Wednesday, March 11, 2009

More pictures...

Gabriel and Gillian met for the first time in the hospital, and we have been very impressed with the way that Gillian has handled being a big sister. She is way excited every day to "hold, hold" as she puts it. We are never far away when she does this, but it's the cutest....

I put together a video of some pictures that have been taken over the last week (and a few from the weeks before it for good measure). Let me know if you want any of them and I can share them.

From Movies

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Gabe's play-by-play

So...I haven't posted much about how all this went down, but here's a little synopsis of Gabe's birthday:

Michelle was scheduled for an NST (non-stress test) on Tuesday at 3:30 PM, because she was over her due date. When she arrived at her appointment, they put the baby on the fetal heart monitor and watched her and baby for a while. The nurse asked if there had been any contractions. Michelle's response was yes, but they're not painful, just uncomfortable. Dr. Baker then came over to see what was taking so long (this was only supposed to be a 20 minute test). As it turns out, the nurses had been watching Michelle's contractions from the nursing station and were paying close attention because of their frequency. Dr. Baker decided to go ahead and see if Michelle was dilated before sending her home. Lo and behold, Michelle was dilated to a 4. Needless to say, they admitted her immediately and began delivery preparations. This all took place in the span of an hour and a half, so it's right around 5 o'clock by this time.

Since it was a workday, Gillian was at Miss Melissa's so arrangements needed to be made for her to be picked up and brought to the hospital so we could see her. Josh and Abby picked her up and took her to eat and brought her to Menorah. She got to hang out at the hospital til a little after 9, when Dan and Margie showed up to take her to their house where she would spend the next couple days.

Now...back to Gabe: in the name of modern medicine, Michelle chose to have an epidural. The anesthesiologist was giving Michelle a hard time because she was not in any pain at that point. He wanted to know why do the epidural if you're not in pain now...Michelle made the case that she knew things would get painful in due time.....just like most everyone to ever give birth, she was right.

Over the next couple of hours Michelle progressed and was dilated to a 6 by 7 o'clock. From there things stalled and she remained at a 6. Around 8:00, Dr. Baker started to push pitocin to help Michelle's contractions become more consistent and get her dilated further. Over the next 2 hours, Michelle didn't dilate any more, but the baby was moving into position.

At 10:30 the nurse spoke to us about a procedure that would monitor the intensity of the contractions and see if the pitocin was actually doing what it was supposed to be or if the contractions were actually too close together. If they were too close together, they were going to immediately stop the pitocin because it had done it's job (even though she had dilated no further than a 6 -- baby had moved and was ready to make an appearance). In the midst of that conversation, Michelle experienced the longest and most painful contraction she had had to date and we also noticed that the baby's heartrate dropped due to the intensity of the contraction.

After that was over, our nurse Stacy mentioned that she would watch the contractions and baby's heartrate at the nurse's station. She would return in 30 minutes if this pattern of strong contractions and lowered fetal heartrate continued. She was back shortly (around 11:00) because she noticed that things were continuing the same way. In order to curb baby's dropping heartrate, Stacy wanted to roll Michelle to her left-side to get baby in a better position. Pretty much right at that moment is when Michelle starting having severe contractions and also began to shake/shiver.

Because Michelle's contractions were still very severe, she asked our guests to leave and Stacy rolled her to her back and checked dilation. Michelle was dilated fully and Stacy immediately called for the delivery team, and had the nurses page Dr. Baker for delivery. Well-oiled machine, I say.....we went from 1 nurse to about 8 in the span of 45 seconds.....and everyone had a job. Pretty cool. Another nurse rolled Michelle back to her side and gave her oxygen. Within a couple minutes, Michelle was pushing....Dr. Baker pointed out that she was gonna have to do better than that -- so she pushed one more time and Gabriel was born at 11:22.

This all happened so fast and there was so much going on, that we wanted to make sure Gabriel knew as many details about his birth as possible....stories get lost over time, but if we write it down at least we're guaranteeing not to forget anything :)

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Portraits of Gabe

Gabe's first few hours in picture form:



Gabriel Paul Madison

Gabriel was born at 11:22 PM on March 3, 2009 (a square root day, as it was affectionately called). He weighs 8 lbs. 5 oz. and is 20" long. Mom is doing beautifully, and was (once again) a champ through delivery. The nurses kicked visitors out around 11:10 and Gabriel was born a mere 12 minutes later. Quick indeed.

Pictures to follow...

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Things are a-happenin!

Just to let everyone know that Michelle is in labor and she is currently dilated to a 6. she is progressing nicely. Our nurse, Stacy has told us that new baby has a little bit of hair. We were coincidentally at the hospital today for a post-date NST (stress test for the baby), and Michelle just happened to start contracting and go into labor while the baby was hooked up to the fetal heart monitor. Conveniently Dr. Sarah told us we could stay put. (No chicken tacos for us for dinner tonight!).

I will keep this updated along with Facebook, so please keep checking!