all her glory

The Chase girls - all four of them.

Wow! I'm back. The story and the name were requested,so here we go.

name:Sarah Chase

story: Wednesday night ~7pm, take big box of music to stake music library, think to self, you should not carry this, ask for help. A car pulled up just as I did, but alas, it contained a rather elderly, very frail looking brother, so I hefted my own box.

Went home and helped with baths - some "ouchy" contractions, so I decide to "time".

As most of you know, you are allowed to go to the hospital when contractions are about a minute long, and about 5 minutes apart. I watched a 2 hour PBS special on bio-diversity in the plant world (very interesting actually) and timed, but we never hit the magic time, so I sent myself to bed a little disappointed.

In bed, the contractions really spaced out (like every 20 or 30 minutes) but they HURT! I was obviously not going to sleep, so I took an uber-long shower (all the hot water) and made a desision based on a couple of facts. Fact #1 - if we went to the hospital and it was not the real thing, they would send me home and not even slap my wrist, it would be OK to be wrong. Fat # 2 - if it was the real thing, an epidural would be really nice and I have NOOOOO desire to have a panicked delivery. So, I got dressed, woke up Ryan, told Aunt Di the plan and off we went.

Crista, super nice triage nurse, got me all hooked up and checked and as Ryan said, I was progressing - yipppppeeee and permitted to stay. Crista handed us over to Donna, also FAB who called Larry the nurse anestises who gave me my best epidural yet (not all epidurals are created equal you know) while he and Ryan bonded over stories of many daughters (Larry has 3, no sons).

After the epidural tube was comfy in my back we had some naps. I woke up around 3:15 and felt my water break at 3:30. The trippiest part about epidurals is your body is doing all sorts of CRAZY stuff and you cannot feel it (ah). As I finished getting to a 10 I had the most amazing shakes, Ryan thought I was freezing, but I wasn't, just in a TON of intense pain that I could not feel - very trippy, but OK by me.

Dr. Beck showed up bright eyed and bushy tailed about 4 am and checked life out, only to declare that baby was face up - RUDE! Can I just say, the man is VERY good at what he does. In two contractions he worked some magic and got her facing the right direction - Crista, Donna, Ryan and I were all in awe (and I was grateful). A few more contractions and we had ourselves a beautiful Sarah baby.

She is indeed heavy: 8 lb 10 oz and our longest yet: 22 inches. SHe has the darkest hair thus far too and it's actually longer than peach fuzz. She was kind of a stinker in the hospital, just fussy and stuff but she LOVES being home and is doing great. Needless to say, we are all in LOVE. But I must wrap up, she wants her dinner.