AC Capehart capehart

Friday evening 2 of us went into the hospital. This evening, 3 of us have come home. I can’t describe (at least right now) how amazing it is. (And how I tear up at just about everything.) I’m just overjoyed to have Sam in our lives.

Sam will probably cringe and grimace when she gets old enough to read this and she sees the details I’m sharing about her first days. But that’s one of the key roles of parents-to embarass us beyond belief. Today’s embarassing tale is about urine. We were worried that she simply wasn’t doing it. We change (or at least inspect) diapers with every feeding. We’ve seen a couple of really good poops, but no pee.

The first day of life has been a little rough. Mom and dad already need to be getting more sleep than they are. Breastfeeding didn’t start easily despite a pretty good understanding of how it’s “supposed” to go. Recently, dad’s been feeding Sam a special high-calorie formula from a small tube run along his pinkie finger. All sorts of pictures are being taken. Several of which are appropriate for a broader audience and so will find their way here or at least in the gallery, but not until all three of us come home (expected to be Tuesday morning.

Samantha Fay Capehart was born this morning at 12:50 AM. She weighed 5 lbs, 4 oz and was 17 inches long. Mom and baby are well.

Phew. The “official” mail will come out tomorrow (well, later today), but I thought a quick note here would be nice. Our baby girl arrived just before 1:00 AM on Sunday, Oct. 2. She’s a small one – I don’t have the length yet, Ca thinks she heard 17 inches – but she’s 5 pounds 4 ounces, we got to see that measurement take place. They were a bit worried about her right after birth, so they whisked her away for a while.

7:00 water broken by midwife with big, blue, plastic hook. Mom and dad quite emotional.

At 6:00 the midwife wanted to break the water. She had done a test and we were stuck at 4cm. We managed to get an hour’s reprive, which is just about up. I hope we’ve progressed enough to further forstall it, but we’ll see soon enough. The contractions are still irregular and manageable.

For a while recently, Carolyn was having what they were calling “late decells”. Meaning that baby’s heart rate was dropping (_decel_lerating) during the late part of contractions. This apparently means that baby is not tolerating the contractions well — not getting enough oxygen during them so the heart rate declines. So, at the moment, the pit is off, Carolyn’s on oxygen and resting. I’m going to see if I can cat nap too.

We had a bit of drama recently. The pitocin (actually oxytocin) level had been gradually pumped up to 8 mili-units. The contractions were coming a bit more regularly, but were still well under controll. Carolyn had been having some twinges of lower back pain, so the doula suggested a hands and knees position to try to pull the baby forward some. In that position, Carolyn felt no contractions at all, and none showed on the monitor.

Carolyn is now on pitocin. They just upped the dose from the minimum they started her out on about 20 min. ago. The contractions are more frequent, but still pretty managable. She can talk through them. She greeted the most recent one with “Oooh, here’s one.”