She's Here!!

Well, obviously our little Addison Rose is finally here! I will try to give a somewhat brief recollection of the time leading up to her delivery. Momma was starting to get a little bit anxious when I actually made it to my due date because no one thought we would make it that far. So, I decided to bite the bullet and see if I could help things along. That shows you all how patient I am. I took the dreaded castor oil with a juice chaser at about 4pm on 7/17/11, my due date. Well, low and behold I actually started contracting pretty regularly that night around 9-10pm that night. I have to say I was pretty excited to get this show on the road :) I took a nice long warm shower cause I knew I might not get one for a day or two. Thanks Katie for telling me to do this!! So, I knew it could be a while so I decided to try and get some sleep after that. I woke up to some stronger contractions about 2 hours later and decided to give our doula a heads up. I think it was about 4am at this time. She told me to get in a warm bath to relax and see if they continued or slowed down at all. After about 20 minutes in the bath they were still coming so I got out. That is when my water broke. I realized that this is actually it now! We are going to have a baby soon!

Our doula came over to our house about 6am and we started the "marathon". At least that's what it felt like to me. We did a lot of walking and talking and just let everything happen on it's own time. I didn't call the hospital till about 4pm that day because I knew they would want me to come in right away because my water had broke. We did finally go to the hospital around 6pm on Monday evening. After being admitted we started walking the halls to get things going. I was only contracting about every 4 minutes and was only dilated to 3cm by 8pm that night. We realized I still had a small portion of my bag of water that was cushioning Addy's head and was inhibiting our progress. So, about midnight they broke that last little bag of water because I was just barely 5cm at this point. That is when things really got going.

I have to say, at this point I was starting to get a little bit

tired. My saving grace was the jacuzzi tub. When I started getting worn out it helped me relax so my body could do what it needed to. Our midwife showed up about 6am and said I was getting really close. This was such a wonderful experience because they all just trusted me to birth this little girl in my own timing. Everyone around me was so positive and supportive and that helped so much!! I remember when I was starting to push that my midwife was sitting in a rocking chair in front of me, just allowing me to trust my own body. I think I pushed for about 20minutes(that's what my mom said), and out she came. Little miss Addison Rose Hemphill was a perfect 9lb. baby and she was 22 inches long. She had a full head of beautiful dark brown hair and lots of little chubby rolls! Here are a few of her very first pictures!

We had a photographer at the birth, so when she gets those pictures to me I will post a few of them as well.