36 weeks

There's no 36 week baby bump photo because the baby decided to come early! She officially arrived on the 36 week mark. Vivian Rose was born on August 1, 2011 at 10:31 a.m. She was 19 inches long and weighed 6 pounds 5 ounces.

We were down at my parents' lake house which is four hours away from the hospital I'd planned to use for delivery. On Saturday night/Sunday morning I noticed my water had broken. After determining that is actually what happened, I looked online to see if this was considered an emergency... I really did not want to go to a hospital down at the lake! It looked like the general consensus was as long as I went to the hospital within twelve hours we would be ok. We waited until 5:30 in the morning and then drove back to KC and went directly to the hospital.

Unfortunately, I had not yet packed my bag or gotten anything together in preparation of the big day! So after I was admitted Victor went to our house and packed a giant bag for me and got the house in order after being gone for three days. I was technically in labor in the hospital for 24 hours and 20 minutes before Vivian was born. Including my water breaking it was closer to 33 hours. Around 2 in the afternoon I was put on a Pitocin drip to start contractions. They started pretty quickly after that. I tried to nap as much as possible but that's kind of a joke when you are in pain! Around 4 a.m. I was given an epidural which helped quite a bit. Unfortunately, the contraction monitor had quite a bit of trouble tracking my contractions so my epidural had to be dialed back to that I could tell the nurse when I was having contractions. Around 9 Victor went to breakfast in the cafeteria with a friend and another friend sat in the room with me. Around 9:30 Victor was told to get his butt back up to the room because I needed to start pushing. And she was born about an hour later!

I feel pretty lucky that it was a relatively uneventful labor. Kind of long but I was only having contractions for part of the time. Now she is gaining weight very well and feeding like a champ. She had to be supplemented on formula and hasn't had any trouble switching between feeding types. And her clothes are finally starting to fit her!