Tanner's Birth Story *December 17, 2009*

I've decided to post Tanner's birth story since I know I'll be posting the new baby's in a week or two.  This is also a great place to have his story saved since I recently lost the story when my computer crashed.  Luckily my mom and dad had it saved on their home computer.

This was originally written and emailed December 20, 2009.

Tanner Michael Shope's Birth Story

On Tuesday the 15th, around 8pm I started losing my mucous plug and I felt my first contractions shortly afterwards.  It was so exciting and didn't seem real.  I decided to lay down and sleep a bit.  At 11pm I woke up with more contractions.  These contractions were in my back. I got up and took a bath.  After my bath I sat down on my exercise ball and bounced, rocked my hips and did circles on it... for HOURS. I rocked in my glider chair, and walked around the house.  When Brandon woke up around 4am  on the 16th I told him that I'd been having contractions all night. That they hadn't gotten regular or intense yet. He decided to stay home with me and called into work at 7am.  I kept myself moving throughout the day, had Brandon applying pressure on my lower back and by 2pm I felt that things had really picked up; I was having contractions every 3 to 5 minutes and they were getting intense. I told Brandon I was ready to go to the hospital, so we loaded up the car and headed in.  Sitting in the car my contractions started slowing down, by the time I got to the hospital and got hooked up to the monitors my contractions were 6-7 minutes apart and nowhere near as intense as they had been.  My pelvic exam revealed I was only dilated to 2cm, 50% effaced and a -1 station.  The nurse sent me home, told me that they couldn't admit me until I was 3-4cm dilated or my water had broken or I was leaking fluids that would soak through a pad in an hour.  Feeling a little down and embarrassed I went home, ate some soup and laid down for a bit.  After about an hour I couldn't take laying down.  I went back to bouncing on my exercise ball.  At 7:15pm Brandon and I went to walk around the grocery store and the mall area attached to it until 8pm.  After this we just hung out around the house.  Brandon went back to bed at 11pm and I went and sat on the toilette.  The toilette didn't put pressure on my tail bone and lower back, which was where I was still experiencing all of my contractions.  After a few hours of sitting on the toilette, bending over the bathroom counter and walking from the bathroom to the bedroom to have Brandon apply pressure on my back I started leaking fluid.  I told Brandon that I was leaking fluid and he called Labor and Delivery.  They told him the same thing they had told us earlier, to have me put  a pad on and see if I soaked through it in an hour.  As he was coming back to the bathroom to tell me this, I was having a contraction and fluids literally shot out of me!  At that point I said I'm done, I need to go to the hospital.  I got dressed and sat down to have Brandon help me put shoes on. He wanted me to have a few more contractions so that he could time them.  I was having them about 2 minutes apart.  We rushed to the car and headed into town. It was at this point I told Brandon he needed to hurry because I could feel baby's head descending.  I had my eyes closed and peeked at the speedometer to see that we had reached 100mph in our little Chevy Cobalt.  Brandon kept telling me to breath because as each contraction was coming I was bearing down to get through it.  Trying to get onto post Brandon slowed and told them I was in labor.  We made it to the hospital and I was attempting to climb the stairs to Labor and Delivery when a man who had followed us in grabbed a wheelchair and told me to get in and took me to L&D himself.  Brandon accompanied me to L&D and got me to the exam room then ran back out to move the car, which was still running and sitting in front of the hospital.  The nurse hooked the monitors up to me and checked my cervix.  I was dilated to 10cm.  Brandon arrived as the nurse ran to go wake the midwife.  They moved me to my delivery room and helped me get into my bed.  At this point the midwife arrived into the room and looked at me and asked if I was ready to have this baby!!! She opened my legs and said, “Well he has light brown hair” I pushed twice over 7 minutes and then had my baby in my arms!!!  The time was 2:53am on December the 17th.  He weighed 7lbs  13.4ozs and was 20” long.