Ready or Not, Here They Come!

On Sunday, May 25 at 1 am I awoke to some pain in my stomach. I thought that maybe I was finally having some Braxton Hicks contractions or perhaps my stomach was paying me back for the real ground beef hamburger I had had for dinner. Either way I got out of bed and decided to use the bathroom. I returned to bed only to have the pains resume a few minutes later. I was starting to grow a bit suspicious at this point and wondered how real contractions would feel if the false ones were this strong. On my second trip to the bathroom I felt the "gush" that everyone describes and started to get the feeling that there was nothing false about what was happening. I woke Ian up and we called the doctor. He told me that I better come to the hospital to make sure my water had indeed broken (I am not sure he really believed me that I was in labor). As we left the house, Ian and I had to laugh at how ill prepared we were. I hadn't even started packing my hospital bag and we still had one week of childbirth class left. Then again, who packs their hospital bag at 31 weeks?

We arrived at the hospital around 1:40 am. It took the nurses quite a while to pick up both boys' heartbeats on the fetal monitors. Ian was given the job of holding one of the monitors on my stomach while also helping me breathe through each of my contractions, which were getting progressively worse. When the nurse finally checked me I was already dilated 5 cm and it was clear that I was having the babies. Dr. Naylor came in and asked, "What happened?" I was thinking, "Isn't that what I should be asking you?" I had just seen him on Friday and everything had appeared to be fine then. He decided a c-section was in the best interest of the babies, even though Baby A (Gavin) was "locked and loaded" as our childbirth instructor would say.

They made the final preparations for the surgery which took probably another 40 minutes. Right before I was taken to the OR the doctor checked me again and I was already at 7 cm. Clearly the babies wanted out and were not going to wait. When I got into the OR, I was given an epidural, which thankfully put an end to the contractions. Ian was brought into the OR and kept me company during the procedure. We had quite the crowd in the OR with two ob-gyns, an anesthesiologist, a neonatologist, and probably 9-10 nurses.

The adventures of Gavin and Aiden officially began at 3:23 and 3:24 am respectively. Gavin weighed 3 lbs, 11 oz. and was 15 inches long. Aiden weighed 2 lbs, 15 oz. and was 15 1/4 inches long.

When the whole procedure was done and both boys were in the NICU, Dr. Naylor said to me, "You know, if you really wanted to get out of school all you had to do was ask." Ha ha.

[Top photo is Aiden, bottom photo is Gavin]