Hudson James arrived on Sunday, December 12 at 1:33 am. He weighed 7lbs 5oz and measured 20.5 inches.
Here's how it all went down:
To our surprise my water broke on Saturday early morning, without any signs of contractions. The day before was my last day of work and we attended my company's holiday party that night until almost midnight. I wasn't showing any signs of labor at my doctor's appointment that Tuesday and was scheduled to be induced on Wednesday, December 15.
We arrived at the hospital around noon and the doctor gave me Cytotec to start my contractions. By 2:00pm, I was having full contractions 2 - 3 minutes a part. And around 7:00pm I had my epidural started. About the same time, the doctor gave me Pitocin to help speed up my labor, since I was not showing much progress after 7 hours. With the Pitocin, my doctor thought I would deliver sometime between 4:00am - 7:00am.
Unfortunately, I had some issues with my epidural. It wasn't taking to my right side and made my left side completely numb and feeling like dead weight. Between 8:00pm and midnight the doctors kept trying to fix it. Finally, a little after midnight the anesthesiologist decided to take out and redo my epidural completely. However, when the nurse checked my progress I was ready to start pushing. I went from 3 centimeters to 10 centimeters in 3 hours!
Because of this there was no time to redo the epidural, the doctors gave me a medication through my IV to help reduce the pain and an anti-nausea med to help with the nausea.
While my labor was tougher than I planned, the rest was much smoother. My doctor arrived around 1:20am and Hudson was born at 1:33am! I joked that I had a "natural" birth on my right side and "medicated" birth on my left.
Luckily my mom was able to get on an earlier than planned flight to LAX. She arrived in perfect timing to the hospital around 8:00pm and was able to greet Hudson when he was born!
We brought Hudson home on Tuesday afternoon and we can't stop staring at him! He's just so precious and innocent, it's an overwhelming feeling of love and joy. Joe and I feel so blessed and are excited to celebrate Christmas with Hudson this year.
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| First day home from hospital! |
On Christmas morning Hudson woke up at 6:30am, so I fed him and put him back down for some more sleep. After his 9:30am feeding we all gathered around the Christmas tree and started to open our stockings. While Indiana got a white Christmas with beautiful snow, we enjoyed our version of a white Christmas with our DVD of winterscapes and Christmas music looping on our TV. It was the best of both worlds! 
