February 16th, 2008 - Birth Day

At just one day shy of 35 weeks into the pregnancy, I woke up to my water breaking at 4:15am. I had gone to the hospital one other time because I thought my water broke. Now that cracks me up because when it broke I KNEW it broke. There was no doubt this time. Mark and I were at the hospital by 5:00am. They started us out in triage where they did all the baby monitoring and checked to see if my water really broke. Ha. Duh. After they were satisfied with all that, they moved me into a labor and delivery room for more monitoring and to get me ready for surgery. Both boys were butt down so there was no doubt that I would be having a c-section. They gave me some drugs to slow the contractions down from every 1.5 minutes so that we could get through a shift change of the doctors. That got the contractions down to every 5 minutes. I was very lucky in that I didn't actually feel any of these contractions other than for some very slight cramping. By this time my parents and Mark's brother, Jeff, and his wife, Steph, had arrived to give their support. By 8:30am they were taking me into the operating room. The delivery doctor turned out to be Dr. Perlow, the same doctor that originally sent me to the hospital after doing an ultra sound and seeing that my cervix had completely thinned at week 19 of my pregnancy. The assisting nurse practitioner was Mary Beth who had been my favorite person while I was in the hospital for 8.5 weeks after my cerclage. I was so glad to know who the doctors were. By 9:15am the doctor was pulling Colvin out of my abdomen. Nolan came out one minute later at 9:16am. I had kept my cool with Mark there by my side but as soon as I heard those two babies crying I started crying too. I fell in love at that very moment and I hadn't even seen them yet. Nolan weighed 6 pounds even and measured 18 inches. His color wasn't quite pink enough and there was some signs of stress so he was taken to intermediate care where he received some oxygen. Colvin, on the other hand, was pink and doing great. He weighed 4 pounds, 3 ounces and measured 17 inches. When they held him up for me, he looked me right in the eyes. He was very alert. We didn't see Nolan's eyes for a couple days. Later in the afternoon I was allowed to go up to IMC and see the babies. Vicky and Barb were visiting and were able to go up with us one at a time.