Early Surprise!

Welcome Stella SuzAnne Whitesides who came to us 4 weeks early:
6 lbs. 3oz. 19 1/4 inchesSo here's the labor and delivery story. People are right when they say every experience is different! It all started before we left to go visit the Rigby's in Austin for the weekend. Literally, right before I got in the car, I found out that I had some spotting. After talking to the nurse and researching the internet with Kristen it was decided that I lost my mucuos plug (I know, sounds gross and is) and that labor could still be weeks away. I decide to go the 3 hr. trip. That night, I had painful contractions that were consistently 7 minutes apart for an hour and I was about to die. Not from pain but from fear that I was going to give birth in Austin, away from home and our hospital! I prayed like I never prayed before and they went away that night. So that was Friday night. We had a blast with the Rigby's over the weekend and came back on Sunday. The painful contractions were still coming, but not consistently. Monday morning, I had heavy bleeding and decided to go to my OB who found that I was dialated at a 5. I was having contractions 10 minutes apart so they checked me into the hospital right then. They stopped again and after several hours of waiting and watching, my OB decided to send me home hoping that we could keep the baby in longer. This was my wakeup call and when I got home, I was in a "nesting" frenzy trying to get everything that I had put off into order before I really went into labor...hospital bag, laundry for baby, clean house, etc. Made back-up arrangements for the boys and so forth. At about 2ish, I started to have contractions again but waited almost 2 hrs. to make sure it was the real thing this time! I called my dear friend Jayne and she came over to stay with the boys and we headed over to the hospital! It was smooth sailing from there...labor progressed quickly, got my epidural and had Stella at 9:30 that morning. Coming home from the hospital. As you can tell, I'm a little excited to have a girl...there's lot's of pink in our house right now!

To help us survive this unexpected early arrival, we had help from so many amazing friends. I had it planned so that Joe's mom would be here 2 weeks prior to my due date so that the boys would be covered should I go into labor a little early. Obviously that wasn't early enough so thank goodness I have some amazing friends we were able to count on. I just wanted to give a special thanks to: *Jayne Klingler for coming over to my house at 4AM...4 AM! to stay with the boys and get them ready for preschool when I went into labor. *Kristen Rigby for driving up from AUSTIN to watch the boys all day on Wednesday while I was at the hospital and Joe was at work. And then, thanks to my sweet dad who left his obligations back home to fly out last minute and help me with the boys while I adjusted to having a new baby at home. The past 12 days of Stella's life has been a whirlwind. Although she was born a healthy size for being "near term", she's lost more than 10 % of her birthweight and has since struggled to regain some of that weight. She has also struggled with jaundice...she was under lights for a weekend, the biliruben count went down and has since rebounded up and is now staying level not going back down. I've taken her to the doctor's every other day to check her count and weight and to test for several things to see why her body is not taking care of the biliruben on it's own. I guess the hardest part of this whole thing is trying to force her to eat every 2-3 hrs. I nurse, supplement with formula for the jaundice, and then pump. By the time I'm done with that, it's time to start all over again!!
Well, hopefully on Monday we'll have good news and I can just relax and get more rest at night! Waking her up so often is starting to catch up on me and my poor boys are starting to notice how grouchy I am. Whatever the case, she's totally worth it and I am loving having a little peanut around again.