Allow me to introduce...

Emma Annette is here!!! She was born this afternoon at 2:38 pm and weighed in at an impressive 9 lbs. 3 1/2 oz. and 21 inches long. She's completely healthy and has spent most of the evening with us in the recovery room, though I think we will elect to use the nursery tonight so we can get a couple nights of good sleep before heading home.

This experience could not have been more different then our time with Claire. After starting on pitocin, contractions started almost immediately. The initial part of the day went rather slowly. At 9:00am we were looking at 3cm, by 11:00am she had moved to 4cm, and finally 7cm by 1:00pm.

The only issue we had through the whole process was the epideral wearing off just after 1:00 pm. After several painful sets of contractions, she was able to get more drugs and though it only seemed to effect her left leg, it did appear to help with the pain. Contractions moved to about every minute and a half.

The main question we had was whether Emma would be face up or face down when she came out. If you remember from Claire's delivery, she came out face up, which led to a rather long two and a half hours of pushing and a lot of bruising. After checking, the doctor stated she was face up.

At 2:20pm the doctor came back in and said "the baby is falling out". I don't think she meant that literally, but it did mean they were about to have Annie start pushing. During the first push, the doctor was able to turn Emma so she would be face down. Three more sets of pushes and out came what appeared to be a three month old version of Claire : ) Emma looked almost identical to Claire, but Claire did not weigh that much until she was nearly 2-3 monthes old.

She had her vitals checked and everything looked good. She got her first bath in the nursery and was then sent down to our recovery room and has been with us ever since.

We had our first vistors this evening. Emma's big sister Claire came with her Grammy and Babu to meet her new baby sister. It was really cute. We gave Claire a toy diaper bag complete with diapers, a bottle, wipes, and a toy cell phone (??)...it was our way of appeasing her before telling her that we were going to bring Emma home for good.

Claire wanted to sit right next to her and would want to give her kisses and comfort her whenever she would cry.

Emma's Grammy and Babu