For those who like all the gory details...

...here's the birth story.

I woke up on Tuesday contracting about every 10minutes so. They were intense-ish all day, but weren't progressing very quickly, so I wasn't too worried about things. I figured I was in actual labor, but I have a tendency to putter during labor, so I was just going about business as usual. Anyway, about 5:00ish that evening, I started seriously timing my contractions and realized they were speeding up fairly quickly. I started packing up the kids to go with my mom to her house and getting stuff for the hospital and by the time I left, my contractions were about 4-5 minutes apart and were hurting a lot. They continued to get more intense on the drive down to the hospital (about an hour away), but actually spread out in time to about 6 minutes apart. I was paranoid about going into the hospital and having contractions that far apart, so I convinced Spencer to pick up some dinner for himself and fill up the car with gas before we parked at the hospital. I considered stopping at the mall to walk around for a bit-thank heavens we didn't or I definitely would've had a baby there. When we parked they were still 6 minutes apart. My doctor suspects at that point in time, I was probably dilated to a 4/5. Because I wanted to give my contractions a chance to speed up, I had Spencer park in the parking garage (rather than do valet parking at the front of the hospital) and walk to the hospital with me (it's about a 5 minute walk while not in labor). As soon as we started walking (especially w/two flights of stairs ), my contractions sped up like crazy. When I checked in at labor and delivery, it was exactly 8:32pm and my contractions hurt like heck, but I was surprisingly managing them really well. I think it's because I seriously thought I had like 6 hours of labor ahead of me, so I kept on comparing them to how much more intense they'd be getting, if that makes any sense. Anyway, they put me in triage and the nurse checked me and lo and behold, I was fully dilated. So, I had dilated from a 5ish all the way to a 10 in the time it took me to walk from the car to labor and delivery. That was a very. long. painful. walk. Anyway, right after she checked me in triage, I started to feel a little pushy. They immediately moved me over to a delivery room and called my doctor, who arrived all out of breath about 10 minutes later. I couldn't hold back any longer so I started pushing soon after the doctor got there and two contractions later, we had a baby. I was lucky and didn't have anything more than a little skid mark. Scarlett was officially born at 9:31, so about an hour after we got to the hospital. The pushing was by far the most painful part for me. The contractions were very intense, but I just focused on breathing and relaxing my way through them and I somehow was able to stay on top of them pretty well. The pushing...well, let's just say I was glad it only lasted for like five minutes, although I was at least crowning for nearly all of it, so that probably didn't help things any. After birth, however, I just felt so fabulous. I couldn't even believe how great I felt, both physically and emotionally. It was such a high and it was so nice not to have to deal with everything that comes with an epidural and tearing and all that. 4 days post birth, I seriously feel almost completely normal.

Since Scarlett descended so quickly, there was loads of mucus still in her lungs when she was born (because it didn't have a chance to get squeezed out in the birth canal), so after the first initial holding and cord-cutting, the nurses and pediatrician started to suck out the mucus and fluid. That took about 30-45 min because they were having a hard time keeping her blood-oxygen levels up. They suspected that part of the problem was how upset she was, so they had me nurse her skin to skin. That calmed her right down and helped loads with her blood-oxygen levels. Other than that, however, she was just fine at birth, w/apgar scores of 8 and 9 (all the points taken off were for color-she was VERY blue at birth, despite being alert and active).

Well, that's it in all the gory details. For all the childbirth veterans out there, hope you enjoyed!