Karsten Brice has arrived!

As you all know, we were scheduled to go in for an induction on thursday to have the first of 2 medications administered. Once the nurses got me all situated and checked my cervix, they found that I was already almost 4cm dilated and having contractions (which I couldn't feel) and the medication would not be needed then. They said we could go home and come back early the next morning to get the pitocin started but I was not going to do that again since they already had an iv in and I just wanted to stay and wait it out. Around 5am on Friday the nurse woke us up so she could get Karsten's heart rate on the monitor for a while before starting the iv up. It was actually a lot slower than they wanted it (in the 110's) so they had the doctor come and break my water so that they could put a probe on his skull and see if the heart rate was better that way....it turned out the heart rate wasn't better and when doctor Hirt broke my water, he found out that Karsten had his first poop inside which is not good. After about 45 minutes of talking with the doctor about what we could do or couldn't do, we decided that I would have a c-section. That was really nerve-wracking for me because I get really nervous about stuff like that and they wouldn't let Brice in the OR until right before they were ready to start. Thankfully, they never told me when they started so I had no idea what was going on and I couldn't feel a thing with the epidural. He was born at 7:25am and weighed 8lbs 10oz and was 21 inches long. Hearing his first cry was so amazing, it's impossible to put into words! I just wish that I was able to hold him right away and take care of him like I wanted to. They did let me hold him for about a minute before they had Brice take him to the nursery to get checked out and for the doctor's to close me up to go to recovery. That was the longest wait! By the time Brice got back to recovery, I had already been there about a half an hour and I still hadn't seen Karsten all cleaned up. They did finally bring him in and I got to hold him and tried to feed him right away but since I couldn't sit up it really didn't work. We then went up to our room and they sent Karsten to get a bath so that he was all clean for us. After that, we had to wait for him for about an hour and a half because the nursery was backed up on baths and I wanted to hold him so bad! After that, everything seemed to go smoothly. He did loose a pound while we were at the hospital and also had a little jaundice so we have to take him to the doctor tomorrow to get him checked out and make sure he is doing better. He seems to be eating much better today now that the nurses aren't always bugging him. Here are a few of his first pictures. I hope you all enjoy them as much as we enjoyed taking them!