Rachel Marie Hodgson

Rachel Marie Hodgson

March 30, 2009

7 pounds 5 ounces

19 inches long

Rachel has arrived!  She came a few days early, but waited until I was finished with work.  I decided the week before that March 27th was going to be my last day of work.  Originally, I was going to try to work until April 3rd, which was her original due date.  I wanted to have a week off to get stuff done as well as relax a bit.  She came a bit early for me to get either done.  I started having contractions at 4 am and they were about 15 minutes apart.  For the first 2 hours, I laid in bed and tried sleep.  It was my first day off from school and I wanted to sleep in.  At about 6 am, they started coming every 5 minutes apart.  I went downstairs and told Tim.  We started timing them and they were all about 3-6 minutes apart.  I took a shower and we called Dr. Langford at 8:30 when his office opened.  He said I was probably in early labor, but told me to go to the hospital and get checked out.  We got there around 9 am and they tested me for about 30 minutes.  I was about 1 and a half cm dilated.  They said my contractions were not hard enough and told me to come back when they were stronger.  We went to Target and bought newborn diapers since we did not have any and went home and watched movies.  I had an appointment set up with Dr. Langford at 3:45 and so we went in then.  When we got there, I was 3 cm dilated and he sent me to the hospital.  I was having really bad back labor pains.  I was pretty convinced at this point that I wanted an epidural.  Going into it, I figured I would only get one if my back hurt too much since I have had back problems in the past.  We got to the hospital around 4:15 and checked in.  I got the epidural around 6:30.    At around 7:30, I was about 4 cm dilated and by 8:30, I was 8 cm dilated.  This is when we had all of our visitors leave the room.  I was 10 cm just after 9.  I started pushing around 9:15.  I had the best delivery nurse, Gretchen.  Dr. Langford came in around 10:45.  Rachel's heart rate would drop really low right after a contraction and take a long time to come back up.  They called in the high risk team for Rachel (which is when I started getting nervous) because of her heart rate.  Dr. Langford let me know that he was going to get her out immediately.  He said he was going to try the vacuum (which he thought would work), but if it didn't, he was going to quickly do a C-section.  He was able to get her out quickly and the high risk team took her to a table and had to make her cry by hitting her chest with a soft hammer looking thing.  After almost 30 minutes of them checking her out, they brought her to me and I was able to hold my precious daughter for the first time.  It was so amazing.  I can't even put into words how wonderful it felt to finally hold my beautiful baby.  Tim and I held her for a little while before we invited her many visitors in.  The people who were there for her delivery were:  my mom and David, Tim's mom and dad, my sister Brianne and her husband Chris, my brother Tyler and his wife Lacey, Tim's brother Sam, my best friend Becky and her husband Eric, and my friend Lori.  She had many visitors the following day as well.  I will post some of those pictures later.