She's Here!

On June 10th I went from miserable and pregnant

to proud Mommy of 3!

Mackenzie Dawn Carter

Born at 3:25 PM. She was 6 lbs 14 oz and 19 inches long. She has a whole head full of dark hair. She made her entrance memorable because she came in a hurry! Daddy wasn't able to make it in time for her birth, he was about 10 minutes late.

I had gone to my Dr. appointment on Tuesday at 9:30 AM and the midwife who checked me said I was at a 4.5 and she stripped the membranes. She noticed the babies heart rate was a little low and wanted to have me checked on the monitor. So I was all hooked up and they watched the heart rate and contractions for 20 min. On the monitor they saw that I was getting regular contractions every 5 mins so they wheeled me to the labor and delivery for assessment. I was turned away but encouraged that it would probably be sometime soon within the next few days and I should go home and get some lunch and some rest.

Around noon I left the hospital and made some errands with my mother-in-law and got some lunch. Around 2 o'clock we went back to the hospital to see if I would be admitted and get a hospital room. The midwife told me that since I was over 39 weeks and already at a 4.5 they would get me started on pitocin to get things going. After I was situated with a room she checked me again and said I didn't need pitocin because I at a 7 and 75 percent. So I called Jason to tell him that we were going to have a baby today and I called my friend Melanie who is an awesome nurse and labor coach to meet me at the hospital. Jason's parents were already there, thank goodness! Going through labor without support didn't sound like fun.

After about 30 minutes of intense contractions and asking if I could get the epidural, the bag of water broke just as the anesthesiologist was going over the epidural papers. I think it was about 2 minutes and one contraction later that Mackenzie was born. Melanie called Jason to tell him that his daughter had been born and of course he thought it was a mean joke when she held up the phone to Mackenzie so he could hear her cry. I had to confirm that she was telling the truth and I could tell he was very disappointed he had missed it. He had just called 20 minutes earlier and was reassured him that he did have time. I was very surprised at all of the long dark hair she was born with and how alert and calm she was just taking in everything. It seemed like she really was studying all of us over.

Mackenzie on monitors and IV

I don't have many pictures, but Jason's dad has a cd full that I need to get. I will post those later. Its been kind of crazy since then because only a few hours later Mackenzie started choking and turning blue and had to have her stomach suctioned out by the nurses and given oxygen for 5 minutes or so. They said that it is a common thing with newborns, and especially ones that are born quickly and don't get that transition time during pushing. But seeing our concerns they offered to let us hook her up to some monitors for reassurance even though she was most likely fine. We decided hook up the monitors. As soon as she was hooked up alarms started sounding because her heart rate was almost half the rate that most babies would at and the Oxygen level was registering low as well. Mackenzie had also become very lethargic since her chocking incident and would not respond to nursing at all. So they ordered blood work to check for an infection and EKG test for her heart. She was hooked up to an IV and given antibiotics when the results of the blood work showed high white blood cell count. It's Friday night now and she is off the IV and antibiotics, the EKG tests have come back fine, and now we are just dealing with these choking incidents she continues to have occasionally. It seems to be a reflux problem and it may be something we just will need to know how to deal with at home. She wont be released until she goes 24 hours without the need for oxygen for revival after choking so we are looking at Sunday morning at this point. Our main concern is worrying that she will have an incident when we are sleeping or when we aren't watching for a second once she gets home. She is still in the NICU so the first step is getting her home.