The Oldhams: Happy Birthday Alethia Grace- Oct 3rd, 2009

On Friday October 2nd I awoke early at 2:30 in the morning with contractions that were consistently 8 minutes apart and lasting between 30-40 seconds long. I laid in bed debating if this was really it. After not being able to sleep and them continuing till 5:30 am I decided to get up and take a shower, do a load of laundry and make sure all bags were packed. I began to get more and more excited as the time passed thinking the wait was finally over and soon I would get to meet my beautiful daughter. My emotions quickly changed to pure frustration when 8:00 am hit and my contractions just stopped. Absolutely nothing not even a twinge of a contraction could be felt. At this time I decided to go walk until I could feel them again. So my mom and I headed out to Lafayette Park and walked a couple of times around the park. We didn't just take a leisurely stroll I was walking as fast and as hard as I could. After a little over an hour I could feel the exhaustion hitting and realized I couldn't keep pushing, so we went back home. We went ahead with our day as normal as Noah and my dad decided to get tickets to the Cards game that night. At about 4:30 I told my parents I wanted to get out of the house and go out to eat so we all got ready and left to get Balacinos, which according to my dad has the best pizza in the world and was one of my grandparents favorite restaurants. We arrived at the restaurant at 5:00pm and all the sudden the contractions were back. This time they were coming harder, faster, and longer at 5 minutes apart and averaging 35-45 seconds long. We finished our wonderful pizza and I encouraged the guys to go to the game as I felt I had a long way to go before going to the hospital and I wanted to make sure that the contractions did not stop again. At about 8:30 pm and late into the 6th inning of the Cards game all the sudden my contractions were 3 minutes apart and 45-1 minute long. I felt it was now time to head to the hospital so we picked up the guys outside the stadium and headed to the hospital. We arrived at St Johns at about 9pm and got all checked in. After getting there my contractions slowed down slightly but I was dilated to 3cm and about 70% effaced. After being stuck at 4cm for a couple of hours they started me on pitocin and were going to break my water. At this point I was exhausted (I had been up since 2:30am) I decided to opt for the epidural preparing for a long labor. I got the epidural at 1:30am and my water broke on its own at 2:15 all of a sudden things were moving. At 2:50 I called my nurse because I felt a lot of pressure and she was shocked when she checked me and I was dilated to 10cm and was ready to push. This shocked my nurse and my doctor. I had to wait till a little after 4am before my doctor arrived to finish pushing. Once they were set up I pushed twice and Allie was here at 4:36am. I will let the pictures tell the rest of the mornings events.

Here I am getting ready to have a baby :)

Noah falling in love with his baby girl.

Here I am world 6lbs 8 ozs and 20 inches long.

What up world. I am so excited to be here.

Completely in love. Noah was in complete amazement from the time he could see her head till after she was born. His mouth dropped open when he could see her head and it didn't close. He was in awe of this little girl and the reality of her being here. In fact the nurse had to remind him to put my leg down.

Checkin out my little girl. I couldn't believe she was finally here. It seemed SO surreal.

There is now 3 in our family

My parents pulled the all nighter with us and were our camera and video crew. I am so glad they were able to experience the birth of their first grand baby.