Arrived

After 40 hours of labor, Vivienne Hall Jarand was born at 5:18 p.m., Tuesday August 29th. She was 5 lb 14 oz and 18.5 inches long. It was both the happiest, and the longest and scariest day of my life.

We brought Alice into the hospital around 10:00 yesterday and even though her contractions were 5 minutes apart, she was only dilated 1 cm. Our nurse, Shannon, decided Alice had been laboring long enough already and 'manually dilated' her. You don't really want details on how this is done, but I thought Alice was going to tear the bedrails off and beat Shannon with them. Since the dilation finally kicked Alice into gear to deliver, she ended up forgiving her nurse after she was immediately wheeled into the labor and delivery room and Shannon took over as our delivery nurse.

Alice was hooked up to an I.V. and drugged up with painkillers, then given an epidural around 1:00 or so. After a few hours the contractions weren't building well enough so a pitocin drip was started around 2:45 and by 3:15 she was already starting to push. Alice did really great, but Vivienne just refused to come out- close, but not quite. Shortly after 5:00, her OB-GYN decided that Alice had been struggling long enough and brought out the forceps. The final minute or so of delivery ended up happening amazingly fast after Dr. Ryan lost the fetal heartbeat on the monitor. I didn't believe it was possible for a group of ten or so people to move that fast.

At any rate, Vivienne was born with the umbilical wrapped around her neck twice and she wasn't breathing when she came out. They immediately went to work on her and within 15 or 20 seconds she started to wail and complain. I don't think I took a breath from the time Dr. Ryan lost the heartbeat until I heard Vivenne cry. Fortunately, Vivienne recovered quickly and her APGAR scores were 6 at 1 minute, and 8 at 5 minutes. Not too shabby considering all she had to go through to get here.

After her mom and I getting to briefly meet her, she was whisked off to the nursery so they could monitor her blood oxygen saturation (which turned out to be just fine) and they had to get her body temperature up and stable. We ended up getting her back around 10:15 and she seems to have gotten the knack of breastfeeding already. She slept well through the night- woke us up twice and needed to be changed once and made a good crack at feeding. She hasn't really fussed much at all, but I'm sure that will change.

I'll give another update tomorrow after Alice and Vivienne are released (no internet access at the hospital).

As a sidenote- Vivienne was born on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina making landfall. It's good to have something positive happen in the face of all we've dealt with over the last year.