Brantley Katherine

Sooooo...here goes. I never imagined setting up a blog would be this easy. I didn't even start reading blogs until just over a year ago. NEVER imagined I would start one myself. BUT with the last 5 months of Brantley's life having flown by so quickly I decided that I needed to start "writing stuff down". If you know me, I love putting a pen to paper and have been a religious journal keeper all of my life. But these days when I have time to sit down by myself I usually pick up my computer to catch up on the news, Facebook, or pretend internet shop (I fill up my cart on favorite retailers' websites then close the tab. Just. Close. The. Tab.). So my hands are the new "pen" and the Dell is the new "paper"...
Let's start at the beginning-

Brantley was born on October 18, 2009, weighing in at 8lbs 6oz and measuring 21 inches in length. I will never forget those oh so precious coo's and ahh's she made on the first night as long as I live. And her precious little cry, and my precious husband saying "Maybe that's as loud as she'll ever get". Little did we know...
Her due date was October 10, 2009, and that came and went with no apparent fanfare. I saw my doctor on Friday, October 16, 2009, and we decided I would call the next week to set up an inducement for the following weekend when he would be on call.
We never made it that far...I went into labor that night at around 10:30pm. I stayed up all night writing down the time & duration of each contraction (approximately 10 minutes apart). BUT...are you ready...if you didn't know the kind of person I am before you will now...I decided that they were Braxton-Hicks (fake) contractions and I wasn't really in labor. I "decided" this because I had not experienced these "fake" contractions thus far in the pregnancy so this must be them. By 10am the next morning I decided that I may need to go be checked so as to confirm that these were, in fact, Braxton-Hicks contractions and they would be over soon. We showed up on the Labor & Delivery floor at Forrest General Hospital around 11am and waited for the Doctor to see me now. All the while Macaulay Culkin as Kevin McAlister (Home Alone) repeated over and over in my head, "Don't get scared now". Prior to arrival I had decided in my head that this would be something very similar to my weekly visits with my OB. Little exam room and just check me out, maybe break out the heartbeat hearing machine if I was lucky (I teared up EVERY time I heard her heartbeat throughout the pregnancy, full on cry at every ultrasound). But no, it wasn't like that at all. We were shown to an actual delivery room and told to wait, the doctor would be in to see us. Dr. John Holland came in, checked me, and told us to go walk around the hospital for an hour and come back. Riiiight...We came back after the hour and I was admitted (for the first time in my entire life) to the hospital at 2pm measuring 3 centimeters. Only 7 to go...Maybe I could walk to Purvis and back? Nope. I was gowned down and hooked up to a monitor.
I think blogs are supposed to be relatively short so that they are easier to read, but this is my first one so we won't apply that rule just yet.
They broke my water at around 7pm, Saturday, October 17, 2009, and then added some Pitocin around 10pm to "speed things along". I was going through popcicles and Jolly Ranchers like nobody's business with the Beatles' 1 album playing on repeat in the background. Around 1am, Sunday, October 18, 2009, I took a shot of Stadol to take the edge off of the pain, note the word "Epidural" has not been mentioned in this love story because there wasn't one. Things get a little fuzzy from this point forward but at 6:04am, Sunday, October 18, 2009, I delivered the most perfect precious little girl in the history of the world.