Our baby boy arrives

As time was getting closer to the induction and I was doubting whether that was the route I wanted to go...even though we really had no desire for an April Fool's baby, Don had given me a necklace celebrating a "March baby", and we had no desire for this to drag out much longer... the little man decided to do it on his own time and we avoided the induction after all. He was born just 2 hrs. before he was scheduled to be forced out! I went into labor on 3/30/08 at 11 pm. All the preparation books and stories I had heard made me think I had all kinds of time before I had to get to the hospital, so I showered and packed up a few last minute things before I woke Don and Sarah and we headed off to the hospital. By this time the contractions were getting much stronger and closer together, and things seemed to be moving along rapidly. I was quite surprised when the nurse at the hospital told me I was dilated to 6 cm (this is up from 2 cm at last Dr. appt.), and that they had to do labwork, which could take up to an hour to get the results back before I could have an epidural. I was really unhappy that no one had warned me of the wait for lab. I was getting pretty anxious that I was not going to get the epidural in time and would not do well with the escalating pain. By this time, it was around 1:30 am or so, so the lab results came back fairly quickly and next thing I know, I'm schmoozing with the CRNA to get hooked up with the epidual ASAP. Things got pretty rough for a while before the epidural was in, but once it was in place the rest of the labor and delivery was not that bad. Don and Sarah had a great time making fun of my post-epidural and delivery shuffle which I imagine looked a bit like Frankenstein. It all seemed to happen so fast that it was hard to process all of what was happening. My labor from start to finish was only 5 hrs. as he was born at 4:05 am. It is hard to describe the feelings that occured with the birth of our child, but awe, wonder, joy, fatigue, and relief come to mind. Dr. Gordon remarked about how strong his cry was -- he came out screaming and hasn't stopped yet!