Baby Chloe!!!

Hi All! This is Mark posting, first blog post ever! As most immediate family and friends know, baby Chloe was born on 1-17-12 at 1:11 AM! I just wanted to share our baby story and post a few pictures!

I was post-call on Monday and thankfully Gina and I had had a VERY relaxing and restful day at home. At about 11pm, Gina woke me up and told me that either she'd lost control of her bladder or her water had just broke. Assuming the former (especially since she wasn't contracting) I was groggily trying to decide if we should be excited about this or not. About half an hour later, Gina started to have a few contractions, although not very uncomfortable, and we started packing up our things for the hospital. Still not quite certain whether her water broke, we decided to call the hospital around midnight and see if we needed to come in. As Gina was on the phone with one of the family medicine residents, she was asked, "Are you ready?" What a loaded question! Around 12:30, after I had spent sufficient time putzing around the house, trying to decide if Gina was really in labor, we finally got into the car to head to the hospital. While on the way there, as Gina was crying, moaning and writhing in her seat, I decided that she was definitely in labor! We parked in the hospital parking lot and walked in together and Gina calmly told the triage nurse that she thought her water broke and she thought she was in labor. Surprisingly, the test that is done to determine if membranes have ruptured (i.e. the water broke) was negative. The triage nurse checked Gina's cervix after the test was performed and she was 6 cm! Yay! True labor! We're going to have a baby!

I dutifully sent a text to all our immediate family members at exactly 1:00 AM as we were preparing to roll back to a labor and delivery room from triage, telling everyone the exciting news that we were about to welcome baby Chloe into the world. Back in the L&D room, our nurse started to check Gina in while one of my anesthesia classmates excitedly came in to the room to fill out Gina's pre-operative history. She also placed an immediate call to the attending anesthesiologist to come back to put in Gina's epidural. As all this was happening, Gina yelled, "I'm feeling a LOT of pressure and I feel like I need to push!" Our L&D nurse knew these were the magic words for 'baby's comin' out!', so she offered to check Gina's cervix, whereupon she noted a head already coming out. Thankfully, the family medicine resident was already in the room and she quickly delivered Chloe - the resident hadn't had any time to gown up in preparation for delivery. All this transpired 11 minutes after I had originally texted my family! Gina's a champ! She told me after they placed Chloe on her chest, she was still trying to process what had happened and kept on thinking, "This is too fast, things need to slow down!" Indeed it was fast, as she never got an IV, a blood pressure was never checked and we signed all our consent paperwork after Chloe was out! :-)

From water breaking (or so we think) until delivery was just over 2 hours! Gina's amazing! Unfortunately for her, it was very fast and she didn't get the epidural she wanted, but she did great! Chloe was 6 pounds 8 ounces and 21.5 inches long! She has shock blond hair, which looks almost as if she got her tips frosted before coming out!

Gina and our little bundle of joy!

Our little blondie!

Dana and Adam were our first family members to visit, thanks for stopping by!