Welcome to the world Cade Owen!!

On December 26th we welcomed Cade Owen into the world! I had started having contractions on Christmas Eve but refused to get TOO excited as they were pretty small and irregular. All day on Christmas I was timing my contractions. Did you know there is an iPod app for that?? No, seriously - there is. It is called the Contraction Master and I used it!! When I woke up they were about 8 minutes a part, 30 seconds long, and not very painful. Christmas was great. We hung out at the house all day with my family. I spent the evening playing Big Buck Hunter w/ my dad's latest Wii toy and of course rested between contractions by letting someone else shoot for a while.

Everyone left our house around 11:00 and we decided that if I couldn't fall asleep because of the contractions, we would go to the hospital. According to my Contraction Master app - they were now about 4 - 5 minutes a part and nearly a minute long. We decided it was time to go!! And off we went.

When we got to the hospital it was about 1:30am. They checked to see how much I was dilated and the nurse was shocked to find out that I was around 6cm. I was pretty surprised too because she said usually there is a lot more pain at this point. My mom, dad, and brother showed up shortly after. Because of visitor restrictions (swine flu), I was only allowed to have 2 people back with me so it was just mom and Tyler leaving Greg and my dad out in the waiting room. They stayed for a while but then decided to go home a few hours later since it didn't look like anything was going to happen right away. I decided to get the epidural even though I wasn't in tremendous pain just so hopefully I could get some sleep before I had to push. The epidural was great but I still couldn't really sleep. It actually caused me to stop contracting because I was so relaxed so they put me on a pitocin drip which got them started right back up again. I finally started pushing around 9:00. The nurses and doctor told me they wanted me to be able to feel when to push but not feel pain. I could definitely feel when to push so all was going well. The last little bit however didn't go so well because the epidural no longer was blocking out the pain. There was a button I could push for more epidural medicine but by this time it wasn't much help. Cade's heartbeat began to drop quickly and stayed low for nearly five minutes so the doctor decided it was best to use the forceps and get him the heck out of there. It was quite painful to say the least - you know its bad when the doctor loses count of the stitches but it was all worth it a million times over. I mean - look what we got out of it! Cade was born at 10:16 am.

First family picture.

Look at that butt! So cute!!!

He immediately started to suck on his hands when he was born trying to calm himself down. He still does this and makes the funniest sucking noises.

Pretty cute if I don't say so myself. Being home has been really nice. The first few nights were spent switching off sleeping on the recliner w/ him but we decided to bring down the hammer and have him sleep in his bassinet as we had planned. We elevated it slightly as suggested by our doctor so now he sleeps at an angle rather than flat on his back and it seems to be really helping. The real help though is that now my milk has come in and he chows down regularly then passes out for several hours. My parents have been a huge help now that we are home. I'm not sure if I would still be sane w/o my mom coming over on a daily basis to help out. It's been great and I'm going to do everything in my will power to make them never leave!! Tyler and I are so happy with our new little man and this crazy turn our life just took. It's pretty amazing.