Labor and Delivery

Welcome to the world, Seth Bryant Riggs!!

If things had gone according to plan, today I would have been settling into daily life after coming home from the hospital just two days ago.  But things never quite go according to plan, do they?  (And in this case, that is really, really good!)

Seth Bryant was born on Wednesday, April 4th, one week before my scheduled c-section.  I started having contractions on Tuesday afternoon, and they were really no different than the Braxton Hicks I had been having in the preceding weeks - except that this time, they didn't go away.  That evening I went to dinner with my friend Rachel, and we kept a rough estimate of the time between the contractions.  They were pretty far apart, but I did notice that they weren't going away, and they were getting longer and stronger. When I got home from dinner I told Jim, "It's no major rush, but I'm going to go take a shower and finish packing, because I think tonight is probably the night."  By 11 PM or so, we had packed, I had showered, and Jim decided we should lay down and try to rest.  Well, I laid down, but I never slept.  The contractions became so strong they took my breath away, and at one point one of the contractions came 3 or 4 minutes after the last.  I panicked, woke Jim up and told him it was time to go.  We called his mom and had her come to the house, I left the kids a note, and we drove in the dead of night to the hospital.

I noticed on the way to the hospital that it was nearly a full moon, and that should have been indicative of things to come.  When we got there it was between 3:30 and 4:00 am, and another laboring girl had just arrived before me.  In the time during which they processed my information and waited for a room to open up, four other pregnant women arrived, all in labor!  Six women may not sound like a lot for a large hospital, but I was at a small county hospital, and they did not have enough rooms for all of us!

My contractions were all over the board.  Some were twelve minutes apart and some were three minutes apart.  When the nurse checked me, she found that I was barely dilated to 1 cm.  I panicked that they would send me home to writhe in pain so one of the other pregnant women could have my room, but the nurse told me that contracting so hard over my two previous c-section scars wasn't safe and they were going to go ahead and operate.  I was so relieved.

My c-section went extremely well, and Seth was born a perfect 8 pounds, 1/2 ounce and 20 inches long.  
The hospital did an awesome job of giving us bonding time, and overall I found this to be our best birth experience ever.

Brennan and Cora came to meet Seth later in the day, and they couldn't have loved him more. That hasn't changed yet.  The novelty has worn off a little, but both kids adore him and have welcomed him into their lives without restraint.