Ethan

In the few days before Ethan arrived, I had some regular contractions but they weren't very painful and they would always stop after an hour or so.

Thursday afternoon and evening I didn't really have any contractions, but that night shortly before 9pm, I started having really sharp pains. I thought they were probably gas pains since they seemed to come out of nowhere, but Peter suggested we time them just to make sure they weren't contractions. By the time we got to the second one, I was doubled over on the floor. We didn't bother timing anymore but called Peter's brother to come over, grabbed the hospital bag, and paged the doctor. Ten minutes later we were on the freeway and I told Peter he needed to speed...now. I was in so much pain I could barely sit on the seat. Of course when we arrived at the ER there were no parking spots except a handicapped one. I figured if being in labor didn't qualify me to park in that spot, then it was worth $350 anyway. I had a huge contraction in the parking lot and a security guard ran a wheelchair out. By the time we got in to the lobby, I was making enough noise that they just took us strait up to the OB triage and didn't bother making us check in.

They kept me at the triage just long enough to get a gown on me and tell me I was dilated to an 8 and that my water was about to break. Somewhere around this point I think the screaming began. I had epidurals with my two other deliveries and the contractions had never been even close to this bad.

They wheeled me into the delivery room and my water broke on the next contraction (a nurse told me after that it shot out across the room). Even though I could hear the nurses telling me to slow down and breathe until the doctor could get here (they paged the attending OB since there was no chance my OB was going to make it), I managed to say that I had to push on the next contraction. I will forever love the OB resident who looked at me and said "You just do what you gotta do."

Well, I pushed and out came Ethan's head. One more push and Ethan was born at 10:13pm - just 13 minutes after we arrived at the hospital, and just over an hour after the contractions started. I am really hoping we never have to cut it that close again!