Ok ladies, quick drive by - I'm sitting at the computer outside of the nursery while I wait for Adele to wake for another feeding, so here goes. Wednesday started out like a normal day. DH and I were both off so we ran some errands, hit some after Christmas sales and spent pretty much the whole day out and about. Contractions were nothing to really notice, just an annoyance. We returned home, had dinner and I started tracking the contractions about 7:30pm. They were about 5-7 minutes apart and not terribly strong at all. About 10:30 we decided to go to bed but I of course got no sleep, laying down spread them out to about 10 minutes but they were still pretty strong and by about 12:30 I couldn't lay there and take them anymore so I would get up and walk around, or sit on my exercise ball, or sit on the toilet for each one. About 1:30 DH got up because they weren't going away. He called the hospital and they recommended a hot bath, they were about 5 minutes apart to this point. So I got into the bathtub and tried to breathe through them but by 3am I couldn't handle them anymore and we headed to the hospital. When I got there I was dialated to a SIX! Everyone was surprised that it was my first pregnancy (great!) so they admitted me and got me an epidural. The epidural was HEAVEN and I was "complete" by 8:30am, doctors and nurses all said I'd have a baby by noon. Should have known then that it wasn't going to work that way. So about 9:30am we started pushing. We'd push for 20 minutes or so then break for about that long. After about two hours of that they couldn't figure out why I wasn't progressing and about this time I started losing the effectiveness of my epidural in my left groin area. So they adjusted the epidural and the Chief Resident came in to check me himself. He was GREAT and when I find out where he goes after residency I will recommend him to EVERYONE I know that lives there. He figured out that her head was basically stuck under my pelvic bone and helped me target my pushing. So he adjusted the placement of the bed, the pain got MUCH better, and we pushed for about another hour. It was about 2pm at this point so we'd been pushing solidly for about 2 hours and off and on for about 2 1/2 before that. Finally around 2:30pm he came in and we started talking options, 1-forceps, 2-vaccuum, 3-cesarean. We knew we didn't want the cesarean if humanly possible and DH was strongly opposed to the vaccum so we opted for the forceps, they worked great, she did great and at 2:43pm she came out with the cord wrapped around her neck, meconium in the her mouth and high throat, but pink and as happy as can be. They got all the meconium before it got any further down and the cord really wasn't an issue since in all monitoring to that point we didn't even know it was wrapped. They did have to give me an episotomy so that I wouldn't tear, and I didn't tear further so they sewed that back up afterwards and we got to take her back to our room. We made all of our phone calls and had a pretty uneventful day and a half until we were ready to go home this morning. We knew she looked a little yellow and I'm kind of annoyed that they don't test them for jaundice until right before you're ready to leave but her levels were high and her cumms (sp?) was a weak positive so I was discharged but she was not. As I sit here she is under the light about 10 feet from me but on the other side of the nursery glass. I'm feeding her when she's ready to eat and they're keeping her under the lights the rest of the time with the hope that we can all go home tomorrow. Then she'll have her first peds appointment on Monday. So she's beautiful, she's perfect and we're very much in love with her but I won't deny that I was very bummed to not get to go home this morning. I've decided I could never work in a hospital they're just not cheery. Even though we've had some great nurses I'm ready to go home. Everyone has given us tons of compliments on her name, the families are both thrilled and I'm so glad she didn't come on Christmas. So give me a few years with this one and I'll be ready to do this again but if I ever have to do it without an epidural I'm pretty sure I'll die so in that case she will be an only child. Thanks for all the kind wishes and for thinking of us, I'll post more pictures as soon as I can.