Ava Marguerite Wilcox was born on Thursday, November 10th at 4:05 pm. She weighed 6 lbs 7 oz and measured 19 inches long.
I was overdue by two days so my doctor decided to have me go in to the hospital on Wednesday, November 9th, for an ultrasound and a non-stress test, just to make sure things were OK. If things were fine, we decided that we would probably wait a week and induce on the 14th. Unfortunately, the ultrasound and NST showed very little movement and breathing issues. So, the hospital called my doctor and then we spoke to her ourselves--she said that there wasn't necessarily anything wrong, that the baby could just be sleeping...but she really kind of just wanted to be on the safe side and asked if we were open to induction. We all agreed that it was a good idea and she instructed the hospital to keep me overnight for monitoring and that she would come back in the morning to break my water. I actually started having contractions on my own that evening, but never progressed beyond 3 cm. So, they then gave me a shot of morphine (ie: heaven) so that I could get some rest overnight. My doctor showed up at 7:30 on Thursday morning. I had dilated to 5 cm overnight and she broke my water. The contractions became fairly regular and increasingly painful so I decided to get an epidural at about 11am. I then napped for almost 2 hours (who would have thought you could sleep during labor?), and then they gave me pitocin at about 1:30 to help speed things along a little bit because I still hadn't progressed beyond 5 cm. The pitocin worked like magic and I was at 10 cm within about an hour. By 3:00 I was pushing and gave birth about an hour later. All in all, it was a pretty easy labor. The most dreadful part of the whole day was getting the epidural. The anesthesiologist had to stick me 3 times before he found the right spot--it was excruciating.
Ava is very healthy and it turned out that there wasn't anything wrong with her, despite the poor results from the u/s and NST. We had many visitors at the hospital and went home on Saturday, November 12th.
