Introducing Sarah Lucile!

It's a girl! Sarah Lucile Carlson was born on Thursday, December 28, 2006 at 12:28 am. She weighed 7 pounds 5 ounces and was 20 inches long. I will post several pictures of her here so you can see how cute she is! The first two pictures were taken right after she was born, the third is our first family photo taken on her second day with us by Grandma Carlson, and the last two were taken on the day we brought her home from the hospital.

On Tuesday, December 26th I had a checkup at the doctor's office with Dr. Soleanicov as my regular doctor, Dr. Leaphart-St.Cloud, was on vacation all week. They put me on a monitor to make sure that the baby was OK and she was. They then did an ultrasound and found that the fluid level around the baby was low, but not dangerously. They planned to induce me on Thursday the 28th, but the doctor scheduled was not my favorite so we asked when Dr. Soleanicov was on duty. She told us to go to the hospital Tuesday night at 7:30 to begin induction. We wanted to surprise everyone so we arranged for the dogs and cat to be taken care of by the neighbor, went to dinner, and headed to the hospital.

When we arrived they inserted a drug called Cervidil around my cervix to help soften and open it. It had to stay in for 12 hours and I had to stay in bed the whole time so they gave me something to help me sleep and our first night in the hospital was spent pretty uneventfully.

Wednesday morning they removed the first drug treatment, let me walk around, eat breakfast, and take a shower and then they began the Pitocin drip around 10 am to start contractions. At 1 pm Dr. Soleanicov stopped in to check on my progress. When she saw that I had not progressed much and the contractions were not strong or regular she decided to break my bag of waters to help things progress. After that the contractions began to get stronger and more regular. At the ultrasound on Tuesday we found out that the baby's head was facing forward instead of backward so the back of her skull was pushing on my tailbone causing me to have back labor. By 4 pm I couldn't handle the pain anymore and I asked for an epidural which worked great-at first. However, after the initial dose of drug wore off I found that I could still feel pain in my lower left abdomen and the left side of my back so I suffered with back labor for the rest of the time.

I did not dialate to 10 cm until about 10 pm when they finally told me to start pushing. I pushed for an hour and half at which point the doctor checked and I was no further along than I had been when I started pushing. She also found that the baby had turned her head and was now transverse. It was quickly decided that the best option would be a C-section. They took me into the operating room to prep me while Matt got dressed for the OR. While they were prepping me for surgery they found that I could still feel the area that they were going to cut (probably due to the epidural not working properly) so they decided to put me to sleep. This scared both Matt and I as we didn't even get a chance to see each other before they put me under.

When I woke up in recovery it was just me and one nurse. I was told that my baby was fine an so was I but the nurse wouldn’t tell me if I had a boy or a girl. She said Matt wanted to tell me himself. I also had to ask what day she was born on since it had been so close to midnight when they took me to the OR. A little while later Matt was allowed to come into the room and he told me that we had a little girl. I asked him if she was beautiful and he told me that he hadn’t seen her yet – he was waiting for me so that we could both see her for the first time together – he is the best husband.

Shortly after, they took us to our room and as we passed the nursery window, one of the nurses held Sarah up for us to see. She is so beautiful! I wasn’t in my room very long and they brought her to us so that we could hold her and I got to feed her for the first time. We stayed in the hospital only 2 nights and came home on Saturday.

Thank you very much to everyone that has called or visited with congratulations and gifts. Your support means a lot to us. We are still adjusting to life with a baby, but I will post updates and new pictures as often as Sarah will let me.