Baby Time!

Update #2: And she's here! After 51 minutes of pushing she arrived screaming her little head off at 9:06 A.M. She's quite a horse at 8 pounds, 11 oz. Mama and baby are currently getting to know one another. Here's the first of many, many pictures:

Update #1: As of 5:30 she is 7 cm dilated on her way up to 10 at ~1 cm per hour. Once she gets there, they tell us that we can expect between 1 and 3 hours of pushing till we're done. Do the math and it means a baby by noon and maybe as early as 10.

It's currently 4:41 A.M. and we're in the labor and delivery room at Evanston Hospital awaiting Anabelle's arrival. I was finishing up playing some online poker (where, shockingly enough, I actually won some money) and heading off to bed at a little before 12:30 when Christy came out of the bathroom and said "I'm not sure, but I think my water might have just broken." Unsure of what to do with this uncertain information, I just said "well, lay back down and try to sleep. If it's something, then we'll know soon enough and if it's nothing well then I guess we'll know that soon too." Not more than 4 minutes later she sat up and said "yep; that was definitely my water." Before I could even get her a towel from the linen closet she'd already had her first *real* contraction and immediately knew that they were different from the preparation ones she'd been feeling over the last couple weeks. So we got up and immediately started making all the last minute preparations. The contractions started coming every 4-5 minutes and after about a half hour we called the doctor to see if we should head over to the hospital. He said that we should so at about 1:30 we did just that.

After getting relatively settled and a few more contractions any lingering doubts Christy had about getting an epidural went out the window. They administered it to her at around 3:00 and since then she has been resting comfortably. She can still feel her legs and move them around but all the pain from the contractions are gone. It's funny because she can watch the little monitor and see the point where the contraction is at its peak and used to cause her absolutely excruciating pain but now she might as well be watching a video game.

She has been advised to try to get some sleep if she can and given that I got to lay down for a whopping 4 minutes so far tonight (I know, poor me) I am going to try and do the same. My completely non-medical opinion predicts that we'll have a daughter at 10:04 this morning. So far everything is going smoothly and everyone at the hospital, especially our nurse Amy, has been wonderful. I'll update more when I have a chance.

This is the monitor Christy is hooked up to. The upper left number is Anabelle's heart rate. It fluctuates between about 130 and 155. The upper right number measures the contractions. When it hits about 30, the contraction is starting (so you can see that she was in the middle of one when we took this). The highest number we've seen so far has been 118. Not sure how high they go.

This is the actual machine that does the monitoring. The monitor from the picture before is really just the screen on the left blown up. The paper on the right tracks the heartbeat and contractions so the doctors can see what is happening over time.

Have no idea what this is. Possibly the machine that goes "Bing!"