Brooklyn Kate

Our precious Brooklyn Kate is here and we could not be more in love!!  Before I forget the details here is how she made her grand entrance into the world.

We were scheduled to be induced last Thursday, April 24th at 7:30 am.  We went to bed Wednesday night with our alarms set for 6:15 prepared to start the induction process.  Brooklyn, however, had other plans.  I woke up at around 1:30 am with a few contractions that got progressively more painful pretty quickly.  By about 2:30 am I was pretty sure I was in labor.  I held off a little longer just to make sure it wasn't a false alarm but things were starting to get pretty intense at that point.  At 3am, I decided it was time to call my Dr. and see if she thought it was time for us to go it.  Sure enough the on call dr. agreed I was in labor and it was time to head to the hospital.  I woke Collin up and told him it was time and that we needed to get ready.  Thankfully, since we were planning to be induced we had all our stuff ready to go and Collin's parents were staying at our house so we didn't have to worry about what to do with the big kids. Once we got ready we headed to the hospital.  I was in quite a bit of pain at this point and was doing my best to breath through each contraction.  

We got to the hospital at around 4 am and got all checked in.  Unfortunately, lots of other babies decided to come at the same time so all of the delivery rooms were full.  That meant we had to deliver in triage.  The room had 3 beds separated by half walls and curtains.  It was not optimal but honestly at that point I didn't really care.  I got changed and in bed and the nurse checked to see what our progress was.  We were absolutely shocked to hear her say I was already at 8 cm.  The first thing out of my mouth after hearing that was "can I still have my epidural??"  The nurse said yes but I'm not sure how close we were to not being able to get it.  There was an emergency c-section going on at that time so the anesthesiologist was tied up.  They had to call the back up, who I'm pretty sure was asleep in an on call room at the time.  He didn't come in until a little before 5 am and by then I was absolutely miserable.  Each contraction was excruciatingly painful!  Like a 9 on that 1-10 pain scale thing.  So I was so so so relieved when he walked in the door.  By 5:15 I was in epidural bliss!  Before the epidural I had given my phone to Collin because I could even manage to respond to texts from family about what was going on.  After the miracle drug, I was able to take my phone back and even get a pic of us.  While the dr. was doing my epidural, my OB, Dr. Oster stuck her head in to let us know she was at the hospital so that was a relief.

At around 6 am, Dr. Oster came in the room and said, "I think its a good time to have a baby!"  They got everything set up, broke my water and after 3 contractions and 9 pushes, our baby was here and the dr. announced "It's a GIRL!"  It was so much fun having that extra surprise on delivery day.  I'm not gonna lie the delivery was painful.  The most painful of the 3 but thankful it was the quickest of the 3 as well.  She was born face up just like her big brother so things would have gone even faster had she been face down.  Collin cut the cord for the 3rd time and they placed our sweet baby girl on my chest!  It's one of those moments that you can't even explain.  The relief of being done with delivery and the pure joy of meeting your baby for the first time that has been growing inside you for the last 9 months.  

Our beautiful baby girl has a full head of dark hair just like her sister but looks a lot like her brother did when he was born.  She's absolutely perfect!  She weighed in at 7 lbs 1 oz and was 19.5 inches long. 

Thankfully the entire time I was laboring and through delivery we were the only ones in the triage room.  However, right after B was born another girl in labor was brought in and delivered about 30 minutes later.  A bit awkward but we were just thankful to have our baby girl with us.  It did make it difficult to bring our kids and family in to meet her but after a while Collin went out and shared the news with our friends and family in the waiting room who were patiently waiting to hear if our newest member was a boy or a girl.  I think they were all pretty shocked to hear that we had a girl and not a boy.  My little buddy, Maddox, was pretty disappointed at first but has since warmed up and loves his baby sister.

our first photo as a family of 5

We stayed at the hospital for 2 days and were able to get a little bit of rest at night by letting B stay in the nursery at night.  Brooklyn passed all her tests with flying colors and we are so thankful for that.  We also had several visitors but I failed at taking any pics of them.

Our stay at the hospital was good but we were ready to head home Saturday morning to see the kids and get all settled in with our newest little addition.  They always look so tiny when you put them in their carseat for the first time.

Big brother and sister were excited to have us home.

Taking her first ride in the MommaRoo.

Miss Brooklyn is the sweetest little thing and we are so grateful that she is a part of our family!  She has been with us for just over a week now and I can honestly says she is a dream baby.  We are still working on getting adjusted to having a 5th member in our family but things are going really well.  The kids really love her and always want to hold and kiss her.

 We feel so unbelievably blessed that we have been given another precious, healthy baby!  God is so very good and we can't thank him enough for this amazing gift.