Starting at the beginning

Will is asleep which is amazing and means I can use the computer without him desperately trying to get at it. Last night I spent a full hour and forty minutes trying to get him to sleep. He wouldn't calm down when I rocked him so I put him in his crib which usually results in him screaming, but last night he was perfectly content to just play with his stuffed animal and pacifier and mobile. That is, he was perfectly content as long as I sat right next to the crib in the rocking chair. Tonight I was watching a movie with my cousin and he just crawled over to me, laid down, and went to sleep- so I guess he is making up for last night. Bryce is on a scout campout which is why I am entertaining myself on a Friday night.

Will is walking more and more. He will stand up and walk from the coffee table to the couch or over to the tv or even across the whole family room, but crawling is still his predominant method of transportation.

His other new trick that he started doing on our car ride to Vegas is singing Old McDonald. If we sing the song he will sing EIEIEI (he doesn't do the O). We thought it was just a fluke at first, but he does it every time.

Since I don't have anything specific to add this time I thought I would go back to the very beginning...

On Friday, July 15, 2005 I was at work at the BYU Bookstore and started having contractions. Everything I'd heard said you'd have contractions for days before you actually went into labor so I didn't really think anything of it . . . especially since we were supposed to be going on a church campout that night (yes, even though I was 9 months pregnant). Will wasn't due until the 27th so we thought we could fit it in. After work we drove up to the campout- but the directions were wrong so we ended up driving on bumpy, curvy mountain roads for about 2 hours. By the time we found the new directions and actually made it to the campsite my contractions were about 5 minutes apart. I thought they might stop when I got out of the car and walked around but they didn't. Bryce ate dinner and then I decided we needed to go. By the time we made it down off the mountain and back into Provo I was very uncomfortable and my contractions were every three minutes. The doctor said to go to the hospital when your contractions were three minutes apart so we stopped at the house quickly (Bryce got the carseat) and then drove up to Timpanogos Regional Hospital in Orem. When we got there the nurses decided to watch me for an hour so they hooked me up to all the monitors and after an hour said that I wasn't progressing and so they were sending me home. They told me to come back when my contractions were 2 minutes apart instead of 3. Before I left (which was at about midnight) they gave me a morphine shot. The morphine knocked me out until about 8 the next morning. When I woke up my contractions were only about every 6 minutes or so ("only"--HA!). We spent the day waiting for them to get closer and even went up to BYU campus and walked around for a distraction. By 10:30 that night (Saturday) they were back at 3 minutes apart and I was very unhappy. My back had started hurting severely by about 5 that evening and was getting worse. Bryce kept trying to talk me into going back to the hospital, but I kept telling him that they said not to come back until my contractions were 2 minutes apart and that they would just send me back home. Meanwhile my mom and little sisters had just arrived in Salt Lake and were getting their rental car to drive down to Orem. They called to tell us they were at the airport and Bryce told them we were just leaving for the hospital. I had finally given in and said we could go back because the pain was definitely outweighing the fear of being embarrassed by being sent home again.

At the hospital they checked me in (again), hooked me up to all the monitors (again) and said that I wasn't close to delivering (again). After an hour they called my doctor who (mercifully) told them I could stay this time (even though I wasn't any closer to delivering than when I went in the night before). Being officially admitted to the hospital meant I could have an epidural though. First, however, I had to have antibiotics because I had tested positive for Strep B at a prior checkup. I don't really know why, but I couldn't have an epidural until the antibiotics were in. The nurse couldn't find a vein to start an IV so after about 15 minutes of poking (which I don't remember feeling at all) she called in the head nurse who spent another 10 minutes trying to get the IV in. Once it was in they started the antibiotic drip. Once the antibiotics were finally in I had to wait for the anesthesiologist who was busy somewhere else in the hospital. All told, I finally got the epidural at about 1:30 in the morning. Shortly after that my water broke and the nurses assured me that would probably speed up the labor process (since I still wasn't anywhere close to actually having a baby---however, with the epidural in I really didn't care--I was ready to get some sleep anyways). About 10 minutes later the monitors all started beeping and the nurses came in to figure out why the baby's heartrate was dropping. They thought the monitor had just slipped off so they kept trying to adjust it and put me on oxygen just in case. The monitor was still beeping though so the nurse said she would just check me to be sure and when she did she said "OH MY GOSH PROLAPSED CORD" and then everyone started moving. She said "Call the doctor STAT STAT STAT" and nurses were running in and out of the room. Then the nurse (who was maybe a year or two older than me) looked at me and said "You're gonna have a c-section, ok." <--It wasn't a question. [Note: a prolapsed cord is when the umbilical cord slips out before the baby and each contraction squeezes it shut blocking off the baby's bloodflow...it's a lot like stepping on the garden hose. Most prolapsed cords happen with breech babies (meaning they are feet first instead of head first), but Will was head first which is very unusual] My doctor was, of course, home in bed so they had to get him to the hospital ASAP. The nurse had to try to push the baby's head up to relieve some of the pressure on the cord and they lowered the head of my bed so that gravity could help too. Even so, the baby's heartrate just kept dropping lower and lower. When the heartrate started to drop into the 50s the nurse said "I'm sorry guys, this isn't looking good" which was the first time I actually thought something bad might happen. Everything was happening so fast that I had just kind of thought "we're in the hospital, they'll take care of things." The anesthesiologist ran back in and started more meds in the epidural to get ready for the c-section. This is about the moment when my mom walked into the room with no clue of what was going on. Apparently she had decided to come to the hospital and see how things were going and walked in right after they found the prolapsed cord. I saw her and thought "they contacted my next of kin?!" because when I checked in they made me right a next of kin and said it couldn't be Bryce so I had written my mom. Doctor Gordon and Doctor Judd arrived and wheeled me into the operating room. Two nurses held up a sheet so I couldn't see anything, the doctors splashed some betadine on me, and they did a very fast c-section and pulled out Will. He was born at 2:14 am on Sunday, July 17th. I could hear the nurses thumping on him and then he started screaming. After a while a nurse showed him to me for about 1/2 second - he had gone to sleep and looked like a miniature old man - and then they whisked him off to the nursery to get an IV and some fluids in him. The nurses cleaned me up and wheeled me to a recovery room and after a while Dr. Gordon came in and said that he had set a new record tonight: from when his phone rang until when Will was born was 18 minutes! All I can say is that it was a very quick ending after being in labor for 2 days!! My doctors and nurses were excellent and we owe them for our healthy baby. Since Will was being worked on in the nursery I didn't get to see him until a little before 6 in the morning. (I'd been up all night, but it was sort of an eventful night so I didn't really notice). The same nurse who had discovered the prolapsed cord came in to check on me and asked if I had seen the baby yet. I said no so she called the nursery and they told her they would bring him in when they were done with him--which they said would be soon. About 15 minutes later they still hadn't brought him in so my nurse loaded me in a wheelchair and took me down the hall to the nursery to meet Will. (She was a very good nurse.) The nursery nurses were annoyed to see me and said "We told you we'd bring him down," but my nurse just said "Yeah, we just felt like going for a stroll so we came to see him instead." Finally by about 8 am I had been moved to a regular room and they finished with Will and brought him in to us. Bryce made some calls to tell people I wouldn't be at church and they would have to find subs for my Primary class and then we finally got some sleep! We were very thankful: - that we went back to the hospital even though my contractions still weren't 2 minutes apart (a prolapsed cord at home would have been fatal for the baby) - that I got an epidural as soon as they would give it to me (the extra time it would have taken to numb me for a c-section if I hadn't already had the epidural could have lost us our baby = it is good to be a wimp!) - for the labor and delivery nurse who found the prolapsed cord and remembered exactly what to do even though she had never seen one before...and later took me to meet Will - for Dr. Gordon and Dr. Judd --> the fastest c-sectioners in all the land and very nice too!
- for my anesthesiologist - I tell Bryce that I would have married him if I hadn't already been married...after all, he made all the pain go away instantly which was very endearing! and he was the only one I could see when they were doing the c-section and he gave me a play-by-play and described Will for me
- for the cooks at the hospital -- they had good food there! :-)

*Will turned out to be just perfect with no lasting effects from the oxygen deprivation caused by the prolapsed cord. He does not, however, have a uvula (hangy thing in the back of your throat)--but that is unrelated!! :-)
Oops- Will woke up!