Arrival of Baby Brimhall!!

Well, for any who don't already know, I'm sorry to disappoint you. There will be no more belly pictures, because the precious little baby that was IN my belly, has arrived! Without further delay I present:

Breckin Barry Brimhall

born Saturday, November 28th

3:17 am

6 lbs 4 oz

19 in

I've been getting lots of questions about my labor, delivery, hospital stay and everything since, so with proper warning I am going to share those experiences here... I will label each section so you don't have to read anything you don't want to :)

LABOR - Pre-hospital - Friday, the 27th

(slightly graphic details)

We woke up and Bryce had basketball practice. I got up and started doing some cleaning around the house. Bryce made me promise that I'd pack my hospital bag that day, since I'd been putting it off for weeks at this point. Most of the stuff I thought I'd need was gathered into the same place in the living room, I just needed to actually put it in a bag and get some last things. Bryce came home from practice and I continued cleaning and working on a few little sewing projects I'd been wanting to finish. I got up to use the bathroom and when I was in there I noticed some blood and brown goo and immediately freaked out because I had NO idea what was going on. I called for Bryce saying "there's crap in my pee" and he came running downstairs (confused) because he thought I was talking about actual crap and didn't know why I was yelling for him in the situation! Haha! When I clarified he proceeded to freak out as well. I asked him to find my "What to expect..." book so I could try and look up what was going on. He's rushing around, looking for it, going "I can't find it. Where could it be?" Finally I decided I'd look it up online and decided it was probably my mucus plug (or possibly the bloody show, I didn't really know) and it said it was an early sign of labor and that I could go into labor within a couple of days or up to a couple of weeks. So we both relaxed a little and went about our business. After vacuuming the living room I looked around at all the cleaning and organizing I'd done that day and thought to myself "this baby is coming in the next couple of days" - so I sat down and started packing my hospital bag. A little before 1pm Bryce left to go help a family from church move and around 1:30 I was gathering some clothes for the hospital bag when I felt what felt like a menstrual cramp and I kind of stopped and took a little breath. It caught me off guard and then I remembered a conversation I'd had with a friend a few days earlier. She told me her belly didn't get hard when she had contractions, they just felt like cramps. So I stood there for a moment and realized, I'd probably just had my first contraction. I headed downstairs and sat on the couch and decided to see if it happened again, and how far apart it was, just to get an idea of what I was dealing with. I timed the contractions, which weren't really unbearable, until Bryce got home around 2:30 and they'd been about 12 minutes apart. He walked in the door and I said "Um, I think I'm having contractions" - he sat with me on the couch and we continued to time them and for the next few hours the ranged from 8-12 minutes apart. They slowly moved more towards 6-7 minutes apart. After a few that were 5 minutes apart Bryce said "if there's 4 more that are 5 minutes apart, I'm going to jump in the shower, in case we need to go to the hospital" the next 4 were all 5 minutes apart, so Bryce jumped in the shower, and we continued to time them, they were getting closer and closer. We left for the hospital around 8:30 pm and they were probably 3-4 minutes apart.

GETTING TO THE HOSPITAL

We walked up to the desk in the Labor & Delivery department at Corona Regional Hospital at 8:50 pm and there were a handful of nurses sitting there. I smiled to them and said "I think I'm going to have a baby soon." One of the nurses, stood up and said "Dear, you're still smiling, you're not having a baby anytime soon" I said, "Well my contractions have been 5 minutes apart for more then an hour, so they told me that's when to go to the hospital." She handed me a paper to fill out and then took me back to the observation room. She introduced herself (Lisa) and said she'd be my nurse, "if you keep me" I said, "Yes, if we even keep you" she said. She hooked me up to all the machines and started asking me questions. The only one I really remember was "On a scale of 0-10, 0 being no pain and 10 being the worst pain of your life, how would you rate your contractions?" I shrugged my shoulders, and said, "Um, I don't know, I've never broken a bone, I've never had surgery, I've never been in a car accident, so I don't really have anything to compare it to... so maybe a 6? or 7? They feel like bad period cramps." She smiled and then looked at the machine next to her and said, surprised, "Oh, your contractions are 2 minutes apart, I should probably check you." So she checked me and said, even more surprised, "Wow, you're at 6 cm, so yea, you're going to have a baby pretty soon, let's get you moved over to a delivery room."

DELIVERY

(slightly graphic details)

Lisa moved me over to a delivery room and got me all settled in. This was close to 9:30 pm and Lisa asked me if I'd thought at all about how I'd want to manage my pain if it got to be too much. She talked to me about my options and I told her, if it got bad enough I'd choose to have an epidural. She told me to let her know, but that so far I was doing great. Fast forward 30 minutes and you'd see me throwing up into a little plastic bowl (that Bryce was holding for me) while having the worst contraction I'd had up to that point. Lisa walked in as this was happening and said "Thinking about the epidural now?" I nodded my head and she said she'd call the anesthesiologist because it can sometimes take awhile for them to make it down. When my contraction was over, I asked Lisa to check me again, before I signed for the epidural. She said that was a good idea, because if I was already at 10, there was no reason to get it. So, she checked me and said I was between 7-8 and I grabbed the pen from her and signed the paper. If it was going to get worse, I think I'd held out as long as possible. The anesthesiologist made in down by 10:30 pm and was done super quick. He was funny too. He was telling us about how his wife had made a 30 lb turkey for Thanksgiving and it was just the two of them eating! He said he'd be eating turkey for all of 2010! The epidural went smoothly and I was pain free before I knew it. My only complaint is, I think he gave me too strong of a dose because Bryce literally had to come move my legs for me every hour when I tried to flip from side to side in bed. I was so numb on the lower half of my body, that I didn't even feel when my water broke about a hour later! If I chose to get an epidural in the future, I'd probably ask for a "light" epidural... The next couple of hours went by fairly uneventfully. Bryce's parents came up and sat with us until about 2:30 am when Lisa said I was ready to start pushing. She said that sometimes after getting an epidural the pushing can be hard, so we'd try some practice pushes and see how it went. Bryce's parents headed to the waiting room and the practice pushing commenced.

BABY BRIMHALL'S ARRIVAL

The "practice" pushing turned quickly into real pushing. Lisa said at one point "I can see your baby's head. I can see the hair!" Bryce and I looked at each other and said "The baby has hair?!" At one point Lisa told Bryce to be ready to push the call button when she said, when she told him to push it she called into the speaker "Call the doctor and tell him to come now!" She looked at me and said, "He's going to be so mad at me, I've called him in at 3 am the last 3 nights!" I told her, "That's why he gets paid the big bucks!" He arrived shortly there after and that's when things got crazy. It seriously seemed like only a few minutes and I heard this loud crying fill the room. I actually missed the announcement "It's a boy!" because I was so distracted by the fact that there was a crying baby in the room. I mean, I heard him say "it's a boy" but it didn't really register right away. Once he was all the way out, they wiped him down and put him on me and I looked at him and thought "Are you sure this is the right baby?" I was anticipating a LARGE and chubby baby... and the baby I was holding was long and skinny... but when I looked at his face, I knew he was ours. He looks JUST like Bryce! While all the business was going on in the rest of the room I just looked at him and rocked him and all of a sudden I was like "what is that?" I had this black stuff on my hands. I looked down and it was all over my gown and the blanket that was wrapped around the baby. Yes, everyone, my baby pooped on me. Not even 30 minutes after being born! It was EVERYWHERE! But I just didn't care! He was so cute, I just didn't care! Shortly there after one of the nurses was giving him a bath and he peed right on her. So before we even left the delivery room he'd peed and pooped. The nurse in our postpartum room was surprised when we told her.

HOSPITAL STAY

Bryce's parents were the first to come visit after we'd been moved into our postpartum room. They came around 6:30 am - later that day Bryce's siblings came in shifts. Preston and Brittini came with Bryce's parents and then a little while later Alisha & Brandon and Chrissy & Zack came down. It was fun to have some visitors, but mostly we just hung out, the three of us all day, napping, taking pictures and calling around to our family and friends to fill them in on the exciting news. Our nurse gave us a breast feeding log to keep track of when he ate, how long and how many of each diaper we changed. This kid SERIOUSLY pees and poops more then any baby I've ever seen. We were supposed to have 1 of each diaper in the first day and we probably had 4 of each! The nurses all said it was a good thing, so I didn't worry! One thing that I did worry about was on Saturday night they took him to take some blood for the blood screening, Bryce went with them, and when they came back he was sleeping. About an hour later he woke up crying, which up until this point had always meant he was hungry, so I picked him up and tried to feed him, but he didn't want anything to do with it. I was trying to figure out what was going on when I noticed blood on my arm which I realized was coming from his little foot, quite profusely. I woke Bryce up and we cleaned up the bottom of his foot and put new bandages on it and he seemed better, but it was scary, because it had been bleeding for like a hour. He bled through the band aid on his foot and his blanket :( I asked the nurse about it the next time she came in and she said some babies bleed a little more in the beginning because their clotting ability hasn't fully developed. She said if it continued to bleed to let her know, which it didn't. This was also when they weighed him again, and he'd lost 4 oz, so at 24 hours he was weighing in at 6 lbs. Sunday we were visited by our good friends from church Steve & Kerri and Jennie. We got released from the hospital by 2 pm on Sunday and headed home to start the rest of our lives together!

Whew... I think that's a good start to our story... there will be plenty more to come, so please keep checking back... and if you have any specific questions about the experiences we've had (or will have) please feel free to ask!! Thanks for following along on this crazy road we've been on the last 9 months or so! There will be lots of craziness to come!