden drop in my BP, leading to Hannah's drop in her heart rate. But all was well and on March 4th at 1:06am Hannah was poked from her waters! Then very soon after Hayden was born at 1:07am, and not even a minute later Jonathan was born! I couldn't see them but I could hear them crying. And what a wonderful feeling that was to hear their tiny little voices! Then as they they stitching me up they wheeled them over one at a time so that I could see them before they took them back to the NICU. They were so beautiful and I wanted to hold them so bad! It felt like I was dreaming! The doctors all commented on how well they looked and how healthy they seemed. Here are some pictures of them while they are still in the operating room getting all cleaned up and checked out!

(One of our little girls!)

(Jonathan)

(Another girl!)

Adam got to go back to the NICU with them while they finished their work on me. It was a little after 2:00am once they finished their work on me and I was back in the recovery room. Then at about 4:30am my legs were just awake enough for them to let me see the babies before they would wheel me to the Mother Baby Unit.

So that was our early morning on March 4th. What a blessed day!